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Stories cut from paper

{0: 'Béatrice Coron has developed a language of storytelling by papercutting multi-layered stories.'}

TED2011

(Applause) (Applause) I am a papercutter. (Laughter) I cut stories. So my process is very straightforward. I take a piece of paper, I visualize my story, sometimes I sketch, sometimes I don't. And as my image is already inside the paper, I just have to remove what's not from that story. So I didn't come to papercutting in a straight line. In fact, I see it more as a spiral. I was not born with a blade in my hand. And I don't remember papercutting as a child. As a teenager, I was sketching, drawing, and I wanted to be an artist. But I was also a rebel. And I left everything and went for a long series of odd jobs. So among them, I have been a shepherdess, a truck driver, a factory worker, a cleaning lady. I worked in tourism for one year in Mexico, one year in Egypt. I moved for two years in Taiwan. And then I settled in New York where I became a tour guide. And I still worked as a tour leader, traveled back and forth in China, Tibet and Central Asia. So of course, it took time, and I was nearly 40, and I decided it's time to start as an artist. (Applause) I chose papercutting because paper is cheap, it's light, and you can use it in a lot of different ways. And I chose the language of silhouette because graphically it's very efficient. And it's also just getting to the essential of things. So the word "silhouette" comes from a minister of finance, Etienne de Silhouette. And he slashed so many budgets that people said they couldn't afford paintings anymore, and they needed to have their portrait "a la silhouette." (Laughter) So I made series of images, cuttings, and I assembled them in portfolios. And people told me — like these 36 views of the Empire State building — they told me, "You're making artist books." So artist books have a lot of definitions. They come in a lot of different shapes. But to me, they are fascinating objects to visually narrate a story. They can be with words or without words. And I have a passion for images and for words. I love pun and the relation to the unconscious. I love oddities of languages. And everywhere I lived, I learned the languages, but never mastered them. So I'm always looking for the false cognates or identical words in different languages. So as you can guess, my mother tongue is French. And my daily language is English. So I did a series of work where it was identical words in French and in English. So one of these works is the "Spelling Spider." So the Spelling Spider is a cousin of the spelling bee. (Laughter) But it's much more connected to the Web. (Laughter) And this spider spins a bilingual alphabet. So you can read "architecture active" or "active architecture." So this spider goes through the whole alphabet with identical adjectives and substantives. So if you don't know one of these languages, it's instant learning. And one ancient form of the book is scrolls. So scrolls are very convenient, because you can create a large image on a very small table. So the unexpected consequences of that is that you only see one part of your image, so it makes a very freestyle architecture. And I'm making all those kinds of windows. So it's to look beyond the surface. It's to have a look at different worlds. And very often I've been an outsider. So I want to see how things work and what's happening. So each window is an image and is a world that I often revisit. And I revisit this world thinking about the image or cliché about what we want to do, and what are the words, colloquialisms, that we have with the expressions. It's all if. So what if we were living in balloon houses? It would make a very uplifting world. And we would leave a very low footprint on the planet. It would be so light. So sometimes I view from the inside, like EgoCentriCity and the inner circles. Sometimes it's a global view, to see our common roots and how we can use them to catch dreams. And we can use them also as a safety net. And my inspirations are very eclectic. I'm influenced by everything I read, everything I see. I have some stories that are humorous, like "Dead Beats." (Laughter) Other ones are historical. Here it's "CandyCity." It's a non-sugar-coated history of sugar. It goes from slave trade to over-consumption of sugar with some sweet moments in between. And sometimes I have an emotional response to news, such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Other times, it's not even my stories. People tell me their lives, their memories, their aspirations, and I create a mindscape. I channel their history [so that] they have a place to go back to look at their life and its possibilities. I call them Freudian cities. I cannot speak for all my images, so I'll just go through a few of my worlds just with the title. "ModiCity." "ElectriCity." "MAD Growth on Columbus Circle." "ReefCity." "A Web of Time." "Chaos City." "Daily Battles." "FeliCity." "Floating Islands." And at one point, I had to do "The Whole Nine Yards." So it's actually a papercut that's nine yards long. (Laughter) So in life and in papercutting, everything is connected. One story leads to another. I was also interested in the physicality of this format, because you have to walk to see it. And parallel to my cutting is my running. I started with small images, I started with a few miles. Larger images, I started to run marathons. Then I went to run 50K, then 60K. Then I ran 50 miles — ultramarathons. And I still feel I'm running, it's just the training to become a long-distance papercutter. (Laughter) And running gives me a lot of energy. Here is a three-week papercutting marathon at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. The result is "Hells and Heavens." It's two panels 13 ft. high. They were installed in the museum on two floors, but in fact, it's a continuous image. And I call it "Hells and Heavens" because it's daily hells and daily heavens. There is no border in between. Some people are born in hells, and against all odds, they make it to heavens. Other people make the opposite trip. That's the border. You have sweatshops in hells. You have people renting their wings in the heavens. And then you have all those individual stories where sometimes we even have the same action, and the result puts you in hells or in heavens. So the whole "Hells and Heavens" is about free will and determinism. And in papercutting, you have the drawing as the structure itself. So you can take it off the wall. Here it's an artist book installation called "Identity Project." It's not autobiographical identities. They are more our social identities. And then you can just walk behind them and try them on. So it's like the different layers of what we are made of and what we present to the world as an identity. That's another artist book project. In fact, in the picture, you have two of them. It's one I'm wearing and one that's on exhibition at the Center for Books Arts in New York City. Why do I call it a book? It's called "Fashion Statement," and there are quotes about fashion, so you can read it, and also, because the definition of artist book is very generous. So artist books, you take them off the wall. You take them for a walk. You can also install them as public art. Here it's in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it's called "Floating Memories." So it's regional memories, and they are just randomly moved by the wind. I love public art. And I entered competitions for a long time. After eight years of rejection, I was thrilled to get my first commission with the Percent for Art in New York City. It was for a merger station for emergency workers and firemen. I made an artist book that's in stainless steel instead of paper. I called it "Working in the Same Direction." But I added weathervanes on both sides to show that they cover all directions. With public art, I could also make cut glass. Here it's faceted glass in the Bronx. And each time I make public art, I want something that's really relevant to the place it's installed. So for the subway in New York, I saw a correspondence between riding the subway and reading. It is travel in time, travel on time. And Bronx literature, it's all about Bronx writers and their stories. Another glass project is in a public library in San Jose, California. So I made a vegetable point of view of the growth of San Jose. So I started in the center with the acorn for the Ohlone Indian civilization. Then I have the fruit from Europe for the ranchers. And then the fruit of the world for Silicon Valley today. And it's still growing. So the technique, it's cut, sandblasted, etched and printed glass into architectural glass. And outside the library, I wanted to make a place to cultivate your mind. I took library material that had fruit in their title and I used them to make an orchard walk with these fruits of knowledge. I also planted the bibliotree. So it's a tree, and in its trunk you have the roots of languages. And it's all about international writing systems. And on the branches you have library material growing. You can also have function and form with public art. So in Aurora, Colorado it's a bench. But you have a bonus with this bench. Because if you sit a long time in summer in shorts, you will walk away with temporary branding of the story element on your thighs. (Laughter) Another functional work, it's in the south side of Chicago for a subway station. And it's called "Seeds of the Future are Planted Today." It's a story about transformation and connections. So it acts as a screen to protect the rail and the commuter, and not to have objects falling on the rails. To be able to change fences and window guards into flowers, it's fantastic. And here I've been working for the last three years with a South Bronx developer to bring art to life to low-income buildings and affordable housing. So each building has its own personality. And sometimes it's about a legacy of the neighborhood, like in Morrisania, about the jazz history. And for other projects, like in Paris, it's about the name of the street. It's called Rue des Prairies — Prairie Street. So I brought back the rabbit, the dragonfly, to stay in that street. And in 2009, I was asked to make a poster to be placed in the subway cars in New York City for a year. So that was a very captive audience. And I wanted to give them an escape. I created "All Around Town." It is a papercutting, and then after, I added color on the computer. So I can call it techno-crafted. And along the way, I'm kind of making papercuttings and adding other techniques. But the result is always to have stories. So the stories, they have a lot of possibilities. They have a lot of scenarios. I don't know the stories. I take images from our global imagination, from cliché, from things we are thinking about, from history. And everybody's a narrator, because everybody has a story to tell. But more important is everybody has to make a story to make sense of the world. And in all these universes, it's like imagination is the vehicle to be transported with, but the destination is our minds and how we can reconnect with the essential and with the magic. And it's what story cutting is all about. (Applause)

FBI, here I am!

{0: 'In 2002, American artist Hasan Elahi’s name was added (by mistake) to the US government’s watch list.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Hi there. I'm Hasan. I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, "Do you paint?" or "What kind of medium do you work in?" Well most of my work that I work with is really a little bit about methodologies of working rather than actually a specific discipline or a specific technique. So what I'm really interested in is creative problem solving. And I had a little bit of a problem a few years ago. So let me show you a little of that. So it started over here. And this is the Detroit airport in June 19th of 2002. I was flying back to the U.S. from an exhibition overseas. And as I was coming back, well I was taken by the FBI, met by an FBI agent, and went into a little room and he asked me all sorts of questions — "Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you talking with? Why were you there? Who pays for your trips?" — all these little details. And then literally just out of nowhere, the guy asks me, "Where were you September 12th?" And when most of us get asked, "Where were you September 12th?" or any date for that fact, it's like, "I don't exactly remember, but I can look it up for you." So I pulled out my little PDA, and I said, "Okay, let's look up my appointments for September 12th." I had September 12th — from 10:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., I paid my storage bill. From 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., I met with Judith who was one of my graduate students at the time. From 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., I taught my intro class, 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., I taught my advanced class. "Where were you the 11th?" "Where were you the 10th?" "Where were you the 29th? the 30th?" "Where were you October 5th?" We read about six months of my calendar. And I don't think he was expecting me to have such detailed records of what I did. But good thing I did, because I don't look good in orange. (Laughter) So he asked me — (Applause) "So this storage unit that you paid the rent on, what did you have in it?" This was in Tampa, Florida, so I was like, "Winter clothes that I have no use for in Florida. Furniture that I can't fit in my ratty apartment. Just assorted garage sale junk, because I'm a pack rat." And he looks at me really confused and says, "No explosives?" (Laughter) I was like, "No, no. I'm pretty certain there were no explosives. And if there were, I would have remembered that one." And he's still a little confused, but I think that anyone who talks to me for more than a couple of minutes realizes I'm not exactly a terrorist threat. And so we're sitting there, and eventually after about an hour, hour and a half of just going back and forth, he says, "Okay, I have enough information here. I'm going to pass this onto the Tampa office. They're the ones who initiated this. They'll follow up with you, and we'll take care of it." I was like, "Great." So I got home and the phone rings, and a man introduced himself. Basically this is the FBI offices in Tampa where I spent six months of my life — back and forth, not six months continuously. By the way, you folks know that in the United States, you can't take photographs of federal buildings, but Google can do it for you. So to the folks from Google, thank you. (Applause) So I spent a lot of time in this building. Questions like: "Have you ever witnessed or participated in any act that may be detrimental to the United States or a foreign nation?" And you also have to consider the state of mind you're in when you're doing this. You're basically face-to-face with someone that essentially decides life or death. Or questions such as — actually, during the polygraph, which was how it finally ended after nine consecutive of them — one of the polygraph questions was ... well the first one was, "Is your name Hasan?" "Yes." "Are we in Florida?" "Yes." "Is today Tuesday?" "Yes." Because you have to base it on a yes or no. Then, of course, the next question is: "Do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States?" I work at a university. (Laughter) So I was like, "Maybe you want to ask some of my colleagues that directly." But they said, "Okay, aside from what we had discussed, do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States?" I was like, "No." So at the end of six months of this and nine consecutive polygraphs, they said, "Hey, everything's fine." I was like, "I know. That's what I've been trying to tell you guys all along. I know everything's fine." So they're looking at me really odd. And it's like, "Guys, I travel a lot." This is with the FBI. And I was like, "All we need is Alaska not to get the last memo, and here we go all over again." And there was a sincere concern there. And he was like, "You know, if you get into trouble, give us a call — we'll take care of it." So ever since then, before I would go anywhere, I would call the FBI. I would tell them, "Hey guys, this is where I'm going. This is my flight. Northwest flight seven coming into Seattle on March 12th" or whatever. A couple weeks later, I'd call again, let them know. It wasn't that I had to, but I chose to. Just wanted to say, "Hey guys. Don't want to make it look like I'm making any sudden moves." (Laughter) "I don't want you guys to think that I'm about to flee. Just letting you know. Heads up." And so I just kept doing this over and over and over. And then the phone calls turned into emails, and the emails got longer and longer and longer ... with pictures, with travel tips. Then I'd make websites. And then I built this over here. Let me go back to it over here. So I actually designed this back in 2003. So this kind of tracks me at any given moment. I wrote some code for my mobile phone. Basically, what I decided is okay guys, you want to watch me, that's cool. But I'll watch myself. It's okay. You don't have to waste your energy or your resources. And I'll help you out. So in the process, I start thinking, well what else might they know about me? Well they probably have all my flight records, so I decided to put all my flight records from birth online. So you can see, Delta 1252 going from Kansas City to Atlanta. And then you see, these are some of the meals that I've been fed on the planes. This was on Delta 719 going from JFK to San Francisco. See that? They won't let me on a plane with that, but they'll give it to me on the plane. (Laughter) These are the airports that I hang out in, because I like airports. That's Kennedy airport, May 19th, Tuesday. This is in Warsaw. Singapore. You can see, they're kind of empty. These images are shot really anonymously to the point where it could be anyone. But if you can cross-reference this with the other data, then you're basically replaying the roll of the FBI agent and putting it all together. And when you're in a situation where you have to justify every moment of your existence, you're put in the situation where you react in a very different manner. At the time that this was going on, the last thing on my mind was "art project." I was certainly not thinking, hey, I got new work here. But after going through this, after realizing, well what just happened? And after piecing together this, this and this, this way of actually trying to figure out what happened for myself eventually evolved into this, and it actually became this project. So these are the stores that I shop in — some of them — because they need to know. This is me buying some duck flavored paste at the Ranch 99 in Daly City on Sunday, November 15th. At Coreana Supermarket buying my kimchi because I like kimchi. And I bought some crabs too right around there, and some chitlins at the Safeway in Emoryville. And laundry too. Laundry detergent at West Oakland — East Oakland, sorry. And then my pickled jellyfish at the Hong Kong Supermarket on Route 18 in East Brunswick. Now if you go to my bank records, it'll actually show something from there, so you know that, on May 9th, that I bought $14.79 in fuel from Safeway Vallejo. So not only that I'm giving this information here and there, but now there's a third party, an independent third party, my bank, that's verifying that, yes indeed, I was there at this time. So there's points, and these points are actually being cross-referenced. And there's a verification taking place. Sometimes they're really small purchases. So 34 cents foreign transaction fee. All of these are extracted directly from my bank accounts, and everything pops up right away. Sometimes there's a lot of information. This is exactly where my old apartment in San Francisco was. And then sometimes you get this. Sometimes you just get this, just an empty hallway in Salt Lake City, January 22nd. And I can tell you exactly who I was with, where I was, because this is what I had to do with the FBI. I had to tell them every little detail of everything. I spend a lot of time on the road. This is a parking lot in Elko, Nevada off of Route 80 at 8:01 p.m. on August 19th. I spend a lot of time in gas stations too — empty train stations. So there's multiple databases. And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of images. There's actually 46,000 images right now on my site, and the FBI has seen all of them — at least I trust they've seen all of them. And then sometimes you don't get much information at all, you just get this empty bed. And sometimes you get a lot of text information and no visual information. So you get something like this. This, by the way, is the location of my favorite sandwich shop in California — Vietnamese sandwich. So there's different categorizations of meals eaten outside empty train stations, empty gas stations. These are some of the meals that I've been cooking at home. So how do you know these are meals eaten at home? Well the same plate shows up a whole bunch of times. So again, you have to do some detective work here. So sometimes the databases get so specific. These are all tacos eaten in Mexico City near a train station on July fifth to July sixth. At 11:39 a.m. was this one. At 1:56 p.m. was this one. At 4:59 p.m. was this one. So I time-stamp my life every few moments. Every few moments I shoot the image. Now it's all done on my iPhone, and it all goes straight up to my server, and my server does all the backend work and categorizes things and puts everything together. They need to know where I'm doing my business, because they want to know about my business. So on December 4th, I went here. And on Sunday, June 14th at 2009 — this was actually about two o'clock in the afternoon in Skowhegan, Maine — this was my apartment there. So what you're basically seeing here is all bits and pieces and all this information. If you go to my site, there's tons of things. And really, it's not the most user-friendly interface. It's actually quite user-unfriendly. And one of the reasons, also being part of the user-unfriendliness, is that everything is there, but you have to really work through it. So by me putting all this information out there, what I'm basically telling you is I'm telling you everything. But in this barrage of noise that I'm putting out, I actually live an incredibly anonymous and private life. And you know very little about me actually. And really so I've come to the conclusion that the way you protect your privacy, particularly in an era where everything is cataloged and everything is archived and everything is recorded, there's no need to delete information anymore. So what do you do when everything is out there? Well you have to take control over it. And if I give you this information directly, it's a very different type of identity than if you were to try to go through and try to get bits and pieces. The other thing that's also interesting that's going on here is the fact that intelligence agencies — and it doesn't matter who they are — they all operate in an industry where their commodity is information, or restricted access to information. And the reason their information has any value is, well, because no one else has access to it. And by me cutting out the middle man and giving it straight to you, the information that the FBI has has no value, so thus devaluing their currency. And I understand that, on an individual level, it's purely symbolic. But if 300 million people in the U.S. started doing this, we would have to redesign the entire intelligence system from the ground up. Because it just wouldn't work if everybody was sharing everything. And we're getting to that. When I first started this project, people were looking at me and saying, "Why would you want to tell everybody what you're doing, where you're at? Why are you posting these photos?" This was an age before people were Tweeting everywhere and 750 million people were posting status messages or poking people. So in a way, I'm glad that I'm completely obsolete. I'm still doing this project, but it is obsolete, because you're all doing it. This is something that we all are doing on a daily basis, whether we're aware of it or not. So we're creating our own archives and so on. And you know, some of my friends have always said, "Hey, you're just paranoid. Why are you doing this? Because no one's really watching. No one's really going to bother you." So one of the things that I do is I actually look through my server logs very carefully. Because it's about surveillance. I'm watching who's watching me. And I came up with these. So these are some of my sample logs. And just little bits and pieces, and you can see some of the things there. And I cleaned up the list a little bit so you can see. So you can see that the Homeland Security likes to come by — Department of Homeland Security. You can see the National Security Agency likes to come by. I actually moved very close to them. I live right down the street from them now. Central Intelligence Agency. Executive Office of the President. Not really sure why they show up, but they do. I think they kind of like to look at art. And I'm glad that we have patrons of the arts in these fields. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Hasan, just curious. You said, "Now everything automatically goes from my iPhone," but actually you do take the pictures and put on information. So how many hours of the day does that take? HE: Almost none. It's no different than sending a text. It's no different than checking an email. It's one of those things, we got by just fine before we had to do any of those. So it's just become another day. I mean, when we update a status message, we don't really think about how long that's going to take. So it's really just a matter of my phone clicking a couple of clicks, send, and then it's done. And everything's automated at the other end. BG: On the day you are in a place where there is no coverage, the FBI gets crazy? HE: Well it goes to the last point that I was at. So it holds onto the very last point. So if I'm on a 12-hour flight, you'll see the last airport that I departed from. BG: Hasan, thank you very much. (HE: Thank you.) (Applause)

Trust, morality -- and oxytocin?

{0: 'A pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics, Paul Zak is uncovering how the hormone oxytocin promotes trust, and proving that love is good for business.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Is there anything unique about human beings? There is. We're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments. We're obsessed with morality as social creatures. We need to know why people are doing what they're doing. And I personally am obsessed with morality. It was all due to this woman, Sister Mary Marastela, also known as my mom. As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense, and I learned to say phrases in Latin, but I also had time to think about whether my mother's top-down morality applied to everybody. I saw that people who were religious and non-religious were equally obsessed with morality. I thought, maybe there's some earthly basis for moral decisions. But I wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral. I want to know if there's a chemistry of morality. I want to know if there was a moral molecule. After 10 years of experiments, I found it. Would you like to see it? I brought some with me. This little syringe contains the moral molecule. (Laughter) It's called oxytocin. So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals. In rodents, it was known to make mothers care for their offspring, and in some creatures, allowed for toleration of burrowmates. But in humans, it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women, and is released by both sexes during sex. So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule. I did what most of us do — I tried it on some colleagues. One of them told me, "Paul, that is the world's stupidist idea. It is," he said, "only a female molecule. It can't be that important." But I countered, "Well men's brains make this too. There must be a reason why." But he was right, it was a stupid idea. But it was testably stupid. In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral. Turns out it wasn't so easy. First of all, oxytocin is a shy molecule. Baseline levels are near zero, without some stimulus to cause its release. And when it's produced, it has a three-minute half-life, and degrades rapidly at room temperature. So this experiment would have to cause a surge of oxytocin, have to grab it fast and keep it cold. I think I can do that. Now luckily, oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood, so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery. Then I had to measure morality. So taking on Morality with a capital M is a huge project. So I started smaller. I studied one single virtue: trustworthiness. Why? I had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous. So in these countries, more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. So poor countries are by and large low trust countries. So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness, I might help alleviate poverty. But I'm also a skeptic. I don't want to just ask people, "Are you trustworthy?" So instead I use the Jerry Maguire approach to research. If you're so virtuous, show me the money. So what we do in my lab is we tempt people with virtue and vice by using money. Let me show you how we do that. So we recruit some people for an experiment. They all get $10 if they agree to show up. We give them lots of instruction, and we never ever deceive them. Then we match them in pairs by computer. And in that pair, one person gets a message saying, "Do you want to give up some of your $10 you earned for being here and ship it to someone else in the lab?" The trick is you can't see them, you can't talk to them. You only do it one time. Now whatever you give up gets tripled in the other person's account. You're going to make them a lot wealthier. And they get a message by computer saying person one sent you this amount of money. Do you want to keep it all, or do you want to send some amount back? So think about this experiment for minute. You're going to sit on these hard chairs for an hour and a half. Some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle and take four tubes of blood. And now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger? So this was the birth of vampire economics. Make a decision and give me some blood. So in fact, experimental economists had run this test around the world, and for much higher stakes, and the consensus view was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust, and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness. But in fact, economists were flummoxed on why the second person would ever return any money. They assumed money is good, why not keep it all? That's not what we found. We found 90 percent of the first decision-makers sent money, and of those who received money, 95 percent returned some of it. But why? Well by measuring oxytocin we found that the more money the second person received, the more their brain produced oxytocin, and the more oxytocin on board, the more money they returned. So we have a biology of trustworthiness. But wait. What's wrong with this experiment? Two things. One is that nothing in the body happens in isolation. So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin, but they didn't have any effect. But the second is that I still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness. I didn't know for sure oxytocin caused trustworthiness. So to make the experiment, I knew I'd have to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly. I used everything short of a drill to get oxytocin into my own brain. And I found I could do it with a nasal inhaler. So along with colleagues in Zurich, we put 200 men on oxytocin or placebo, had that same trust test with money, and we found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust, we can more than double the number of people who sent all their money to a stranger — all without altering mood or cognition. So oxytocin is the trust molecule, but is it the moral molecule? Using the oxytocin inhaler, we ran more studies. We showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent. We showed it increases donations to charity by 50 percent. We've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin. These include massage, dancing and praying. Yes, my mom was happy about that last one. And whenever we raise oxytocin, people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers. But why do they do this? What does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin? To investigate this question, we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son, and his son has terminal brain cancer. After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin. The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy. So it's empathy that makes us connect to other people. It's empathy that makes us help other people. It's empathy that makes us moral. Now this idea is not new. A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." In this book, Smith argued that we are moral creatures, not because of a top-down reason, but for a bottom-up reason. He said we're social creatures, so we share the emotions of others. So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain. So I tend to avoid that. If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy. So I tend to do those things. Now this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later, would write a little book called "The Wealth of Nations" — the founding document of economics. But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher, and he was right on why we're moral. I just found the molecule behind it. But knowing that molecule is valuable, because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off. In particular, it tells us why we see immorality. So to investigate immorality, let me bring you back now to 1980. I'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. You sit in a gas station all day, you see lots of morality and immorality, let me tell you. So one Sunday afternoon, a man walks into my cashier's booth with this beautiful jewelry box. Opens it up and there's a pearl necklace inside. And he said, "Hey, I was in the men's room. I just found this. What do you think we should do with it?" "I don't know, put it in the lost and found." "Well this is very valuable. We have to find the owner for this." I said, "Yea." So we're trying to decide what to do with this, and the phone rings. And a man says very excitedly, "I was in your gas station a while ago, and I bought this jewelry for my wife, and I can't find it." I said, "Pearl necklace?" "Yeah." "Hey, a guy just found it." "Oh, you're saving my life. Here's my phone number. Tell that guy to wait half an hour. I'll be there and I'll give him a $200 reward." Great, so I tell the guy, "Look, relax. Get yourself a fat reward. Life's good." He said, "I can't do it. I have this job interview in Galena in 15 minutes, and I need this job, I've got to go." Again he asked me, "What do you think we should do?" I'm in high school. I have no idea. So I said, "I'll hold it for you." He said, "You know, you've been so nice, let's split the reward." I'll give you the jewelry, you give me a hundred dollars, and when the guy comes ... " You see it. I was conned. So this is a classic con called the pigeon drop, and I was the pigeon. So the way many cons work is not that the conman gets the victim to trust him, it's that he shows he trusts the victim. Now we know what happens. The victim's brain releases oxytocin, and you're opening up your wallet or purse, giving away the money. So who are these people who manipulate our oxytocin systems? We found, testing thousands of individuals, that five percent of the population don't release oxytocin on stimulus. So if you trust them, their brains don't release oxytocin. If there's money on the table, they keep it all. So there's a technical word for these people in my lab. We call them bastards. (Laughter) These are not people you want to have a beer with. They have many of the attributes of psychopaths. Now there are other ways the system can be inhibited. One is through improper nurturing. So we've studied sexually abused women, and about half those don't release oxytocin on stimulus. You need enough nurturing for this system to develop properly. Also, high stress inhibits oxytocin. So we all know this, when we're really stressed out, we're not acting our best. There's another way oxytocin is inhibited, which is interesting — through the action of testosterone. So we, in experiments, have administered testosterone to men. And instead of sharing money, they become selfish. But interestingly, high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish. (Laughter) Now think about this. It means, within our own biology, we have the yin and yang of morality. We have oxytocin that connects us to others, makes us feel what they feel. And we have testosterone. And men have 10 times the testosterone as women, so men do this more than women — we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally. We don't need God or government telling us what to do. It's all inside of us. So you may be wondering: these are beautiful laboratory experiments, do they really apply to real life? Yeah, I've been worrying about that too. So I've gone out of the lab to see if this really holds in our daily lives. So last summer, I attended a wedding in Southern England. 200 people in this beautiful Victorian mansion. I didn't know a single person. And I drove up in my rented Vauxhall. And I took out a centrifuge and dry ice and needles and tubes. And I took blood from the bride and the groom and the wedding party and the family and the friends before and immediately after the vows. (Laughter) And guess what? Weddings cause a release of oxytocin, but they do so in a very particular way. Who is the center of the wedding solar system? The bride. She had the biggest increase in oxytocin. Who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride? Her mother, that's right. Her mother was number two. Then the groom's father, then the groom, then the family, then the friends — arrayed around the bride like planets around the Sun. So I think it tells us that we've designed this ritual to connect us to this new couple, connect us emotionally. Why? Because we need them to be successful at reproducing to perpetuate the species. I also worried that my trust experiments with small amounts of money didn't really capture how often we actually trust our lives to strangers. So even though I have a fear of heights, I recently strapped myself to another human being and stepped out of an airplane at 12,000 ft. I took my blood before and after, and I had a huge spike of oxytocin. And there are so many ways we can connect to people. For example, through social media. Many people are Tweeting right now. So we investigated the role of social media and found the using social media produced a solid double-digit increase in oxytocin. So I ran this experiment recently for the Korean Broadcasting System. And they had the reporters and their producers participate. And one of these guys, he must have been 22, he had 150 percent spike in oxytocin. I mean, astounding; no one has this. So he was using social media in private. When I wrote my report to the Koreans, I said, "Look, I don't know what this guy was doing," but my guess was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend. They checked. He was interacting on his girlfriend's Facebook page. There you go. That's connection. So there's tons of ways that we can connect to other people, and it seems to be universal. Two weeks ago, I just got back from Papua New Guinea where I went up to the highlands — very isolated tribes of subsistence farmers living as they have lived for millenia. There are 800 different languages in the highlands. These are the most primitive people in the world. And they indeed also release oxytocin. So oxytocin connects us to other people. Oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel. And it's so easy to cause people's brains to release oxytocin. I know how to do it, and my favorite way to do it is, in fact, the easiest. Let me show it to you. Come here. Give me a hug. (Laughter) There you go. (Applause) So my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname Dr. Love. I'm happy to share a little more love in the world, it's great, but here's your prescription from Dr. Love: eight hugs a day. We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier. And they're happier because they have better relationships of all types. Dr. Love says eight hugs a day. Eight hugs a day — you'll be happier and the world will be a better place. Of course, if you don't like to touch people, I can always shove this up your nose. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

A plane you can drive

{0: 'Anna Mracek Dietrich is one of the creators of the Transition, the "plane you can drive."'}

TEDGlobal 2011

What is it about flying cars? We've wanted to do this for about a hundred years. And there are historic attempts that have had some level of technical success. But we haven't yet gotten to the point where on your way here this morning you see something that really, truly seamlessly integrates the two-dimensional world that we're comfortable in with the three-dimensional sky above us — that, I don't know about you, but I really enjoy spending time in. We looked at the historical attempts that had been out there and realized that, despite the fact that we have a lot of modern innovations to draw on today that weren't available previously — we have modern composite materials, we have aircraft engines that get good fuel economy and have better power-to-rate ratios than have ever been available, we have glass cockpit avionics that bring the information you need to fly directly to you in the cockpit — but without fundamentally addressing the problem from a different perspective, we realized that we were going to be getting the same result that people had been getting for the last hundred years, which isn't where we want to be right now. So instead of trying to make a car that can fly, we decided to try to make a plane that could drive. And the result is the Terrafugia Transition. It's a two-seat, single-engine airplane that works just like any other small airplane. You take off and land at a local airport. Then once you're on the ground, you fold up the wings, drive it home, park it in your garage. And it works. After two years of an innovative design and construction process, the proof of concept made its public debut in 2008. Now like with anything that's really different from the status quo, it didn't always go so well testing that aircraft. And we discovered that it's a very good thing that, when you go home with something that's been broken, you've actually learned a lot more than when you managed to tick off all of your test objectives the first time through. Still, we very much wanted to see the aircraft that we'd all helped build in the air, off the ground, like it was supposed to be. And on our third high-speed testing deployment on a bitter cold morning in upstate New York, we got to do that for the first time. The picture behind me was snapped by the copilot in our chase aircraft just moments after the wheels got off the ground for the first time. And we were all very flattered to see that image become a symbol of accomplishing something that people had thought was impossible really the world over. The flight testing that followed that was as basic and low-risk as we could make it, but it still accomplished what we needed to to take the program to the next step and to gain the credibility that we needed within our eventual market, the general aviation community, and with the regulators that govern the use of design of aircraft, particularly in the States. The FAA, about a year ago, gave us an exemption for the Transition to allow us to have an additional 110 lbs. within the light sport aircraft category. Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's very important, because being able to deliver the Transition as a light sport aircraft makes it simpler for us to certify it, but it also makes it much easier for you to learn how to fly it. A sport pilot can be certificated in as little as 20 hours of flight time. And at 110 lbs., that's very important for solving the other side of the equation — driving. It turns out that driving, with its associated design implementation and regulatory hurdles, is actually a harder problem to solve than flying. For those of us that spend most of our lives on the ground, this may be counter-intuitive, but driving has potholes, cobblestones, pedestrians, other drivers and a rather long and detailed list of federal motor vehicle safety standards to contend with. Fortunately, necessity remains the mother of invention, and a lot of the design work that we're the most proud of with the aircraft came out of solving the unique problems of operating it on the ground — everything from a continuously-variable transmission and liquid-based cooling system that allows us to use an aircraft engine in stop-and-go traffic, to a custom-designed gearbox that powers either the propeller when you're flying or the wheels on the ground, to the automated wing-folding mechanism that we'll see in a moment, to crash safety features. We have a carbon fiber safety cage that protects the occupants for less than 10 percent of the weight of a traditional steel chassis in a car. Now this also, as good as it is, wasn't quite enough. The regulations for vehicles on the road weren't written with an airplane in mind. So we did need a little bit of support from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Now you may have seen in the news recently, they came through with us at the end of last month with a few special exemptions that will allow the Transition to be sold in the same category as SUVs and light trucks. As a multi-purpose passenger vehicle, it is now officially "designed for occasional off-road use." (Laughter) Now let's see it in action. You can see there the wings folded up just along the side of the plane. You're not powering the propeller, you're powering the wheels. And it is under seven feet tall, so it will fit in a standard construction garage. And that's the automated wing-folding mechanism. That's real time. You just push a few buttons in the cockpit, and the wings come out. Once they're fully deployed, there's a mechanical lock that goes into place, again, from inside the cockpit. And they're now fully capable of handling any of the loads you would see in flight — just like putting down your convertible top. And you're all thinking what your neighbors would think of seeing that. (Video) Test Pilot: Until the vehicle flies, 75 percent of your risk is that first flight. Radio: It actually flew. Yes. Radio 2: That was gorgeous. Radio: What did you think of that? That was beautiful from up here, I tell you. AMD: See, we're all exceedingly excited about that little bunny hop. And our test pilot gave us the best feedback you can get from a test pilot after a first flight, which was that it was "remarkably unremarkable." He would go onto tell us that the Transition had been the easiest airplane to land that he'd flown in his entire 30-year career as a test pilot. So despite making something that is seemingly revolutionary, we really focused on doing as little new as possible. We leverage a lot of technology from the state-of-the-art in general aviation and from automotive racing. When we do have to do something truly out-of-the-box, we use an incremental design, build, test, redesign cycle that lets us reduce risk in baby steps. Now since we started Terrafugia about 6 years ago, we've had a lot of those baby steps. We've gone from being three of us working in the basement at MIT while we were still in graduate school to about two-dozen of us working in an initial production facility outside of Boston. We've had to overcome challenges like keeping the weight below the light sport limit that I talked about, figuring out how to politely respond when a regulator tells you, "But that won't fit through a toll booth with the wings extended — (Laughter) to all of the other associated durability and engineering issues that we talked about on the ground. Still, if everything goes to our satisfaction with the testing and construction of the two production prototypes that we're working on right now, those first deliveries to the, about a hundred, people who have reserved an airplane at this point should begin at the end of next year. The Transition will cost in line with other small airplanes. And I'm certainly not out to replace your Chevy, but I do think that the Transition should be your next airplane. Here's why. While nearly all of the commercial air travel in the world goes through a relatively small number of large hub airports, there is a huge underutilized resource out there. There are thousands of local airstrips that don't see nearly as many aircraft operations a day as they could. On average, there's one within 20 to 30 miles of wherever you are in the United States. The Transition gives you a safer, more convenient and more fun way of using this resource. For those of you who aren't yet pilots, there's four main reasons why those of us who are don't fly as much as we'd like to: the weather, primarily, cost, long door-to-door travel time and mobility at your destination. Now, bad weather comes in, just land, fold up the wings, drive home. Doesn't matter if it rains a little, you have a windshield wiper. Instead of paying to keep your airplane in a hanger, park it in your garage. And the unleaded automotive fuel that we use is both cheaper and better for the environment than traditional avgas. Door-to-door travel time is reduced, because now, instead of lugging bags, finding a parking space, taking off your shoes or pulling your airplane out of the hanger, you're now just spending that time getting to where you want to go. And mobility to your destination is clearly solved. Just fold up the wings and keep going. The Transition simultaneously expands our horizons while making the world a smaller, more accessible place. It also continues to be a fabulous adventure. I hope you'll each take a moment to think about how you could use something like this to give yourself more access to your own world, and to make your own travel more convenient and more fun. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share it with you. (Applause)

The real reason for brains

{0: 'A neuroscientist and engineer, Daniel Wolpert studies how the brain controls the body.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

I'm a neuroscientist. And in neuroscience, we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain. But I want to start with the easiest question and the question you really should have all asked yourselves at some point in your life, because it's a fundamental question if we want to understand brain function. And that is, why do we and other animals have brains? Not all species on our planet have brains, so if we want to know what the brain is for, let's think about why we evolved one. Now you may reason that we have one to perceive the world or to think, and that's completely wrong. If you think about this question for any length of time, it's blindingly obvious why we have a brain. We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain. Think about it. Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. Now that's not quite true. There's one other way, and that's through sweating. But apart from that, everything else goes through contractions of muscles. So think about communication — speech, gestures, writing, sign language — they're all mediated through contractions of your muscles. So it's really important to remember that sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they're only important to either drive or suppress future movements. There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn't affect the way you're going to move later in life. Now for those who don't believe this argument, we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain, but the clinching evidence is this animal here — the humble sea squirt. Rudimentary animal, has a nervous system, swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life. And at some point of its life, it implants on a rock. And the first thing it does in implanting on that rock, which it never leaves, is to digest its own brain and nervous system for food. So once you don't need to move, you don't need the luxury of that brain. And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure, but that's a different subject. (Applause) So I am a movement chauvinist. I believe movement is the most important function of the brain — don't let anyone tell you that it's not true. Now if movement is so important, how well are we doing understanding how the brain controls movement? And the answer is we're doing extremely poorly; it's a very hard problem. But we can look at how well we're doing by thinking about how well we're doing building machines which can do what humans can do. Think about the game of chess. How well are we doing determining what piece to move where? If you pit Garry Kasparov here, when he's not in jail, against IBM's Deep Blue, well the answer is IBM's Deep Blue will occasionally win. And I think if IBM's Deep Blue played anyone in this room, it would win every time. That problem is solved. What about the problem of picking up a chess piece, dexterously manipulating it and putting it back down on the board? If you put a five year-old child's dexterity against the best robots of today, the answer is simple: the child wins easily. There's no competition at all. Now why is that top problem so easy and the bottom problem so hard? One reason is a very smart five year-old could tell you the algorithm for that top problem — look at all possible moves to the end of the game and choose the one that makes you win. So it's a very simple algorithm. Now of course there are other moves, but with vast computers we approximate and come close to the optimal solution. When it comes to being dexterous, it's not even clear what the algorithm is you have to solve to be dexterous. And we'll see you have to both perceive and act on the world, which has a lot of problems. But let me show you cutting-edge robotics. Now a lot of robotics is very impressive, but manipulation robotics is really just in the dark ages. So this is the end of a Ph.D. project from one of the best robotics institutes. And the student has trained this robot to pour this water into a glass. It's a hard problem because the water sloshes about, but it can do it. But it doesn't do it with anything like the agility of a human. Now if you want this robot to do a different task, that's another three-year Ph.D. program. There is no generalization at all from one task to another in robotics. Now we can compare this to cutting-edge human performance. So what I'm going to show you is Emily Fox winning the world record for cup stacking. Now the Americans in the audience will know all about cup stacking. It's a high school sport where you have 12 cups you have to stack and unstack against the clock in a prescribed order. And this is her getting the world record in real time. (Laughter) (Applause) And she's pretty happy. We have no idea what is going on inside her brain when she does that, and that's what we'd like to know. So in my group, what we try to do is reverse engineer how humans control movement. And it sounds like an easy problem. You send a command down, it causes muscles to contract. Your arm or body moves, and you get sensory feedback from vision, from skin, from muscles and so on. The trouble is these signals are not the beautiful signals you want them to be. So one thing that makes controlling movement difficult is, for example, sensory feedback is extremely noisy. Now by noise, I do not mean sound. We use it in the engineering and neuroscience sense meaning a random noise corrupting a signal. So the old days before digital radio when you were tuning in your radio and you heard "crrcckkk" on the station you wanted to hear, that was the noise. But more generally, this noise is something that corrupts the signal. So for example, if you put your hand under a table and try to localize it with your other hand, you can be off by several centimeters due to the noise in sensory feedback. Similarly, when you put motor output on movement output, it's extremely noisy. Forget about trying to hit the bull's eye in darts, just aim for the same spot over and over again. You have a huge spread due to movement variability. And more than that, the outside world, or task, is both ambiguous and variable. The teapot could be full, it could be empty. It changes over time. So we work in a whole sensory movement task soup of noise. Now this noise is so great that society places a huge premium on those of us who can reduce the consequences of noise. So if you're lucky enough to be able to knock a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick, our society will be willing to reward you with hundreds of millions of dollars. Now what I want to convince you of is the brain also goes through a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this sort of noise and variability. And to do that, I'm going to tell you about a framework which is very popular in statistics and machine learning of the last 50 years called Bayesian decision theory. And it's more recently a unifying way to think about how the brain deals with uncertainty. And the fundamental idea is you want to make inferences and then take actions. So let's think about the inference. You want to generate beliefs about the world. So what are beliefs? Beliefs could be: where are my arms in space? Am I looking at a cat or a fox? But we're going to represent beliefs with probabilities. So we're going to represent a belief with a number between zero and one — zero meaning I don't believe it at all, one means I'm absolutely certain. And numbers in between give you the gray levels of uncertainty. And the key idea to Bayesian inference is you have two sources of information from which to make your inference. You have data, and data in neuroscience is sensory input. So I have sensory input, which I can take in to make beliefs. But there's another source of information, and that's effectively prior knowledge. You accumulate knowledge throughout your life in memories. And the point about Bayesian decision theory is it gives you the mathematics of the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge with your sensory evidence to generate new beliefs. And I've put the formula up there. I'm not going to explain what that formula is, but it's very beautiful. And it has real beauty and real explanatory power. And what it really says, and what you want to estimate, is the probability of different beliefs given your sensory input. So let me give you an intuitive example. Imagine you're learning to play tennis and you want to decide where the ball is going to bounce as it comes over the net towards you. There are two sources of information Bayes' rule tells you. There's sensory evidence — you can use visual information auditory information, and that might tell you it's going to land in that red spot. But you know that your senses are not perfect, and therefore there's some variability of where it's going to land shown by that cloud of red, representing numbers between 0.5 and maybe 0.1. That information is available in the current shot, but there's another source of information not available on the current shot, but only available by repeated experience in the game of tennis, and that's that the ball doesn't bounce with equal probability over the court during the match. If you're playing against a very good opponent, they may distribute it in that green area, which is the prior distribution, making it hard for you to return. Now both these sources of information carry important information. And what Bayes' rule says is that I should multiply the numbers on the red by the numbers on the green to get the numbers of the yellow, which have the ellipses, and that's my belief. So it's the optimal way of combining information. Now I wouldn't tell you all this if it wasn't that a few years ago, we showed this is exactly what people do when they learn new movement skills. And what it means is we really are Bayesian inference machines. As we go around, we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down, but we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is, and then combine those in a real Bayesian way. Now a key part to the Bayesian is this part of the formula. And what this part really says is I have to predict the probability of different sensory feedbacks given my beliefs. So that really means I have to make predictions of the future. And I want to convince you the brain does make predictions of the sensory feedback it's going to get. And moreover, it profoundly changes your perceptions by what you do. And to do that, I'll tell you about how the brain deals with sensory input. So you send a command out, you get sensory feedback back, and that transformation is governed by the physics of your body and your sensory apparatus. But you can imagine looking inside the brain. And here's inside the brain. You might have a little predictor, a neural simulator, of the physics of your body and your senses. So as you send a movement command down, you tap a copy of that off and run it into your neural simulator to anticipate the sensory consequences of your actions. So as I shake this ketchup bottle, I get some true sensory feedback as the function of time in the bottom row. And if I've got a good predictor, it predicts the same thing. Well why would I bother doing that? I'm going to get the same feedback anyway. Well there's good reasons. Imagine, as I shake the ketchup bottle, someone very kindly comes up to me and taps it on the back for me. Now I get an extra source of sensory information due to that external act. So I get two sources. I get you tapping on it, and I get me shaking it, but from my senses' point of view, that is combined together into one source of information. Now there's good reason to believe that you would want to be able to distinguish external events from internal events. Because external events are actually much more behaviorally relevant than feeling everything that's going on inside my body. So one way to reconstruct that is to compare the prediction — which is only based on your movement commands — with the reality. Any discrepancy should hopefully be external. So as I go around the world, I'm making predictions of what I should get, subtracting them off. Everything left over is external to me. What evidence is there for this? Well there's one very clear example where a sensation generated by myself feels very different then if generated by another person. And so we decided the most obvious place to start was with tickling. It's been known for a long time, you can't tickle yourself as well as other people can. But it hasn't really been shown, it's because you have a neural simulator, simulating your own body and subtracting off that sense. So we can bring the experiments of the 21st century by applying robotic technologies to this problem. And in effect, what we have is some sort of stick in one hand attached to a robot, and they're going to move that back and forward. And then we're going to track that with a computer and use it to control another robot, which is going to tickle their palm with another stick. And then we're going to ask them to rate a bunch of things including ticklishness. I'll show you just one part of our study. And here I've taken away the robots, but basically people move with their right arm sinusoidally back and forward. And we replay that to the other hand with a time delay. Either no time delay, in which case light would just tickle your palm, or with a time delay of two-tenths of three-tenths of a second. So the important point here is the right hand always does the same things — sinusoidal movement. The left hand always is the same and puts sinusoidal tickle. All we're playing with is a tempo causality. And as we go from naught to 0.1 second, it becomes more ticklish. As you go from 0.1 to 0.2, it becomes more ticklish at the end. And by 0.2 of a second, it's equivalently ticklish to the robot that just tickled you without you doing anything. So whatever is responsible for this cancellation is extremely tightly coupled with tempo causality. And based on this illustration, we really convinced ourselves in the field that the brain's making precise predictions and subtracting them off from the sensations. Now I have to admit, these are the worst studies my lab has ever run. Because the tickle sensation on the palm comes and goes, you need large numbers of subjects with these stars making them significant. So we were looking for a much more objective way to assess this phenomena. And in the intervening years I had two daughters. And one thing you notice about children in backseats of cars on long journeys, they get into fights — which started with one of them doing something to the other, the other retaliating. It quickly escalates. And children tend to get into fights which escalate in terms of force. Now when I screamed at my children to stop, sometimes they would both say to me the other person hit them harder. Now I happen to know my children don't lie, so I thought, as a neuroscientist, it was important how I could explain how they were telling inconsistent truths. And we hypothesize based on the tickling study that when one child hits another, they generate the movement command. They predict the sensory consequences and subtract it off. So they actually think they've hit the person less hard than they have — rather like the tickling. Whereas the passive recipient doesn't make the prediction, feels the full blow. So if they retaliate with the same force, the first person will think it's been escalated. So we decided to test this in the lab. (Laughter) Now we don't work with children, we don't work with hitting, but the concept is identical. We bring in two adults. We tell them they're going to play a game. And so here's player one and player two sitting opposite to each other. And the game is very simple. We started with a motor with a little lever, a little force transfuser. And we use this motor to apply force down to player one's fingers for three seconds and then it stops. And that player's been told, remember the experience of that force and use your other finger to apply the same force down to the other subject's finger through a force transfuser — and they do that. And player two's been told, remember the experience of that force. Use your other hand to apply the force back down. And so they take it in turns to apply the force they've just experienced back and forward. But critically, they're briefed about the rules of the game in separate rooms. So they don't know the rules the other person's playing by. And what we've measured is the force as a function of terms. And if we look at what we start with, a quarter of a Newton there, a number of turns, perfect would be that red line. And what we see in all pairs of subjects is this — a 70 percent escalation in force on each go. So it really suggests, when you're doing this — based on this study and others we've done — that the brain is canceling the sensory consequences and underestimating the force it's producing. So it re-shows the brain makes predictions and fundamentally changes the precepts. So we've made inferences, we've done predictions, now we have to generate actions. And what Bayes' rule says is, given my beliefs, the action should in some sense be optimal. But we've got a problem. Tasks are symbolic — I want to drink, I want to dance — but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence. And there's a big gap between the task and the movement system. So it could be bridged in infinitely many different ways. So think about just a point to point movement. I could choose these two paths out of an infinite number of paths. Having chosen a particular path, I can hold my hand on that path as infinitely many different joint configurations. And I can hold my arm in a particular joint configuration either very stiff or very relaxed. So I have a huge amount of choice to make. Now it turns out, we are extremely stereotypical. We all move the same way pretty much. And so it turns out we're so stereotypical, our brains have got dedicated neural circuitry to decode this stereotyping. So if I take some dots and set them in motion with biological motion, your brain's circuitry would understand instantly what's going on. Now this is a bunch of dots moving. You will know what this person is doing, whether happy, sad, old, young — a huge amount of information. If these dots were cars going on a racing circuit, you would have absolutely no idea what's going on. So why is it that we move the particular ways we do? Well let's think about what really happens. Maybe we don't all quite move the same way. Maybe there's variation in the population. And maybe those who move better than others have got more chance of getting their children into the next generation. So in evolutionary scales, movements get better. And perhaps in life, movements get better through learning. So what is it about a movement which is good or bad? Imagine I want to intercept this ball. Here are two possible paths to that ball. Well if I choose the left-hand path, I can work out the forces required in one of my muscles as a function of time. But there's noise added to this. So what I actually get, based on this lovely, smooth, desired force, is a very noisy version. So if I pick the same command through many times, I will get a different noisy version each time, because noise changes each time. So what I can show you here is how the variability of the movement will evolve if I choose that way. If I choose a different way of moving — on the right for example — then I'll have a different command, different noise, playing through a noisy system, very complicated. All we can be sure of is the variability will be different. If I move in this particular way, I end up with a smaller variability across many movements. So if I have to choose between those two, I would choose the right one because it's less variable. And the fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise. And one intuition to get is actually the amount of noise or variability I show here gets bigger as the force gets bigger. So you want to avoid big forces as one principle. So we've shown that using this, we can explain a huge amount of data — that exactly people are going about their lives planning movements so as to minimize negative consequences of noise. So I hope I've convinced you the brain is there and evolved to control movement. And it's an intellectual challenge to understand how we do that. But it's also relevant for disease and rehabilitation. There are many diseases which effect movement. And hopefully if we understand how we control movement, we can apply that to robotic technology. And finally, I want to remind you, when you see animals do what look like very simple tasks, the actual complexity of what is going on inside their brain is really quite dramatic. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question for you, Dan. So you're a movement — (DW: Chauvinist.) — chauvinist. Does that mean that you think that the other things we think our brains are about — the dreaming, the yearning, the falling in love and all these things — are a kind of side show, an accident? DW: No, no, actually I think they're all important to drive the right movement behavior to get reproduction in the end. So I think people who study sensation or memory without realizing why you're laying down memories of childhood. The fact that we forget most of our childhood, for example, is probably fine, because it doesn't effect our movements later in life. You only need to store things which are really going to effect movement. CA: So you think that people thinking about the brain, and consciousness generally, could get real insight by saying, where does movement play in this game? DW: So people have found out for example that studying vision in the absence of realizing why you have vision is a mistake. You have to study vision with the realization of how the movement system is going to use vision. And it uses it very differently once you think about it that way. CA: Well that was quite fascinating. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)

Augmented reality, techno-magic

{0: 'Using technology and an array of special effects, Marco Tempest develops immersive environments that allow viewers to viscerally experience the magic of technology.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

So magic is a very introverted field. While scientists regularly publish their latest research, we magicians do not like to share our methods and secrets. That's true even amongst peers. But if you look at creative practice as a form of research, or art as a form of R&D for humanity, then how could a cyber illusionist like myself share his research? Now my own speciality is combining digital technology and magic. And about three years ago, I started an exercise in openness and inclusiveness by reaching out into the open-source software community to create new digital tools for magic — tools that could eventually be shared with other artists to start them off further on in the process and to get them to the poetry faster. Today, I'd like to show you something which came out of these collaborations. It's an augmented reality projection tracking and mapping system, or a digital storytelling tool. Could we bring down the lights please? Thank you. So let's give this a try. And I'm going to use it to give you my take on the stuff of life. (Applause) (Music) Terribly sorry. I forgot the floor. Wake up. Hey. Come on. (Music) Please. (Music) Come on. Ah, sorry about that. Forgot this. (Music) Give it another try. Okay. He figured out the system. (Music) (Laughter) (Applause) (Music) Uh oh. (Music) All right. Let's try this. Come on. (Music) (Laughter) (Music) Hey. (Music) You heard her, go ahead. (Laughter) (Applause) Bye-bye. (Applause)

How mobile phones helped solve two murders

{0: 'Reporter Paul Lewis harnesses the power of mobile phones and social media -- innovations that are making every person a potential journalist.'}

TEDxThessaloniki

I'm here to talk to you about a new way of doing journalism. Some people call this "citizen journalism," other people call it "collaborative journalism." But really, it kind of means this: for the journalists, people like me, it means accepting that you can't know everything, and allowing other people, through technology, to be your eyes and your ears. And for people like you, for other members of the public, it can mean not just being the passive consumers of news, but also coproducing news. And I believe this can be a really empowering process. It can enable ordinary people to hold powerful organizations to account. So I'm going to explain this to you today with two cases, two stories that I've investigated. And they both involve controversial deaths. And in both cases, the authorities put out an official version of events, which was somewhat misleading. We were able to tell an alternative truth utilizing new technology, utilizing social media, particularly Twitter. Essentially, what I'm talking about here is, as I said, citizen journalism. So, to take the first case: this is Ian Tomlinson, the man in the foreground. He was a newspaper vendor from London, and on the 1st of April 2009, he died at the G20 protests in London. Now, he had been — he wasn't a protester, he'd been trying to find his way home from work through the demonstrations. But he didn't get home. He had an encounter with a man behind him, and as you can see, the man behind him has covered his face with a balaclava. And, in fact, he wasn't showing his badge numbers. But I can tell you now, he was PC Simon Harwood, a police officer with London's Metropolitan Police Force. In fact, he belonged to the elite territorial support group. Now, moments after this image was shot, Harwood struck Tomlinson with a baton, and he pushed him to ground, and Tomlinson died moments later. But that wasn't the story the police wanted us to tell. Initially, through official statements and off-the-record briefings, they said that Ian Tomlinson had died of natural causes. They said that there had been no contact with the police, that there were no marks on his body. In fact, they said that when police tried to resuscitate him, the police medics were impeded from doing so, because protesters were throwing missiles, believed to be bottles, at police. And the result of that were stories like this. I show you this slide, because this was the newspaper that Ian Tomlinson had been selling for 20 years of his life. And if any news organization had an obligation to properly forensically analyze what had been going on, it was the Evening Standard newspaper. But they, like everyone else — including my news organization — were misled by the official version of events put out by police. But you can see here, the bottles that were supposedly being thrown at police were turned into bricks by the time they reached this edition of the newspaper. So we were suspicious, and we wanted to see if there was more to the story. We needed to find those protesters you see in the image, but, of course, they had vanished by the time we started investigating. So how do you find the witnesses? This is, for me, where it got really interesting. We turned to the internet. This is Twitter; you've heard a lot about it today. Essentially, for me, when I began investigating this case, I was completely new to this; I'd signed up two days earlier. I discovered that Twitter was a microblogging site. It enabled me to send out short, 140-character messages. Also, an amazing search facility. But it was a social arena in which other people were gathering with a common motive. And in this case, independently of journalists, people themselves were interrogating exactly what had happened to Ian Tomlinson in his last 30 minutes of life. Individuals like these two guys. They went to Ian Tomlinson's aid after he collapsed. They phoned the ambulance. They didn't see any bottles, they didn't see any bricks. So they were concerned that the stories weren't quite as accurate as police were claiming them to be. And again, through social media, we started encountering individuals with material like this: photographs, evidence. Now, this does not show the attack on Ian Tomlinson, but he appears to be in some distress. Was he drunk? Did he fall over? Did this have anything to do with the police officers next to him? Here he appears to be talking to them. For us, this was enough to investigate further, to dig deeper. The result was putting out stories ourselves. One of the most amazing things about the internet is: the information that people put out is freely available to anyone, as we all know. That doesn't just go for citizen journalists, or for people putting out messages on Facebook or Twitter. That goes for journalists themselves, people like me. As long as your news is the right side of a paywall, i.e, it's free, anybody can access it. And stories like these, which were questioning the official version of events, which were skeptical in tone, allowed people to realize that we had questions ourselves. They were online magnets. Individuals with material that could help us were drawn toward us by some kind of gravitational force. And after six days, we had managed to track down around 20 witnesses. We've plotted them here on the map. This is the scene of Ian Tomlinson's death, the Bank of England in London. And each of these witnesses that we plotted on the map, you could click on these small bullet points, and you could hear what they had to say, see their photographic image and at times, see their videographic images as well. But still, at this stage, with witnesses telling us that they'd seen police attack Ian Tomlinson before his death, still, police refused to accept that. There was no official investigation into his death. And then something changed. I got an email from an investment fund manager in New York. On the day of Ian Tomlinson's death, he'd been in London on business, and he'd taken out his digital camera, and he'd recorded this. (Video) Narrator: This is the crowd at G20 protest on April the 1st, around 7:20pm. They were on Cornhill, near the Bank of England. This footage will form the basis of a police investigation into the death of this man. Ian Tomlinson was walking through this area, attempting to get home from work. (People yelling) We've slowed down the footage to show how it poses serious questions about police conduct. Ian Tomlinson had his back to riot officers and dog handlers and was walking away from them. He had his hands in his pockets. Here the riot officer appears to strike Tomlinson's leg area with a baton. He then lunges at Tomlinson from behind. Tomlinson is propelled forward and hits the floor. (People yelling) Paul Lewis: OK. So, shocking stuff. That video wasn't playing too well, but I remember when I first watched the video for myself, I'd been in touch with this investment fund manager in New York, and I had become obsessed with this story. I had spoken to so many people who said they had seen this happen, and the guy on the other end of the phone was saying, "Look, the video shows it." I didn't want to believe him until I saw it for myself. It was two o'clock in the morning, I was there with an IT guy — the video wasn't coming. Finally, it landed, and I clicked on it. And I realized: this is really something quite significant. Within 15 hours, we put it on our website. The first thing police did was they came to our office — senior officers came to our office — and asked us to take the video down. We said no. It would have been too late, anyway, because it had traveled around the world. And the officer in that film, in two days' time, will appear before an inquest jury in London, and they have the power to decide that Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed. So that's the first case; I said two cases today. The second case is this man. Now, like Ian Tomlinson, he was a father, he lived in London. But he was a political refugee from Angola. And six months ago, the British government decided they wanted to return him to Angola; he was a failed asylum seeker. So they booked him a seat on an airline, a flight from Heathrow. Now, the official version of events, the official explanation, of Jimmy Mubenga's death was simply that he'd taken ill. He'd become unwell on the flight, the plane had returned to Heathrow, and then he was transferred to hospital and pronounced dead. Now, what actually happened to Jimmy Mubenga, the story we were able to tell, my colleague Mathew Taylor and I, was that, actually, three security guards began trying to restrain him in his seat; when was resisting his deportation, they were restraining him in his seat. They placed him in a dangerous hold. It keeps detainees quiet, and he was making a lot of noise. But it can also lead to positional asphyxia, a form of suffocation. So you have to imagine: there were other passengers on the plane, and they could hear him saying, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe! They're killing me!" And then he stopped breathing. So how did we find these passengers? In the case of Ian Tomlinson, the witnesses were still in London. But these passengers, many of them, had returned to Angola. How were we going to find them? Again, we turned to the internet. We wrote, as I said before, stories — they're online magnets. The tone of some these stories, journalism professors might frown upon because they were skeptical; they were asking questions, perhaps speculative, maybe the kind of things journalists shouldn't do. But we needed to do it, and we needed to use Twitter also. Here I'm saying an Angolan man dies on a flight. This story could be big; a level of speculation. This next tweet says, "Please RT." That means "please retweet," please pass down the chain. And one of the fascinating things about Twitter is that the pattern of flow of information is unlike anything we've ever seen before. We don't really understand it, but once you let go of a piece of information, it travels like wind. You can't determine where it ends up. But strangely, tweets have an uncanny ability to reach their intended destination. And in this case, it was this man. He says, "I was also there on the BA77" — that's the flight number — "And the man was begging for help, and I now feel so guilty that I did nothing." This was Michael. He was on an Angolan oil field when he sent me this tweet. I was in my office in London. He had concerns about what happened on the flight. He'd gone onto his laptop, he typed in the flight number. He had encountered that tweet, he had encountered our stories. He realized we had an intention to tell a different version of events; we were skeptical. And he contacted me. And this is what Michael said. (Audio) Michael: I'm pretty sure it'll turn out to be asphyxiation. The last thing we heard the man saying was he couldn't breathe. And you've got three security guards, each one of them looked like 100-kilo plus, bearing down on him, holding him down — from what I could see, below the seats. What I saw was the three men trying to pull him down below the seats. And all I could see was his head sticking up above the seats, and he was hollering out, you know, "Help me!" He just kept saying, "Help me! Help me!" And then he disappeared below the seats. And you could see the three security guards sitting on top of him from there. For the rest of my life, I'm always going to have that in the back of my mind. Could I have done something? That's going to bother me every time I lay down to go to sleep now. Wow; I didn't get involved because I was scared I might get kicked off the flight and lose my job. If it takes three men to hold a man down, to put him on a flight, one the public is on, that's excessive. OK? If the man died, that right there is excessive. PL: So that was his interpretation of what had happened on the flight. And Michael was actually one of five witnesses that we eventually managed to track down, most of them, as I said, through the internet, through social media. We could actually place them on the plane, so you could see exactly where they were sat. And I should say at this stage that one really important dimension to all of this for journalists who utilize social media and who utilize citizen journalism is making sure we get our facts correct. Verification is absolutely essential. So in the case of the Ian Tomlinson witnesses, I got them to return to the scene of the death and physically walk me through and tell me exactly what they had seen. That was absolutely essential. In the case of Mubenga, we couldn't do that, but they could send us their boarding passes. And we could interrogate what they were saying and ensure it was consistent with what other passengers were saying, too. The danger in all of this for journalists — for all of us — is that we're victims of hoaxes, or that there's deliberate misinformation fed into the public domain. So we have to be careful. But nobody can deny the power of citizen journalism. When a plane crashes into the Hudson two years ago, and the world finds out about this because a man is on a nearby ferry, and he takes out his iPhone and photographs the image of the plane and sends it around the world — that's how most people found out initially, in the early minutes and hours, about the plane in the Hudson River. Now, think of the two biggest news stories of the year. We had the Japanese earthquake and the tsunami. Cast your mind's eye back to the images that you saw on your television screens. They were boats left five miles inland. They were houses being moved along, as if in the sea. Water lifting up inside people's living rooms, supermarkets shaking — these were images shot by citizen journalists and instantly shared on the internet. And the other big story of the year: the political crisis, the political earthquake in the Middle East. And it doesn't matter if it was Egypt or Libya or Syria or Yemen. Individuals have managed to overcome the repressive restrictions in those regimes by recording their environment and telling their own stories on the internet. Again, always very difficult to verify, but potentially, a huge layer of accountability. This image — and I could have shown you any, actually; YouTube is full of them — This image is of an apparently unarmed protester in Bahrain. And he's being shot by security forces. It doesn't matter if the individual being mistreated, possibly even killed, is in Bahrain or in London. But citizen journalism and this technology has inserted a new layer of accountability into our world, and I think that's a good thing. So to conclude: the theme of the conference, "Why not?" — I think for journalists, it's quite simple, really. I mean, why not utilize this technology, which massively broadens the boundaries of what's possible, accept that many of the things that happen in our world now go recorded, and we can obtain that information through social media? That's new for journalists. The stories I showed you, I don't think we would have been able to investigate 10 years ago, possibly even five years ago. I think there's a very good argument to say that the two deaths, the death of Ian Tomlinson and the death of Jimmy Mubenga, we still today wouldn't know exactly what had happened in those cases. And "Why not?" for people like yourselves? Well, I think that's very simple, too. If you encounter something that you believe is problematic, that disturbs you, that concerns you, an injustice of some kind, something that just doesn't feel quite right, then why not witness it, record it and share it? That process of witnessing, recording and sharing is journalism. And we can all do it. Thank you.

The right to understand

{0: 'Sandra Fisher-Martins fights “information apartheid” -- the barrier created by overly complex language. '}

TEDxO'Porto

The story I want to tell you about, started to me, in 1996 when I was studying in England. One day, I was glancing through my bank statement (I didn't have much to look at) and I've noticed that in the upper corner there was a symbol, that I'm going to show you, saying that document had been made in plain language, for me to understand it. The idea interested me; I tried to find out what that was and I found out that there was a campaign for the simplification of language, which was the "Plain English Campaign". I thought it was a fabulous idea, for about one day or two, and I've never thought about it since. When I came back to Portugal, for good, I came across with several documents - for example, my work contract, the papers I had to sign to buy a house, the electricity bill — a series of documents that reminded me of that bank statement. Not because they were equally clear and simple, but because they were the exact opposite. Because I had to read everything twice or thrice, to begin to understand what was written there. And then, that little seed that had been sown in 1996, started germinating. And one day, I found myself entering through my boss' office and quitting my job to dedicate myself to this. And so, what did I find out, right off the start? I found out that it was a much more severe problem than I thought. It wasn't only about these documents being complex and annoying, it was the fact that Portuguese people's literacy — literacy is the hability to understand written documents — is extremely low. I'm going to show you a chart about Portuguese people's literacy [rate]. You know that about 10, 11% of people, in Portugal, don't know how to read nor write at all, yet. Over there are those who know, or say they know, how to read and write. So, what do we have? We have that group of red people in level 1, which is the lowest in literacy [rate]. They are persons who are able to join letters, but they can't, actually, understand. For example, if a person, from that red group, has to pick up the package leaflet of a medicinal product, to give a dose of medicine to his/her child, he/she can't, can't understand the information. 50% of the Portuguese. Then we have 30% more, those yellow ones, over there, people who get by on the daily basis. That is, if they don't have to read anything too new or too different, they will manage. But, for example, if they work in a factory and a new machine arrives and they have to read the machine's manual to be able to work with it, they can't do it anymore. And there they go, 80% of the Portuguese people. Then we have a few more that can handle documents, as long as they are not too complex, and we have 5% of the population that can handle really complex documents. Now, just so you don't think this is normal, that over there is Sweden. While we have 20% of people with the literacy considered essential for a daily basis, Sweden has 75%. And looking at that, what did I realize? I realized we live in an apartheid of information. I realized that there's a small minority of people who has indeed access to information and can use it to their advantage and a huge majority that can't. And because they can't, they are excluded and they are impaired. Let me give you an example. That one is Mr. Domingos, my building's doorkeeper. Mr. Domingos started to read at the age of 27, so, he falls in that yellow group that we have seen a little while ago. From time to time, I'm arriving home and he says: "Miss Sandra!"; "Yes, Mr. Domingos." "Here is a little letter." So, the deal is: when Mr. Domingos or someone in the family or in the neighbourhood receives something that they don't understand, they come to me and I help them to translate it. And so, that time he said to me like this: "Oh, Miss Sandra, I'm about to throw this away, but check it if this is important." It was very important. He had been waiting, for quite a while, to have a knee surgery and that was the letter of the famous surgery-bank checks. When a person is waiting for a long time, they get a bank check and with that bank check they can have that surgery in the private sector. It was almost thrown away into the garbage, Mr. Domingos' letter. In that same year, I've found out, only 20% of people had used these surgery-bank checks. The other 80%, I don't believe they had been cured while they were waiting. They most likely did the same as Mr. Domingos: "Ah! What's this? I'm not understanding, it's going to the garbage". They lost the opportunity to have the surgery they needed. What happens here? When people don't understand this has severe consequences — to the individual, but also for the country. When I don't understand which are my rights, the benefits I can have access to, I can't understand my duties and I'm not an active and participative citizen either. Now, maybe, you are sitting there and thinking: "Yeah, poor Mr. Domingos... Bad luck, isn't it? Me?! I'm in the green ones." "I'm absolutely sure that I'm one of the green ones. I was selected to come to TED! Hum?" (Laughter) So the deal is: I have here some texts to read to you and I'm going to see what color are you when I finish reading. So, come on, this is an automobile insurance contract. It says this: "Unless contrary stipulation, the decease of the ensured person, the ensured capital is provided, in case of predeceasing of the beneficiary relatively to the ensured person, to the heirs of the last, in case of the simultaneous decease of the ensured person and of the beneficiary, to the heirs of the last". Hum? (Laughter) Next, there's another one, from the medicines' package leaflet, that says the following: "Warning! It may also occur erythema, edema, vesiculation, keratolysis and urticaria." Hum? Are you clear? And this one is really good. This one, I signed a renting contract to the new office on Friday and I laughed my head off. So, it said: "I, as a cosigner, assume the opportune payment of the rents, waiving the benefits of the division and prior foreclosure." When I heard "opportune payment" ["storm payment" in Portuguese], I imagined myself bursting in there, slamming the door and saying: "Here's the money!!!" (Laughter) But it's not! (Laughter) (Applause) But it's not! (Applause) (Applause) (Applause) So, it's this: when we leave our area of expertise — and it only takes a little; there is no need to go to the string theory or something like that, it only takes a little... (Laughter) What happens? We get as lost as Mr. Domingos. And these documents are not written by experts to experts, as the ones from the string theory. No! These are documents written for me, these are the public documents, the public documents I need to understand in my daily life, to govern myself, to live my life. These are the renting contracts, the package leaflet of the medicines. It's all this. The electricity bills. This has to be clear, so that I can understand. Because, if I can't understand, what happens? I make mistakes, I get wrong. I'm going to give you an example of mistakes that were committed, bad decisions made for not being able to understand documents. Do you remember the subprime crisis that took place in the United States? What happened? People signed those loans to buy houses, without truly understanding what they were signing. Because if they knew what they were signing, they'd know that as soon as the interest rate started to rise, the monthly payment would also increase, they wouldn't be able to pay anymore and they would end up without a house. So, the rest, after that, next, everything crumbled down and we know the rest. Do you think that if there was a culture of clarity in the financial sector things would have got up to where they've got? I don't think so. So, how do you solve this problem, this such big difference between the literacy [rate] of the Portuguese, that is down here, and the complexity of the public documents, those ones we need to understand in our daily lives, sorry, that are up here? So, the first think that comes to mind is, "If literacy is down here, let's make it rise" — isn't it? Let's educate people. Let's, let's... of course we will, of course we will educate people. The thing is, it's hard and it's slow. And I don't even want to imagine how many generations it will take until we are at Sweden's level. But, besides that, it's not only because it is slow. There is another problem. If the language of the documents isn't simpler, we've already seen that people, even with a high literacy level, like you, if the language is hard, they don't get cleared, they continue to be unable to understand these documents. So, besides increasing literacy [rate], and for now, it's much more important to reduce the complexity of documents and simplify the language. I'm going to show you an example. When I talk about simplifying the language. Notice! On the left side of a contract: "It is agreed that the insurance company, bla bla bla, bla bla bla, bla bla..." This is a before and after example. What do we mean with simplifying language? It's communicating in a simple and clear way, enabling our reader to understand it at first glance. What do you prefer? Before or after? There isn't much doubt, is there? So, how is this achieved? How can you make the State and companies communicate with citizens in a language they can understand at first glance? There are several ways. There are countries that are going by the path of legislation. For example, Sweden and the United States introduced, last year, a legislation that forces the State to communicate with people in a language they can understand. And you think, "Well, that's normal. They are countries that are a bit ahead. "Sweden, maybe, much more than the United States. "But they are countries that are a bit ahead. "It would be nice if in our country there was also legislation towards that, wouldn't it be?" So it would. And there is! Since 1999. The Law of the Administrative Modernization says that the communication between the State and the people should be simple, clear, concise, meaningful, without acronyms, bla bla bla... But the thing is: it is not applied. So, the question, the path of going through legislation, enforcing through legislation, works in those countries where laws are made to be applied. Now, there is another way, the way of marketing. How does that work? It's like this: private companies change their language; communicate in a clearer and simpler way, they make a big fuss about it, consumers love it, the sales rise, it works beautifully. But it works for the private sector. Now, what is the third path, and to me, the most important one? It's the path of civil movements, that are based in a mentality shift. In countries where this really went forward — do you remember the English label, of the "Plain English Campaign"? — this is all based on a consumers' movement. So, what does it take for that civic movement to happen? We need to understand two very important things: First, wanting to understand these public documents is not a whim, is not an intellectual curiosity. It is a necessity that I have in my daily life. And above all, it is a right, it is everyone's right. On this side we have: understanding is a right. And we have to understand another thing too, which is: he who writes, has to write in order to be understood. How do we get there? First of all: we have to become demanding consumers and citizens. Think it this way: next time someone gives you a document that you just simply don't understand, don't be shy, don't keep quiet, pretending that you are understanding everything. No! Demand to understand. Ask. I know that this is not easy. Turn to the gentleman in the little suite and say: "Look here, this contract, this part, what does this mean?" It's not easy, and perhaps it's even a bit embarrassing, isn't it? But it is not. It's a sign of intelligence. What do you teach your children when they have doubts in school? "Don't say nothing to anyone, shut up really good and act smart." No, you don't, right? You say: "Look, when you don't understand, you put your hand up in the air and ask the teacher until you are cleared." And that is exactly what we have to do, as consumers and citizens. So, next time you come across with a document you don't understand, demand to understand, put aside your pride and ask until you get completely cleared. Then, there's the other side, which is: "Okay, these awful documents "which are in circulation, they don't grow on trees. "Someone wrote them." Hum? Maybe, among this big group, some persons... I don't know, some lawyers, some public employees — I'm not asking you to identify yourselves, but I ask you to search your own conscience. How many times do you write documents for the general public, for people that don't share your language, and you write them in a language that only you will understand? And you'll say: "Ah, that's because there is a reason, here!" Dear friends, I already heard all the reasons. There are thousands of reasons. They go like these: "Ah, it's the house's culture"; "Oh, my boss!" "Oh, the judge! And what if this goes to court?" "What you want is to destroy language. We have to educate people." "We can't lower the level"; bla, bla, bla... I've seen all of this. These are excuses. A while ago, they told us about Einstein. Einstein said this: "If you can't write about a subject, in a simple way, it's because, in fact, you don't understand it." So, if you... (Applause) To Einstein... (Applause) To Einstein...(Applause) So — ah, ah, I don't have time! — so, if you do know what you want to say — don't you? — you are aware of what you want to say, you just have to do one thing: believe that it is possible to write in a simple way. And how do you do that? It's very easy. You write to your grandmother. Hum? You write to your grandmother. I'm going to show grandma to you. (Laughter) You write with respect and without paternalism. And you use three techniques that I'm going to teach you. First of all: Start by the most important. Grandma has a lot to do. She is not going to read three pages to get to the main idea. Start by the most important. Next, use short sentences, because grandma, like anyone of us, if you make very long sentences, she gets to the end and she can't remember what you said in the beginning, anymore. And lastly, the third, use plain words, those ones that grandma knows. Alright? It's easy! Before I leave, I would like to talk to you about "Clara" (Clear). "Clara" is a project of social responsibility. It has this mission: to change the way how public communication is made. What do we do? We are going to launch this year a collection of "Claro" guides, that is, we are going to pick very, very, very complex subjects and put them simple. We are going to start with the "Claro" Guide of Justice. I think it is an area... that comes in handy. (Applause) And now I'm going to follow Manuel [Forjaz]'s advise. If it's time to ask, whoever wants to sponsor the "Claro" Guide of Justice — I don't know... for example, the EDP Foundation, or...ha? — come talk to me later. Another thing we will do is to grant prizes to the worse and best documents, because, indeed, there are people who are working to communicate in a clearer way, and that have to be rewarded, and there are lazy people that do nothing about it and need to be humiliated. So, we'll give prizes to the worst and to the best. I'm counting on your help. (Applause) (Applause) We are going to launch... we are going to launch the campaign via Clara's Facebook, so, send your friendship request and you'll be up to date. But, lastly, above all, what does "Clara" want? It wants to put two little things in your heads. The first one: demand to understand. Don't be shy. And write in order to be understood. Write to your grandma. And if you don't have a grandmother, write to Mr. Domingos, he will like it. Thank you. (Applause)

The line between life and not-life

{0: 'Martin Hanczyc explores the path between living and nonliving systems, using chemical droplets to study behavior of the earliest cells.'}

TEDSalon London Spring 2011

So historically there has been a huge divide between what people consider to be non-living systems on one side, and living systems on the other side. So we go from, say, this beautiful and complex crystal as non-life, and this rather beautiful and complex cat on the other side. Over the last hundred and fifty years or so, science has kind of blurred this distinction between non-living and living systems, and now we consider that there may be a kind of continuum that exists between the two. We'll just take one example here: a virus is a natural system, right? But it's very simple. It's very simplistic. It doesn't really satisfy all the requirements, it doesn't have all the characteristics of living systems and is in fact a parasite on other living systems in order to, say, reproduce and evolve. But what we're going to be talking about here tonight are experiments done on this sort of non-living end of this spectrum — so actually doing chemical experiments in the laboratory, mixing together nonliving ingredients to make new structures, and that these new structures might have some of the characteristics of living systems. Really what I'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life. So what are these characteristics that I'm talking about? These are them. We consider first that life has a body. Now this is necessary to distinguish the self from the environment. Life also has a metabolism. Now this is a process by which life can convert resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain and build itself. Life also has a kind of inheritable information. Now we, as humans, we store our information as DNA in our genomes and we pass this information on to our offspring. If we couple the first two — the body and the metabolism — we can come up with a system that could perhaps move and replicate, and if we coupled these now to inheritable information, we can come up with a system that would be more lifelike, and would perhaps evolve. And so these are the things we will try to do in the lab, make some experiments that have one or more of these characteristics of life. So how do we do this? Well, we use a model system that we term a protocell. You might think of this as kind of like a primitive cell. It is a simple chemical model of a living cell, and if you consider for example a cell in your body may have on the order of millions of different types of molecules that need to come together, play together in a complex network to produce something that we call alive. In the laboratory what we want to do is much the same, but with on the order of tens of different types of molecules — so a drastic reduction in complexity, but still trying to produce something that looks lifelike. And so what we do is, we start simple and we work our way up to living systems. Consider for a moment this quote by Leduc, a hundred years ago, considering a kind of synthetic biology: "The synthesis of life, should it ever occur, will not be the sensational discovery which we usually associate with the idea." That's his first statement. So if we actually create life in the laboratories, it's probably not going to impact our lives at all. "If we accept the theory of evolution, then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world, or between the non-living and living world, forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life" — so, the ones I just discussed — "to which other attributes will be slowly added in the course of development by the evolutionary actions of the environment." So we start simple, we make some structures that may have some of these characteristics of life, and then we try to develop that to become more lifelike. This is how we can start to make a protocell. We use this idea called self-assembly. What that means is, I can mix some chemicals together in a test tube in my lab, and these chemicals will start to self-associate to form larger and larger structures. So say on the order of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of molecules will come together to form a large structure that didn't exist before. And in this particular example, what I took is some membrane molecules, mixed those together in the right environment, and within seconds it forms these rather complex and beautiful structures here. These membranes are also quite similar, morphologically and functionally, to the membranes in your body, and we can use these, as they say, to form the body of our protocell. Likewise, we can work with oil and water systems. As you know, when you put oil and water together, they don't mix, but through self-assembly we can get a nice oil droplet to form, and we can actually use this as a body for our artificial organism or for our protocell, as you will see later. So that's just forming some body stuff, right? Some architectures. What about the other aspects of living systems? So we came up with this protocell model here that I'm showing. We started with a natural occurring clay called montmorillonite. This is natural from the environment, this clay. It forms a surface that is, say, chemically active. It could run a metabolism on it. Certain kind of molecules like to associate with the clay. For example, in this case, RNA, shown in red — this is a relative of DNA, it's an informational molecule — it can come along and it starts to associate with the surface of this clay. This structure, then, can organize the formation of a membrane boundary around itself, so it can make a body of liquid molecules around itself, and that's shown in green here on this micrograph. So just through self-assembly, mixing things together in the lab, we can come up with, say, a metabolic surface with some informational molecules attached inside of this membrane body, right? So we're on a road towards living systems. But if you saw this protocell, you would not confuse this with something that was actually alive. It's actually quite lifeless. Once it forms, it doesn't really do anything. So, something is missing. Some things are missing. So some things that are missing is, for example, if you had a flow of energy through a system, what we'd want is a protocell that can harvest some of that energy in order to maintain itself, much like living systems do. So we came up with a different protocell model, and this is actually simpler than the previous one. In this protocell model, it's just an oil droplet, but a chemical metabolism inside that allows this protocell to use energy to do something, to actually become dynamic, as we'll see here. You add the droplet to the system. It's a pool of water, and the protocell starts moving itself around in the system. Okay? Oil droplet forms through self-assembly, has a chemical metabolism inside so it can use energy, and it uses that energy to move itself around in its environment. As we heard earlier, movement is very important in these kinds of living systems. It is moving around, exploring its environment, and remodeling its environment, as you see, by these chemical waves that are forming by the protocell. So it's acting, in a sense, like a living system trying to preserve itself. We take this same moving protocell here, and we put it in another experiment, get it moving. Then I'm going to add some food to the system, and you'll see that in blue here, right? So I add some food source to the system. The protocell moves. It encounters the food. It reconfigures itself and actually then is able to climb to the highest concentration of food in that system and stop there. Alright? So not only do we have this system that has a body, it has a metabolism, it can use energy, it moves around. It can sense its local environment and actually find resources in the environment to sustain itself. Now, this doesn't have a brain, it doesn't have a neural system. This is just a sack of chemicals that is able to have this interesting and complex lifelike behavior. If we count the number of chemicals in that system, actually, including the water that's in the dish, we have five chemicals that can do this. So then we put these protocells together in a single experiment to see what they would do, and depending on the conditions, we have some protocells on the left that are moving around and it likes to touch the other structures in its environment. On the other hand we have two moving protocells that like to circle each other, and they form a kind of a dance, a complex dance with each other. Right? So not only do individual protocells have behavior, what we've interpreted as behavior in this system, but we also have basically population-level behavior similar to what organisms have. So now that you're all experts on protocells, we're going to play a game with these protocells. We're going to make two different kinds. Protocell A has a certain kind of chemistry inside that, when activated, the protocell starts to vibrate around, just dancing. So remember, these are primitive things, so dancing protocells, that's very interesting to us. (Laughter) The second protocell has a different chemistry inside, and when activated, the protocells all come together and they fuse into one big one. Right? And we just put these two together in the same system. So there's population A, there's population B, and then we activate the system, and protocell Bs, they're the blue ones, they all come together. They fuse together to form one big blob, and the other protocell just dances around. And this just happens until all of the energy in the system is basically used up, and then, game over. So then I repeated this experiment a bunch of times, and one time something very interesting happened. So, I added these protocells together to the system, and protocell A and protocell B fused together to form a hybrid protocell AB. That didn't happen before. There it goes. There's a protocell AB now in this system. Protocell AB likes to dance around for a bit, while protocell B does the fusing, okay? But then something even more interesting happens. Watch when these two large protocells, the hybrid ones, fuse together. Now we have a dancing protocell and a self-replication event. Right. (Laughter) Just with blobs of chemicals, again. So the way this works is, you have a simple system of five chemicals here, a simple system here. When they hybridize, you then form something that's different than before, it's more complex than before, and you get the emergence of another kind of lifelike behavior which in this case is replication. So since we can make some interesting protocells that we like, interesting colors and interesting behaviors, and they're very easy to make, and they have interesting lifelike properties, perhaps these protocells have something to tell us about the origin of life on the Earth. Perhaps these represent an easily accessible step, one of the first steps by which life got started on the early Earth. Certainly, there were molecules present on the early Earth, but they wouldn't have been these pure compounds that we worked with in the lab and I showed in these experiments. Rather, they'd be a real complex mixture of all kinds of stuff, because uncontrolled chemical reactions produce a diverse mixture of organic compounds. Think of it like a primordial ooze, okay? And it's a pool that's too difficult to fully characterize, even by modern methods, and the product looks brown, like this tar here on the left. A pure compound is shown on the right, for contrast. So this is similar to what happens when you take pure sugar crystals in your kitchen, you put them in a pan, and you apply energy. You turn up the heat, you start making or breaking chemical bonds in the sugar, forming a brownish caramel, right? If you let that go unregulated, you'll continue to make and break chemical bonds, forming an even more diverse mixture of molecules that then forms this kind of black tarry stuff in your pan, right, that's difficult to wash out. So that's what the origin of life would have looked like. You needed to get life out of this junk that is present on the early Earth, four, 4.5 billion years ago. So the challenge then is, throw away all your pure chemicals in the lab, and try to make some protocells with lifelike properties from this kind of primordial ooze. So we're able to then see the self-assembly of these oil droplet bodies again that we've seen previously, and the black spots inside of there represent this kind of black tar — this diverse, very complex, organic black tar. And we put them into one of these experiments, as you've seen earlier, and then we watch lively movement that comes out. They look really good, very nice movement, and also they appear to have some kind of behavior where they kind of circle around each other and follow each other, similar to what we've seen before — but again, working with just primordial conditions, no pure chemicals. These are also, these tar-fueled protocells, are also able to locate resources in their environment. I'm going to add some resource from the left, here, that defuses into the system, and you can see, they really like that. They become very energetic, and able to find the resource in the environment, similar to what we saw before. But again, these are done in these primordial conditions, really messy conditions, not sort of sterile laboratory conditions. These are very dirty little protocells, as a matter of fact. (Laughter) But they have lifelike properties, is the point. So, doing these artificial life experiments helps us define a potential path between non-living and living systems. And not only that, but it helps us broaden our view of what life is and what possible life there could be out there — life that could be very different from life that we find here on Earth. And that leads me to the next term, which is "weird life." This is a term by Steve Benner. This is used in reference to a report in 2007 by the National Research Council in the United States, wherein they tried to understand how we can look for life elsewhere in the universe, okay, especially if that life is very different from life on Earth. If we went to another planet and we thought there might be life there, how could we even recognize it as life? Well, they came up with three very general criteria. First is — and they're listed here. The first is, the system has to be in non-equilibrium. That means the system cannot be dead, in a matter of fact. Basically what that means is, you have an input of energy into the system that life can use and exploit to maintain itself. This is similar to having the Sun shining on the Earth, driving photosynthesis, driving the ecosystem. Without the Sun, there's likely to be no life on this planet. Secondly, life needs to be in liquid form, so that means even if we had some interesting structures, interesting molecules together but they were frozen solid, then this is not a good place for life. And thirdly, we need to be able to make and break chemical bonds. And again this is important because life transforms resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain itself. Now today, I told you about very strange and weird protocells — some that contain clay, some that have primordial ooze in them, some that have basically oil instead of water inside of them. Most of these don't contain DNA, but yet they have lifelike properties. But these protocells satisfy these general requirements of living systems. So by making these chemical, artificial life experiments, we hope not only to understand something fundamental about the origin of life and the existence of life on this planet, but also what possible life there could be out there in the universe. Thank you. (Applause)

High-tech art (with a sense of humor)

{0: 'A part of the Bangalore-based artist duo Pors & Rao, TED Senior Fellow Aparna Rao works with electro-mechanical systems and interactive installations.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Hi. Today, I'm going to take you through glimpses of about eight of my projects, done in collaboration with Danish artist Soren Pors. We call ourselves Pors and Rao, and we live and work in India. I'd like to begin with my very first object, which I call "The Uncle Phone." And it was inspired by my uncle's peculiar habit of constantly asking me to do things for him, almost like I were an extension of his body — to turn on the lights or to bring him a glass of water, a pack of cigarettes. And as I grew up, it became worse and worse, And I started to think of it as a form of control. But of course, I could never say anything, because the uncle is a respected figure in the Indian family. And the situation that irked me and mystified me the most was his use of a landline telephone. He would hold on to the receiver and expect me to dial a number for him. And so as a response and as a gift to my uncle, I made him "The Uncle Phone." It's so long that it requires two people to use it. It's exactly the way my uncle uses a phone that's designed for one person. But the problem is that, when I left home and went to college, I started missing his commands. And so I made him a golden typewriter through which he could dispense his commands to nephews and nieces around the world as an email. So what he had to do was take a piece of paper, roll it into the carriage, type his email or command and pull the paper out. This device would automatically send the intended person the letter as an email. So here you can see, we embedded a lot of electronics that understands all of the mechanical actions and converts it to digital. So my uncle is only dealing with a mechanical interface. And of course, the object had to be very grand and have a sense of ritualism, the way my uncle likes it. The next work is a sound-sensitive installation that we affectionately call "The Pygmies." And we wanted to work with a notion of being surrounded by a tribe of very shy, sensitive and sweet creatures. So how it works is we have these panels, which we have on the wall, and behind them, we have these little creatures which hide. And as soon as it's silent, they sort of creep out. And if it's even more silent, they stretch their necks out. And at the slightest sound, they hide back again. So we had these panels on three walls of a room. And we had over 500 of these little pygmies hiding behind them. So this is how it works. This is a video prototype. So when it's quiet, it's sort of coming out from behind the panels. And they hear like humans do, or real creatures do. So they get immune to sounds that scare them after awhile. And they don't react to background sounds. You'll hear a train in moment that they don't react to. (Noise) But they react to foreground sounds. You'll hear that in a second. (Whistling) So we worked very hard to make them as lifelike as possible. So each pygmy has its own behavior, psyche, mood swings, personalities and so on. So this is a very early prototype. Of course, it got much better after that. And we made them react to people, but we found that people were being quite playful and childlike with them. This is a video installation called "The Missing Person." And we were quite intrigued with playing with the notion of invisibility. How would it be possible to experience a sense of invisibility? So we worked with a company that specializes in camera surveillance, and we asked them to develop a piece of software with us, using a camera that could look at people in the room, track them and replace one person with the background, rendering them invisible. So I'm just going to show you a very early prototype. On the right side you can see my colleague Soren, who's actually in the space. And on the left side, you'll see the processed video where the camera has made him invisible. Soren enters the room. Pop! He goes invisible. And you can see that the camera is tracking him and erasing. It's a very early video, so we haven't yet dealt with the overlap and all of that, but that got refined pretty soon, later. So how we used it was in a room where we had a camera looking into the space, and we had one monitor, one on each wall. And as people walked into the room, they would see themselves in the monitor, except with one difference: one person was constantly invisible wherever they moved in the room. So this is a work called "The Sun Shadow." And it was almost like a sheet of paper, like a cutout of a childlike drawing of an oil spill or a sun. And from the front, this object appeared to be very strong and robust, and from the side, it almost seemed very weak. So people would walking into the room and they'd almost ignore it, thinking it was some crap laying around. But as soon as they passed by, it would start to climb up the wall in jerky fashion. And it would get exhausted, and it would collapse every time. (Laughter) So this work is a caricature of an upside-down man. His head is so heavy, full of heavy thoughts, that it's sort of fallen into his hat, and his body's grown out of him almost like a plant. Well what he does is he moves around in a very drunken fashion on his head in a very unpredictable and extremely slow movement. And it's kind of constrained by that circle. Because if that circle weren't there, and the floor was very even, it would start to wander about in the space. And there's no wires. So I'll just show you an instance — so when people enter the room, it activates this object. And it very slowly, over a few minutes, sort of painfully goes up, and then it gains momentum and it looks like it's almost about to fall. And this is an important moment, because we wanted to instill in the viewer an instinct to almost go and help, or save the subject. But it doesn't really need it, because it, again, sort of manages to pull itself up. So this work was a real technical challenge for us, and we worked very hard, like most of our works, over years to get the mechanics right and the equilibrium and the dynamics. And it was very important for us to establish the exact moment that it would fall, because if we made it in a way that it would topple over, then it would damage itself, and if it didn't fall enough, it wouldn't instill that fatalism, or that sense of wanting to go and help it. So I'm going to show you a very quick video where we are doing a test scenario — it's much faster. That's my colleague. He's let it go. Now he's getting nervous, so he's going to go catch it. But he doesn't need to, because it manages to lift itself up on its own. So this is a work that we were very intrigued with, working with the aesthetic of fur embedded with thousands of tiny different sizes of fiber optics, which twinkle like the night sky. And it's at the scale of the night sky. So we wrapped this around a blob-like form, which is in the shape of a teddy bear, which was hanging from the ceiling. And the idea was to sort of contrast something very cold and distant and abstract like the universe into the familiar form of a teddy bear, which is very comforting and intimate. And the idea was that at some point you would stop looking at the form of a teddy bear and you would almost perceive it to be a hole in the space, and as if you were looking out into the twinkling night sky. So this is the last work, and a work in progress, and it's called "Space Filler." Well imagine a small cube that's about this big standing in front of you in the middle of the room, and as you approached it, it tried to intimidate you by growing into a cube that's twice its height and [eight] times its volume. And so this object is constantly expanding and contracting to create a dynamic with people moving around it — almost like it were trying to conceal a secret within its seams or something. So we work with a lot of technology, but we don't really love technology, because it gives us a lot of pain in our work over years and years. But we use it because we're interested in the way that it can help us to express the emotions and behavioral patterns in these creatures that we create. And once a creature pops into our minds, it's almost like the process of creation is to discover the way this creature really wants to exist and what form it wants to take and what way it wants to move. Thank you. (Applause)

Ancient wonders captured in 3D

{0: 'Ben Kacyra uses state-of-the-art technology to preserve cultural heritage sites and let us in on their secrets in a way never before possible.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

I'd like to start with a short story. It's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp. They would always stop by to visit these huge winged bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis, and the boy used to be scared of these winged bulls, but at the same time they excited him. And the dad used to use those bulls to tell the boy stories about that civilization and their work. Let's fast-forward to the San Francisco Bay Area many decades later, where I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3D laser scanning system. Let me show you how it works. Female Voice: Long range laser scanning by sending out a pulse that's a laser beam of light. The system measures the beam's time of flight, recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return. With two mirrors, the scanner calculates the beam's horizontal and vertical angles, giving accurate x, y, and z coordinates. The point is then recorded into a 3D visualization program. All of this happens in seconds. Ben Kacyra: You can see here, these systems are extremely fast. They collect millions of points at a time with very high accuracy and very high resolution. A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day. These babies would be producing something like ten thousand points a second. So, as you can imagine, this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction as well as in reality capture industry. Approximately ten years ago, my wife and I started a foundation to do good, and right about that time, the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas, hundred and eighty foot tall in Afghanistan, were blown up by the Taliban. They were gone in an instant. And unfortunately, there was no detailed documentation of these Buddhas. This clearly devastated me, and I couldn't help but wonder about the fate of my old friends, the winged bulls, and the fate of the many, many heritage sites all over the world. Both my wife and I were so touched by this that we decided to expand the mission of our foundation to include digital heritage preservation of world sites. We called the project CyArk, which stands for Cyber Archive. To date, with the help of a global network of partners, we've completed close to fifty projects. Let me show you some of them: Chichen Itza, Rapa Nui — and what you're seeing here are the cloud of points — Babylon, Rosslyn Chapel, Pompeii, and our latest project, Mt. Rushmore, which happened to be one of our most challenging projects. As you see here, we had to develop a special rig to bring the scanner up close and personal. The results of our work in the field are used to produce media and deliverables to be used by conservators and researchers. We also produce media for dissemination to the public — free through the CyArk website. These would be used for education, cultural tourism, etc. What you're looking at in here is a 3D viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of [the] cloud of points in real time, cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions. This happens to be the cloud of points for Tikal. In here you see a traditional 2D architectural engineering drawing that's used for preservation, and of course we tell the stories through fly-throughs. And here, this is a fly-through the cloud of points of Tikal, and here you see it rendered and photo-textured with the photography that we take of the site. And so this is not a video. This is actual 3D points with two to three millimeter accuracy. And of course the data can be used to develop 3D models that are very accurate and very detailed. And here you're looking at a model that's extracted from the cloud of points for Stirling Castle. It's used for studies, for visualization, as well as for education. And finally, we produce mobile apps that include narrated virtual tools. The more I got involved in the heritage field, the more it became clear to me that we are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them. Of course, earthquakes and all the natural phenomena — floods, tornadoes, etc. — take their toll. However, what occurred to me was human-caused destruction, which was not only causing a significant portion of the destruction, but actually it was accelerating. This includes arson, urban sprawl, acid rain, not to mention terrorism and wars. It was getting more and more apparent that we're fighting a losing battle. We're losing our sites and the stories, and basically we're losing a piece — and a significant piece — of our collective memory. Imagine us as a human race not knowing where we came from. Luckily, in the last two or three decades, digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we've brought to bear in the digital preservation, in our digital preservation war. This includes, for example, the 3D laser scanning systems, ever more powerful personal computers, 3D graphics, high-definition digital photography, not to mention the Internet. Because of this accelerated pace of destruction, it became clear to us that we needed to challenge ourselves and our partners to accelerate our work. And we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge — and that is to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites in five years. We do have the technology that's scaleable, and our network of global partners has been expanding and can be expanded at a rapid rate, so we're comfortable that this task can be accomplished. However, to me, the 500 is really just the first 500. In order to sustain our work into the future, we use technology centers where we partner with local universities and colleges to take the technology to them, whereby they then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites, and at the same time, it gives them the technology to benefit from in the future. Let me close with another short story. Two years ago, we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal Kasubi Tombs. The work was done successfully in the field, and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the CyArk website. Last March, we received very sad news. The Royal Tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson. A few days later, we received a call: "Is the data available and can it be used for reconstruction?" Our answer, of course, was yes. Let me leave you with a final thought. Our heritage is much more than our collective memory — it's our collective treasure. We owe it to our children, our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm staying here because we wanted to demonstrate to you the power of this technology and so, while I've been speaking, you have been scanned. (Laughter) The two wizards that I have that are behind the curtain will help me bring the results on the screen. (Applause) This is all in 3D and of course you can fly through the cloud of points. You can look at it from on top, from the ceiling. You can look from different vantage points, but I'm going to ask Doug to zoom in on an individual in the crowd, just to show the amount of detail that we can create. So you have been digitally preserved in about four minutes. (Laughter) I'd like to thank the wizards here. We were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this: the Historic Scotland, and the Glasgow School of Art. I'd like to also thank personally the efforts of David Mitchell, who is the Director of Conservation at Historic Scotland. David. (Applause) And Doug Pritchard, who's the Head of Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art. Let's give them a hand. (Applause) Thank you.

A map of the brain

{0: 'As CEO of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Allan Jones leads an ambitious project to build an open, online, interactive atlas of the human brain.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Humans have long held a fascination for the human brain. We chart it, we've described it, we've drawn it, we've mapped it. Now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology — think Google Maps, think GPS — the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation. So let's take a look at the brain. Most people, when they first look at a fresh human brain, they say, "It doesn't look what you're typically looking at when someone shows you a brain." Typically, what you're looking at is a fixed brain. It's gray. And this outer layer, this is the vasculature, which is incredible, around a human brain. This is the blood vessels. 20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs, 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart, is servicing this one organ. That's basically, if you hold two fists together, it's just slightly larger than the two fists. Scientists, sort of at the end of the 20th century, learned that they could track blood flow to map non-invasively where activity was going on in the human brain. So for example, they can see in the back part of the brain, which is just turning around there. There's the cerebellum; that's keeping you upright right now. It's keeping me standing. It's involved in coordinated movement. On the side here, this is temporal cortex. This is the area where primary auditory processing — so you're hearing my words, you're sending it up into higher language processing centers. Towards the front of the brain is the place in which all of the more complex thought, decision making — it's the last to mature in late adulthood. This is where all your decision-making processes are going on. It's the place where you're deciding right now you probably aren't going to order the steak for dinner. So if you take a deeper look at the brain, one of the things, if you look at it in cross-section, what you can see is that you can't really see a whole lot of structure there. But there's actually a lot of structure there. It's cells and it's wires all wired together. So about a hundred years ago, some scientists invented a stain that would stain cells. And that's shown here in the the very light blue. You can see areas where neuronal cell bodies are being stained. And what you can see is it's very non-uniform. You see a lot more structure there. So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex. It's one continuous processing unit, if you will. But you can also see things underneath there as well. And all of these blank areas are the areas in which the wires are running through. They're probably less cell dense. So there's about 86 billion neurons in our brain. And as you can see, they're very non-uniformly distributed. And how they're distributed really contributes to their underlying function. And of course, as I mentioned before, since we can now start to map brain function, we can start to tie these into the individual cells. So let's take a deeper look. Let's look at neurons. So as I mentioned, there are 86 billion neurons. There are also these smaller cells as you'll see. These are support cells — astrocytes glia. And the nerves themselves are the ones who are receiving input. They're storing it, they're processing it. Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain. And each neuron itself is largely unique. The unique character of both individual neurons and neurons within a collection of the brain are driven by fundamental properties of their underlying biochemistry. These are proteins. They're proteins that are controlling things like ion channel movement. They're controlling who nervous system cells partner up with. And they're controlling basically everything that the nervous system has to do. So if we zoom in to an even deeper level, all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes. We each have 23 pairs of chromosomes. We get one from mom, one from dad. And on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes. They're encoded in the DNA. And the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they're turned on. And so our project is seeking to look at this readout, understanding which of these 25,000 genes is turned on. So in order to undertake such a project, we obviously need brains. So we sent our lab technician out. We were seeking normal human brains. What we actually start with is a medical examiner's office. This a place where the dead are brought in. We are seeking normal human brains. There's a lot of criteria by which we're selecting these brains. We want to make sure that we have normal humans between the ages of 20 to 60, they died a somewhat natural death with no injury to the brain, no history of psychiatric disease, no drugs on board — we do a toxicology workup. And we're very careful about the brains that we do take. We're also selecting for brains in which we can get the tissue, we can get consent to take the tissue within 24 hours of time of death. Because what we're trying to measure, the RNA — which is the readout from our genes — is very labile, and so we have to move very quickly. One side note on the collection of brains: because of the way that we collect, and because we require consent, we actually have a lot more male brains than female brains. Males are much more likely to die an accidental death in the prime of their life. And men are much more likely to have their significant other, spouse, give consent than the other way around. (Laughter) So the first thing that we do at the site of collection is we collect what's called an MR. This is magnetic resonance imaging — MRI. It's a standard template by which we're going to hang the rest of this data. So we collect this MR. And you can think of this as our satellite view for our map. The next thing we do is we collect what's called a diffusion tensor imaging. This maps the large cabling in the brain. And again, you can think of this as almost mapping our interstate highways, if you will. The brain is removed from the skull, and then it's sliced into one-centimeter slices. And those are frozen solid, and they're shipped to Seattle. And in Seattle, we take these — this is a whole human hemisphere — and we put them into what's basically a glorified meat slicer. There's a blade here that's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide. We're going to then apply one of those stains to it, and we scan it. And then what we get is our first mapping. So this is where experts come in and they make basic anatomic assignments. You could consider this state boundaries, if you will, those pretty broad outlines. From this, we're able to then fragment that brain into further pieces, which then we can put on a smaller cryostat. And this is just showing this here — this frozen tissue, and it's being cut. This is 20 microns thin, so this is about a baby hair's width. And remember, it's frozen. And so you can see here, old-fashioned technology of the paintbrush being applied. We take a microscope slide. Then we very carefully melt onto the slide. This will then go onto a robot that's going to apply one of those stains to it. And our anatomists are going to go in and take a deeper look at this. So again this is what they can see under the microscope. You can see collections and configurations of large and small cells in clusters and various places. And from there it's routine. They understand where to make these assignments. And they can make basically what's a reference atlas. This is a more detailed map. Our scientists then use this to go back to another piece of that tissue and do what's called laser scanning microdissection. So the technician takes the instructions. They scribe along a place there. And then the laser actually cuts. You can see that blue dot there cutting. And that tissue falls off. You can see on the microscope slide here, that's what's happening in real time. There's a container underneath that's collecting that tissue. We take that tissue, we purify the RNA out of it using some basic technology, and then we put a florescent tag on it. We take that tagged material and we put it on to something called a microarray. Now this may look like a bunch of dots to you, but each one of these individual dots is actually a unique piece of the human genome that we spotted down on glass. This has roughly 60,000 elements on it, so we repeatedly measure various genes of the 25,000 genes in the genome. And when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it, we get a unique fingerprint, if you will, quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample. Now we do this over and over again, this process for any given brain. We're taking over a thousand samples for each brain. This area shown here is an area called the hippocampus. It's involved in learning and memory. And it contributes to about 70 samples of those thousand samples. So each sample gets us about 50,000 data points with repeat measurements, a thousand samples. So roughly, we have 50 million data points for a given human brain. We've done right now two human brains-worth of data. We've put all of that together into one thing, and I'll show you what that synthesis looks like. It's basically a large data set of information that's all freely available to any scientist around the world. They don't even have to log in to come use this tool, mine this data, find interesting things out with this. So here's the modalities that we put together. You'll start to recognize these things from what we've collected before. Here's the MR. It provides the framework. There's an operator side on the right that allows you to turn, it allows you to zoom in, it allows you to highlight individual structures. But most importantly, we're now mapping into this anatomic framework, which is a common framework for people to understand where genes are turned on. So the red levels are where a gene is turned on to a great degree. Green is the sort of cool areas where it's not turned on. And each gene gives us a fingerprint. And remember that we've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available. So what can scientists learn about this data? We're just starting to look at this data ourselves. There's some basic things that you would want to understand. Two great examples are drugs, Prozac and Wellbutrin. These are commonly prescribed antidepressants. Now remember, we're assaying genes. Genes send the instructions to make proteins. Proteins are targets for drugs. So drugs bind to proteins and either turn them off, etc. So if you want to understand the action of drugs, you want to understand how they're acting in the ways you want them to, and also in the ways you don't want them to. In the side effect profile, etc., you want to see where those genes are turned on. And for the first time, we can actually do that. We can do that in multiple individuals that we've assayed too. So now we can look throughout the brain. We can see this unique fingerprint. And we get confirmation. We get confirmation that, indeed, the gene is turned on — for something like Prozac, in serotonergic structures, things that are already known be affected — but we also get to see the whole thing. We also get to see areas that no one has ever looked at before, and we see these genes turned on there. It's as interesting a side effect as it could be. One other thing you can do with such a thing is you can, because it's a pattern matching exercise, because there's unique fingerprint, we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint. So if you're in drug discovery, for example, you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize. Most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying, "Scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect X." And so these kinds of studies are routinely published by scientists and they're great. They analyze large populations. They look at their entire genomes, and they try to find hot spots of activity that are linked causally to genes. But what you get out of such an exercise is simply a list of genes. It tells you the what, but it doesn't tell you the where. And so it's very important for those researchers that we've created this resource. Now they can come in and they can start to get clues about activity. They can start to look at common pathways — other things that they simply haven't been able to do before. So I think this audience in particular can understand the importance of individuality. And I think every human, we all have different genetic backgrounds, we all have lived separate lives. But the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar. We're similar at the genetic level. And what we're finding is actually, even at the brain biochemical level, we are quite similar. And so this shows it's not 99 percent, but it's roughly 90 percent correspondence at a reasonable cutoff, so everything in the cloud is roughly correlated. And then we find some outliers, some things that lie beyond the cloud. And those genes are interesting, but they're very subtle. So I think it's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences, we are quite similar even at the brain level. Now what do those differences look like? This is an example of a study that we did to follow up and see what exactly those differences were — and they're quite subtle. These are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type. These are two genes that we found as good examples. One is called RELN — it's involved in early developmental cues. DISC1 is a gene that's deleted in schizophrenia. These aren't schizophrenic individuals, but they do show some population variation. And so what you're looking at here in donor one and donor four, which are the exceptions to the other two, that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells. It's this dark purple precipitate within the cell that's telling us a gene is turned on there. Whether or not that's due to an individual's genetic background or their experiences, we don't know. Those kinds of studies require much larger populations. So I'm going to leave you with a final note about the complexity of the brain and how much more we have to go. I think these resources are incredibly valuable. They give researchers a handle on where to go. But we only looked at a handful of individuals at this point. We're certainly going to be looking at more. I'll just close by saying that the tools are there, and this is truly an unexplored, undiscovered continent. This is the new frontier, if you will. And so for those who are undaunted, but humbled by the complexity of the brain, the future awaits. Thanks. (Applause)

The shared experience of absurdity

{0: 'Charlie Todd is the creator of Improv Everywhere, a group that creates absurd and joyful public scenes.'}

TEDxBloomington

I started Improv Everywhere about 10 years ago when I moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy. Because I was new to the city, I didn't have access to a stage, so I decided to create my own in public places. So the first project we're going to take a look at is the very first No Pants Subway Ride. Now, this took place in January of 2002. And this woman is the star of the video. She doesn't know she's being filmed. She's being filmed with a hidden camera. This is on the 6 train in New York City. And this is the first stop along the line. These are two Danish guys who come in and sit down next to the hidden camera. And that's me right there in a brown coat. It's about 30 degrees outside. I'm wearing a hat. I'm wearing a scarf. And the girl's going to notice me right here. (Laughter) And as you'll see now, I'm not wearing pants. (Laughter) At this point — at this point she's noticed me, but in New York there's weirdos on any given train car. One person's not that unusual. She goes back to reading her book, which is unfortunately titled "Rape." (Laughter) So she's noticed the unusual thing, but she's gone back to her normal life. Now, in the meantime, I have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well. They're going to be entering this car one by one. We'll act as though we don't know each other. And we'll act as if it's just an unfortunate mistake we've made, forgetting our pants on this cold January day. (Laughter) (Laughter continues) So at this point, she decides to put the rape book away. (Laughter) And she decides to be a little bit more aware of her surroundings. In the meantime, the two Danish guys to the left of the camera, they're cracking up. They think this is the funniest thing they've ever seen before. And watch her make eye contact with them right about now. (Laughter) And I love that moment in this video, because before it became a shared experience, it was something that was maybe a little bit scary, or something that was at least confusing to her. And then, once it became a shared experience, it was funny and something that she could laugh at. So the train is now pulling into the third stop along the 6 line. (Laughter) So the video won't show everything. This goes on for another four stops. A total of seven guys enter anonymously in their underwear. At the eighth stop, a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar — like you might sell batteries or candy on the train. We all very matter-of-factly bought a pair of pants, put them on and said, "Thank you. That's exactly what I needed today," and then exited without revealing what had happened and went in all different directions. (Applause) Thank you. So that's a still from the video there. And I love that girl's reaction so much. And watching that videotape later that day inspired me to keep doing what I do. And really one of the points of Improv Everywhere is to cause a scene in a public place that is a positive experience for other people. It's a prank, but it's a prank that gives somebody a great story to tell. And her reaction inspired me to do a second annual No Pants Subway Ride. And we've continued to do it every year. This January, we did the 10th annual No Pants Subway Ride where a diverse group of 3,500 people rode the train in their underwear in New York — almost every single train line in the city. And also in 50 other cities around the world, people participated. (Laughter) As I started taking improv class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and meeting other creative people and other performers and comedians, I started amassing a mailing list of people who wanted to do these types of projects. So I could do more large-scale projects. Well, one day I was walking through Union Square, and I saw this building, which had just been built in 2005. There was a girl in one of the windows and she was dancing. It was very peculiar, because it was dark out, but she was backlit with florescent lighting. She was very much onstage and I couldn't figure out why she was doing it. After about 15 seconds, her friend appeared — she had been hiding behind a display. They laughed, hugged each other and ran away. Maybe she had been dared to do this. So I got inspired by that. Looking at the entire facade — there were 70 total windows — and I knew what I had to do. (Laughter) So this project is called Look Up More. We had 70 actors dress in black. This was completely unauthorized. We didn't let the stores know we were coming. And I stood in the park giving signals. The first signal was for everybody to hold up these four-foot tall letters that spelled out "Look Up More," the name of the project. The second signal was for everybody to do jumping jacks together. You'll see that start right here. (Laughter) And then we had dancing. We had everyone dance. And then we had dance solos where only one person would dance and everybody would point to them. (Laughter) So then I gave a new hand signal, which signaled the next soloist down below in Forever 21, and he danced. There were several other activities. We had people jumping up and down, people dropping to the ground. And I was standing just anonymously in a sweatshirt, putting my hand on and off of a trashcan to signal the advancement. And because it was in Union Square Park, right by a subway station, there were hundreds of people by the end who stopped and looked up and watched what we were doing. There's a better photo of it. So that particular event was inspired by a moment that I happened to stumble upon. The next project I want to show was given to me in an email from a stranger. A high school kid in Texas wrote me in 2006 and said, "You should get as many people as possible to put on blue polo shirts and khaki pants and go into a Best Buy and stand around." (Laughter) (Applause) So I wrote this high school kid back immediately and I said, "Yes, you are correct. I think I'll try to do that this weekend. Thank you." So here's the video. So again, this is 2005. This is the Best Buy in New York City. We had about 80 people show up to participate, entering one by one. There was an eight-year-old girl, a 10-year-old girl. There was also a 65-year-old man who participated. So a very diverse group of people. (Laughter) And I told people, "Don't work. Don't actually do work. But also, don't shop. Just stand around and don't face products." Now you can see the regular employees by the ones that have the yellow tags on their shirt. Everybody else is one of our actors. (Laughter) The lower-level employees thought it was very funny. Several of them went to go get their camera from the break room and took photos with us. A lot of them made jokes about trying to get us to go to the back to get heavy television sets for customers. The managers and the security guards, on the other hand, did not find it particularly funny. You can see them in this footage. They're wearing either a yellow shirt or a black shirt. And we were there probably 10 minutes before the managers decided to dial 911. (Laughter) So they started running around telling everybody the cops were coming, "Watch out, the cops are coming." And you can see the cops in this footage right here. That's a cop wearing black right there, being filmed with a hidden camera. Ultimately, the police had to inform Best Buy management that it was not, in fact, illegal to wear a blue polo shirt and khaki pants. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So we had been there for 20 minutes; we were happy to exit the store. One thing the managers were trying to do was to track down our cameras. And they caught a couple of my guys who had hidden cameras in duffel bags. But the one camera guy they never caught was the guy that went in just with a blank tape and went over to the Best Buy camera department and just put his tape in one of their cameras and pretended to shop. So I like that concept of using their own technology against them. (Laughter) I think our best projects are ones that are site-specific and happen at a particular place for a reason. And one morning, I was riding the subway. I had to make a transfer at the 53rd St. stop where there are these two giant escalators. And it's a very depressing place to be in the morning, it's very crowded. So I decided to try and stage something that could make it as happy as possible for one morning. So this was in the winter of 2009 — 8:30 in the morning. It's morning rush hour. It's very cold outside. People are coming in from Queens, transferring from the E train to the 6 train. And they're going up these giant escalators on their way to their jobs. [Rob wants] [to give you] (Laughter) [a high five!] (Laughter) [Get ready!] (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. So there's a photograph that illustrates it a little bit better. He gave 2,000 high fives that day, and he washed his hands before and afterward and did not get sick. And that was done also without permission, although no one seemed to care. So I'd say over the years, one of the most common criticisms I see of Improv Everywhere left anonymously on YouTube comments is: "These people have too much time on their hands." And you know, not everybody's going to like everything you do, and I've certainly developed a thick skin thanks to Internet comments, but that one's always bothered me, because we don't have too much time on our hands. The participants in Improv Everywhere events have just as much leisure time as any other New Yorkers, they just occasionally choose to spend it in an unusual way. You know, every Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people each fall gather in football stadiums to watch games. And I've never seen anybody comment, looking at a football game, "All those people in the stands, they have too much time on their hands." And of course they don't. It's a perfectly wonderful way to spent a weekend afternoon, watching a football game in a stadium. But I think it's also a perfectly valid way to spend an afternoon freezing in place with 200 people in the Grand Central terminal or dressing up like a ghostbuster and running through the New York Public Library. (Laughter) Or listening to the same MP3 as 3,000 other people and dancing silently in a park, or bursting into song in a grocery store as part of a spontaneous musical, or diving into the ocean in Coney Island wearing formal attire. (Laughter) You know, as kids, we're taught to play. And we're never given a reason why we should play. It's just acceptable that play is a good thing. And I think that's sort of the point of Improv Everywhere. It's that there is no point and that there doesn't have to be a point. We don't need a reason. As long as it's fun and it seems like it's going to be a funny idea and it seems like the people who witness it will also have a fun time, then that's enough for us. And I think, as adults, we need to learn that there's no right or wrong way to play. Thank you very much. (Applause)

6 ways to save the internet

{0: 'Ten years from now we will interact with the internet in completely different ways. Roger McNamee identifies six changes that are already transforming the ways we consume and create content.'}

TEDxSantaCruz

Have you ever been in the position of watching Silicon Valley take off and wish that you had known what was about to happen? (Laughter) So, I'm here to talk about what I think is going to be the most intense disruption of the technology world that's occurred in the last 15 years. And I believe the end product of it will be entirely about engagement. In fact, I think it is possibly a transformational change in the way we're going to think about engagement. So what would you do if you knew today that there was going to be a major technology cycle beginning in the next couple years, and that you could participate in it? What would you do? (Audience) Jump in! So, this is the situation in which I find myself: I'm a professional investor about half the day, the daylight half. I was paying close attention earlier, and I now know I need to have 10 hours sleep at night, which is tricky, because last night the show ended about 12:30, and so I was, I got — and that was in Santa Rosa, so I got home a little late. I want you to understand, I've been studying the technology world, and things have already begun to change. But they're changing in ways that I see literally no commentator referring to today. There are six things going on that I'm going to focus on. I want you to understand, each one of these is a hypothesis; it is subject to revision. It may even be subject to elimination. But I want you to understand I've been working with this group of hypotheses now for about 10 months, and what's really interesting is that I've been exposing them to a lot of people in the industry, and people have been finding it very hard to debunk them. So I'm going to share them with you today, because I think collectively, we have a chance of figuring this out. The first thing — and I think this is fairly obvious — is: Windows is dying. And — (Applause) I mean no disrespect to Microsoft, because I think, in fact, Microsoft as a company has many things it can do to maintain growth, but desktops would not be one of them. And the key indicator here, and the only one you need to know to understand what's going on here, is that smartphones have basically taken Windows from 96% of internet-connected devices 3 or 4 years ago, to under 50% now. And it is falling precipitously; they'll be under 30 percent, probably about a year and a half from now. Microsoft has lots of things it can do. It can retreat to Exchange and crank the price there. But the reason this is so significant is that Windows and Enterprise software, which is related to it — think SAP and people like that — those businesses account for hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. And I'm suggesting we're going to have a jump ball for that revenue. And in a world where the US economy is not growing that rapidly, having somebody go away is the simplest way to create room for new industries. And this is where the revenues are going to come from. But guess what? Like a Ginsu knife commercial, there's more! (Laughter) It turns out Microsoft is not the only company whose body is lying across the railroad tracks today. Another one is Google. Now, you may not have focused on this, but index search accounted for 90% of all search volume about 4 years ago. But an interesting thing happened. Google got to be so successful that the index became full of garbage. In fact, the entire Web has become full of garbage. If you think about it, the Web has become almost a digital Detroit. (Laughter) If you look hard enough, you can find really compelling things there. But if you aren't really careful, you can get mugged. (Laughter) And it is no shock that each one of us and everyone else out there have looked for other ways to find the things we want to find. We started with Wikipedia, but then Facebook came along for matters of taste and money; Twitter came along for real-time news; LinkedIn, for professional things; Match.com, for less professional things; TripAdvisor for travel, Yelp for restaurants, Realtor.com for finding a home, Dictionary.com for words, Wordnik for the whole language. So the thing has really changed. And here's what's interesting: like Microsoft, Google has plenty of ways to respond in terms of growing its business. But what it cannot do is recover its position as the dominant player on the internet. It is my belief that when Google came along in 1998, the internet was an open-source, long-tail world with no leader. And Google stepped into this void, provided leadership and implemented a strategy that systematically commoditized all forms of content. And the simplest way to look at it is to look at a Google results page: the only logo on that page is Google's; everything else is in the same font. That form of commoditization has been tremendous for Google and horrible for almost everyone else. And I believe, to a first order, it is over — not because index search is going away, but because, like word processing, it's gone from the most important application we all had, to just another thing we do. And you see this in mobile in particular. Because in mobile, people have found other ways to find what they want. Index search is too disruptive on a cell phone, so the rate of index search is a small fraction on cell phones to what it is on desktops. And that is the leading indicator that Google's recovery, if you will, will be in something other than search. The third hypothesis I have is no longer controversial, but it's important to understand what happened. If the left-hand side of this equation is the open-source World Wide Web, with its belief in the long tail, its belief in an absence of regulation, of an absence of security and control, it's really a frontier. Apple came along with a different vision. They said, "We think the Web is dead. We're going to go on the internet, because that's the big data store, and we're going to provide you with branded, thoughtful, value-added, copyright-protected content." And people have overwhelmingly chosen that over Google's vision. Over the last three years, Apple's gone from being an also-ran in computers to this year they will ship approximately 100 million internet-enabled devices. One hundred million. They'll probably be just short of that. The point here is, it's Apple's world. We're lucky to be part of it, because Steve is quite intolerant about who he lets in. (Laughter) But think about this: imagine Georgia in the Civil War. OK? Apple is Sherman, World Wide Web is Joe Johnston. And the point is, they've lost. So the Web is looking at this and going, "My God, we've got to come back." And the cost in order to do this is they have to sacrifice Google. So Google has pushed the pendulum of technology to the absolute limit of commoditization, to the point where people who spent their whole lives developing really valuable, compelling entertainment and really valuable, compelling journalism and really valuable, compelling novels, can't make money doing it anymore. So the Web said, "OK, if Google's over here, and Apple's here, HTML 5, the next generation, is going to be on the other side of Apple." So the new battle, instead of being commoditization versus the App Store, is going to be between the App Store and highly differentiated content. If you don't know what HTML 5 is, let me help you understand. It is a programming language. But it's a profound one. Because for the first time, you're going to be able to construct a web page where the entire thing can have embedded interactivity, can have video, audio, whatever it is that you want. But no more Flash boxes. And it's a huge, huge change, because it essentially opens up a new canvas. And it doesn't just open it up for The New York Times, it opens it up for everybody on WordPress, it opens it up for every band ... Because suddenly, the ability to produce a differentiated, highly compelling, value-added — maybe even monetizable — product will be there. And what's really interesting is, thanks to Apple, there's nothing that commoditizers can do about you. Apple may try to stop us, but I don't think they will. I think they're smarter than that. So the key point is, I don't know where we're going to stop as the pendulum swings back. But I think the days of hypercommoditization are behind us. And we can all play in this. In a moment I'm going to tell you how I'm doing it personally. Tablets. This is the other side of why Windows is dead. If any of you does not own an iPad — Look, I don't own any Apple stock, so I have no axe in this, but seriously, if you don't own an iPad, you cannot possibly understand the most important things going on now. (Laughter) No, I'm really serious about this. And I think the most important point is that the other players on this thing, at the moment, have made no impact. And keep in mind, it was our investment that built Palm's webOS that HP's shipping soon, eventually, someday. (Laughter) I think it's highly probable Apple wins this thing with market share closer to what they have on the iPod than to what they have on the iPhone. That would be 70 or 80%. If that's right, Apple's going to be 50 to 100 billion dollars bigger in a few years than they are today. And I literally don't see anybody else even challenging them. It's really important to understand that Apple's cost structure is so favorable relative to everybody else, it's almost impossible to imagine any of the cell phone guys, particularly Android guys, catching up. Because Apple's gross margins exceed the retail price of almost every Android phone. Here is the one that I want to leave you with as an investment idea, first and foremost. The mania on Wall Street is about social. Social is a sideshow. And I say this as somebody whose fund has most of its money in Facebook. It is a one-off. This is not ... To borrow a phrase from Star Wars: this is not the mania you are looking for. The one we're talking about will be so much bigger than this. Facebook has won. It is the new Windows. OK? A few other guys — Twitter, Yelp, Skype, LinkedIn — are building successful platforms that are much smaller than what Facebook has. And they'll be successful. But everybody else coming along is going to have to follow the Zynga model. They're going to have to make themselves subordinate to the platform of Facebook. And Zynga's inability to build anything successful off of Facebook, I think, is the key indicator of why this platform is so powerful. So if you do a start-up today in the social world, build it on top of Facebook. It's the only piece of advice I can give you. But the most important piece of advice is: forget social. Social is now a feature, it's not a platform. So embed social, the same way that Catherine said, "Embed gamification into everything." It's all about engagement. The future is going to be different. And the core question is: What are we all going to do about it? What I do is very simple: I believe in full-contact investing. So I looked at HTML 5 about a year ago, and I said, "This thing could be really important. How do I find out?" So my band, Moonalice, which, a couple years ago, did an album with T Bone Burnett, that we thought was going to be a huge hit and blah, blah, blah ... Well, we learned that nobody cared about hippie music done by old folks, so — (Laughter) So we put it all onto the net, went on Facebook and Twitter. We started doing things called "Twittercasts," the first live concerts and then prerecorded concerts, distributed over Twitter. Then we started using live stream, the same thing we're using here today, to do internet-based live video of our shows. And then recently, we bought a satellite network. Why? 'Cause it cost less than three months of what our manager used to cost. (Laughter) And right now, we broadcast every one of our shows — other than the U2 show — live, in HTML 5, via satellite, in a system we totally control. We have an app that's about to ship within the next month. It's — "app" is the wrong term; our website is being upgraded to HTML 5. And in it, you will be able, from any phone, anywhere, to play any song we've ever played live and view any live video that we have, which is 150, 200 shows. Now, it cost practically nothing to do this. And we're this teeny-weeny little band. Now, I know more about technology than most people, but that's just because I know more than most people who are 55. But people who are 18 to 20, who live in this world, are going to be able to use these platforms in music and everywhere else in a fundamentally different way. I think creativity is coming back. Moonalice is something that's built around that. We have poster artists for every single show. We have photographers who work every show, we have painters. And the notion is, I believe that creativity has been stifled, not so much by technology, but by the general deterioration of American culture — you know, people's unwillingness to be educated, this notion that we have to fall back on ritual and beliefs, instead of facts. But I think technology is finally going to do us a favor. I think it's finally going to give us the tools to make us independent. And there's little glimmers, right? We see the Arab Spring and the impact that Twitter and Facebook had. Pretty exciting. But imagine a world in which everything is an app. In HTML 5, digital Detroit gets replaced by this thing where every tweet is an app, every advertisement is an instance of a store. Think about what that means. So instead of seeing an Amazon display ad, you see the store, say, on the New York Times Book Review. You can both create demand and satisfy it in the same place. Why? Because that's better for everybody. Saves time, increases engagement, because it keeps you on the page. We're going from a web of elevators, where you go to different places, and you go off sites and you lose people, to a control panel model. And guess who's going to make it? You are. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Open science now!

{0: 'A physicist turned writer, Michael Nielsen believes online communication and collaboration tools are revolutionizing the way we make scientific discoveries.'}

TEDxWaterloo

Well, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you all very much for coming along today. I'd like to begin my talk with a story. It's a story that begins, but does not end, with a mathematician named Tim Gowers. Gowers is one of the world's most renowned mathematicians. He's a professor at Cambridge University and a recipient of the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics. Gowers is also a blogger, and in January of 2009, he used his blog to pose a very striking question: Is massively collaborative mathematics possible? So what he was proposing in this post was to use his blog to attack a difficult unsolved mathematical problem — a problem which he said he would "love to solve" — completely in the open, using his blog to post his ideas and his partial progress. What's more, he issued an open invitation, inviting anybody in the world who thought that they had an idea to contribute to post their idea in the comment section of the blog. His hope was that by combining the ideas of many minds, he could make easy work of his hard mathematical problem. He called this experiment the Polymath Project. Well, the Polymath Project got off to a slow start. In the first seven hours, nobody posted any comments. But then, a mathematician from the University of British Columbia named Jozsef Solymosi posted a short comment. And this seemed to break the ice, because a few minutes later, a high school teacher named Jason Dyer posted a suggestion. And a few minutes after that, another mathematician named Terence Tao, also a Fields medalist, posted an idea. And things really started to move quickly at this point. Over the next 37 days, 27 different people would post 800 substantive comments containing 170,000 words. I was not a serious participant, but I was following along closely from the start, and it was just amazing. The speed with which an idea would be tentatively proposed and then really rapidly developed by other people and improved, sometimes discarded — it was just amazing. Gowers described the process as being to ordinary research "as driving is to pushing a car." (Laughter) At the end of the 37 days, Gowers used his blog to announce that they had solved the core problem; in fact, they had solved a harder generalization of the problem. The Polymath Project had succeeded. So what the Polymath Project suggests, at least to me, is that we can use the internet to build tools that actually expand our ability to solve the most challenging intellectual problems. Or, to put it in another way: we can build tools which actively amplify our collective intelligence in much the same way as, for millennia, we've used physical tools to amplify our strength. OK? So what I'd like to talk about today, or what I'd like to explore today, is what this means for science. It's much more important than just solving a single mathematical problem. It means an expansion in the range of scientific problems we can hope to attack at all. It means, potentially, an acceleration in the rate of scientific discovery. It means a change in the way we construct knowledge itself. So, before I get too overexcited, however, I would like to talk about some of the challenges, some of the problems. Particularly, I'd like to describe a failure of this approach. It occurred in 2005, or started in 2005. A grad student at Caltech named John Stockton had a very good idea for what he called the "Quantum Wiki," or "Qwiki" for short. (Laughter) OK? It's a great idea. What he did with the Qwiki was — the idea of the Qwiki was that it was going to be a great repository of human knowledge, much like Wikipedia. But instead of being focused on general knowledge, it was going to be focused on specialist knowledge in quantum computing. It was going be kind of a supertextbook for the field, with information about all the latest research, about what the big open problems in the field were, people's speculation about how to solve the problems, and so on. Like Wikipedia, the intention was that it would be written by the users, in this case, by experts in quantum computing. I was present at the conference at Caltech in 2005, when it was announced. And some of the people who I spoke to were very skeptical, but some of the people were very excited by the idea. They were impressed by the implementation; they were impressed by the amount of initial seed material which had been put on the site; and most of all, they were excited by the vision. But just because they were excited, didn't mean they wanted to take the time themselves to contribute. They hoped that other people would do so. And in the end, nobody, essentially, was really all that interested in contributing. If you look today, except in a few small corners, the Qwiki is essentially dead. And, sad to say, this is quite a common story. Many scientists, in fields ranging from genetics to string theory, have tried to start science wikis along very similar lines. And typically, they've failed for essentially the same reason. It's not just science wikis, either. Inspired by Facebook, many organizations have tried to create social networks for scientists, which will connect scientists to other people with similar interests. So they can share things like data or code, their ideas and so on. Again, it sounds like a good idea. But if you join one of these sites, you'll quickly discover that they're essentially empty. They're virtual ghost towns. So what's going on? What's the problem here? Why are these promising sites failing? Well, imagine that you're an ambitious young scientist. In fact, I know some of you here are ambitious young scientists. Imagine you're an ambitious young scientist. You really would like to get a job — a permanent job, a good job — doing the work that you love. But it's incredibly competitive to get such jobs. Often, there'll be hundreds of very highly qualified applicants for positions. And so you find yourself working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, doing the one thing that you know will get you such a job, and that is writing scientific papers. You may think that the Qwiki is a wonderful idea in principle, but you also know that writing a single mediocre paper will do much more for your career and your job prospects than a long series of brilliant contributions to such a site. So even though you may like the idea and you may think it will advance science more quickly, you find you just can't conceive of it as being part of your job. It's not. The only things which can succeed in this kind of environment are projects like the Polymath Project, which, even though they employ an unconventional means to an end, they have an essential conservatism about them. The end product of the Polymath Project was still a scientific paper. In fact, it was several papers. Right? So unconventional means, but conventional ends. So there's a kind of conservatism about it. And don't get me wrong — the Polymath Project is terrific, but it is a pity that scientists can only use tools which have this kind of conservative nature. So let me tell you a story about an instance where we moved away from this conservatism. It's a rare story where the conservatism has been broken. It occurred in the 1990s, when, as you know, for the first time, biologists were taking large amounts of genetic data to collect in the Human Genome Project. And there were sites online which would allow biologists to upload that data so it could be shared with other people around the world and analyzed by other people. Probably the best known of these is the site GenBank, which some of you may have heard of or used. And these sites, like GenBank, had the problem in common with Qwiki that scientists — they're not paid or rewarded for sharing their data. It's all about publishing papers. So there was a considerable reluctance to actually upload the data. Yet, everybody could see that this was silly — it was obvious that this was the right thing to do. But just because it was obvious didn't mean that people were actually doing it. So a meeting was convened in Bermuda in 1996 of many of the world's leading molecular biologists. And they sat and they discussed the problem for several days, and they came up with what are now called the Bermuda Principles, which state that: first, once human genetic data is taken in the lab, it should be immediately uploaded to a site like GenBank; and two, that the data would be in the public domain. And these principles were given teeth, because they were taken by the big scientific grant agencies — the US National Institutes of Health, the UK Wellcome Trust — and actually baked into policy. So it meant that if you were a scientist who wanted to work on the human genome, you had to agree to abide by these principles. And today, I'm very pleased to say, as a result, you can go online — anybody here — and download the human genome. So that's a terrific story. But the human genome is just a tiny, tiny fraction of all scientific knowledge. Even just in other parts of genetics, there is so much knowledge that is still locked up. I spoke with one bioinformatician who told me that he'd been "sitting on the genome of an entire species for more than a year." An entire species. And in other parts of science, it is routine that scientists hoard their data. They hoard the computer code that they write that could be useful, potentially, to other people. They hoard their best ideas. And they often hoard even the descriptions of the problems that they think are most interesting. And so, what I and other people in the Open Science movement would like to do is, we'd like to change this situation. We would like to change the culture of science so that scientists become much more strongly motivated to share all of these different kinds of knowledge. We want to change the values of individual scientists so they start to see it as part of their job to be sharing their data, to be sharing their code, to be sharing their best ideas and their problems. So, if we can do this, this kind of change in values, then we will indeed start to see individual scientists rewarded for doing these things; there will be incentives to do them. It's a difficult thing to do, however. We're talking about changing the culture of entire large parts of science. But it has happened before once in history, right back at the dawn of science. Galileo, 1609: he points his telescope up at the sky towards Saturn, and he sees for the first time in history what we now know are the rings of Saturn. Does he tell everybody in the world? No, he doesn't do that. He writes down a description, privately, and then he scrambles the letters in the description into an anagram, and he sends that anagram to several of his astronomer rivals. (Laughter) And what this ensures is that, if they later make the same discovery, he can reveal the anagram and get the credit, but in the meantime, he hasn't given up any knowledge at all. And I'm sad to say that he was not uncommon at the time: Newton, Huygens, Hooke, Leonardo — they all used similar devices. OK? The printing press had been around for 150 years by this time. And yet, there was a great battle in the 17th and 18th centuries to change the culture of science, so that it became expected that when a scientist made a discovery, they would reveal it in a journal. Now, that's great that that change has happened. It's terrific. But today, we have new technologies, we have new opportunities to share our knowledge in new ways and the ability to create tools that actually allow us to solve problems in entirely new ways. So we need to have a second open science revolution. It is my belief that any publicly funded science should be open science. How can we achieve this change? Well, if you're a scientist — and I know many of you are not scientists, but if you are a scientist, then there are things that you can do. You can get involved in an open science project, even if it's just for a small fraction of your time. You can find forums online where you can share your knowledge in new ways, ways that allow other people to build on that knowledge. You can also, if you're more ambitious, start an open science project of your own. If you're really bold, you may wish to experiment with entirely new ways of collaborating, in much the same way as the Polymath Project did. But above all, what you should do is be very generous in giving credit to those of your colleagues who are practicing science in the open and to promote their work. It is only conservative scientific values that look down on these activities — the sharing of data, the blogging, or using of wikis and so on. You can reject those conservative values and engage your scientific colleagues in conversation to promote the value of these new ways of working, to emphasize that it takes bravery to do these things, particularly by young scientists. It's through such conversation that the culture of science can be changed. So if you are not a scientist, there are also things that you can do. My belief is that the single most important thing that we can do to give impetus to open science is to create a general awareness amongst the population of the issue of open science and of its critical importance. If there is that general awareness, then the scientific community will inevitably find — it will be dragged by the population at large in the right direction. There are simple things you can do. You can talk to your friends and acquaintances who are scientists and just ask them what are they doing to work more openly. Or you can use your imagination and your personal power to raise awareness in other ways. We're talking about changing not just what scientists do but what grant agencies do, what universities do and what governments do. And you can influence all of those things. Our society faces a fundamental question: What kinds of knowledge are we going to expect and incentivize our scientists to share? Will we continue as we have done in the past? Or will we embrace new kinds of sharing, which lead to new methods for solving problems and an acceleration in the process of science, entirely across the board? My hope is that we will embrace open science and really seize this opportunity that we have to reinvent discovery itself. Thank you. (Applause)

Conception to birth -- visualized

{0: 'Using art and technology, Alexander Tsiaras visualizes the unseen human body.'}

INK Conference

I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine. And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep-space flight, so they could be kept in robotic pods. One of the fascinating things about what we were working on is that we were seeing, using new scanning technologies, things that had never been seen before. Not only in disease management, but also things that allowed us to see things about the body that just made you marvel. I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen. And your entire body, everything — your hair, skin, bone, nails — everything is made of collagen. And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this. And the only place that collagen changes its structure is in the cornea of your eye. In your eye, it becomes a grid formation, and therefore, it becomes transparent, as opposed to opaque. So perfectly organized a structure, it was hard not to attribute divinity to it. Because we kept on seeing this in different parts of the body. One of the opportunities I had was one person was working on a really interesting micromagnetic resonance imaging machine with the NIH. And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these new technologies. So I wrote the algorithms and code, and he built the hardware — Paul Lauterbur — then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI. I got the data. And I'm going to show you a sample of the piece, "From Conception to Birth." (Music) [From Conception to Birth] [Oocyte] [Sperm] [Egg Inseminated] [24 Hours: Baby's first division] [The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion...] [And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours.] [Early Embryo] [Yolk sack still feeding baby.] [25 Days: Heart chamber developing.] [32 Days: Arms & hands are developing] [36 Days: Beginning of the primitive vertebrae] [These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus.] [If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire 9 months, it would be 1.5 tons at birth.] [45 Days] [Embryo's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother's.] [51 Days] [Developing retina, nose and fingers] [The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.] [12 Weeks: Indifferent penis] [Girl or boy yet to be determined] [8 Months] [Delivery: The expulsion stage] [The moment of birth] (Applause) Alexander Tsiaras: Thank you. But as you can see, when you actually start working on this data, it's pretty spectacular. And as we kept on scanning more and more, working on this project, looking at these two simple cells that have this unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you. And as we kept on working on this data, looking at small clusters of the body, these little pieces of tissue that were the trophoblasts coming off of the blastocyst, all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus, saying, "I'm here to stay." Having conversation and communications with the estrogens, the progesterones, saying, "I'm here to stay, plant me," building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being. The marvel of this information: How do we actually have this biological mechanism inside our body to actually see this information? I'm going to show you something pretty unique. Here's a human heart at 25 days. It's just basically two strands. And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself. Within five weeks, you start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles. Six weeks, these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart — and then basically the development of the entire human body. The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexity of these, the mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension. Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us? It's a mystery, it's magic, it's divinity. Then you start to take a look at adult life. Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries. It's just a tiny sub-substructure, microscopic. But basically by the time you're nine months and you're given birth, you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body. And only one mile is visible. 59,999 miles that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away. The complexity of building that within a single system is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today. And then instructions set, from the brain to every other part of the body — look at the complexity of the folding. Where does this intelligence of knowing that a fold can actually hold more information, so as you actually watch the baby's brain grow. And this is one of the things we're doing. We're launching two new studies of scanning babies' brains from the moment they're born. Every six months until they're six years old, we're going to be doing about 250 children, watching exactly how the gyri and the sulci of the brains fold to see how this magnificent development actually turns into memories and the marvel that is us. And it's not just our own existence, but how does the woman's body understand to have genetic structure that not only builds her own, but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological, cardiovascular system that basically is a mobile system that can actually nurture, treat this child with a kind of marvel that is beyond, again, our comprehension — the magic that is existence, that is us? Thank you. (Applause)

Fly with the Jetman

{0: 'With a jet-powered wing attached to his body, Yves Rossy expands the possibilities of human flight.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

(Music) [music by Moby] [Grand Canyon] Narrator: Many of the tests are conducted while Yves is strapped onto the wing, because Yves' body is an integral part of the aircraft. [Wind tunnel tests] Narrator: The wing has no steering controls, no flaps, no rudder. Yves uses his body to steer the wing. Stefan Von Bergen: Well, he turns by just putting his head on one or the other side. And sometimes he assists that with his hands, sometimes even with the leg. He's acting as a human fuselage, so to say. And that's quite unique. Narrator: When he arches his back, he gains altitude. When he pushes his shoulders forward, he goes into a dive. [Swiss Alps] [Strait of Gibraltar crossing] [English Channel crossing] Commentator One: There he goes. There is Yves Rossy. And I think the wing is open. So our first critical moment, it's open. He is down. Is he flying? Commentator Two: It looks like he's stabilized. He's starting to make his climb. Commentator One: There's that 90 degree turn. He's out over the channel. There is Yves Rossy. There is no turning back now. He is over the English Channel and under way. Ladies and gentlemen, a historic flight has begun. [Images: National Geographic] Commentator Two: And as he approaches the ground, he's going to pull down on those toggles to flare, slow himself down just a little bit, and then come in for a nice landing. Commentator One: There he is. Yves Rossy has landed in England. Bruno Giussani: And now he's in Edinburgh. Yves Rossy! (Applause) (Applause ends) And his equipment as well. Yves, welcome. It is quite amazing. Those sequences were shot over the last three years in various moments of your activities. And there were many, many others. So it's possible to fly almost like a bird. What is it like to be up there? Yves Rossy: It's fun. It's fun. (Laughter) I don't have feathers. But I feel like a bird sometimes. It's really an unreal feeling, because normally you have a big thing, a plane, around you. And when I strap just this little harness, this little wing, I really have the feeling of being a bird. BG: How did you start to become Jetman? YR: It was about 20 years ago, when I discovered free falling. When you go out of an airplane, you are almost naked. You take a position like that. And especially when you take a tracking position, you have the feeling that you are flying. And that's the nearest thing to the dream. You have no machine around you. You are just in the element. It's very short and only in one direction. (Laughter) So the idea was, okay, keep that feeling of freedom, but change the vector and increase the time. BG: So I'm kind of curious, what's your top speed? YR: It's about 300 km per hour before looping. That means about 190 miles per hour. BG: What's the weight of the equipment you're carrying? YR: When I exit full of kerosene, I'm about 55 kilos. I have 55 kilos on my back. BG: And you're not piloting? There is no handle, no steering, nothing? It is purely your body, and the wings become part of the body and vice versa? YR: That's really the goal, because if you put in steering, then you reinvent the airplane. And I wanted to keep this freedom of movement. And it's really like the kid playing the airplane. I want to go down like that. And up I climb, I turn. It's really pure flying. It's not steering, it's flight. BG: What kind of training do you do, you personally, for that? YR: Actually, I try to stay just fit. I don't do special physical training. I just try to keep my mobility through new activities. For example, last winter I began with kite surfing. So, new things. So you have to adapt. I'm quite an experienced manager of systems as a pilot, but this is, really — You need fluidity, you need to be agile and also to adapt really fast. BG: Somebody in the audience asked me, "How does he breathe up there?" Because you're going fast and you're up at 3,000 meters or so. YR: Okay, up to 3,000 meters, it's not such a big problem with oxygen. But for example, bikers, they have the same speed. Just with the helmet, integral helmet, it's really no problem to breathe. BG: Describe for me the equipment, since you have it here. So Breitling's four engines. YR: Yeah, two-meter span. Ultra-stable profile. Four little engines, 22 kilos thrust each, turbines, working with kerosene. Harness, parachute. My only instruments are an altimeter and time. I know I have about eight minutes fuel. So I just check before it's finished. (Laughter) And yeah, that's all. Two parachutes. That means, if I have a problem with the first one I pull, I still have the possibility to open the second one. And this is my life. That's the real important thing about safety. I did use that during these last 15 years about 20 times. Never with that type of wing, but at the beginning. I can release my wing when I am in a spin or unstable. BG: We saw the 2009 crossing of the Gibraltar Strait where you lost control and then you dived down into the clouds and in the ocean. So that was one of those cases where you let the wings go, right? YR: Yeah. I did try in the clouds, but you lose orientation completely. So I did try to take, again, a climb altitude. I thought, okay, I will go out. But most probably, I did something like that. (Laughter) BG: Something that is not very safe, the image. YR: You feel great, but — (Laughter) But you have not the right altitude. So the next thing I saw was just blue. It was the sea. I have also an audible altimeter. So I was at my minimum altitude in that vector — fast — so I pulled that. And then I did open my chute. BG: So the wings have their own parachute, and you have your two parachutes. YR: Exactly. There is a rescue parachute for the wing for two reasons: so I can repair it afterward and especially so nobody takes that, just on his head. BG: I see. Maybe come back here. This is risky stuff indeed. People have died trying to do this kind of thing. And you don't look like a crazy guy; you're a Swiss airline pilot, so you're rather a checklist kind of guy. I assume you have standards. YR: Yeah. I have no checklist for that. (Laughter) BG: Let's not tell your employer. (Laughter) YR: No, that's really two worlds. Civil aviation is something that we know very well. We have a hundred years of experience. And you can adapt really precisely. With that, I have to adapt to something new. That means improvise. So it's really a play between these two approaches. Something that I know very well, these principles. For example, we have two engines on an Airbus; with only one engine, you can fly it. So plan B, always a plan B. In a fighter, you have an ejection seat. That's my ejection seat. So I have the approach of a professional pilot with the respect of a pioneer in front of Mother Nature. BG: It's well said. What happens if one of the engines stops? YR: I do a roll. And then I stabilize, and according to my altitude, I continue on two or three engines. It's sometimes possible. It's quite complicated to explain, but according to which regime I was, I can continue on two and try to get a nice place to land, and then I open my parachute. BG: So the beginning of the flight is actually you jump off a plane or a helicopter, and you go on a dive and accelerate the engines, and then you basically take off mid-air somewhere. And then the landing, as we have seen, arriving on this side of the Channel, is through a parachute. So just as a curiosity, where did you land when you flew over the Grand Canyon? Did you land on the rim, down at the bottom? YR: It was down on the bottom. And I came back afterward on the sled of the helicopter back. But it was too stony and full of cactus on top. (Laughter) BG: That's exactly why I asked the question. YR: And also, the currents are quite funny there. There is big thermal activity, big difference in altitude also. So it was much safer for me to land at the bottom. BG: I think that right now, many people are asking, "When are you developing a double-seater so they can fly with you?" YR: I have a standard answer. Have you ever seen tandem birds? (Laughter) BG: Perfect answer. (Applause) (Applause ends) BG: Yves, one last question. What's next for you? What's next for Jetman? YR: First, to instruct a younger guy. I want to share it, to do formation flights. And I plan to start from a cliff, like catapulted from a cliff. BG: So instead of jumping off a plane, yes? YR: Yes, with the final goal to take off, but with initial speed. Really, I go step by step. It seems a little bit crazy, but it's not. It's possible to start already now, it's just too dangerous. (Laughter) Thanks to the increasing technology, better technology, it will be safe. And I hope it will be for everybody. BG: Yves, thank you very much. Yves Rossy. (Applause)

A 12-year-old app developer

{0: 'Thomas Suarez, a 12 year old, taught himself to build iphone apps.'}

TEDxManhattanBeach

I've always had a fascination for computers and technology, and I made a few apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. I'd like to share a couple with you today. My first app was a unique fortune teller called "Earth Fortune" that would display different colors of Earth depending on what your fortune was. My favorite and most successful app is "Bustin Jieber," which is — (Laughter) which is a Justin Bieber whack-a-mole. (Laughter) I created it because a lot of people at school disliked Justin Bieber a little bit, so I decided to make the app. So I went to work programming it, and I released it just before the holidays in 2010. A lot of people ask me, how did I make these? A lot of times it's because the person who asked the question wants to make an app also. A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them, and it's difficult, because not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program. I mean, for soccer, you could go to a soccer team. For violin, you could get lessons for a violin. But what if you want to make an app? And the kid's parents might have done some of these things when they were young, but not many parents have written apps. (Laughter) Where do you go to find out how to make an app? Well, this is how I approached it, this is what I did. First of all, I've been programming in multiple other programming languages to get the basics down, such as Python, C, Java, etc. And then Apple released the iPhone, and with it, the iPhone software development kit, and the software development kit is a suite of tools for creating and programming an iPhone app. This opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me, and after playing with the software development kit a little bit, I made a couple of apps, I made some test apps. One of them happened to be "Earth Fortune," and I was ready to put "Earth Fortune" on the App Store, and so I persuaded my parents to pay the 99 dollar fee to be able to put my apps on the App Store. They agreed, and now I have apps on the App Store. I've gotten a lot of interest and encouragement from my family, friends, teachers and even people at the Apple Store, and that's been a huge help to me. I've gotten a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs, and I've started an app club at school, and a teacher at my school is kindly sponsoring my app club. Any student at my school can come and learn how to design an app. This is so I can share my experiences with others. There's these programs called the iPad Pilot Program, and some districts have them. I'm fortunate enough to be part of one. A big challenge is, how should the iPads be used, and what apps should we put on the iPads? So we're getting feedback from teachers at the school to see what kind of apps they'd like. When we design the app and we sell it, it will be free to local districts; and other districts that we sell to — all the money from that will go into the local ed foundations. These days, students usually know a little bit more than teachers with the technology. (Laughter) So — (Laughter) Sorry. (Laughter) So this is a resource to teachers, and educators should recognize this resource and make good use of it. (Laughter) I'd like to finish up by saying what I'd like to do in the future. First of all, I'd like to create more apps, more games. I'm working with a third party company to make an app. I'd like to get into Android programming and development, and I'd like to continue my app club, and find other ways for students to share knowledge with others. Thank you. (Applause)

Experiments that hint of longer lives

{0: 'When it comes to aging well, having “good genes” (or rather, mutant ones) is key, says Cynthia Kenyon. She unlocked the genetic secret of longevity in roundworms —\xa0and now she’s working to do the same for humans.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Have you ever wanted to stay young a little longer and put off aging? This is a dream of the ages. But scientists have for a long time thought this just was never going to be possible. They thought you just wear out, there's nothing you can do about it — kind of like an old shoe. But if you look in nature, you see that different kinds of animals can have really different lifespans. Now these animals are different from one another, because they have different genes. So that suggests that somewhere in these genes, somewhere in the DNA, are genes for aging, genes that allow them to have different lifespans. So if there are genes like that, then you can imagine that, if you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan. And if you could do that, then you could find the genes for aging. And if they exist and you can find them, then maybe one could eventually do something about it. So we've set out to look for genes that control aging. And we didn't study any of these animals. Instead, we studied a little, tiny, round worm called C. elegans, which is just about the size of a comma in a sentence. And we were really optimistic that we could find something because there had been a report of a long-lived mutant. So we started to change genes at random, looking for long-lived animals. And we were very lucky to find that mutations that damage one single gene called daf-2 doubled the lifespan of the little worm. So you can see in black, after a month — they're very short-lived; that's why we like to study them for studies of aging — in black, after a month, the normal worms are all dead. But at that time, most of the mutant worms are still alive. And it isn't until twice as long that they're all dead. And now I want to show what they actually look like in this movie here. So the first thing you're going to see is the normal worm when it's about college student age — a young adult. It's quite a cute little fellow. And next you're going to see the long-lived mutant when it's young. So this animal is going to live twice as long. Is it miserable? It doesn't seem to be. It's active. You can't tell the difference really. And they can be completely fertile — have the same number of progeny as the normal worms do. Now get out your handkerchiefs here. You're going to see, in just two weeks, the normal worms are old. You can see the little head moving down at the bottom there. But everything else is just lying there. The animal's clearly in the nursing home. And if you look at the tissues of the animal, they're starting to deteriorate. You know, even if you've never seen one of these little C. elegans — which probably most of you haven't seen one — you can tell they're old — isn't that interesting? So there's something about aging that's kind of universal. And now here is the daf-2 mutant. One gene is changed out of 20,000, and look at it. It's the same age, but it's not in the nursing home; it's going skiing. This is what's really cool: it's aging more slowly. It takes this worm two days to age as much as the normal worm ages in one day. And when I tell people about this, they tend to think of maybe an 80 or 90 year-old person who looks really good for being 90 or 80. But it's really more like this: let's say you're a 30 year-old guy — or in your 30s — and you're a bachelor and you're dating people. And you meet someone you really like, you get to know her. And you're in a restaurant, and you say, "Well how old are you?" She says, "I'm 60." That's what it's like. And you would never know. You would never know, until she told you. (Laughter) Okay. So what is the daf-2 gene? Well as you know, genes, which are part of the DNA, they're instructions to make a protein that does something. And the daf-2 gene encodes a hormone receptor. So what you see in the picture there is a cell with a hormone receptor in red punching through the edge of the cell. So part of it is like a baseball glove. Part of it's on the outside, and it's catching the hormone as it comes by in green. And the other part is on the inside where it sends signals into the cell. Okay, so what is the daf-2 receptor telling the inside of the cell? I just told you that, if you make a mutation in the daf-2 gene cell, that you get a receptor that doesn't work as well; the animal lives longer. So that means that the normal function of this hormone receptor is to speed up aging. That's what that arrow means. It speeds up aging. It makes it go faster. So it's like the animal has the grim reaper inside of itself, speeding up aging. So this is altogether really, really interesting. It says that aging is subject to control by the genes, and specifically by hormones. So what kind of hormones are these? There's lots of hormones. There's testosterone, adrenalin. You know about a lot of them. These hormones are similar to hormones that we have in our bodies. The daf-2 hormone receptor is very similar to the receptor for the hormone insulin and IGF-1. Now you've all heard of at least insulin. Insulin is a hormone that promotes the uptake of nutrients into your tissues after you eat a meal. And the hormone IGF-1 promotes growth. So these functions were known for these hormones for a long time, but our studies suggested that maybe they had a third function that nobody knew about — maybe they also affect aging. And it's looking like that's the case. So after we made our discoveries with little C. elegans, people who worked on other kinds of animals started asking, if we made the same daf-2 mutation, the hormone receptor mutation, in other animals, will they live longer? And that is the case in flies. If you change this hormone pathway in flies, they live longer. And also in mice — and mice are mammals like us. So it's an ancient pathway, because it must have arisen a long time ago in evolution such that it still works in all these animals. And also, the common precursor also gave rise to people. So maybe it's working in people the same way. And there are hints of this. So for example, there was one study that was done in a population of Ashkenazi Jews in New York City. And just like any population, most of the people live to be about 70 or 80, but some live to be 90 or 100. And what they found was that people who lived to 90 or 100 were more likely to have daf-2 mutations — that is, changes in the gene that encodes the receptor for IGF-1. And these changes made the gene not act as well as the normal gene would have acted. It damaged the gene. So those are hints suggesting that humans are susceptible to the effects of the hormones for aging. So the next question, of course, is: Is there any effect on age-related disease? As you age, you're much more likely to get cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, all sorts of diseases. It turns out that these long-lived mutants are more resistant to all these diseases. They hardly get cancer, and when they do it's not as severe. So it's really interesting, and it makes sense in a way, that they're still young, so why would they be getting diseases of aging until their old? So it suggests that, if we could have a therapeutic or a pill to take to replicate some of these effects in humans, maybe we would have a way of combating lots of different age-related diseases all at once. So how can a hormone ultimately affect the rate of aging? How could that work? Well it turns out that in the daf-2 mutants, a whole lot of genes are switched on in the DNA that encode proteins that protect the cells and the tissues, and repair damage. And the way that they're switched on is by a gene regulator protein called FOXO. So in a daf-2 mutant — you see that I have the X drawn here through the receptor. The receptor isn't working as well. Under those conditions, the FOXO protein in blue has gone into the nucleus — that little compartment there in the middle of the cell — and it's sitting down on a gene binding to it. You see one gene. There are lots of genes actually that bind on FOXO. And it's just sitting on one of them. So FOXO turns on a lot of genes. And the genes it turns on includes antioxidant genes, genes I call carrot-giver genes, whose protein products actually help other proteins to function well — to fold correctly and function correctly. And it can also escort them to the garbage cans of the cell and recycle them if they're damaged. DNA repair genes are more active in these animals. And the immune system is more active. And many of these different genes, we've shown, actually contribute to the long lifespan of the daf-2 mutant. So it's really interesting. These animals have within them the latent capacity to live much longer than they normally do. They have the ability to protect themselves from many kinds of damage, which we think makes them live longer. So what about the normal worm? Well when the daf-2 receptor is active, then it triggers a series of events that prevent FOXO from getting into the nucleus where the DNA is. So it can't turn the genes on. That's how it works. That's why we don't see the long lifespan, until we have the daf-2 mutant. But what good is this for the worm? Well we think that insulin and IGF-1 hormones are hormones that are particularly active under favorable conditions — in the good times — when food is plentiful and there's not a lot of stress in the environment. Then they promote the uptake of nutrients. You can store the food, use it for energy, grow, etc. But what we think is that, under conditions of stress, the levels of these hormones drop — for example, having limited food supply. And that, we think, is registered by the animal as a danger signal, a signal that things are not okay and that it should roll out its protective capacity. So it activates FOXO, FOXO goes to the DNA, and that triggers the expression of these genes that improves the ability of the cell to protect itself and repair itself. And that's why we think the animals live longer. So you can think of FOXO as being like a building superintendent. So maybe he's a little bit lazy, but he's there, he's taking care of the building. But it's deteriorating. And then suddenly, he learns that there's going to be a hurricane. So he doesn't actually do anything himself. He gets on the telephone — just like FOXO gets on the DNA — and he calls up the roofer, the window person, the painter, the floor person. And they all come and they fortify the house. And then the hurricane comes through, and the house is in much better condition than it would normally have been in. And not only that, it can also just last longer, even if there isn't a hurricane. So that's the concept here for how we think this life extension ability exists. Now the really cool thing about FOXO is that there are different forms of it. We all have FOXO genes, but we don't all have exactly the same form of the FOXO gene. Just like we all have eyes, but some of us have blue eyes and some of us have brown eyes. And there are certain forms of the FOXO gene that have found to be more frequently present in people who live to be 90 or 100. And that's the case all over the world, as you can see from these stars. And each one of these stars represents a population where scientists have asked, "Okay, are there differences in the type of FOXO genes among people who live a really long time?" and there are. We don't know the details of how this works, but we do know then that FOXO genes can impact the lifespan of people. And that means that, maybe if we tweak it a little bit, we can increase the health and longevity of people. So this is really exciting to me. A FOXO is a protein that we found in these little, round worms to affect lifespan, and here it affects lifespan in people. So we've been trying in our lab now to develop drugs that will activate this FOXO cell using human cells now in order to try and come up with drugs that will delay aging and age-related diseases. And I'm really optimistic that this is going to work. There are lots of different proteins that are known to affect aging. And for at least one of them, there is a drug. There's one called TOR, which is another nutrient sensor, like the insulin pathway. And mutations that damage the TOR gene — just like the daf-2 mutations — extend lifespan in worms and flies and mice. But in this case, there's already a drug called rapamycin that binds to the TOR protein and inhibits its activity. And you can take rapamycin and give it to a mouse — even when it's pretty old, like age 60 for a human, that old for a mouse — if you give the mouse rapamycin, it will live longer. Now I don't want you all to go out taking rapamycin. It is a drug for people, but the reason is it suppresses the immune system. So people take it to prevent organ transplants from being rejected. So this may not be the perfect drug for staying young longer. But still, here in the year 2011, there's a drug that you can give to mice at a pretty old age that will extend their lifespan, which comes out of this science that's been done in all these different animals. So I'm really optimistic, and I think it won't be too long, I hope, before this age-old dream begins to come true. Thank you. (Applause) Matt Ridley: Thank you, Cynthia. Let me get this straight. Although you're looking for a drug that can solve aging in old men like me, what you could do now pretty well in the lab, if you were allowed ethically, is start a human life from scratch with altered genes that would make it live for a lot longer? CK: Ah, so the kinds of drugs I was talking about would not change the genes, they would just bind to the protein itself and change its activity. So if you stop taking the drug, the protein would go back to normal. You could change the genes in principle. There isn't the technology to do that. But I don't think that's a good idea. And the reason is that these hormones, like the insulin and the IGF hormones and the TOR pathway, they're essential. If you knock them out completely, then you're very sick. So it might be that you would just have to fine tune it very carefully to get the benefits without getting any problems. And I think that's much better, that kind of control would be much better as a drug. And also, there are other ways of activating FOXO that don't even involve insulin or IGF-1 that might even be safer. MR: I wasn't suggesting that I was going to go and do it, but ... (Laughter) There's a phenomenon which you have written about and spoken about, which is a negligible senescence. There are some creatures on this planet already that don't really do aging. Just move to one side for us, if you would. CK: There are. There are some animals that don't seem to age. For example, there are some tortoises called Blanding's turtles. And they grow to be about this size. And they've been tagged, and they've been found to be 70 years old. And when you look at these 70 year-old turtles, you can't tell the difference, just by looking, between those turtles and 20 year-old turtles. And the 70 year-old ones, actually they're better at scouting out the good nesting places, and they also have more progeny every year. And there are other examples of these kinds of animals, like turns, certain kinds of birds are like this. And nobody knows if they really can live forever, or what keeps them from aging. It's not clear. If you look at birds, which live a long time, cells from the birds tend to be more resistant to a lot of different environmental stresses like high temperature or hydrogen peroxide, things like that. And our long-lived mutants are too. They're more resistant to these kinds of stresses. So it could be that the pathways that I've been talking about, which are set to run really quickly in the worm, have a different normal set point in something like a bird, so that a bird can live a lot longer. And maybe they're even set really differently in animals with no senescence at all — but we don't know. MR: But what you're talking about here is not extending human lifespan by preventing death, so much as extending human youthspan. CK: Yes, that's right. It's more like, say, if you were a dog. You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, "Why isn't this human getting old?" They're not getting old in the dog's lifespan. It's more like that. But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human. MR: Thank you very much indeed, Cynthia Kenyon. (Applause)

Science versus wonder?

{0: 'The rational-minded Robin Ince conducts live experiments in comedy.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

I'd like to apologize, first of all, to all of you because I have no form of PowerPoint presentation. So what I'm going to do is, every now and again, I will make this gesture, and in a moment of PowerPoint democracy, you can imagine what you'd like to see. I do a radio show. The radio show is called "The Infinite Monkey Cage." It's about science, it's about rationalism. So therefore, we get a lot of complaints every single week — complaints including one we get very often, which is to say the very title, "Infinite Monkey Cage," celebrates the idea of vivisection. We have made it quite clear to these people that an infinite monkey cage is roomy. (Laughter) We also had someone else who said, "'The Infinite Monkey Cage' idea is ridiculous. An infinite number of monkeys could never write the works of Shakespeare. We know this because they did an experiment." Yes, they gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom. (Laughter) So the main element though, the main complaint we get — and one that I find most worrying — is that people say, "Oh, why do you insist on ruining the magic? You bring in science, and it ruins the magic." Now I'm an arts graduate; I love myth and magic and existentialism and self-loathing. That's what I do. But I also don't understand how it does ruin the magic. All of the magic, I think, that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful. Astrology, for instance: like many rationalists, I'm a Pisces. (Laughter) Now astrology — we remove the banal idea that your life could be predicted; that you'll, perhaps today, meet a lucky man who's wearing a hat. That is gone. But if we want to look at the sky and see predictions, we still can. We can see predictions of galaxies forming, of galaxies colliding into each other, of new solar systems. This is a wonderful thing. If the Sun could one day — and indeed the Earth, in fact — if the Earth could read its own astrological, astronomical chart, one day it would say, "Not a good day for making plans. You'll been engulfed by a red giant." And that to me as well, that if you think I'm worried about losing worlds, well Many Worlds theory — one of the most beautiful, fascinating, sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation — is a wonderful thing. That every person here, every decision that you've made today, every decision you've made in your life, you've not really made that decision, but in fact, every single permutation of those decisions is made, each one going off into a new universe. That is a wonderful idea. If you ever think that your life is rubbish, always remember there's another you that's made much worse decisions than that. (Laughter) If you ever think, "Ah, I want to end it all," don't end it all. Remember that in the majority of universes, you don't even exist in the first place. This to me, in its own strange way, is very, very comforting. Now reincarnation, that's another thing gone — the afterlife. But it's not gone. Science actually says we will live forever. Well, there is one proviso. We won't actually live forever. You won't live forever. Your consciousness, the you-ness of you, the me-ness of me — that gets this one go. But every single thing that makes us, every atom in us, has already created a myriad of different things and will go on to create a myriad of new things. We have been mountains and apples and pulsars and other people's knees. Who knows, maybe one of your atoms was once Napoleon's knee. That is a good thing. Unlike the occupants of the universe, the universe itself is not wasteful. We are all totally recyclable. And when we die, we don't even have to be placed in different refuse sacs. This is a wonderful thing. Understanding, to me, does not remove the wonder and the joy. For instance, my wife could turn to me and she may say, "Why do you love me?" And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, "Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors." (Laughter) Though I'll probably also say something about her hair and personality as well. And that is a wonderful thing there. Love does not die because of that thing. Pain doesn't go away either. This is a terrible thing, even though I understand pain. If someone punches me — and because of my personality, this is recently a regular occurrence — I understand where the pain comes from. It is basically momentum to energy where the four-vector is constant — that's what it is. But at no point can I react and go, "Ha! Is that the best momentum-to-energy fourth vector constant you've got?" No, I just spit out a tooth. (Laughter) And that is all of these different things — the love for my child. I have a son. His name is Archie. I'm very lucky, because he's better than all the other children. Now I know you don't think that. You may well have your own children and think, "Oh no, my child's best." That's the wonderful thing about evolution — the predilection to believe that our child is best. Now in many ways, that's just a survival thing. The fact we see here is the vehicle for our genes, and therefore we love it. But we don't notice that bit; we just unconditionally love. That is a wonderful thing. Though I should say that my son is best and is better than your children. I've done some tests. And all of these things to me give such joy and excitement and wonder. Even quantum mechanics can give you an excuse for bad housework, for instance. Perhaps you've been at home for a week on your own. You house is in a terrible state. Your partner is about to return. You think, what should I do? Do nothing. All you have to do is, when she walks in, using a quantum interpretation, say, "I'm so sorry. I stopped observing the house for a moment, and when I started observing again, everything had happened." (Laughter) That's the strong anthropic principle of vacuuming. For me, it's a very, very important thing. Even on my journey up here — the joy that I have on my journey up here every single time. If you actually think, you remove the myth and there is still something wonderful. I'm sitting on a train. Every time I breathe in, I'm breathing in a million-billion-billion atoms of oxygen. I'm sitting on a chair. Even though I know the chair is made of atoms and therefore actually in many ways empty space, I find it comfortable. I look out the window, and I realize that every single time we stop and I look out that window, framed in that window, wherever we are, I am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet Earth. If you go to the safari parks on Saturn or Jupiter, you will be disappointed. And I realize I'm observing this with the brain, the human brain, the most complex thing in the known universe. That, to me, is an incredible thing. And do you know what, that might be enough. Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate, once said, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." Now for some people, that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism. But for me, it doesn't. That is a wonderful thing. I'm glad the universe is pointless. It means if I get to the end of my life, the universe can't turn to me and go, "What have you been doing, you idiot? That's not the point." I can make my own purpose. You can make your own purpose. We have the individual power to go, "This is what I want to do." And in a pointless universe, that, to me, is a wonderful thing. I have chosen to make silly jokes about quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation. You, I imagine, can do much better things with your time. Thank you very much. Goodbye. (Applause)

How games make kids smarter

{0: "Do kids these days have short attention spans, or does the world just move too slow? Gabe Zichermann suggests that today's video games are making children smarter -- and we should all embrace gamification."}

TEDxKids@Brussels

I'm 36 years old. My first experience with the video game business was neighbors who were wealthier than us bringing home an Atari 2600 and playing it. It was a pretty definitive moment for me. I also remember going to school, and on an Apple II, playing a game called "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" an awesome game, which was the first time I played a game in the school context. When you ask people about the video game business and what's significant, most people think that Atari 2600 is really the nexus, the catalyst of the video game business. But I actually think that "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" is probably the most important video game ever made, principally because it was the first and the last time that parents, teachers and kids all agreed that a video game was awesome. (Laughter) Now, that was a long time ago. In fact, it was 1987. And it may surprise you to know that "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" continues to be the last substantial giant hit in the entertainment business, despite the fact that it was 1987, which is such an incredibly long time ago, and I'm only 36, so you can do the math. Things are completely different today from what they were. Just as a simple example, in 1987, we thought this guy was kind of crazy. Then we met this dude, who has really changed our perspective on that subject. (Laughter) Things have changed. (Laughter) Anti-Bush political humor goes a long way in Western Europe. (Laughter) So, between 1987 and now, I played a lot of this game called "Civilization," which was designed by a guy named Sid Meier. In fact, I spent about 8- to 10,000 hours of my life playing "Civilization," which is a long time I probably should have spent studying. But nonetheless, I managed to turn this love of video games into a job, first working on the Game Developers Conference, helping to start the first successful digital distribution company in games, called Trymedia, and then now, writing the Gamification blog. I'm author of two books on the subject of gamification, including the recent "Gamification by Design," published by O'Reilly. And I chair the Gamification Summit, which is an event that brings all this stuff together. So in many ways, I am parents' dream of how somebody can turn a sedentary lifestyle of playing video games into an actual career that pays real money. So when I get invited to an event like this, I'm sure that all of you expect me to get up here and say, "Games are awesome for your children." Right? Because I'm a games guy and this is how I make my living. (Applause) Games will help children. But instead, I want to ask you a different question, which is: Really, who needs games help? I started this process by thinking about reading a particular article in the New York Times recently. In the article, a neuroscientist was talking about how children were presenting themselves with attention deficit disorder. Their parents would come in and say, "My kids can't possibly have ADD, because they're super good at focusing on video games, But when they go to school, they're really bad." The neuroscientist was debunking this idea in the article. She trotted out researchers like Dr Christopher Lucas at NYU, who said games don't teach the right kind of attention skills where kids have sustained attention, where they're not receiving regular rewards. And she trotted out experts like Dr Dimitri Christakis at the University of Washington, who said that kids who play a lot of video games may find the real world unpalatable or uninteresting, as a result of their sensitization to games. So I sat there and thought to myself, I'm scratching my head, is it that our children have ADD, or is our world just too freaking slow for our children to appreciate? (Applause) Seriously, consider the picture you're looking at right now, like in my era, even my grandfather's era, sitting down on a Sunday afternoon to read a good book with a cup of tea — I just have to say, I don't think that today's kids are ever going to do that. The evidence is found in the games they play. Consider the video game "World of Warcraft." When I was growing up, the maximum skill that I was expected to display in a video game was simple hand-eye coordination, a joystick and a firing button. Today's kids play games in which they're expected to chat in text and voice, operate a character, follow long- and short-term objectives, and deal with their parents interrupting them all the time to talk to them. (Laughter) Kids have to have an extraordinary multitasking skill to be able to achieve things today. We never had to have that. It turns out things like that actually make you smarter. Research by Arne May et Al at the University of Regensburg in Germany found that when they gave participants — this was actually done on adults — a simple task to learn, like juggling, in 12 weeks, people who were asked to learn juggling displayed a marked increase in gray matter in their brain. On an MRI, you can see people get more gray matter after 12 weeks of learning juggling. In 2008, they went back and redid the study to see why the gray matter increased. They discovered it was the act of learning that produced the increased brain matter, not performance at the activity itself, which is a very interesting finding. It also reinforced this idea, which should go over well here as well, that multilingual people outperform monolingual people on most standardized tests by about 15%. There's something that happens in the brain from that kind of activity. Andrea Kuszewski, speaking at Harvard, talked about these five things that people do to increase their grey matter and to teach themselves to increase their fluid intelligence. "Fluid intelligence" is the intelligence we use to problem-solve. It's different from crystalline intelligence, it helps us problem-solve. She identified, from the research, that there were five things you could do: seek novelty, challenge yourself, think creatively, do things the hard way and network. Think about those five things. Any of you play video games? Does it resemble the basic pattern of a video game to you in any way? These are five things that recur in all very successful video games. It also is connected to a constant and exponential increase in learning. Video games fundamentally present a continuous process of learning to users. They don't just learn for a little while and then stop. They're constantly evolving and moving forward. It may, in fact, help us to explain the Flynn effect, finally. The "Flynn effect," for those of you who don't know, is the pattern that human intelligence is actually rising over time. So if we look at the history of IQ, people, in fact, are getting smarter. In the US right now, average IQ is rising at .36 points of IQ per year. What's been very interesting is that in some countries — not to call anyone out, but Denmark and Norway — in some countries, overall crystalline IQ has stopped or slowed down or declined. In other countries, though, particularly when looking at fluid IQ, fluid intelligence, the number is increasing, and the rate of fluid intelligence increase is increasing, starting in the 1990s. Coincidence? I think not. (Laughter) In fact, games are wired to produce a particular kind of reaction in people. So we've got this learning brain increase, multitasking brain increase connection, and we also have a strong dopamine loop in the brain. As games present a challenge, and you struggle to achieve that challenge and you overcome it, dopamine is released in your brain. And that produces an intrinsic reinforcement. In the words of Judy, that produces an intrinsic reinforcement that causes you to go back and keep seeking that activity over and over again. So this is really powerful stuff. I want to introduce you to an educator who understands this in intricate detail, named Ananth Pai. Ananth was a very successful businessperson who worked on process reengineering. When his kids went into school in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, he saw the education system and decided he wanted to do something about it. So as an adult, he went back and got a master's in [Education] and took over a class at White Bear Lake Elementary School. Ananth Pai replaced the standard curriculum with a video game based curriculum of his own design, separating the kids into leaning styles and giving them Nintendo DS's and computer games — everything off the shelf, nothing custom — giving them Nintendo DS's and computer games that were both individual and social to play, that taught them math and language. Let me tell you what happened. In the space of 18 weeks, Mr. Pai's class went from a below-3rd-grade level in reading and math to a mid-4th-grade level in reading and math. In 18 weeks of a game-based curriculum. More importantly, when you talk to the children, when they're interviewed on television, even away from Mr. Pai, they say two things over and over again, that help them learn in his class: learning is fun, and learning is multiplayer. Whether they use those exact words or not, they say learning is fun and learning is multiplayer. This is the key to making that experience really successful for kids. It's also true, though, that we need to talk about the relationship between kids and violence in games. Study after study very clearly tells you that violent games do not make children violent. We also must acknowledge, however, that if you have a child predisposed to violence, violent games may help make them a better violent child. If they train kids to do other things, they also will train that, and we need to accept that, and we need to start understanding the connection between games as a form of training. We can't blanket-say that they don't affect kids. It's not true. I'd like to call the group of people who are driving this trend forward "Generation G." There are 126 million millennials in the United States and the EU, plus younger kids we can't yet count, that form Generation G. And the way that Generation G is different from X, Y, and all the different generations that we may belong to, is that video games are the primary form of entertainment that Generation G is consuming. It is their primary form of entertainment. This is already starting to have a tremendous effect on society. All around us, Generation G's desire for game-like experiences is reshaping industries, from Foursquare, which caused the mobile social networking ecosystem to start, to companies like Nike, Coke, Chase, and also Kozinga, which owes much of its success to games. The trend that underlies this whole pattern is called "gamification." It's a word that many of you, I'm sure, have heard. A simple definition of gamification is it's the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems. Part of the reason gamification has become such an emergent topic right now is because of Generation G's effect on culture and society already. Their expectations are different. Some examples of gamification that you may have seen that are really fascinating to me are the emergence of in-dash[board] games in cars. Today, if you buy a hybrid or an electric vehicle, you'll almost certainly see the product of a hundred million dollars' worth of tooling and research and development, in the form of a Tamagotchi-style game, in a dashboard designed to make you a more ecological driver. Most of the game mechanics are very simple: a plant grows as you drive more ecologically and withers if you don't, like those virtual pets Tamagotchi. This is an example of gamification at work. Another really interesting example is a thing called "speed camera lottery," designed by Kevin Richardson, based in San Francisco, works for MTV. Awesome guy. This is the concept in speed camera lottery: you know those speeding cameras that you pass by, and they take your picture and send you a ticket? In many Scandinavian countries, the ticket you get is actually based not only on how fast you were going, but how much money you make: the more you make, the bigger the ticket. Kevin reengineered a speeding camera in Sweden that instead of just giving tickets to people who drive over the speed limit that pass the camera, anybody who drives under the limit is entered into a lottery to win the proceeds of the people who speed. (Laughter) (Applause) It is game thinking — that term I described earlier, the core foundation of gamification — in its purest and most beautiful form: take a big, negative reinforcement loop and turn it into small, incremental positive reinforcement loop. It had the effect of dropping speed by over 20% at that point of intervention. Corporations have also become aware of the trend of gamification and the effect of games on people like Generation G. Gartner Group says that by 2015, 70% of all the Global 2000, the biggest companies in the world, will be actively using gamification, and 50% of their process of innovation will be gamified, which is an astonishing thing. It's a huge change. What this all points to is a future that looks pretty different from the world we live in today. Generation G and those driving the gamification meme forward, are advocating for a different world. It's a world in which things move at faster pace than they did for you and me. It's a world in which there are rewards everywhere for actions that people take. The rewards don't always have to be cash rewards. They can be meaningful status rewards, meaningful access rewards, meaningful power rewards. A world in which there's extensive collaborative play. This is one of the things that Generation G does so much differently than even my generation. I remember going to school and teachers struggling to come up with exercises that we could do as a team, that would be graded as a team. In the end, those group exercises always boiled down to an individual score, which distorted the way that people behaved. But, Generation G plays a lot of games that are purely collaborative, in which there is group value. This will also affect our world in untold ways. And, Generation G, the fun future, is a much more global world. It turns out that we are already out of touch. We are the generation most out of touch with our future or current children than any generation in history. We like to think that baby boomers' parents were the most out-of-touch people in the world. They're the ones who had to deal with the summer of love and sex and drugs and all that kind of stuff. We still make phone calls. (Laughter) I mean, we are the ones with the problem, and we are going to be the most out-of-touch generation in history. Of course, it's also true, and I'm here to tell you: the kids are alright. They're going to be just fine. We don't need to worry, strictly speaking, about kids and games, and the effect that it will have on the world. Not just are the kids are going to be alright; frankly, the kids are going to be awesome. But it's going to take your help to make the kids awesome. I have a prescription for you. This is the best prescription anybody is ever going to write in your life. I'm going to write it for you right now, in your mind, I don't have an actual pad. Just for clarity, a disclaimer: I'm not a doctor. (Laughter) I am, however, going to write a prescription for you all. This is the prescription: if you have children or you work with children, or you desire to work with children, or you want to change he world, this is the absolute, positive best thing that you can do with your time, from now until I see you in the retirement home on the coast of Spain or in the virtual world, wherever you choose to retire, which is: get into the game with your kids. Stop fighting the game trend, if that's where you are right now. Don't fight the game trend. Become one with the game. Enter the game. Understand it. Understand the dynamic of how your children play the games that they play. Understand how their minds work from the context of the game outward, rather than from the world outside inward. The world that we live in right now, the world of Sunday afternoons, drinking a cup of herbal tea, reading some old book, chilling out by the window, is over. (Laughter) And that's okay. There's a lot more things that we can do that are fun and engaging. If you take away one thing from today's presentation, I hope it is you get a chance to go play with your kids. Thank you. (Applause)

Being young and making an impact

{0: 'Natalie Warne did not let being too young stop her from running a successful campaign for the Invisible Children project In this talk, she calls on young people everywhere not to let age stop them from changing the world.'}

TEDxTeen

My mom is a strong black woman who raised her kids to have the same sense of strength and pride. This spirit was epitomized by a single wall in our small, two-bedroom apartment on the South Side of Chicago. Two pictures hung proudly: one larger-than-life photo of my siblings and I and the other a picture of my mom at 12 years old staring into the eyes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When I was younger, I used to stand on my tippy-toes, stare at that picture, close my eyes tightly, and just pretend that it was me gazing up at the man who revolutionized the Civil Rights Movement, who marched on Washington and who transformed a generation by his words, "I have a dream." But I did get to meet him. Now, obviously, I didn't meet Dr. King, but I met a man named Dr. Vincent Harding. He worked with Dr. King from day one and even wrote some of his most iconic speeches. You see, this was a really important moment for me as a kid, because it was the first time that I realized that it wasn't just Dr. King who led this revolution, but he was surrounded by a movement made up of anonymous extraordinaries. Anonymous extraordinaries are people who work selflessly and vigorously for what they believe in, people who are motivated by conviction and not recognition. It took me a long time to realize the significance of this moment, until I was much older. And like I said, I grew up in Chicago. I grew up in a rough, poor neighborhood, but it didn't really matter to me as kid because I literally have the most incredible family in the world. Two things that I did struggle with a lot growing up was one — that my dad has been sick my whole life. He suffers from Parkinson's and pancreatitis, and as a kid, it was so hard for me to watch my hero in so much pain. And my other issue was with me. I guess you could say I had an identity crisis. I had to move four times during high school, and my freshman year I went to an extremely racist high school. Kids were so cruel. They gave us hate letters, wrote terrible things on our lockers and because I'm biracial, they would tell me, "You can't be both. You have to choose, black or white." And in the end I just resented being either. And then all of a sudden, my senior year rolls around, 2008, and being mixed, being racially ambiguous is this new cool fad, like, "Natalie, now it's OK for you to like you. You're pretty now." I was over it. I was tired of caring about what other people thought and I just wanted to hurry up, go through my classes, whatever school I was going to be at next, and graduate. It wasn't until I was 17 and I saw a film called "Invisible Children" that something happened. Child soldiers, children as young as my nephews being abducted, given AK-47s and forced to kill, not just anyone, but oftentimes forced to kill their own parents, their own siblings — a rebel army committing mass murder for no political or religious reason, just because. 25 years. 25 years this conflict has been going on. I'm 20 years old, so that makes this conflict five years older than me. One man, one man with one charismatic voice, started this whole thing. His name is Joseph Kony. When I saw this film, something happened. Something started kind of stirring inside of me, and I couldn't identify what it was. I didn't know if it was rage, if it was pity, if I felt guilty because this was the first time I'd heard about a 25-year-long war. I couldn't even give it a name. All I knew is that it kicked me off my ass and I started asking questions. What do I do? What can one 17-year-old do? You've got to give me something. And they gave me something. The founders and filmmakers at Invisible Children told me that there was this bill, that if we could just get this bill passed, it would do two things: one, it would apprehend Joseph Kony and the top commanders in his rebel army, and two, it would provide funding for the recovery of these regions that had been devastated by 25 years of war. And I was like, done. Let me at it. I swear I will do whatever I can to make this happen. So myself and 99 other idealistic 18- to 20-year-olds hopped on a plane to intern in San Diego with Invisible Children. I was postponing college. We weren't getting paid for this and you could call it irresponsible or crazy — my parents did. But for us, it would have been insane not to go. We all felt this urgency, and we would do whatever it took to pass this bill. So we were given our first task. We were going to plan an event called the Rescue of Joseph Kony's Child Soldiers where participants would come in a hundred cities worldwide and rally in their city center until a celebrity or a political figure came and used their voice on behalf of these child soldiers, and at that point each city was "rescued." But the catch was, we weren't leaving the cities until we were rescued. I was given Chicago and nine other cities and I told my bosses, I was like, "If we're going for big-name people, why not go for the queen bee? Right? Why not go for Oprah Winfrey?" They thought I was a little idealistic, but I mean, we were trying to think big. We were doing an impossible thing, so why not try to reach more impossible things? And so we had from January to April to get this done. This is the number of hours that I spent on logistics, from getting permits to rallying participants and finding venues. This is the number of times that I was rejected by celebrities' agents or politicians' secretaries. That is amount of money that I spent personally on Red Bull and Diet Coke to stay awake during this movement. (Laughter) You can judge me if you want to. That is my hospital bill from the kidney infection I got from an overconsumption of caffeine due to this event. (Laughter) These were just some of the ridiculous things that we did to try and pull this event off. And so April 21 rolls around and the event begins. A hundred cities around the world. They were beautiful. Six days later, all the cities were rescued but one: Chicago. So we were waiting in the city. People started coming from all over the world, all over the country to be reinforcements and join their voice with ours. And finally, on May 1, we wrapped ourselves around Oprah's studio and we got her attention. This is a clip from a film called "Together We Are Free" documenting the rescue event and my attempt to get Oprah. (Video) Oprah Winfrey: When I drove into the office, there was a giant — when you came in, was there a group outside? Crowd: Yes. OW: Holding up signs asking if I would talk to them for just five minutes, so I was happy to do so. And they are with a group called "Invisible Children," and I told this group outside that I'd give them a minute to state their case. Man: Oprah, thank you so much for having us. Basically, these folks out here have seen the story of 30,000 children abducted by a rebel leader named Joseph Kony. And they're out here in solidarity, and they have been out here for six days. This started 100,000 people worldwide. Now it's down to 500 standing strong so that you can raise the profile of this issue and we can end the longest-running war in Africa and rescue those kids that are child soldiers still in East Africa. Oprah, I have to say this girl Natalie here, she's 18 years old. She was an intern for us this year, and she said, "My one goal is to get Oprah." She had 2,000 people come out on Saturday, but it rained. She stood here in the rain with 50 people. When they heard she was here, hundreds started coming. People are here from Mexico, Australia. Natalie's 18. Don't think you're too young. You can change the world any day. Start now. Start today. (Cheers) Man: Was it worth it? Crowd: Yeah! Natalie! Natalie! Natalie! (Music) Together we are free! Together we are free! (Applause) So you would think that this is the moment in my life, the pinnacle that made me an extraordinary. And it was an awesome moment. I mean, I was on top of the world. Ten million people watched the "Oprah Winfrey Show." But looking back, that wasn't it. Don't get me wrong. Like I said, it was great moment. It made for a heck of a profile picture on Facebook for a week. (Laughter) But I had been extraordinary all along, and I wasn't alone. You see, even though my story was featured in this film, I was just one of a hundred interns who worked their tails off to make this happen. I'm up in the air, but the guy that I'm sitting on his shoulders, he's my best friend. His name is Johannes Oberman and Johannes worked with me from day one in Chicago, just as long hours, just as many sleepless nights as I did. The girl on the right, her name's Bethany Bylsma. Bethany planned New York City and Boston, and they were seriously the most beautiful events that we held. The girl on the left, her name's Colleen. Colleen moved to Mexico, moved, for three months, to plan five events there, only to be kicked out the day before the events because of the swine flu. And then there was this family. This family, they didn't get to come to the rescue. They couldn't make it out, but they ordered a hundred boxes of pizza for us, delivered them to the corner of Michigan and Randolph where we were all silently protesting. You see, it was people like this doing whatever they could, simultaneously, single-mindedly, without a care to who was watching, that made this happen. It wasn't about us getting on Oprah, because when I got down from their shoulders, the war hadn't ended. It was about that bill. Oprah was just a checkpoint on the way to that bill. That bill was the point. That bill is what we had our eyes set on from day one. That was going to help us end Africa's longest-running war. And that is what brought a hundred thousand people out to the rescue event from around the world. And it paid off: 10 days after we were on Oprah, the bill was introduced into Congress. A year after that, it got unanimously 267 cosponsors in Congress. And then one week after that, President Obama signed our bill into law. (Applause) And none of us interns got to be there. We didn't get to be there in this moment. Our founders were there. They're the guys cheesing in the background. But that moment right there is what made all of it worth it. It's what a hundred thousand anonymous extraordinaries worked for so hard to make that happen. You know, the Oprah moments, they prove that the supposedly impossible can be done. They inspire us. They boost our confidence. But the moment isn't a movement. Even a lot of those moments strung together don't fuel a movement. What fuels a movement are the anonymous extraordinaries behind it. You know, for me, what kept me pushing on through the rescue was the thought of those child soldiers. It became personal. I was able to go to Africa at one point. I met these incredible people. I have friends that have been living in this conflict their entire life, and it was personal to me. But that doesn't have to be what drives you. You know, you may want to be the next Shepard Fairey or the next JK Rowling or the next whoever. It doesn't matter, but whatever you want, chase after it with everything that you have — not because of the fame or the fortune, but solely because that's what you believe in, because that's what makes your heart sing. That's what your dance is. That's what is going to define our generation, when we start chasing and fighting after the things that we love and that we want to fight for. I cared too much in high school about what people thought about me. That's what so awesome about this conference, is so many of you are so young. Find that thing that inspires you that you love, and just chase after it. You know, fight for that, because that is what is going to change this world and that is what defines us. Despite what people think, my Oprah moments, my being on TED, doesn't define me, because if you were to follow me home to LA, you would see me waiting tables and nannying to pay the bills as I chase after my dream of becoming a filmmaker. In the small, anonymous, monotonous every-single-day acts, I have to remind myself to be extraordinary. And believe me, when the door is closed and the cameras are off, it's tough. But if there's one thing that I want to drive home to you, one thing that I can say, not just to you but to myself, is that it is the acts that make us extraordinary, not the Oprah moments. Thank you.

How to defend Earth from asteroids

{0: 'Phil Plait has spent his life evangelizing science, getting the word out about the real world and how we know what we know about it.'}

TEDxBoulder 2011

I want to talk to you about something kind of big. We'll start here. Sixty-five million years ago — (Laughter) the dinosaurs had a bad day. (Laughter) A chunk of rock six miles across, moving something like 50 times the speed of a rifle bullet, slammed into the Earth. It released its energy all at once, and it was an explosion that was mind-numbing. If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together, and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment. The dinosaurs had a really bad day. OK? Now, a six-mile-wide rock is very large. We all live here in Boulder. If you look out your window and see Longs Peak — you're probably familiar with it — now, scoop up Longs Peak and put it out in space. Take ... Meeker, Mt. Meeker. Lump that in there, and put that in space as well. And Mt. Everest. And K2. And the Indian peaks. Then you're starting to get an idea of how much rock we're talking about, OK? We know it was that big because of the impact it had and the crater it left. It hit in what we now know as Yucatan, the Gulf of Mexico. You can see here, there's the Yucatan Peninsula, if you recognize Cozumel off the east coast there. Here is how big of a crater was left. It was huge. To give you a sense of the scale ... there you go. The scale here is 50 miles on top, a hundred kilometers on the bottom. This thing was 300 kilometers across — 200 miles — an enormous crater that excavated out vast amounts of earth that splashed around the globe and set fires all over the planet, threw up enough dust to block out the sun. It wiped out 75 percent of all species on Earth. Now, not all asteroids are that big. Some of them are smaller. Here is one that came in over the United States in October of 1992. It came in on a Friday night. Why is that important? Because back then, video cameras were just starting to become popular, and parents would bring them to their kids' football games to film their kids playing football. And since this came in on a Friday, they were able to get this great footage of this thing breaking up as it came in over West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey until it did that to a car in New York. (Laughter) Now, this is not a 200-mile-wide crater, but then again, you can see the rock, which is sitting right here, about the size of a football, that hit that car and did that damage. Now, this thing was probably about the size of a school bus when it first came in. It broke up through atmospheric pressure, it crumbled, and then the pieces fell apart and did some damage. Now, you wouldn't want that falling on your foot or your head, because it would do that to it. That would be bad. But it won't wipe out, you know, all life on Earth, so that's fine. But it turns out, you don't need something six miles across to do a lot of damage. There is a median point between tiny rock and gigantic rock, and in fact, if any of you have ever been to near Winslow, Arizona, there is a crater in the desert there that is so iconic that it is actually called "Meteor Crater." To give you a sense of scale, this is about a mile wide. If you look up at the top, that's a parking lot, and those are recreational vehicles right there. So it's about a mile across, 600 feet deep. The object that formed this was probably about 30 to 50 yards across, so roughly the size of Macky Auditorium here. It came in at speeds that were tremendous, slammed into the ground, blew up, and exploded with the energy of roughly a 20-megaton nuclear bomb — a very hefty bomb. This was 50,000 years ago, so it may have wiped out a few buffalo or antelope, or something like that out in the desert, but it probably would not have caused global devastation. It turns out that these things don't have to hit the ground to do a lot of damage. Now, in 1908, over Siberia, near the Tunguska region — for those of you who are Dan Aykroyd fans and saw "Ghostbusters," when he talked about the greatest cross-dimensional rift since the Siberia blast of 1909, where he got the date wrong, but that's OK. (Laughter) It was 1908. That's fine. I can live with that. (Laughter) Another rock came into the Earth's atmosphere and this one blew up above the ground, several miles up above the surface of the Earth. The heat from the explosion set fire to the forest below it, and then the shock wave came down and knocked down trees for hundreds of square miles. This did a huge amount of damage. And again, this was a rock probably roughly the size of this auditorium that we're sitting in. In Meteor Crater, it was made of metal, and metal is much tougher, so it made it to the ground. The one over Tunguska was probably made of rock, and that's much more crumbly, so it blew up in the air. Either way, these are tremendous explosions — 20 megatons. Now, when these things blow up, they're not going to do global ecological damage. They're not going to do something like the dinosaur killer did. They're just not big enough. But they will do global economic damage, because they don't have to hit, necessarily, to do this kind of damage. They don't have to do global devastation. If one of these things were to hit pretty much anywhere, it would cause a panic. But if it came over a city, an important city — not that any city is more important than others, but some of them we depend on more on the global economic basis — that could do a huge amount of damage to us as a civilization. So, now that I've scared the crap out of you — (Laughter) what can we do about this? This is a potential threat. Let me note that we have not had a giant impact like the dinosaur killer for 65 million years. They're very rare. The smaller ones happen more often, but probably on the order of a millennium, every few centuries or every few thousand years. But it's still something to be aware of. Well, what do we do about them? The first thing we have to do is find them. This is an image of an asteroid that passed us in 2009. It's right here. But you can see that it's extremely faint. I don't know if you can see that in the back row. These are just stars. This is a rock that was about 30 yards across, so roughly the size of the ones that blew up over Tunguska and hit Arizona 50,000 years ago. These things are faint. They're hard to see, and the sky is really big. We have to find these things first. Well, the good news is, we're looking for them. NASA has devoted money to this; the National Science Foundation and other countries are interested in doing this. We're building telescopes that are looking for the threat. That's a great first step. But what's the second step? The second step is if we see one heading toward us, we have to stop it. What do we do? You've probably heard about the asteroid Apophis. If you haven't yet, you will. If you've heard about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse, you're going to hear about Apophis, because you're keyed in to all the doomsday networks, anyway. (Laughter) Apophis is an asteroid that was discovered in 2004. It's roughly 250 [meters] across, so it's pretty big — bigger than a football stadium. And it's going to pass by the Earth in April of 2029. And it's going to pass us so close that it's actually going to come underneath our weather satellites. The Earth's gravity is going to bend the orbit of this thing so much that if it's just right, if it passes through this region of space, this kidney-bean-shaped region called the keyhole, the Earth's gravity will bend it just enough that seven years later, on April 13 — which is a Friday, I'll note — in the year 2036 — (Laughter) you can't plan that kind of stuff — (Laughter) Apophis is going to hit us. And it's 250 meters across, so it would do unbelievable damage. The good news is that the odds of it actually passing through this keyhole and hitting us next go-around are one in a million, roughly — very, very low odds. So I personally am not lying awake at night worrying about this at all. I don't think Apophis is a problem. In fact, Apophis is a blessing in disguise, because it woke us up to the dangers of these things. This thing was discovered just a few years ago and could hit us a few years from now. It won't, but it gives us a chance to study these kinds of asteroids. We didn't really necessarily understand these keyholes, and now we do, and it turns out that's really important, because how do you stop an asteroid like this? Well, let me ask you: What happens if you're standing in the road and a car's headed for you? What do you do? You do this. Right? Move, and the car goes past you. But we can't move the Earth, at least not easily, but we can move a small asteroid. And it turns out, we've even done it. In the year 2005, NASA launched a probe called Deep Impact, which slammed a piece of itself into the nucleus of a comet. Comets are very much like asteroids. The purpose wasn't to push it out of the way; the purpose was to make a crater to excavate the material and see what was underneath the surface of this comet, which we learned quite a bit about. We did move the comet a little tiny bit — not very much, but that wasn't the point. However, think about this: This thing is orbiting the Sun at 10, 20 miles per second. We shot a space probe at it and hit it, OK? Imagine how hard that must be, and we did it. That means we can do it again. If we see an asteroid that's coming toward us, headed right for us, and we have two years to go? Boom! We hit it. You know, if you watch the movies — (Laughter) you might think: Why don't we use a nuclear weapon? Well, you can try that, but the problem is timing. Shoot a nuclear weapon at this thing, you have to blow it up within a few milliseconds of tolerance, or else you'll miss it. And there are a lot of other problems with that; it's very hard to do. But just hitting something? That's pretty easy. I think even NASA can do that, and proved that they can. (Laughter) The problem is, if you hit this asteroid, you've changed the orbit, you measure the orbit, then you find out, oh yeah, we just pushed it into a keyhole, and now it's going to hit us in three years. Well, my opinion is: fine! It's not hitting us in six months — that's good. Now we have three years to do something else. And you can hit it again. That's kind of ham-fisted; you might just push it into a third keyhole or whatever, so you don't do that. And this is the part — it's the part I just love. (Laughter) After the big macho "Grr ... bam! We're gonna hit this thing in the face," then we bring in the velvet gloves. (Laughter) There's a group of scientists and engineers and astronauts, and they call themselves The B612 Foundation. For those of you who've read "The Little Prince," you understand that reference, I hope — the little prince lived on an asteroid called B612. These are smart guys — men and women — astronauts, like I said, engineers. Rusty Schweickart, who was an Apollo 9 astronaut, is on this. Dan Durda, my friend who made this image, works here at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, on Walnut Street. He created this image for this. He's actually one of the astronomers who works for them. If we see an asteroid that's going to hit the Earth and we have enough time, we can hit it to move it into a better orbit. But then what we do is launch a probe that has to weigh a ton or two. It doesn't have to be huge — a couple of tons, not that big — and you park it near the asteroid. You don't land on it, because these things are tumbling end over end. It's very hard to land on them. Instead you get near it. The gravity of the asteroid pulls on the probe, and the probe has a couple of tons of mass. It has a little tiny bit of gravity, but it's enough that it can pull the asteroid, and you have your rocket set up — you can barely see it here, but there's rocket plumes — and these guys are connected by their own gravity, and if you move the probe very slowly — very, very gently, you can very easily finesse that rock into a safe orbit. You can even put in orbit around the Earth where we could mine it, although that's a whole other thing; I won't go into that. (Laughter) But we'd be rich! (Laughter) So think about this, right? There are these giant rocks flying out there, and they're hitting us, and they're doing damage to us. But we've figured out how to do this, and all the pieces are in place to do this. We have astronomers with telescopes, looking for them. We have very, very smart people, who are concerned about this and figuring out how to fix the problem, and we have the technology to do this. This probe actually can't use chemical rockets. Chemical rockets provide too much thrust, too much push. The probe would just shoot away. We invented something called an ion drive, which is a very, very, very low-thrust engine. It generates the force a piece of paper would have on your hand — incredibly light, but it can run for months and years, providing that very gentle push. If anybody here is a fan of the original "Star Trek," they ran across an alien ship that had an ion drive, and Spock said, "They're very technically sophisticated. They're a hundred years ahead of us with this drive." Yeah, we have an ion drive now. We don't have the Enterprise, but we've got an ion drive now. (Laughter) (Applause) Spock. (Laughter) So ... That's the difference — that's the difference between us and the dinosaurs. This happened to them. It doesn't have to happen to us. The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote, and so we can change our future. (Laughter) We have the ability to change our future. Sixty-five million years from now, we don't have to have our bones collecting dust in a museum. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Meet Rezero, the dancing ballbot

{0: 'Péter Fankhauser is the leader of a team of students working on Rezero, a robot that balances on a single sphere.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Let me introduce to you Rezero. This little fellow was developed by a group of 10 undergraduate students at the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at ETH-Zurich. Our robot belongs to a family of robots called Ballbots. Instead of wheels, a Ballbot is balancing and moving on one single ball. The main characteristics of such a system is that there's one sole contact point to the ground. This means that the robot is inherently unstable. It's like when I am trying to stand on one foot. You might ask yourself, what's the usefulness of a robot that's unstable? Now we'll explain that in a second. Let me first explain how Rezero actually keeps his balance. Rezero keeps his balance by constantly measuring his pitch angle with a sensor. He then counteracts and avoids toppling over by turning the motors appropriately. This happens 160 times per second, and if anything fails in this process, Rezero would immediately fall to the ground. Now to move and to balance, Rezero needs to turn the ball. The ball is driven by three special wheels that allow Rezero to move into any direction and also move around his own axis at the same time. Due to his instability, Rezero is always in motion. Now here's the trick. It's indeed exactly this instability that allows a robot to move very [dynamically]. Let's play a little. You may have wondered what happens if I give the robot a little push. In this mode, he's trying to maintain his position. For the next demo, I'd like you to introduce to my colleagues Michael, on the computer, and Thomas who's helping me onstage. In the next mode, Rezero is passive, and we can move him around. With almost no force I can control his position and his velocity. I can also make him spin. In the next mode, we can get Rezero to follow a person. He's now keeping a constant distance to Thomas. This works with a laser sensor that's mounted on top of Rezero. With the same method, we can also get him to circle a person. We call this the orbiting mode. All right, thank you, Thomas. (Applause) Now, what's the use of this technology? For now, it's an experiment, but let me show you some possible future applications. Rezero could be used in exhibitions or parks. With a screen it could inform people or show them around in a fun and entertaining way. In a hospital, this device could be used to carry around medical equipment. Due to the Ballbot system, it has a very small footprint and it's also easy to move around. And of course, who wouldn't like to take a ride on one of these. And these are more practical applications. But there's also a certain beauty within this technology. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you.

The technology of storytelling

{0: 'Joe Sabia investigates new ways to tell stories -- meshing viral video and new display technologies with old-fashioned narrative.'}

Full Spectrum Auditions

Ladies and gentlemen, gather around. I would love to share with you a story. Once upon a time in 19th century Germany, there was the book. Now during this time, the book was the king of storytelling. It was venerable. It was ubiquitous. But it was a little bit boring. Because in its 400 years of existence, storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device. But then one author arrived, and he changed the game forever. (Music) His name was Lothar, Lothar Meggendorfer. Lothar Meggendorfer put his foot down, and he said, "Genug ist genug!" He grabbed his pen, he snatched his scissors. This man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold. History would know Lothar Meggendorfer as — who else? — the world's first true inventor of the children's pop-up book. (Music) For this delight and for this wonder, people rejoiced. (Cheering) They were happy because the story survived, and that the world would keep on spinning. Lothar Meggendorfer wasn't the first to evolve the way a story was told, and he certainly wasn't the last. Whether storytellers realized it or not, they were channeling Meggendorfer's spirit when they moved opera to vaudville, radio news to radio theater, film to film in motion to film in sound, color, 3D, on VHS and on DVD. There seemed to be no cure for this Meggendorferitis. And things got a lot more fun when the Internet came around. (Laughter) Because, not only could people broadcast their stories throughout the world, but they could do so using what seemed to be an infinite amount of devices. For example, one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine. One Taiwanese production studio would interpret American politics in 3D. (Laughter) And one man would tell the stories of his father by using a platform called Twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate. And after all this, everyone paused; they took a step back. They realized that, in 6,000 years of storytelling, they've gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls. And this was a cause for celebration. The art of storytelling has remained unchanged. And for the most part, the stories are recycled. But the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure, consistent novelty. And they remembered a man, one amazing German, every time a new storytelling device popped up next. And for that, the audience — the lovely, beautiful audience — would live happily ever after. (Applause)

A garden in my apartment

{0: 'Britta Riley designs and builds urban farms and other participatory artworks that explore the city.'}

TEDxManhattan

I, like many of you, am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities. And there are days — I don't know about the rest of you — but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. And some days, that can even be a little scary. But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open-source collaboration. A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan, in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment. Now at the time that I was reading this, it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment. So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Pollan was making in this article — it's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system. So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. And that you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants' root systems. Now to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space. But I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control. Fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors. And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets — so there's no dirt involved. Now light and temperature vary with each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically. Back at the time, a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing. And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now, and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. So I decided that, instead of creating a product, what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of codevelopers. The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked. We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window. And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff. But the first few systems were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved. (Laughter) So to bring on more codevelopers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked, and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. So actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people. And we have window farms all over the world. What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development. But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or "research and develop it yourself." (Laughter) So, for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps. It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients. And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they're now making open source and part of the project. So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software. And with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns, and the universal concerns. So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone. And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers. So for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free, very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world, can build one of these systems for free. And there's a patent pending on these systems as well that's held by the community. And to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don't have time to build their own systems. Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. In our culture, it is better to be a tester who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy. What we get out of this project is support for our own work, as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs. But I think that Eleen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration. So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term "consumer" and get behind the people who are doing stuff. Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own. And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems. And we're building upon innovations of generations who went before us. And we're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now. So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united, and to declare that we are all still pioneers. (Applause)

Living beyond limits

{0: 'Amy Purdy became a professional snowboarder despite losing both her legs to meningitis. She encourages us to take control of our lives, and our limits.'}

TEDxOrangeCoast

If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? That's the question that changed my life forever. Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell. At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed and I became a massage therapist. With this job all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere. For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life. That is, until my life took a detour. I went home from work early one day with what I thought was the flu, and less than 24 hours later I was in the hospital on life support with less than a two percent chance of living. It wasn't until days later as I lay in a coma that the doctors diagnosed me with bacterial meningitis, a vaccine-preventable blood infection. Over the course of two and a half months I lost my spleen, my kidneys, the hearing in my left ear and both of my legs below the knee. When my parents wheeled me out of the hospital I felt like I had been pieced back together like a patchwork doll. I thought the worst was over until weeks later when I saw my new legs for the first time. The calves were bulky blocks of metal with pipes bolted together for the ankles and a yellow rubber foot with a raised rubber line from the toe to the ankle to look like a vein. I didn't know what to expect, but I wasn't expecting that. With my mom by my side and tears streaming down our faces, I strapped on these chunky legs and I stood up. They were so painful and so confining that all I could think was, how am I ever going to travel the world in these things? How was I ever going to live the life full of adventure and stories, as I always wanted? And how was I going to snowboard again? That day, I went home, I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like for the next few months: me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs resting by my side. I was absolutely physically and emotionally broken. But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy. And that is when it dawned on me that I didn't have to be five-foot-five anymore. I could be as tall as I wanted! (Laughter) (Applause) Or as short as I wanted, depending on who I was dating. (Laughter) And if I snowboarded again, my feet aren't going to get cold. (Laughter) And best of all, I thought, I can make my feet the size of all the shoes that are on the sales rack. (Laughter) And I did! So there were benefits here. It was this moment that I asked myself that life-defining question: If my life were a book and I were the author, how would I want the story to go? And I began to daydream. I daydreamed like I did as a little girl and I imagined myself walking gracefully, helping other people through my journey and snowboarding again. And I didn't just see myself carving down a mountain of powder, I could actually feel it. I could feel the wind against my face and the beat of my racing heart as if it were happening in that very moment. And that is when a new chapter in my life began. Four months later I was back up on a snowboard, although things didn't go quite as expected: My knees and my ankles wouldn't bend and at one point I traumatized all the skiers on the chair lift when I fell and my legs, still attached to my snowboard — (Laughter) — went flying down the mountain, and I was on top of the mountain still. I was so shocked, I was just as shocked as everybody else, and I was so discouraged, but I knew that if I could find the right pair of feet that I would be able to do this again. And this is when I learned that our borders and our obstacles can only do two things: one, stop us in our tracks or two, force us to get creative. I did a year of research, still couldn't figure out what kind of legs to use, couldn't find any resources that could help me. So I decided to make a pair myself. My leg maker and I put random parts together and we made a pair of feet that I could snowboard in. As you can see, rusted bolts, rubber, wood and neon pink duct tape. And yes, I can change my toenail polish. It was these legs and the best 21st birthday gift I could ever receive — a new kidney from my dad — that allowed me to follow my dreams again. I started snowboarding, then I went back to work, then I went back to school. Then in 2005 I cofounded a nonprofit organization for youth and young adults with physical disabilities so they could get involved with action sports. From there, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa, where I helped to put shoes on thousands of children's feet so they could attend school. And just this past February, I won two back-to-back World Cup gold medals — (Applause) — which made me the highest ranked adaptive female snowboarder in the world. Eleven years ago, when I lost my legs, I had no idea what to expect. But if you ask me today, if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no. Because my legs haven't disabled me, if anything they've enabled me. They've forced me to rely on my imagination and to believe in the possibilities, and that's why I believe that our imaginations can be used as tools for breaking through borders, because in our minds, we can do anything and we can be anything. It's believing in those dreams and facing our fears head-on that allows us to live our lives beyond our limits. And although today is about innovation without borders, I have to say that in my life, innovation has only been possible because of my borders. I've learned that borders are where the actual ends, but also where the imagination and the story begins. So the thought that I would like to challenge you with today is that maybe instead of looking at our challenges and our limitations as something negative or bad, we can begin to look at them as blessings, magnificent gifts that can be used to ignite our imaginations and help us go further than we ever knew we could go. It's not about breaking down borders. It's about pushing off of them and seeing what amazing places they might bring us. Thank you.

Philosophy in prison

{0: 'Damon Horowitz explores what is possible at the boundaries of technology and the humanities.'}

TED2011

Meet Tony. He's my student. He's about my age, and he's in San Quentin State Prison. When Tony was 16 years old, one day, one moment, "It was mom's gun. Just flash it, scare the guy. He's a punk. He took some money; we'll take his money. That'll teach him. Then last minute, I'm thinking, 'Can't do this. This is wrong.' My buddy says, 'C'mon, let's do this.' I say, 'Let's do this.'" And those three words, Tony's going to remember, because the next thing he knows, he hears the pop. There's the punk on the ground, puddle of blood. And that's felony murder — 25 to life, parole at 50 if you're lucky, and Tony's not feeling very lucky. So when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and I say, "In this class, we will discuss the foundations of ethics," Tony interrupts me. "What are you going to teach me about right and wrong? I know what is wrong. I have done wrong. I am told every day, by every face I see, every wall I face, that I am wrong. If I ever get out of here, there will always be a mark by my name. I'm a convict; I am branded 'wrong.' What are you going to tell me about right and wrong?" So I say to Tony, "Sorry, but it's worse than you think. You think you know right and wrong? Then can you tell me what wrong is? No, don't just give me an example. I want to know about wrongness itself, the idea of wrong. What is that idea? What makes something wrong? How do we know that it's wrong? Maybe you and I disagree. Maybe one of us is wrong about the wrong. Maybe it's you, maybe it's me — but we're not here to trade opinions; everyone's got an opinion. We are here for knowledge. Our enemy is thoughtlessness. This is philosophy." And something changes for Tony. "Could be I'm wrong. I'm tired of being wrong. I want to know what is wrong. I want to know what I know." What Tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy, the project that begins in wonder — what Kant called "admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within." What can creatures like us know of such things? It is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence — what Heidegger called "the always already there." It is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it — what Socrates called "the examined life." Socrates, a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing. Socrates died in prison, his philosophy intact. So Tony starts doing his homework. He learns his whys and wherefores, his causes and correlations, his logic, his fallacies. Turns out, Tony's got the philosophy muscle. His body is in prison, but his mind is free. Tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous, the epistemologically anxious, the ethically dubious, the metaphysically ridiculous. That's Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche and Bill Clinton. So when he gives me his final paper, in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure, I say, "I don't know. Let us think about that." Because in that moment, there's no mark by Tony's name; it's just the two of us standing there. It is not professor and convict, it is just two minds ready to do philosophy. And I say to Tony, "Let's do this." Thank you. (Applause)

What we learn before we're born

{0: 'Annie Murphy Paul investigates how life in the womb shapes who we become.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

My subject today is learning. And in that spirit, I want to spring on you all a pop quiz. Ready? When does learning begin? Now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher. Or maybe you've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork. Maybe you've encountered the Zero-to-Three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones. And so your answer to my question would be: Learning begins at birth. Well today I want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology. And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb. Now I'm a science reporter. I write books and magazine articles. And I'm also a mother. And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called "Origins." "Origins" is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins. Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb. Now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me. I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book. And one of the most fascinating insights I took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it. When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they're clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in. Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies. First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices. Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled. One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher in the old "Peanuts" cartoon. But the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily. And because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot. Once the baby's born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else's. How can we know this? Newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking. Researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice. Babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one. Scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored. This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat" while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb. My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. So fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into. A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language. French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages. Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? It may have evolved to aid the baby's survival. From the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it — its mother. It even makes its cries sound like the mother's language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language. But it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero. It's also tastes and smells. By seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning. The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus. Babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they're out in the world. In one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water. Six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it. The offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more. A sort of French version of this experiment was carried out in Dijon, France where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life. Babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as "yuck." What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat. Fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food. They're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth. Now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons. But before I get to that, I want to address something that you may be wondering about. The notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus — like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. But actually, the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that. Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels — are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. And often it does something more. It treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside. So what a fetus is learning about in utero is not Mozart's "Magic Flute" but answers to questions much more critical to its survival. Will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one? The pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind. The resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert. To conclude, I want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born. In the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of World War II, German troops blockaded Western Holland, turning away all shipments of food. The opening of the Nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades — so cold the water in the canals froze solid. Soon food became scarce, with many Dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day — a quarter of what they consumed before the war. As weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs. By the beginning of May, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted. The specter of mass starvation loomed. And then on May 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when Holland was liberated by the Allies. The "Hunger Winter," as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more. But there was another population that was affected — the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege. Some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality. But others wouldn't be discovered for many years. Decades after the "Hunger Winter," researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions. These individuals' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways. They have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance — a precursor of diabetes. Why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? One explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation. When food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver. This keeps the fetus alive in the short-term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease. But that may not be all that's going on. It seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly. They're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb. The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it. And the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats. The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation. This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems — an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival. Faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood. The real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty. This is what happened to the children of the Dutch "Hunger Winter." And their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result. Bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war Western diet. The world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born. Here's another story. At 8:46 a.m. on September 11th, 2001, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in New York — commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on Wall Street. 1,700 of these people were pregnant women. When the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster — the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives. About a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack. In the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to PTSD — an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester. In other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero. Now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering. But there's another way of thinking about PTSD. What looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances. In a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of PTSD — a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger — could save someone's life. The notion that the prenatal transmission of PTSD risk is adaptive is still speculative, but I find it rather poignant. It would mean that, even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it's a wild world out there, telling them, "Be careful." Let me be clear. Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy. It's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation. That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb. Learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined. Thank you. (Applause)

Dance vs. powerpoint, a modest proposal

{0: 'John Bohannon is a scientist and writer who runs the annual Dance Your Ph.D. contest. ', 1: 'Black Label Movement is an explosively physical Minneapolis dance company.'}

TEDxBrussels

(Music) Good afternoon. As you're all aware, we face difficult economic times. I come to you with a modest proposal for easing the financial burden. This idea came to me while talking to a physicist friend of mine at MIT. He was struggling to explain something to me: a beautiful experiment that uses lasers to cool down matter. Now he confused me from the very start, because light doesn't cool things down. It makes it hotter. It's happening right now. The reason that you can see me standing here is because this room is filled with more than 100 quintillion photons, and they're moving randomly through the space, near the speed of light. All of them are different colors, they're rippling with different frequencies, and they're bouncing off every surface, including me, and some of those are flying directly into your eyes, and that's why your brain is forming an image of me standing here. Now a laser is different. It also uses photons, but they're all synchronized, and if you focus them into a beam, what you have is an incredibly useful tool. The control of a laser is so precise that you can perform surgery inside of an eye, you can use it to store massive amounts of data, and you can use it for this beautiful experiment that my friend was struggling to explain. First you trap atoms in a special bottle. It uses electromagnetic fields to isolate the atoms from the noise of the environment. And the atoms themselves are quite violent, but if you fire lasers that are precisely tuned to the right frequency, an atom will briefly absorb those photons and tend to slow down. Little by little it gets colder until eventually it approaches absolute zero. Now if you use the right kind of atoms and you get them cold enough, something truly bizarre happens. It's no longer a solid, a liquid or a gas. It enters a new state of matter called a superfluid. The atoms lose their individual identity, and the rules from the quantum world take over, and that's what gives superfluids such spooky properties. For example, if you shine light through a superfluid, it is able to slow photons down to 60 kilometers per hour. Another spooky property is that it flows with absolutely no viscosity or friction, so if you were to take the lid off that bottle, it won't stay inside. A thin film will creep up the inside wall, flow over the top and right out the outside. Now of course, the moment that it does hit the outside environment, and its temperature rises by even a fraction of a degree, it immediately turns back into normal matter. Superfluids are one of the most fragile things we've ever discovered. And this is the great pleasure of science: the defeat of our intuition through experimentation. But the experiment is not the end of the story, because you still have to transmit that knowledge to other people. I have a Ph.D in molecular biology. I still barely understand what most scientists are talking about. So as my friend was trying to explain that experiment, it seemed like the more he said, the less I understood. Because if you're trying to give someone the big picture of a complex idea, to really capture its essence, the fewer words you use, the better. In fact, the ideal may be to use no words at all. I remember thinking, my friend could have explained that entire experiment with a dance. Of course, there never seem to be any dancers around when you need them. Now, the idea is not as crazy as it sounds. I started a contest four years ago called Dance Your Ph.D. Instead of explaining their research with words, scientists have to explain it with dance. Now surprisingly, it seems to work. Dance really can make science easier to understand. But don't take my word for it. Go on the Internet and search for "Dance Your Ph.D." There are hundreds of dancing scientists waiting for you. The most surprising thing that I've learned while running this contest is that some scientists are now working directly with dancers on their research. For example, at the University of Minnesota, there's a biomedical engineer named David Odde, and he works with dancers to study how cells move. They do it by changing their shape. When a chemical signal washes up on one side, it triggers the cell to expand its shape on that side, because the cell is constantly touching and tugging at the environment. So that allows cells to ooze along in the right directions. But what seems so slow and graceful from the outside is really more like chaos inside, because cells control their shape with a skeleton of rigid protein fibers, and those fibers are constantly falling apart. But just as quickly as they explode, more proteins attach to the ends and grow them longer, so it's constantly changing just to remain exactly the same. Now, David builds mathematical models of this and then he tests those in the lab, but before he does that, he works with dancers to figure out what kinds of models to build in the first place. It's basically efficient brainstorming, and when I visited David to learn about his research, he used dancers to explain it to me rather than the usual method: PowerPoint. And this brings me to my modest proposal. I think that bad PowerPoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy. (Laughter) (Applause) Now it does depend on how you measure it, of course, but one estimate has put the drain at 250 million dollars per day. Now that assumes half-hour presentations for an average audience of four people with salaries of 35,000 dollars, and it conservatively assumes that about a quarter of the presentations are a complete waste of time, and given that there are some apparently 30 million PowerPoint presentations created every day, that would indeed add up to an annual waste of 100 billion dollars. Of course, that's just the time we're losing sitting through presentations. There are other costs, because PowerPoint is a tool, and like any tool, it can and will be abused. To borrow a concept from my country's CIA, it helps you to soften up your audience. It distracts them with pretty pictures, irrelevant data. It allows you to create the illusion of competence, the illusion of simplicity, and most destructively, the illusion of understanding. So now my country is 15 trillion dollars in debt. Our leaders are working tirelessly to try and find ways to save money. One idea is to drastically reduce public support for the arts. For example, our National Endowment for the Arts, with its $150 million budget, slashing that program would immediately reduce the national debt by about one one-thousandth of a percent. One certainly can't argue with those numbers. However, once we eliminate public funding for the arts, there will be some drawbacks. The artists on the street will swell the ranks of the unemployed. Many will turn to drug abuse and prostitution, and that will inevitably lower property values in urban neighborhoods. All of this could wipe out the savings we're hoping to make in the first place. I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. Once we eliminate public funding for the artists, let's put them back to work by using them instead of PowerPoint. As a test case, I propose we start with American dancers. After all, they are the most perishable of their kind, prone to injury and very slow to heal due to our health care system. Rather than dancing our Ph.Ds, we should use dance to explain all of our complex problems. Imagine our politicians using dance to explain why we must invade a foreign country or bail out an investment bank. It's sure to help. Of course someday, in the deep future, a technology of persuasion even more powerful than PowerPoint may be invented, rendering dancers unnecessary as tools of rhetoric. However, I trust that by that day, we shall have passed this present financial calamity. Perhaps by then we will be able to afford the luxury of just sitting in an audience with no other purpose than to witness the human form in motion. (Music) (Applause)

Building the musical muscle

{0: 'Charles Limb is a doctor and a musician who researches the way musical creativity works in the brain.'}

TEDMED 2011

Now when we think of our senses, we don't usually think of the reasons why they probably evolved, from a biological perspective. We don't really think of the evolutionary need to be protected by our senses, but that's probably why our senses really evolved — to keep us safe, to allow us to live. Really when we think of our senses, or when we think of the loss of the sense, we really think about something more like this: the ability to touch something luxurious, to taste something delicious, to smell something fragrant, to see something beautiful. This is what we want out of our senses. We want beauty; we don't just want function. And when it comes to sensory restoration, we're still very far away from being able to provide beauty. And that's what I'd like to talk to you a little bit about today. Likewise for hearing. When we think about why we hear, we don't often think about the ability to hear an alarm or a siren, although clearly that's an important thing. Really what we want to hear is music. (Music) So many of you know that that's Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Many of you know that he was deaf, or near profoundly deaf, when he wrote that. Now I'd like to impress upon you how unusual it is that we can hear music. Music is just one of the strangest things that there is. It's acoustic vibrations in the air, little waves of energy in the air that tickle our eardrum. Somehow in tickling our eardrum that transmits energy down our hearing bones, which get converted to a fluid impulse inside the cochlea and then somehow converted into an electrical signal in our auditory nerves that somehow wind up in our brains as a perception of a song or a beautiful piece of music. That process is entirely abstract and very, very unusual. And we could discuss that topic alone for days to really try to figure out, how is it that we hear something that's emotional from something that starts out as a vibration in the air? Turns out that if you have hearing loss, most people that lose their hearing lose it at what's called the cochlea, the inner ear. And it's at the hair cell level that they do this. Now if you had to pick a sense to lose, I have to be very honest with you and say, we're better at restoring hearing than we are at restoring any sense that there is. In fact, nothing even actually comes close to our ability to restore hearing. And as a physician and a surgeon, I can confidently tell my patients that if you had to pick a sense to lose, we are the furthest along medically and surgically with hearing. As a musician, I can tell you that if I had to have a cochlear implant, I'd be heartbroken. I'd just be plainly heartbroken, because I know that music would never sound the same to me. Now this is a video that I'm going to show you of a girl who's born deaf. She's in a very supportive environment. Her mother's doing everything she can. Okay, play that video please. (Video) Mother: That's an owl. Owl, yeah. Owl. Owl. Yeah. Baby. Baby. You want it? (Kiss) Charles Limb: Now despite everything going for this child in terms of family support and simple infused learning, there is a limitation to what a child who's deaf, an infant who was born deaf, has in this world in terms of social, educational, vocational opportunities. I'm not saying that they can't live a beautiful, wonderful life. I'm saying that they're going to face obstacles that most people who have normal hearing will not have to face. Now hearing loss and the treatment for hearing loss has really evolved in the past 200 years. I mean literally, they used to do things like stick ear-shaped objects onto your ears and stick funnels in. And that was the best you could do for hearing loss. Back then you couldn't even look at the eardrum. So it's not too surprising that there were no good treatments for hearing loss. And now today we have the modern multi-channel cochlear implant, which is an outpatient procedure. It's surgically placed inside the inner ear. It takes about an hour and a half to two hours, depending on where it's done, under general anesthesia. And in the end, you achieve something like this where an electrode array is inserted inside the cochlea. Now actually, this is quite crude in comparison to our regular inner ear. But here is that same girl who is implanted now. This is her 10 years later. And this is a video that was taken by my surgical mentor, Dr. John Niparko, who implanted her. If we could play this video please. (Video) John Niparko: So you've written two books? Girl: I have written two books. (Mother: Was the other one a book or a journal entry?) Girl: No, the other one was a book. (Mother: Oh, okay.) JN: Well this book has seven chapters, and the last chapter is entitled "The Good Things About Being Deaf." Do you remember writing that chapter? Girl: Yes I do. I remember writing every chapter. JN: Yeah. Girl: Well sometimes my sister can be kind of annoying. So it comes in handy to not be annoyed by her. JN: I see. And who is that? Girl: Holly. (JN: Okay.) Mother: Her sister. (JN: Her sister.) Girl: My sister. JN: And how can you avoid being annoyed by her? Girl: I just take off my CI, and I don't hear anything. (Laughter) It comes in handy. JN: So you don't want to hear everything that's out there? Girl: No. CL: And so she's phenomenal. And there's no way that you can't look at that as an overwhelming success. It is. It's a huge success story in modern medicine. However, despite this incredible facility that some cochlear implant users display with language, you turn on the radio and all of a sudden they can't hear music almost at all. In fact, most implant users really struggle and dislike music because it sounds so bad. And so when it comes to this idea of restoring beauty to somebody's life, we have a long way to go when it comes to audition. Now there are a lot of reasons for that. I mentioned earlier the fact that music is a different capacity because it's abstract. Language is very different. Language is very precise. In fact, the whole reason we use it is because it has semantic-specificity. When you say a word, what you care is that word was perceived correctly. You don't care that the word sounded pretty when it was spoken. Music is entirely different. When you hear music, if it doesn't sound good, what's the point? There's really very little point in listening to music when it doesn't sound good to you. The acoustics of music are much harder than those of language. And you can see on this figure, that the frequency range and the decibel range, the dynamic range of music is far more heterogeneous. So if we had to design a perfect cochlear implant, what we would try to do is target it to be able to allow music transmission. Because I always view music as the pinnacle of hearing. If you can hear music, you should be able to hear anything. Now the problems begin first with pitch perception. I mean, most of us know that pitch is a fundamental building block of music. And without the ability to perceive pitch well, music and melody is a very difficult thing to do — forget about a harmony and things like that. Now this is a MIDI arrangement of Rachmaninoff's Prelude. Now if we could just play this. (Music) Okay, now if we consider that in a cochlear implant patient pitch perception could be off as much as two octaves, let's see what happens here when we randomize this to within one semitone. We would be thrilled if we had one semitone pitch perception in cochlear implant users. Go ahead and play this one. (Music) Now my goal in showing you that is to show you that music is not robust to degradation. You distort it a little bit, especially in terms of pitch, and you've changed it. And it might be that you kind of like that. That's kind of hypnotic. But it certainly wasn't the way the music was intended. And you're not hearing the same thing that most people who have normal hearing are hearing. Now the other issue comes with, not just the ability to tell pitches apart, but the ability to tell sounds apart. Most cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between an instrument. If we could play these two sound clips in succession. (Trumpet) The trumpet. And the second one. (Violin) That's a violin. These have similar wave forms. They're both sustained instruments. Cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between these instruments. The sound quality, or the sound of the sound is how I like to describe timbre, tone color — they cannot tell these things whatsoever. This implant is not transmitting the quality of music that usually provides things like warmth. Now if you look at the brain of an individual who has a cochlear implant and you have them listen to speech, have them listen to rhythm and have them listen to melody, what you find is that the auditory cortex is the most active during speech. You would think that because these implants are optimized for speech, they were designed for speech. But actually if you look at melody, what you find is that there's very little cortical activity in implant users compared with normal hearing controls. So for whatever reason, this implant is not successfully stimulating auditory cortices during melody perception. Now the next question is, well how does it really sound? Now we've been doing some studies to really get a sense of what sound quality is like for these implant users. I'm going to play you two clips of Usher, one which is normal and one which has almost no high frequencies, almost no low frequencies and not even that many mid frequencies. Go ahead and play that. (Music) (Limited Frequency Music) I had patients tell me that those sound the same. They cannot differentiate sound quality differences between those two clips. Again, we are very, very far away in just getting to where we want to get to. Now the question comes to mind: Is there any hope? And yes, there is hope. Now I don't know if anybody knows who this is. This is ... does somebody know? This is Beethoven. Now why would we know what Beethoven's skull looks like? Because his grave was exhumed. And it turns out that his temporal bones were harvested when he died to try to look at the cause of his deafness, which is why he has molding clay and his skull is bulging out on the side there. But Beethoven composed music long after he lost his hearing. What that suggests is that, even in the case of hearing loss, the capacity for music remains. The brains remain hardwired for music. I've been very lucky to work with Dr. David Ryugo where I've been working on deaf cats that are white and trying to figure out what happens when we give them cochlear implants. This is a cat that's been trained to respond to a trumpet for food. (Music) Text: Beethoven doesn't excite her. (Music) The "1812 Overture" isn't worth waking for. (Trumpet) But she jumps to action when called to duty! (Trumpet) CL: Now I'm not suggesting that the cat is hearing that trumpet the way we're hearing it. I'm suggesting that with training you can imbue a musical sound with significance, even in a cat. If we were to direct efforts towards training cochlear implant users to hear music — because right now there's virtually no effort put towards that, no rehabilitative strategies, very little in the way of technological advances to actually improve music — we would come a long way. Now I want to show you one last video. And this is of a student of mine named Joseph who I had the good fortune to work with for three years in my lab. He's deaf, and he learned to play the piano after he received the cochlear implant. And here's a video of Joseph. (Music) (Video) Joseph: I was born in 1986. And at about four months old, I was diagnosed with profoundly severe hearing loss. Not long after, I was fitted with hearing aids. But although these hearing aids were the most powerful hearing aids on the market at the time, they weren't very helpful. So as a result, I had to rely on lip reading a lot, and I couldn't really hear what people were saying. When I was 12 years old, I was one of the first few people in Singapore who underwent cochlear implantation. And not long after I got my cochlear implant, I started learning how to play piano. And it was absolutely wonderful. Since then, I've never looked back. CL: Joseph is phenomenal. He's brilliant. He is now a medical student at Yale University, and he's contemplating a surgical career — one of the first deaf individuals to consider a career in surgery. There are almost no deaf surgeons anywhere. And this is really unheard of stuff, and this is all because of this technology. And the fact that he can play the piano like that is a testament to his brain. Truth of the matter is you can play the piano without a cochlear implant, because all you have to do is press the keys at the right time. You don't actually have to hear it. I know he doesn't hear well, because I've heard him do Karaoke. (Laughter) And it's one of the most awful things — heartwarming, but awful. (Laughter) And so there is certainly a lot of hope, but there's a lot more that needs to be done. So I just want to conclude with the following words. When it comes to restoration of hearing, we have certainly come a long way, a remarkably long way. And we have a much longer way to go when it comes to the idea of restoring perfect hearing. And let me tell you right now, it's fine that we would all be very happy with speech. But I tell you, if we lost our hearing, if anyone here suddenly lost your hearing, you would want perfect hearing back. You wouldn't want decent hearing, you would want perfect hearing. Restoration of basic sensory function is critical. And I don't mean to understate how important it is to restore basic function. But it's really restoration of the ability to perceive beauty where we can get inspiring. And I don't think that we should give up on beauty. And I want to thank you for your time. (Applause)

Don't regret regret

{0: 'Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for the New Yorker and is the author of "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error."'}

TEDSalon NY2011

So that's Johnny Depp, of course. And that's Johnny Depp's shoulder. And that's Johnny Depp's famous shoulder tattoo. Some of you might know that, in 1990, Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder, and he had tattooed on his right shoulder "Winona forever." And then three years later — which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards — they broke up, and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done. And now his shoulder says, "Wino forever." (Laughter) So like Johnny Depp, and like 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 50, I have a tattoo. I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s, but I deliberately waited a really long time. Because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30. That didn't happen to me. I got my tattoo when I was 29, and I regretted it instantly. And by "regretted it," I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place — this is just a couple miles from here down on the Lower East Side — and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street. (Laughter) Which is a great place to do it because nobody cares. (Laughter) And then I went home that night, and I had an even larger emotional meltdown, which I'll say more about in a minute. And this was all actually quite shocking to me, because prior to this moment, I had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets. I made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions, of course. I do that hourly. But I had always felt like, look, you know, I made the best choice I could make given who I was then, given the information I had on hand. I learned a lesson from it. It somehow got me to where I am in life right now. And okay, I wouldn't change it. In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets. This idea is nicely captured by this quote: "Things without all remedy should be without regard; what's done is done." And it seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first — something we might all agree to sign onto ... until I tell you who said it. Right, so this is Lady MacBeth basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people. And as it happens, Shakespeare was onto something here, as he generally was. Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths. It's also, by the way, a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage. So people who have damage to their orbital frontal cortex seem to be unable to feel regret in the face of even obviously very poor decisions. So if, in fact, you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy. But if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live, not without regret, but with it. So let's start off by defining some terms. What is regret? Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past. So in other words, regret requires two things. It requires, first of all, agency — we had to make a decision in the first place. And second of all, it requires imagination. We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice, and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present. And in fact, the more we have of either of these things — the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret, the more acute that regret will be. So let's say for instance that you're on your way to your best friend's wedding and you're trying to get to the airport and you're stuck in terrible traffic, and you finally arrive at your gate and you've missed your flight. You're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20. Why? Well because, if you miss your flight by three minutes, it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome. "I should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel. I should have gone through that yellow light." These are the classic conditions that create regret. We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly, but almost came out well. Now within that framework, we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things. This session today is about behavioral economics. And most of what we know about regret comes to us out of that domain. We have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them — buyer's remorse, basically. But then finally, it occurred to some researchers to step back and say, well okay, but overall, what do we regret most in life? Here's what the answers turn out to look like. So top six regrets — the things we regret most in life: Number one by far, education. 33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education. We wish we'd gotten more of it. We wish we'd taken better advantage of the education that we did have. We wish we'd chosen to study a different topic. Others very high on our list of regrets include career, romance, parenting, various decisions and choices about our sense of self and how we spend our leisure time — or actually more specifically, how we fail to spend our leisure time. The remaining regrets pertain to these things: finance, family issues unrelated to romance or parenting, health, friends, spirituality and community. So in other words, we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance. But it turns out, when you look overall at what people regret in life, you know what, our financial decisions don't even rank. They account for less than three percent of our total regrets. So if you're sitting there stressing about large cap versus small cap, or company A versus company B, or should you buy the Subaru or the Prius, you know what, let it go. Odds are, you're not going to care in five years. But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around, what does that experience feel like? We all know the short answer. It feels terrible. Regret feels awful. But it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways. So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial. When I went home that night after getting my tattoo, I basically stayed up all night. And for the first several hours, there was exactly one thought in my head. And the thought was, "Make it go away!" This is an unbelievably primitive emotional response. I mean, it's right up there with, "I want my mommy!" We're not trying to solve the problem. We're not trying to understand how the problem came about. We just want it to vanish. The second characteristic component of regret is a sense of bewilderment. So the other thing I thought about there in my bedroom that night was, "How could I have done that? What was I thinking?" This real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret. We can't identify with that part. We don't understand that part. And we certainly don't have any empathy for that part — which explains the third consistent component of regret, which is an intense desire to punish ourselves. That's why, in the face of our regret, the thing we consistently say is, "I could have kicked myself." The fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative. To perseverate means to focus obsessively and repeatedly on the exact same thing. Now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop. So it's not that I sat there in my bedroom that night, thinking, "Make it go away." It's that I sat there and I thought, "Make it go away. Make it go away. Make it go away. Make it go away." So if you look at the psychological literature, these are the four consistent defining components of regret. But I want to suggest that there's also a fifth one. And I think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call. That night in my apartment, after I got done kicking myself and so forth, I lay in bed for a long time, and I thought about skin grafts. And then I thought about how, much as travel insurance doesn't cover acts of God, probably my health insurance did not cover acts of idiocy. In point of fact, no insurance covers acts of idiocy. The whole point of acts of idiocy is that they leave you totally uninsured; they leave you exposed to the world and exposed to your own vulnerability and fallibility in face of, frankly, a fairly indifferent universe. This is obviously an incredibly painful experience. And I think it's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Control-Z culture — Control-Z like the computer command, undo. We're incredibly used to not having to face life's hard realities, in a certain sense. We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem — we can undo and unfriend and unfollow. And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot. Sometimes instead of Control-Z, we actually have zero control. And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists — and I know where of I speak — this is really hard, because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right. Now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos, and I'm going to return to that point in a few minutes. But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we're feeling regretful about. So for instance, here's one of my favorite automatic generators of regret in modern life. (Laughter) Text: Relpy to all. And the amazing thing about this really insidious technological innovation is that even just with this one thing, we can experience a huge range of regret. You can accidentally hit "reply all" to an email and torpedo a relationship. Or you can just have an incredibly embarrassing day at work. Or you can have your last day at work. And this doesn't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life. Because of course, sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences, either for our own or for other people's health and happiness and livelihoods, and in the very worst case scenario, even their lives. Now obviously, those kinds of regrets are incredibly piercing and enduring. I mean, even the stupid "reply all" regrets can leave us in a fit of excruciating agony for days. So how are we supposed to live with this? I want to suggest that there's three things that help us to make our peace with regret. And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality. If you Google regret and tattoo, you will get 11.5 million hits. (Laughter) The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17 percent of us regret getting them. That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends. And that's just regret about tattoos. We are all in this together. The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves. Now in my case, this really wasn't a problem, because it's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don't like your new tattoo. But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets. I don't think that's the case though. All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive. It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us. The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds — except for tattoos, which are permanent. So it's been several years since I got my own tattoo. And do you guys just want to see it? All right. Actually, you know what, I should warn you, you're going to be disappointed. Because it's actually not that hideous. I didn't tattoo Marilyn Manson's face on some indiscreet part of myself or something. When other people see my tattoo, for the most part they like how it looks. It's just that I don't like how it looks. And as I said earlier, I'm a perfectionist. But I'll let you see it anyway. This is my tattoo. I can guess what some of you are thinking. So let me reassure you about something. Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are. I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling. And when I came and settled in New York afterward, I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time. Specifically the two things I learned about myself that I most didn't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring and, simultaneously, how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north. And what I loved about this image of the compass was that I felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image. And I thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device. Well it did. But it turns out, it doesn't remind me of the thing I thought it would; it reminds me constantly of something else instead. It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us, which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us. And ironically, I think it's probably the single most important thing I possibly could have tattooed onto my body — partly as a writer, but also just as a human being. Here's the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them. The lesson that I ultimately learned from my tattoo and that I want to leave you with today is this: We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better. Thank you. (Applause)

Don't misrepresent Africa

{0: 'Leslie Dodson’s work has taken her from Latin America to Indonesia covering international finance, economics, and politics.'}

TEDxBoulder 2011

I just want to start with a little bit of a word of warning, and that is: my job here tonight is to be a little bit of a "doctor bring-me-down." So bear with me for a few minutes, and know that after this, things will get lighter and brighter. So let's start. I know that many of you have heard the traveler's adage, "Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints." Well, I'm going to say I don't think that's either as benign nor as simple as it sounds, particularly for those of us in industries who are portraying people in poor countries, in developing countries and portraying the poor. And those of us in those industries are reporters, researchers and people working for NGOs; I suspect there are a lot of us in those industries in the audience. We're going overseas and bringing back pictures like this: of the utterly distressed or the displaced or the hungry or the child laborers or the exotic. Now, Susan Sontag reminds us that photographs, in part, help define what we have the right to observe, but more importantly, they are an ethics of seeing. And I think right now is a good time to review our ethics of seeing, as our industries of reporting and research and NGO work are collapsing and changing, in part, by what's being driven by what's happening in the economy. But it's making us forge new relationships. And those new relationships have some fuzzy boundaries. I worked at the edge of some of these fuzzy boundaries, and I want to share with you some of my observations. My ethics of seeing is informed by 25 years as a reporter covering emerging economies and international relations. And I believe in a free and independent press. I believe that journalism is a public good. But it's getting harder to do that job, in part, because of the massive layoffs, because the budgets for international reporting aren't there anymore, new technologies and new platforms begging new content, and there are a lot of new journalisms. There's activist journalism, humanitarian journalism, peace journalism, and we are all looking to cover the important stories of our time. So we're going to NGOs and asking them if we can embed in their projects. This is in part because they're doing important work in interesting places. That's one example here: this is a project I worked on in the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. NGOs understand the benefits of having reporters tag along on their team. They need the publicity, they are under tremendous pressure, they're competing in a very crowded market for compassion. So they're also looking to reporters and to hire freelance reporters to help them develop their public relations material and their media material. Now, researchers are also under pressure. They're under pressure to communicate their science outside of the academy. So they're collaborating with reporters, because for many researchers, it's difficult for them to write a simple story or a clear story. And the benefit for reporters is that covering field research is some of the best work out there. You not only get to cover science, but you get to meet interesting scientists, like my PhD advisor Revi Sterling, she, of the magic research high tops there. And it was a discussion with Revi that brought us to the edge of the researcher and reporter, that fuzzy boundary. And I said to her, "I was looking forward to going to developing countries and doing research and covering stories at the same time." She said, "I don't think so, girlfriend." And that confusion, that mutual confusion, drove us to publish a paper on the conflicting ethics and the contradictory practices of research and reporting. We started with the understanding that researchers and reporters are distant cousins, equally storytellers and social analysts. But we don't see nor portray developing communities the same way. Here's a very classic example. This is Somalia, 1992. It could be Somalia today. And this is a standard operating procedure for much of the news video and the news pictures that you see, where a group of reporters will be trucked in, escorted to the site of a disaster, they'll produce their material, take their pictures, get their interviews, and then they'll be escorted out. This is decidedly not a research setting. Now, sometimes, we're working on feature stories. This is an image I took of a woman in Bhongir Village in Andhra Pradesh in India. She's at a microfinance meeting. It's a terrific story. What's important here is that she is identifiable. You can see her face. This also is not a research picture. This is much more representative of a research picture. It's a research site: you see young women accessing new technologies. It's more of a time stamp, it's a documentation of research. I couldn't use this for news. It doesn't tell enough, and it wouldn't sell. But then, the differences are even deeper than that. Revi and I analyzed some of the mandates that researchers are under. They are under some very strict rules governed by their university research review boards when it comes to content and confidentiality. Researchers are mandated to acquire document-informed consent. Well, as a reporter, if I hang a microphone on someone, that is consent. And when it comes to creating the story, I'll fact-check as a reporter, but I don't invite company to create that story, whereas social scientists, researchers, and particularly participatory researchers, will often work on constructing the narrative with the community. And when it comes to paying for information, "checkbook journalism" is roundly discouraged, in part, because of the bias it introduces in the kind of information you get. But social scientists understand that people's time is valuable so they pay them for that time. So while journalists are well-placed to convey the beauty of the scientific process — and I would add, the NGO process — what about the warts? What happens if a research project is not particularly well-designed, or an NGO project doesn't fulfill its goals? Or the other kind of warts, you know, what happens after dark when the drinks happen. Research environments and reporting trips and NGO projects are very intimate environments; you make good friends while you're doing good work. But there's a little bit of Johnnie Walker journalism after dark, and what happens to that line between embedded and in-bedded? Or what do you do with the odd and odious behavior? The point is that you'll want to negotiate in advance what is on the record and off the record. I'm going to turn now to some NGO imagery which will be familiar to some of you in this audience. (Video) Narrator: For about 70 cents, you can buy a can of soda, regular or diet. In Ethiopia, for just 70 cents a day, you can feed a child like Jamal nourishing meals. For about 70 cents, you can also buy a cup of coffee. In Guatemala, for 70 cents a day, you can help a child like Vilma get the clothes she needs to attend school. Leslie Dodson: Now, there's some very common imagery that's been around for 40 years. That's part of Sally Struthers's famine campaign. Some of it is very familiar; it's the Madonna and child. Women and children are very effective in terms of NGO campaigns. We've been looking at this imagery for a long time, for hundreds and hundreds of years; the Madonna and child. Here is [Duccio], and here is Michelangelo. My concern is: Are we one-noting the genders in our narratives of poverty in developing communities? Do we have women as victims, and are men only the perpetrators? Are they the guys with the AK-47s or the boy soldiers? Because that doesn't leave room for stories like the man who's selling ice cream at the refuge camp in Southern Sudan, where we did a project, or the stories of the men who are working on the bridge over the Blue Nile. So I wonder: Are these stories inconvenient to our narratives? And what about this narrative? This is a for-profit game, and its aim is to make development fun. One question is: Did they inadvertently make fun of? Another set of questions is: What are the rights of these children? What rights of publicity or privacy do they have? Did they get paid? Should they get paid? Should they share in the profit? This is a for-profit game. Did they sign talent waivers? I have to use these when I'm working with NGOs and documentary filmmakers here in the States. In the States, we take our right to privacy and publicity very seriously. So what is it about getting on a long-haul flight that makes these rights vaporize? I don't want to just pick on our friends in the gaming arts; I'll turn to the graphic arts, where we often see these monolithic, homogeneous stories about the great country of Africa. But Africa is not a country, it's a continent. It's 54 countries and thousands and thousands of languages. So my question is: Is this imagery productive, or is it reductive? I know that it's popular. USAID just launched their campaign "Forward" — FWD: Famine, War and Drought. And by looking at it, you would think that was happening all the time, all over Africa. But this is about what's happening in the Horn of Africa. And I'm still trying to make sense of Africa in a piece of Wonder Bread. I'm wondering about that. Germaine Greer has wondered about the same things and she says, "At breakfast and at dinner, we can sharpen our own appetites with a plentiful dose of the pornography of war, genocide, destitution and disease." She's right. We have sharpened our appetites. But we can also sharpen our insights. It is not always war, insurrection and disease. This is a picture out of South Sudan, just a couple of months before the new country was born. I will continue to work as a researcher and a reporter in developing countries, but I do it with an altered ethic of seeing. I ask myself whether my pictures are pandering, whether they contribute to stereotypes, whether the images match the message, am I complacent or am I complicit? Thank you. (Applause)

How many lives can you live?

{0: 'Sarah Kay is a poet, performer, educator and the founder of Project VOICE, an organization that uses spoken word poetry to entertain, educate and empower students and teachers worldwide.'}

TEDxEast

(Singing) I see the moon. The moon sees me. The moon sees somebody that I don't see. God bless the moon, and God bless me. And God bless the somebody that I don't see. If I get to heaven, before you do, I'll make a hole and pull you through. And I'll write your name on every star, and that way the world won't seem so far. The astronaut will not be at work today. He has called in sick. He has turned off his cell phone, his laptop, his pager, his alarm clock. There is a fat yellow cat asleep on his couch, raindrops against the window and not even the hint of coffee in the kitchen air. Everybody is in a tizzy. The engineers on the 15th floor have stopped working on their particle machine. The anti-gravity room is leaking, and even the freckled kid with glasses, whose only job is to take out the trash, is nervous, fumbles the bag, spills a banana peel and a paper cup. Nobody notices. They are too busy recalculating what this all mean for lost time. How many galaxies are we losing per second? How long before next rocket can be launched? Somewhere an electron flies off its energy cloud. A black hole has erupted. A mother finishes setting the table for dinner. A Law & Order marathon is starting. The astronaut is asleep. He has forgotten to turn off his watch, which ticks, like a metal pulse against his wrist. He does not hear it. He dreams of coral reefs and plankton. His fingers find the pillowcase's sailing masts. He turns on his side, opens his eyes at once. He thinks that scuba divers must have the most wonderful job in the world. So much water to glide through! (Applause) Thank you. When I was little, I could not understand the concept that you could only live one life. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean, I literally thought that I was going to get to do everything there was to do and be everything there was to be. It was only a matter of time. And there was no limitation based on age or gender or race or even appropriate time period. I was sure that I was going to actually experience what it felt like to be a leader of the civil rights movement or a ten-year old boy living on a farm during the dust bowl or an emperor of the Tang dynasty in China. My mom says that when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my typical response was: princess-ballerina-astronaut. And what she doesn't understand is that I wasn't trying to invent some combined super profession. I was listing things I thought I was gonna get to be: a princess and a ballerina and an astronaut. and I'm pretty sure the list probably went on from there. I usually just got cut off. It was never a question of if I was gonna get to do something so much of a question of when. And I was sure that if I was going to do everything, that it probably meant I had to move pretty quickly, because there was a lot of stuff I needed to do. So my life was constantly in a state of rushing. I was always scared that I was falling behind. And since I grew up in New York City, as far as I could tell, rushing was pretty normal. But, as I grew up, I had this sinking realization, that I wasn't gonna get to live any more than one life. I only knew what it felt like to be a teenage girl in New York City, not a teenage boy in New Zealand, not a prom queen in Kansas. I only got to see through my lens. And it was around this time that I became obsessed with stories, because it was through stories that I was able to see through someone else's lens, however briefly or imperfectly. And I started craving hearing other people's experiences because I was so jealous that there were entire lives that I was never gonna get to live, and I wanted to hear about everything that I was missing. And by transitive property, I realized that some people were never gonna get to experience what it felt like to be a teenage girl in New York city. Which meant that they weren't gonna know what the subway ride after your first kiss feels like, or how quiet it gets when its snows. And I wanted them to know, I wanted to tell them. And this became the focus of my obsession. I busied myself telling stories and sharing stories and collecting them. And it's not until recently that I realized that I can't always rush poetry. In April for National Poetry Month, there's this challenge that many poets in the poetry community participate in, and its called the 30/30 Challenge. The idea is you write a new poem every single day for the entire month of April. And last year, I tried it for the first time and was thrilled by the efficiency at which I was able to produce poetry. But at the end of the month, I looked back at these 30 poems I had written and discovered that they were all trying to tell the same story, it had just taken me 30 tries to figure out the way that it wanted to be told. And I realized that this is probably true of other stories on an even larger scale. I have stories that I have tried to tell for years, rewriting and rewriting and constantly searching for the right words. There's a French poet and essayist by the name of Paul Valéry who said a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. And this terrifies me because it implies that I could keep re-editing and rewriting forever and its up to me to decide when a poem is finished and when I can walk away from it. And this goes directly against my very obsessive nature to try to find the right answer and the perfect words and the right form. And I use poetry in my life, as a way to help me navigate and work through things. But just because I end the poem, doesn't mean that I've solved what it was I was puzzling through. I like to revisit old poetry because it shows me exactly where I was at that moment and what it was I was trying to navigate and the words that I chose to help me. Now, I have a story that I've been stumbling over for years and years and I'm not sure if I've found the perfect form, or whether this is just one attempt and I will try to rewrite it later in search of a better way to tell it. But I do know that later, when I look back I will be able to know that this is where I was at this moment and this is what I was trying to navigate, with these words, here, in this room, with you. So — Smile. It didn't always work this way. There's a time you had to get your hands dirty. When you were in the dark, for most of it, fumbling was a given. If you needed more contrast, more saturation, darker darks and brighter brights, they called it extended development. It meant you spent longer inhaling chemicals, longer up to your wrist. It wasn't always easy. Grandpa Stewart was a Navy photographer. Young, red-faced with his sleeves rolled up, fists of fingers like fat rolls of coins, he looked like Popeye the sailor man come to life. Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair, he showed up to World War II, with a smirk and a hobby. When they asked him if he knew much about photography, he lied, learned to read Europe like a map, upside down, from the height of a fighter plane, camera snapping, eyelids flapping the darkest darks and brightest brights. He learned war like he could read his way home. When other men returned, they would put their weapons out to rest, but he brought the lenses and the cameras home with him. Opened a shop, turned it into a family affair. My father was born into this world of black and white. His basketball hands learned the tiny clicks and slides of lens into frame, film into camera, chemical into plastic bin. His father knew the equipment but not the art. He knew the darks but not the brights. My father learned the magic, spent his time following light. Once he traveled across the country to follow a forest fire, hunted it with his camera for a week. "Follow the light," he said. "Follow the light." There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs. The loft on Wooster Street with the creaky hallways, the twelve-foot ceilings, white walls and cold floors. This was my mother's home, before she was mother. Before she was wife, she was artist. And the only two rooms in the house, with walls that reached all the way up to the ceiling, and doors that opened and closed, were the bathroom and the darkroom. The darkroom she built herself, with custom-made stainless steel sinks, an 8x10 bed enlarger that moved up and down by a giant hand crank, a bank of color-balanced lights, a white glass wall for viewing prints, a drying rack that moved in and out from the wall. My mother built herself a darkroom. Made it her home. Fell in love with a man with basketball hands, with the way he looked at light. They got married. Had a baby. Moved to a house near a park. But they kept the loft on Wooster Street for birthday parties and treasure hunts. The baby tipped the grayscale, filled her parents' photo albums with red balloons and yellow icing. The baby grew into a girl without freckles, with a crooked smile, who didn’t understand why her friends did not have darkrooms in their houses, who never saw her parents kiss, who never saw them hold hands. But one day, another baby showed up. This one with perfect straight hair and bubble gum cheeks. They named him sweet potato. When he laughed, he laughed so loudly he scared the pigeons on the fire escape And the four of them lived in that house near the park. The girl with no freckles, the sweet potato boy, the basketball father and darkroom mother and they lit their candles and said their prayers, and the corners of the photographs curled. One day, some towers fell. And the house near the park became a house under ash, so they escaped in backpacks, on bicycles to darkrooms But the loft of Wooster Street was built for an artist, not a family of pigeons, and walls that do not reach the ceiling do not hold in the yelling and the man with basketball hands put his weapons out to rest. He could not fight this war, and no maps pointed home. His hands no longer fit his camera, no longer fit his wife's, no longer fit his body. The sweet potato boy mashed his fists into his mouth until he had nothing more to say. So, the girl without freckles went treasure hunting on her own. And on Wooster Street, in a building with the creaky hallways and the loft with the 12-foot ceilings and the darkroom with too many sinks under the color-balanced lights, she found a note, tacked to the wall with a thumb-tack, left over from a time before towers, from the time before babies. And the note said: "A guy sure loves the girl who works in the darkroom." It was a year before my father picked up a camera again. His first time out, he followed the Christmas lights, dotting their way through New York City's trees, tiny dots of light, blinking out at him from out of the darkest darks. A year later he traveled across the country to follow a forest fire stayed for a week hunting it with his camera, it was ravaging the West Coast eating 18-wheeler trucks in its stride. On the other side of the country, I went to class and wrote a poem in the margins of my notebook. We have both learned the art of capture. Maybe we are learning the art of embracing. Maybe we are learning the art of letting go. (Applause)

How to topple a dictator

{0: 'Srdja Popovic was a founder and leader of the student movement that brought down the Milosovic regime. Now, he helps other nonviolent movements learn and grow.'}

TEDxKrakow

Good afternoon, I'm proud to be here at TEDxKrakow. I'll try to speak a little bit today about a phenomenon which can, and actually is changing the world, and whose name is people power. I'll start with an anecdote, or for those of you who are Monty Python lovers, a Monty Python type of sketch. Here it is. It is December 15, 2010. Somebody gives you a bet: you will look at a crystal ball, and you will see the future; the future will be accurate. But you need to share it with the world. OK, curiosity killed the cat, you take the bet, you look at the crystal ball. One hour later, you're sitting in a building of the national TV, in a top show, and you tell the story. Before the end of 2011, Ben Ali, and Mubarak, and Gaddafi would be down, and prosecuted. Saleh of Yemen and Assad of Syria would be either challenged, or already on their knees. Osama bin Laden would be dead, and Ratko Mladic would be in the Hague. Now, the anchor watches you with a strange gaze on his face. And then, on top of it you add: "And thousands of young people from Athens, Madrid and New York will demonstrate for social justice, claiming they are inspired by Arabs." Next thing you know, two guys in white appear, they give you the strange t-shirt, take you to the nearest mental institution. So I would like to speak a little bit about the phenomenon which is behind what already seems to be a very bad year for bad guys. And this phenomenon is called people power. Well, people power has been there for a while. It helped Gandhi kick the Brits from India, it helped Martin Luther King win his historic racial struggle. It helped a local, Lech Walesa, to kick out one million Soviet troops from Poland, and in beginning the end of the Soviet Union as we know it. So what's new in it? What seems to be very new, which is the idea I would like to share with you today, is that there is a set of rules and skills which can be learned and taught in order to perform successful nonviolent struggle. If this is true, we can help these movements. Well, the first one - analytic skills. I'll try where it all started in the Middle East. And for so many years, we were living with a completely wrong perception of the Middle East. It was looking like the frozen region. Literally a refrigerator. And there were only two types of meal there. Steak, which stands for a Mubarak-Ben Ali type of military police dictatorship, or a potato, which stands for a Tehran type of theocracies. And everybody was amazed when the refrigerator opened, and millions of young, mainly secular people stepped out to do the change. Guess what - they didn't watch the demographics. What is the average age of an Egyptian? 24. How long was Mubarak in power? 31. So, this system was just obsolete, they expired. And young people of the Arab world have awakened one morning, and understood that power lies in their hands. The rest is the year in front of us. And guess what? The same Generation Y, with their rules, with their tools, with their games, and with their language, which sounds a little bit strange to me. I'm 38 now. And can you look at the age of the people on the streets of Europe? It seems that Generation Y is coming. Now, let me set another example. I'm meeting different people throughout the world, and they are, you know, academics, and professors, and doctors, and they will always talk conditions. They will say: "People power will work only if the regime is not too oppressive." They will say: "People power will work, if the annual income of the country is between X and Z." They will say: "People power will work only if there is a foreign pressure." They will say: "People power will work only if there is no oil." And, I mean, there is a set of conditions. Well, the news here is that your skills during the conflict seem to be more important than the conditions. Namely, the skills of unity, planning, and maintaining nonviolent discipline. Let me give you an example. I come from a country called Serbia. It took us 10 years to unite 18 opposition party leaders, with their big egos, behind one single candidate against the Balkan dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Guess what? That was the day of his defeat. You look at the Egyptians, they fight on Tahrir Square, they get rid of their individual symbols, they appear on the street only with the flag of Egypt. I will give you a counter-example. You see nine presidential candidates running against Lukashenko, you all know the outcome. So unity is a big thing. And this can be achieved. Same with planning. Somebody has lied to you about the successful and spontaneous nonviolent revolution. That thing doesn't exist in the world. Whenever you see young people in front of the row trying to fraternize with the police or military, somebody was thinking about it before. Now, at the end, nonviolent discipline. And this is probably the game-changer. If you maintain nonviolent discipline, you'll exclusively win. You have 100,000 people in a nonviolent march, one idiot or agent-provocateur throwing a stone. Guess what takes all the cameras. That one guy. One single act of violence can literally destroy your movement. Now, let me move to another place. It's the selection of strategies and tactics. There are certain rules in nonviolent struggle you may follow. First, you start small. Second, you pick the battles you can win. It's only 200 of us in this room. We won't call for the march of a million. But what if we organized the spraying of graffiti throughout the night, all over Krakow. The city will know. So, we pick tactics accommodated to the event, especially this thing we call the small tactics of dispersion. They're very useful in violent oppression. We are actually witnessing the picture of one of the best tactics ever used. It was on Tahrir square, where the international community was constantly frightened that, you know, the Islamists will overtake the revolution. What they organized — Christians protecting Muslims where they are praying, a Coptic wedding cheered by thousands of Muslims, the world has just changed the picture, but somebody was thinking about this previously. So there are so many things you can do instead of getting into one place, shouting, and you know, showing off in front of the security forces. Now, there is also another very important dynamic. And this is a dynamic that analysts normally don't see. This is the dynamic between fear and apathy on the one side, and enthusiasm and humor on another side. So, it works like in a video game. You have the fear high, you have status quo. You have the enthusiasm higher, you see the fear is starting to melt. Day two, you see people running towards the police instead of from the police, in Egypt. You can tell that something is happening there. And then, it's about the humor. Humor is such a powerful game-changer, and of course, it was very big in Poland. You know, we were just a small group of crazy students in Serbia when we made this big skit. We put the big petrol barrel with a portrait of Mr. President on it, in the middle of the Main Street. There was a hole in the top. So you could literally come, put a coin in, get a baseball bat, and hit his face. Sounds loud. And within minutes, we were sitting in a nearby café having coffee, and there was a queue of people waiting to do this lovely thing. Well, that's just the beginning of the show. The real show starts when the police appears. (Laughter) "What will they do?" Arrest us? We were nowhere to be seen. We were like three blocks away, observing it from our espresso bar. Arrest the shoppers, with kids? Doesn't make sense. Of course, you could bet, they did the most stupid thing. They arrested the barrel. And now, the picture of the smashed face on the barrel, with the policemen dragging it to the police car, that was the best day for newspaper photographers that they will ever have. So, I mean, these are the things you can do. And you can always use humor. There is also one big thing about humor, it really hurts. Because these guys really are taking themselves too seriously. When you start to mock them, it hurts. Now, everybody is talking about His Majesty, the Internet, and it is also a very useful skill. But don't rush to label things like "a Facebook Revolution," "Twitter Revolution." Don't mix the tools with the substance. It is true that the Internet and the new media are very useful in making things faster and cheaper. They also make it a bit safer for the participants, because they give partial anonymity. We're watching the great example of something else the Internet can do. It can put the price tag of state-sponsored violence over a nonviolent protester. This is the famous group "We are all Khaled Said," made by Wael Ghonim in Egypt, and his friend. This is the mutilated face of the guy who was beaten by the police. This is how he became known to the public, and this is what probably became the straw that broke the camel's back. But here is also the bad news. The nonviolent struggle is won in the real world, in the streets. You will never change your society towards democracy, or, you know, the economy, if you sit down and click. There are risks to be taken, and there are living people who are winning the struggle. Well, the million-dollar question. What will happen in the Arab world? And though young people from the Arab world were pretty successful in bringing down three dictators, shaking the region, kind of persuading the clever kings from Jordan and Morocco to do substantial reforms, it is yet to be seen what will be the outcome. Whether the Egyptians and Tunisians will make it through the transition, or this will end in bloody ethnic and religious conflicts, whether the Syrians will maintain nonviolent discipline, faced with a brutal daily violence which kills thousands already, or they will slip into violent struggle and make ugly civil war. Will these revolutions be pushed through the transitions and democracy or be overtaken by the military or extremists of all kinds? We cannot tell. The same works for the Western sector, where you can see all these excited young people protesting around the world, occupying this, occupying that. Are they going to become the world wave? Are they going to find their skills, their enthusiasm, and their strategy to find what they really want and push for the reform, or will they just stay complaining about the endless list of the things they hate? This is the difference between the two paths. Now, what do the statistics have? My friend Maria Stephan's book talks a lot about violent and nonviolent struggle, and there are some shocking data. If you look at the last 35 years and different social transitions, from dictatorship to democracy, you will see that, out of 67 different cases, in 50 of these cases it was nonviolent struggle which was the key power. This is one more reason to look at this phenomenon, this is one more reason to look at Generation Y. Enough for me to give them credit, and hope that they will find their skills and their courage to use nonviolent struggle and thus fix at least a part of the mess our generation is making in this world. Thank you. (Applause)

Massive-scale online collaboration

{0: 'Luis von Ahn builds systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone.'}

TEDxCMU

How many of you had to fill out a web form where you've been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this? How many of you found it really annoying? (Laughter) OK, outstanding. So I invented that. (Laughter) Or I was one of the people who did it. That thing is called a CAPTCHA. And it is there to make sure you, the entity filling out the form, are a human and not a computer program that was written to submit the form millions of times. The reason it works is because humans, at least non-visually-impaired humans, have no trouble reading these distorted characters, whereas programs can't do it as well yet. In the case of Ticketmaster, the reason you have to type these characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets, two at a time. CAPTCHAs are used all over the Internet. And since they're used so often, a lot of times the sequence of random characters shown to the user is not so fortunate. So this is an example from the Yahoo registration page. The random characters that happened to be shown to the user were W, A, I, T, which, of course, spell a word. But the best part is the message that the Yahoo help desk got about 20 minutes later. [Help! I've been waiting for over 20 minutes and nothing happens.] (Laughter) This person thought they needed to wait. This, of course, is not as bad as this poor person. (Laughter) CAPTCHA Project is something that we did at Carnegie Melllon over 10 years ago, and it's been used everywhere. Let me now tell you about a project that we did a few years later, which is sort of the next evolution of CAPTCHA. This is a project that we call reCAPTCHA, which is something that we started here at Carnegie Mellon, then we turned it into a start-up company. And then about a year and a half ago, Google actually acquired this company. Let me tell you what this project started. This project started from the following realization: It turns out that approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed everyday by people around the world. When I first heard this, I was quite proud of myself. I thought, look at the impact my research has had. But then I started feeling bad. Here's the thing: each time you type a CAPTCHA, essentially, you waste 10 seconds of your time. And if you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs. (Laughter) So then I started feeling bad. (Laughter) And then I started thinking, of course, we can't just get rid of CAPTCHAs, because the security of the web depends on them. But then I started thinking, can we use this effort for something that is good for humanity? So see, here's the thing. While you're typing a CAPTCHA, during those 10 seconds, your brain is doing something amazing. Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do. So can we get you to do useful work for those 10 seconds? Is there some humongous problem that we cannot yet get computers to solve, yet we can split into tiny 10-second chunks such that each time somebody solves a CAPTCHA, they solve a little bit of this problem? And the answer to that is "yes," and this is what we're doing now. Nowadays, while you're typing a CAPTCHA, not only are you authenticating yourself as a human, but in addition you're helping us to digitize books. Let me explain how this works. There's a lot of projects trying to digitize books. Google has one. The Internet Archive has one. Amazon, with the Kindle, is trying to digitize books. Basically, the way this works is you start with an old book. You've seen those things, right? Like a book? (Laughter) So you start with a book and then you scan it. Now, scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page. It gives you an image for every page. This is an image with text for every page of the book. The next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher the words in this image. That's using a technology called OCR, for optical character recognition, which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there. Now, the problem is that OCR is not perfect. Especially for older books where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow, OCR cannot recognize a lot of the words. For things that were written more than 50 years ago, the computer cannot recognize about 30 percent of the words. So now we're taking all of the words that the computer cannot recognize and we're getting people to read them for us while they're typing a CAPTCHA on the Internet. So the next time you type a CAPTCHA, these words that you're typing are actually words from books that are being digitized that the computer could not recognize. The reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book, it didn't know what it was and it's going to present it to you. But since it doesn't know the answer, it cannot grade it. So we give you another word, for which the system does know the answer. We don't tell you which one's which and we say, please type both. And if you type the correct word for the one for which the system knows the answer, it assumes you are human and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly. And if we repeat this process to 10 different people and they agree on what the new word is, then we get one more word digitized accurately. So this is how the system works. And since we released it about three or four years ago, a lot of websites have started switching from the old CAPTCHA, where people wasted their time, to the new CAPTCHA where people are helping to digitize books. So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book. Facebook: Every time you add a friend or poke somebody, you help to digitize a book. Twitter and about 350,000 other sites are all using reCAPTCHA. And the number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the number of words we're digitizing per day is really large. It's about 100 million a day, which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year. And this is all being done one word at a time by just people typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet. (Applause) Now, of course, since we're doing so many words per day, funny things can happen. This is especially true because now we're giving people two randomly chosen English words next to each other. So funny things can happen. For example, we presented this word. It's the word "Christians"; there's nothing wrong with it. But if you present it along with another randomly chosen word, bad things can happen. So we get this. [bad Christians] But it's even worse, because the website where we showed this actually happened to be called The Embassy of the Kingdom of God. (Laughter) Oops. (Laughter) Here's another really bad one. JohnEdwards.com [Damn liberal] (Laughter) So we keep on insulting people left and right everyday. Of course, we're not just insulting people. Here's the thing. Since we're presenting two randomly chosen words, interesting things can happen. So this actually has given rise to a really big Internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in, which is called CAPTCHA art. I'm sure some of you have heard about it. Here's how it works. Imagine you're using the Internet and you see a CAPTCHA that you think is somewhat peculiar, like this CAPTCHA. [invisible toaster] What you're supposed to do is you take a screenshot of it. Then of course, you fill out the CAPTCHA because you help us digitize a book. But first you take a screenshot and then you draw something that is related to it. (Laughter) That's how it works. (Laughter) There are tens of thousands of these. Some of them are very cute. [clenched it] (Laughter) Some of them are funnier. [stoned Founders] (Laughter) And some of them, like paleontological shvisle ... (Laughter) they contain Snoop Dogg. (Laughter) OK, so this is my favorite number of reCAPTCHA. So this is the favorite thing that I like about this whole project. This is the number of distinct people that have helped us digitize at least one word out of a book through reCAPTCHA: 750 million, a little over 10 percent of the world's population, has helped us digitize human knowledge. And it is numbers like these that motivate my research agenda. So the question that motivates my research is the following: If you look at humanity's large-scale achievements, these really big things that humanity has gotten together and done historically — like, for example, building the pyramids of Egypt or the Panama Canal or putting a man on the Moon — there is a curious fact about them, and it is that they were all done with about the same number of people. It's weird; they were all done with about 100,000 people. And the reason for that is because, before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge. So the question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000, what can we do with 100 million? So based on this question, we've had a lot of different projects that we've been working on. Let me tell you about one that I'm most excited about. This is something that we've been semiquietly working on for the last year and a half or so. It hasn't yet been launched. It's called Duolingo. Since it hasn't been launched, shhh! (Laughter) Yeah, I can trust you'll do that. So this is the project. Here's how it started. It started with me posing a question to my graduate student, Severin Hacker. OK, that's Severin Hacker. So I posed the question to my graduate student. By the way, you did hear me correctly; his last name is Hacker. (Laughter) So I posed this question to him: How can we get 100 million people translating the web into every major language for free? There's a lot of things to say about this question. First of all, translating the web. Right now, the web is partitioned into multiple languages. A large fraction of it is in English. If you don't know English, you can't access it. But there's large fractions in other different languages, and if you don't know them, you can't access it. So I would like to translate all of the web, or at least most of it, into every major language. That's what I would like to do. Now, some of you may say, why can't we use computers to translate? Machine translation is starting to translate some sentences here and there. Why can't we use it to translate the web? The problem with that is it's not yet good enough and it probably won't be for the next 15 to 20 years. It makes a lot of mistakes. Even when it doesn't, since it makes so many mistakes, you don't know whether to trust it or not. So let me show you an example of something that was translated with a machine. Actually, it was a forum post. It was somebody who was trying to ask a question about JavaScript. It was translated from Japanese into English. So I'll just let you read. This person starts apologizing for the fact that it's translated with a computer. So the next sentence is going to be the preamble to the question. So he's just explaining something. Remember, it's a question about JavaScript. [At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit.] (Laughter) Then comes the first part of the question. [How many times like the wind, a pole, and the dragon?] (Laughter) Then comes my favorite part of the question. [This insult to father's stones?] (Laughter) And then comes the ending, which is my favorite part of the whole thing. [Please apologize for your stupidity. There are a many thank you.] (Laughter) OK, so computer translation, not yet good enough. So back to the question. So we need people to translate the whole web. So now the next question you may have is, well, why can't we just pay people to do this? We could pay professional translators to translate the whole web. We could do that. Unfortunately, it would be extremely expensive. For example, translating a tiny fraction of the whole web, Wikipedia, into one other language, Spanish. OK? Wikipedia exists in Spanish, but it's very small compared to the size of English. It's about 20 percent of the size of English. If we wanted to translate the other 80 percent into Spanish, it would cost at least 50 million dollars — and this is even at the most exploited, outsourcing country out there. So it would be very expensive. So what we want to do is, we want to get 100 million people translating the web into every major language for free. If this is what you want to do, you quickly realize you're going to run into two big hurdles, two big obstacles. The first one is a lack of bilinguals. So I don't even know if there exists 100 million people out there using the web who are bilingual enough to help us translate. That's a big problem. The other problem you're going to run into is a lack of motivation. How are we going to motivate people to actually translate the web for free? Normally, you have to pay people to do this. So how are we going to motivate them to do it for free? When we were starting to think about this, we were blocked by these two things. But then we realized, there's a way to solve both these problems with the same solution. To kill two birds with one stone. And that is to transform language translation into something that millions of people want to do and that also helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals, and that is language education. So it turns out that today, there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language. People really want to learn a foreign language. And it's not just because they're being forced to do so in school. In the US alone, there are over five million people who have paid over $500 for software to learn a new language. So people really want to learn a new language. So what we've been working on for the last year and a half is a new website — it's called Duolingo — where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the web. And so basically, they're learning by doing. So the way this works is whenever you're a just a beginner, we give you very simple sentences. There's a lot of very simple sentences on the web. We give you very simple sentences along with what each word means. And as you translate them and as you see how other people translate them, you start learning the language. And as you get more advanced, we give you more complex sentences to translate. But at all times, you're learning by doing. Now, the crazy thing about this method is that it actually really works. People are really learning a language. We're mostly done building it and now we're testing it. People really can learn a language with it. And they learn it about as well as the leading language learning software. So people really do learn a language. And not only do they learn it as well, but actually it's more interesting. Because with Duolingo, people are learning with real content. As opposed to learning with made-up sentences, people are learning with real content, which is inherently interesting. So people really do learn a language. But perhaps more surprisingly, the translations that we get from people using the site, even though they're just beginners, the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators, which is very surprising. So let me show you one example. This is a sentence that was translated from German into English. The top is the German. The middle is an English translation that was done by a professional translator who we paid 20 cents a word for this translation. And the bottom is a translation by users of Duolingo, none of whom knew any German before they started using the site. If you can see, it's pretty much perfect. Of course, we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators. We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator. Now, even though we're combining the translations, the site actually can translate pretty fast. So let me show you, this is our estimates of how fast we could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish. Remember, this is 50 million dollars' worth of value. So if we wanted to translate Wikipedia into Spanish, we could do it in five weeks with 100,000 active users. And we could do it in about 80 hours with a million active users. Since all the projects my group has worked on so far have gotten millions of users, we're hopeful that we'll be able to translate extremely fast. Now, the thing that I'm most excited about with Duolingo is I think this provides a fair business model for language education. So here's the thing: The current business model for language education is the student pays, and in particular, the student pays Rosetta Stone 500 dollars. (Laughter) That's the current business model. The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world's population doesn't have 500 dollars. So it's extremely unfair towards the poor. This is totally biased towards the rich. Now, see, in Duolingo, because while you learn, you're actually creating value, you're translating stuff — which, for example, we could charge somebody for translations, so this is how we could monetize this. Since people are creating value while they're learning, they don't have to pay with their money, they pay with their time. But the magical thing here is that is time that would have had to have been spent anyways learning the language. So the nice thing about Duolingo is, I think, it provides a fair business model — one that doesn't discriminate against poor people. So here's the site. Thank you. (Applause) We haven't yet launched, but if you go there, you can sign up to be part of our private beta, which is probably going to start in three or four weeks. We haven't yet launched it. By the way, I'm the one talking here, but Duolingo is the work of a really awesome team, some of whom are here. So thank you. (Applause)

The magnificence of spider silk

{0: "Cheryl Hayashi studies the delicate but terrifically strong silk threads that make up a spider's web, finding startling applications for human use. "}

TED2010

I'm here to spread the word about the magnificence of spiders and how much we can learn from them. Spiders are truly global citizens. You can find spiders in nearly every terrestrial habitat. This red dot marks the Great Basin of North America, and I'm involved with an alpine biodiversity project there with some collaborators. Here's one of our field sites, and just to give you a sense of perspective, this little blue smudge here, that's one of my collaborators. This is a rugged and barren landscape, yet there are quite a few spiders here. Turning rocks over revealed this crab spider grappling with a beetle. Spiders are not just everywhere, but they're extremely diverse. There are over 40,000 described species of spiders. To put that number into perspective, here's a graph comparing the 40,000 species of spiders to the 400 species of primates. There are two orders of magnitude more spiders than primates. Spiders are also extremely old. On the bottom here, this is the geologic timescale, and the numbers on it indicate millions of years from the present, so the zero here, that would be today. So what this figure shows is that spiders date back to almost 380 million years. To put that into perspective, this red vertical bar here marks the divergence time of humans from chimpanzees, a mere seven million years ago. All spiders make silk at some point in their life. Most spiders use copious amounts of silk, and silk is essential to their survival and reproduction. Even fossil spiders can make silk, as we can see from this impression of a spinneret on this fossil spider. So this means that both spiders and spider silk have been around for 380 million years. It doesn't take long from working with spiders to start noticing how essential silk is to just about every aspect of their life. Spiders use silk for many purposes, including the trailing safety dragline, wrapping eggs for reproduction, protective retreats and catching prey. There are many kinds of spider silk. For example, this garden spider can make seven different kinds of silks. When you look at this orb web, you're actually seeing many types of silk fibers. The frame and radii of this web is made up of one type of silk, while the capture spiral is a composite of two different silks: the filament and the sticky droplet. How does an individual spider make so many kinds of silk? To answer that, you have to look a lot closer at the spinneret region of a spider. So silk comes out of the spinnerets, and for those of us spider silk biologists, this is what we call the "business end" of the spider. (Laughter) We spend long days ... Hey! Don't laugh. That's my life. (Laughter) We spend long days and nights staring at this part of the spider. And this is what we see. You can see multiple fibers coming out of the spinnerets, because each spinneret has many spigots on it. Each of these silk fibers exits from the spigot, and if you were to trace the fiber back into the spider, what you would find is that each spigot connects to its own individual silk gland. A silk gland kind of looks like a sac with a lot of silk proteins stuck inside. So if you ever have the opportunity to dissect an orb-web-weaving spider, and I hope you do, what you would find is a bounty of beautiful, translucent silk glands. Inside each spider, there are hundreds of silk glands, sometimes thousands. These can be grouped into seven categories. They differ by size, shape, and sometimes even color. In an orb-web-weaving spider, you can find seven types of silk glands, and what I have depicted here in this picture, let's start at the one o'clock position, there's tubuliform silk glands, which are used to make the outer silk of an egg sac. There's the aggregate and flagelliform silk glands which combine to make the sticky capture spiral of an orb web. Pyriform silk glands make the attachment cement — that's the silk that's used to adhere silk lines to a substrate. There's also aciniform silk, which is used to wrap prey. Minor ampullate silk is used in web construction. And the most studied silk line of them all: major ampullate silk. This is the silk that's used to make the frame and radii of an orb web, and also the safety trailing dragline. But what, exactly, is spider silk? Spider silk is almost entirely protein. Nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a single gene family, so this means that the diversity of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family, so presumably the original spider ancestor made one kind of silk, and over the last 380 million years, that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged, specialized, over and over and over again, to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today. There are several features that all these silks have in common. They all have a common design, such as they're all very long — they're sort of outlandishly long compared to other proteins. They're very repetitive, and they're very rich in the amino acids glycine and alanine. To give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like, this is a dragline silk protein, it's just a portion of it, from the black widow spider. This is the kind of sequence that I love looking at day and night. (Laughter) So what you're seeing here is the one letter abbreviation for amino acids, and I've colored in the glycines with green, and the alanines in red, and so you can see it's just a lot of G's and A's. You can also see that there's a lot of short sequence motifs that repeat over and over and over again, so for example there's a lot of what we call polyalanines, or iterated A's, AAAAA. There's GGQ. There's GGY. You can think of these short motifs that repeat over and over again as words, and these words occur in sentences. So for example this would be one sentence, and you would get this sort of green region and the red polyalanine, that repeats over and over and over again, and you can have that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times within an individual silk molecule. Silks made by the same spider can have dramatically different repeat sequences. At the top of the screen, you're seeing the repeat unit from the dragline silk of a garden argiope spider. It's short. And on the bottom, this is the repeat sequence for the egg case, or tubuliform silk protein, for the exact same spider. And you can see how dramatically different these silk proteins are — so this is sort of the beauty of the diversification of the spider silk gene family. You can see that the repeat units differ in length. They also differ in sequence. So I've colored in the glycines again in green, alanine in red, and the serines, the letter S, in purple. And you can see that the top repeat unit can be explained almost entirely by green and red, and the bottom repeat unit has a substantial amount of purple. What silk biologists do is we try to relate these sequences, these amino acid sequences, to the mechanical properties of the silk fibers. Now, it's really convenient that spiders use their silk completely outside their body. This makes testing spider silk really, really easy to do in the laboratory, because we're actually, you know, testing it in air that's exactly the environment that spiders are using their silk proteins. So this makes quantifying silk properties by methods such as tensile testing, which is basically, you know, tugging on one end of the fiber, very amenable. Here are stress-strain curves generated by tensile testing five fibers made by the same spider. So what you can see here is that the five fibers have different behaviors. Specifically, if you look on the vertical axis, that's stress. If you look at the maximum stress value for each of these fibers, you can see that there's a lot of variation, and in fact dragline, or major ampullate silk, is the strongest of these fibers. We think that's because the dragline silk, which is used to make the frame and radii for a web, needs to be very strong. On the other hand, if you were to look at strain — this is how much a fiber can be extended — if you look at the maximum value here, again, there's a lot of variation and the clear winner is flagelliform, or the capture spiral filament. In fact, this flagelliform fiber can actually stretch over twice its original length. So silk fibers vary in their strength and also their extensibility. In the case of the capture spiral, it needs to be so stretchy to absorb the impact of flying prey. If it wasn't able to stretch so much, then basically when an insect hit the web, it would just trampoline right off of it. So if the web was made entirely out of dragline silk, an insect is very likely to just bounce right off. But by having really, really stretchy capture spiral silk, the web is actually able to absorb the impact of that intercepted prey. There's quite a bit of variation within the fibers that an individual spider can make. We call that the tool kit of a spider. That's what the spider has to interact with their environment. But how about variation among spider species, so looking at one type of silk and looking at different species of spiders? This is an area that's largely unexplored but here's a little bit of data I can show you. This is the comparison of the toughness of the dragline spilk spun by 21 species of spiders. Some of them are orb-weaving spiders and some of them are non-orb-weaving spiders. It's been hypothesized that orb-weaving spiders, like this argiope here, should have the toughest dragline silks because they must intercept flying prey. What you see here on this toughness graph is the higher the black dot is on the graph, the higher the toughness. The 21 species are indicated here by this phylogeny, this evolutionary tree, that shows their genetic relationships, and I've colored in yellow the orb-web-weaving spiders. If you look right here at the two red arrows, they point to the toughness values for the draglines of nephila clavipes and araneus diadematus. These are the two species of spiders for which the vast majority of time and money on synthetic spider silk research has been to replicate their dragline silk proteins. Yet, their draglines are not the toughest. In fact, the toughest dragline in this survey is this one right here in this white region, a non orb-web-weaving spider. This is the dragline spun by scytodes, the spitting spider. Scytodes doesn't use a web at all to catch prey. Instead, scytodes sort of lurks around and waits for prey to get close to it, and then immobilizes prey by spraying a silk-like venom onto that insect. Think of hunting with silly string. That's how scytodes forages. We don't really know why scytodes needs such a tough dragline, but it's unexpected results like this that make bio-prospecting so exciting and worthwhile. It frees us from the constraints of our imagination. Now I'm going to mark on the toughness values for nylon fiber, bombyx — or domesticated silkworm silk — wool, Kevlar, and carbon fibers. And what you can see is that nearly all the spider draglines surpass them. It's the combination of strength, extensibility and toughness that makes spider silk so special, and that has attracted the attention of biomimeticists, so people that turn to nature to try to find new solutions. And the strength, extensibility and toughness of spider silks combined with the fact that silks do not elicit an immune response, have attracted a lot of interest in the use of spider silks in biomedical applications, for example, as a component of artificial tendons, for serving as guides to regrow nerves, and for scaffolds for tissue growth. Spider silks also have a lot of potential for their anti-ballistic capabilities. Silks could be incorporated into body and equipment armor that would be more lightweight and flexible than any armor available today. In addition to these biomimetic applications of spider silks, personally, I find studying spider silks just fascinating in and of itself. I love when I'm in the laboratory, a new spider silk sequence comes in. That's just the best. (Laughter) It's like the spiders are sharing an ancient secret with me, and that's why I'm going to spend the rest of my life studying spider silk. The next time you see a spider web, please, pause and look a little closer. You'll be seeing one of the most high-performance materials known to man. To borrow from the writings of a spider named Charlotte, silk is terrific. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

Ultrasound surgery -- healing without cuts

{0: 'With his team, Yoav Medan is developing a tool for incision-less surgery via focused ultrasound.'}

TEDMED 2011

Over the last 13 years — one, three, 13 years — I've been part of an exceptional team at InSightec in Israel and partners around the world for taking this idea, this concept, noninvasive surgery, from the research lab to routine clinical use. And this is what I'll tell you about. 13 years — for some of you, you can empathize with that number. For me, today, on this date, it's like a second bar mitzvah experience. (Laughter) So this dream is really enabled by the convergence of two known technologies. One is the focused ultrasound, and the other one is the vision-enabled magnetic resonance imaging. So let's first talk about focused ultrasound. And I hold in my hand a tissue-mimicking phantom. It is made out of silicon. It is transparent, made just for you. So you see, it's all intact, completely transparent. I'll take you now to the acoustic lab. You see the phantom within the aquarium. This is a setup I put in a physics lab. On the right-hand side, you see an ultrasonic transducer. So the ultrasonic transducer emits basically an ultrasonic beam that focuses inside the phantom. Okay, when you hear the click, this is when the energy starts to emit and you see a little lesion form inside the phantom. Okay, so everything around it is whole and intact. It's just a lesion formed inside. So think about, this is in your brain. We need to reach a target inside the brain. We can do it without harming any tissue. So this is, I think, the first kosher Hippocratic surgical system. (Laughter) Okay, so let's talk a little bit about ultrasound, the force of ultrasound. You know all about imaging, right, ultrasound imaging. And you know also about lithotripsy — breaking kidney stones. But ultrasound can be shaped to be anything in between, because it's a mechanical force. Basically, it's a force acting on a tissue that it transverses. So you can change the intensity, the frequency, the duration, the pulse shape of the ultrasound to create anything from an airbrush to a hammer. And I am going to show you multiple applications in the medical field that can be enabled just by focusing, physically focusing. So this idea of harnessing focused ultrasound to treat lesions in the brain is not new at all. When I was born, this idea was already conceived by pioneers such as the Fry brothers and Lars Leksell, who is know actually as the inventor of the gammaknife. But you may not know that he tried to perform lobotomies in the brain, noninvasively, with focused ultrasound in the '50s. He failed, so he then invented the gammaknife. And it makes you ponder why those pioneers failed. And there was something fundamental that they were missing. They were missing the vision. It wasn't until the invention of the MR and really the integration of MR with focused ultrasound that we could get the feedback — both the anatomical and the physiological in order to have a completely noninvasive, closed-loop surgical procedure. So this is how it looks, you know, the operating room of the future today. This is an MR suite with a focused ultrasound system. And I will give you several examples. So the first one is in the brain. One of the neurological conditions that can be treated with focused ultrasound are movement disorders, like Parkinson's or essential tremor. What is typical to those conditions, to essential tremor for example, is inability to drink or eat cereal or soup without spilling everything all over you, or write legibly so people can understand it, and be really independent in your life without the help of others. So I'd like you to meet John. John is a retired professor of history from Virginia. So he suffered from essential tremor for many years. And medication didn't help him anymore. And many of those patients refused to undergo surgery to have people cut into their brain. And about four or five months ago, he underwent an experimental procedure. It is approved under an FDAIDE at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville using focused ultrasound to ablate a point in his thalamus. And this is his handwriting. "On June 20th," if you can read it, "2011." This is his handwriting on the morning of the treatment before going into the MR So now I'll take you through [what] a typical procedure like that looks like, [what] noninvasive surgery looks like. So we put the patient on the MR table. We attach a transducer, in this case, to the brain, but if it will be a different organ, it will be a different transducer attached to the patient. And the physician will then take a regular MR scan. And the objective of that? I don't have a pointer here, but you see the green, sort of rectangle or trapezoid? This is the sort of general area of the treatment. It's a safety boundary around the target. It's a target in the thalamus. So once those pictures are acquired and the physician has drawn all the necessary safety limits and so on, he selects basically a point — you see the round point in the middle where the cursor is — and he presses this blue button called "sonicate." We call this instance of injecting the energy, we call it sonication. The only handwork the physician does here is moving a mouse. This is the only device he needs in this treatment. So he presses "sonicate," and this is what happens. You see the transducer, the light blue. There's water in between the skull and the transducer. And it does this burst of energy. It elevates the temperature. We first need to verify that we are on target. So the first sonication is at lower energy. It doesn't do any damage, but it elevates the temperature by a few degrees. And one of the unique capabilities that we leverage with the MR is the ability to measure temperature noninvasively. This is really a unique capability of the MR. It is not being used in regular diagnostic imaging. But here we can get both the anatomical imaging and the temperature maps in real time. And you can see the points there on the graph. The temperature was raised to 43 degrees C temporarily. This doesn't cause any damage. But the point is we are right on target. So once the physician verifies that the focus spot is on the target he has chosen, then we move to perform a full-energy ablation like you see here. And you see the temperature rises to like 55 to 60 degrees C. If you do it for more than a second, it's enough to basically destroy the proteins of the cells. This is the outcome from a patient perspective — same day after the treatment. This is an immediate relief. (Applause) Thank you. John is one of [about] a dozen very heroic, courageous people who volunteered for the study. And you have to understand what is in people's mind when they are willing to take the risk. And this is a quote from John after he wrote it. He said, "Miraculous." And his wife said, "This is the happiest moment of my life." And you wonder why. I mean, one of the messages I like to carry over is, what about defending quality of life? I mean, those people lose their independence. They are dependent on others. And John today is fully independent. He returned to a normal life routine. And he also plays golf, like you do in Virginia when you are retired. Okay, so you can see here the spot. It's like three millimeters in the middle of the brain. There's no damage outside. He suffers from no neurodeficit. There's no recovery needed, no nothing. He's back to his normal life. Let's move now to a more painful subject. Pain is something that can make your life miserable. And people are suffering from all kinds of pain like neuropathic pain, lower-back pain and cancer pain from bone metastases, when the metastases get to your bones, sometimes they are very painful. All those I've indicated have already been shown to be successfully treated by focused ultrasound relieving the pain, again, very fast. And I would like to tell you about PJ. He's a 78 year-old farmer who suffered from — how should I say it? — it's called pain in the butt. He had metastases in his right buttock, and he couldn't sit even with medication. He had to forgo all the farm activities. He was treated with radiation therapy, state-of-the-art radiation therapy, but it didn't help. Many patients like that favor radiation therapy. And again, he volunteered to a pivotal study that we ran worldwide, also in the U.S. And his wife actually took him. They drove like three hours from their farm to the hospital. He had to sit on a cushion, stand still, not move, because it was very painful. He took the treatment, and on the way back, he drove the truck by himself. So again, this is an immediate relief. And you have to understand what those people feel and what their family experiences when it happens. He returned again to his daily routine on the farm. He rides his tractor. He rides his horse to their mountain cabin regularly. And he has been very happy. But now, you ask me, but what about war, the war on cancer? Show us some primary cancer. What can be done there? So I have good news and bad news. The good news: there's a lot that can be done. And it has been shown actually outside of the U.S. And doing that in the U.S. is very painful. I don't see, without this nation taking it as some collective will or something that is a national goal to make that happen, it will not happen. And it's not just because of regulation; it's because of the amount of money needed under the current evidence-based medicine and the size of trials and so on to make it happen. So the first two applications are breast cancer and prostate cancer. They were the first to be treated by focused ultrasound. And we have better-than-surgery results in breasts. But I have a message for the men here. We heard here yesterday Quyen talking about the adverse event trait in prostate cancer. There is a unique opportunity now with focused ultrasound guided by MR, because we can actually think about prostate lumpectomy — treating just the focal lesion and not removing the whole gland, and by that, avoiding all the issues with potency and incontinence. Well, there are other cancer tumors in the abdomen — quite lethal, very lethal actually — pancreas, liver, kidney. The challenge there with a breathing and awake patient — and in all our treatments, the patient is awake and conscious and speaks with the physician — is you have to teach the MR some tricks how to do it in real time. And this will take time. This will take two years. But I have now a message to the ladies. And this is, in 2004, the FDA has approved MR-guided focused ultrasounds for the treatment of symptomatic uterine fibroids. Women suffer from that disease. All those tumors have heavy bleeding during periods, abdominal pressure, back pain, frequent urination. And sometimes, they cannot even conceive and become pregnant because of the fibroid. This is Frances. She was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized fibroid. This is a big fibroid. She was offered a hysterectomy, but this is an inconceivable proposition for someone who wants to keep her pregnancy option. So she elected to undergo a focused ultrasound procedure in 2008. And in 2010, she became a first-time mother to a healthy baby. So new life was born. (Applause) So in conclusion, I'd like to leave you with actually four messages. One is, think about the amount of suffering that is saved from patients undergoing noninvasive surgery, and also the economical and emotional burden removed from their families and communities and the society at large — and I think also from their physicians, by the way. And the other thing I would like you to think about is the new type of relationship between physician and patients when you have a patient on the table [who] is awake and can even monitor the treatment. In all our treatments, the patient holds a stop sonication button. He can stop the surgery at any moment. And with that note, I would like to thank you for listening. (Applause)

There are no mistakes on the bandstand

{0: 'Stefon Harris plays the vibraphone -- and leads a jazz ensemble with a collaborative sound built on collective inspiration.'}

TEDSalon NY2011

Okay, I have no idea what we're going to play. I won't be able to tell you what it is until it happens. I didn't realize there was going to be a little music before. So I think I'm going to start with what I just heard. (Music) (Applause) Okay, so first of all, let's welcome Mr. Jamire Williams on the drums, (Applause) Burniss Travis on the bass, (Applause) and Mr. Christian Sands on the piano. (Applause) So the bandstand, as we call it, this is an incredible space. It is really a sacred space. And one of the things that is really sacred about it is that you have no opportunity to think about the future, or the past. You really are alive right here in this moment. There are so many decisions being made when you walk on the bandstand. We had no idea what key we were going to play in. In the middle, we sort of made our way into a song called "Titi Boom." But that could have happened — maybe, maybe not. Everyone's listening. We're responding. You have no time for projected ideas. So the idea of a mistake: From the perspective of a jazz musician, it's easier to talk about someone else's mistake. So the way I perceive a mistake when I'm on the bandstand — first of all, we don't really see it as a mistake. The only mistake lies in that I'm not able to perceive what it is that someone else did. Every "mistake" is an opportunity in jazz. So it's hard to even describe what a funny note would be. So for example, if I played a color, like we were playing on a palette, that sounded like this ... (Music) So if Christian played a note — like play an F. (Music) See, these are all right inside of the color palette. If you played an E. See, these all lie right inside of this general emotional palette that we were painting. If you played an F# though, (Dissonance) to most people's ears, they would perceive that as a mistake. So I'm going to show you, we're going to play just for a second. And we're going to play on this palette. And at some point, Christian will introduce this note. And we won't react to it. He'll introduce it for a second and then I'll stop, I'll talk for a second. We'll see what happens when we play with this palette. (Music) So someone could conceptually perceive that as a mistake. The only way that I would say it was a mistake is in that we didn't react to it. It was an opportunity that was missed. So it's unpredictable. We'll paint this palette again. He'll play it. I don't know how we'll react to it, but something will change. We'll all accept his ideas, or not. (Music) So you see, he played this note. I ended up creating a melody out of it. The texture changed in the drums this time. It got a little bit more rhythmic, a little bit more intense in response to how I responded to it. So there is no mistake. The only mistake is if I'm not aware, if each individual musician is not aware and accepting enough of his fellow band member to incorporate the idea and we don't allow for creativity. So jazz, this bandstand is absolutely amazing. It's a very purifying experience. And I know that I speak for all of us when I tell you that we don't take it for granted. We know that to be able to come on the bandstand and play music is a blessing. So how does this all relate to behavioral finance? Well we're jazz musicians, so stereotypically we don't have a great relationship to finance. (Laughter) Anyway, I just wanted to sort of point out the way that we handle it. And the other dynamic of it is that we don't micromanage in jazz. You have some people who do. But what that does is it actually limits the artistic possibilities. If I come up and I dictate to the band that I want to play like this and I want the music to go this way, and I just jump right in ... ready, just play some time. One, two, one, two, three, four. (Music) It's kind of chaotic because I'm bullying my ideas. I'm telling them, "You come with me over this way." If I really want the music to go there, the best way for me to do it is to listen. This is a science of listening. It has far more to do with what I can perceive than what it is that I can do. So if I want the music to get to a certain level of intensity, the first step for me is to be patient, to listen to what's going on and pull from something that's going on around me. When you do that, you engage and inspire the other musicians and they give you more, and gradually it builds. Watch. One, two, a one, two, three, four. (Music) Totally different experience when I'm pulling ideas. It's much more organic. It's much more nuanced. It's not about bullying my vision or anything like that. It's about being here in the moment, accepting one another and allowing creativity to flow. Thank you. (Applause)

The world's smallest 3D printer

{0: "Klaus Stadlmann was pursuing his PhD at Vienna's Technical University when a broken laser system gave him some unexpected free time to think. Instead of working on his thesis, he decided to build the world's smallest 3D printer."}

TEDxVienna

Hello everybody, thanks for having me today. I'm a little bit injured, but it takes more than a car to stop me from talking to you. (Laughter) (Applause) Maybe a tank? So today, I want to talk about the microprinter, about my work, how everything started, what was my motivation to build the smallest 3-D printer in the world. Let's start with my daily business. So, my normal working field is called two-photon polymerization. It sounds very nerdy, it is very nerdy. (Laughter) What do you need for making this stuff? You need a complex laser system, a so-called femtosecond laser system, which you focus onto a very tiny spot — very, very, very tiny — and this is a very expensive, not very durable laser system. (Laughs) And on the other hand, you need a very complex positioning system. We call it "Agathe," because it's very heavy, and we thought Agathe was a nice name. (Laughter) And, well, you need this system to move the laser through, for example, at the very accurate level, about 200 nanometers, so very accurate. And, well, what can you do with that? You can do things that you cannot see with your eyes. So you can print out whatever you want, you can print out a tower bridge, you can print out Agathe's husband ... (Laughter) OK, but, what makes it so mind-blowing? You maybe notice this scale bar, and it's 100 microns for the tower bridge and 20 microns for the fat man. For comparison, the diameter of a human hair is around 50 microns. So these objects are like a dust particle or even smaller, so you can hardly see them. What you can also do and what we are also working on is improving the system, improving the resins, the material we use for catching a worm or something else. Inside the resin, we move the laser through the resin, it gets polymerized, and we catch a living animal, here, a special worm. What we're trying to do, or what the next step would be, is to make biocompatible polymers and maybe to write some things inside your body or inside the body of a worm, or to attach cells to our structures, and so on. But, OK, that's my normal working field. Today I want to tell the story behind the microprinter. What was my motivation? Well, everything started on Monday morning, 6:30. OK, that's a lie. Maybe it was 10 o'clock. (Laughter) I went to my laser lab, which is located near Karlsplatz, in Freihaus, at the Vienna University of Technology. I went in, and I saw that this laser system was broken, and I tried to fix it. It took me half a day, several hours. Then I noticed, OK, there is a major issue with the pump source. I cannot fix that myself; we have to call the service technician. And from that point on, I noticed I had time to think. So I thought, "What to do now? Maybe start to write my PhD thesis." (Laughter) No, no, not a good idea at all. So I started thinking, maybe write a scientific paper. Not a good idea at all. And then, on Saturday, after a week of thinking, I came up with the idea to build the smallest 3-D microprinter in the world. (Laughter) Or, the smallest 3-D printer in the world. (Applause) So I called my professor and told him about it. "Hey, let's build the thing! I have time. Is it OK?" "Go ahead, build it." And so I went to the university, and from that point on, I just put everything out of my brain inside the computer to make this CAD construction of the whole thing. And after a few months, we had the first test run with the system. It worked brilliantly from the first test on, and it had the same resolution as systems which cost 60,000 euros, and we only spent 1,500 euros for the system, not including my salary, but that wouldn't add so much on its own. (Laughter) OK, how does this work? I brought you a video where you can see how you can put in your three-dimensional file. This video was produced by a friend of mine, Junior Veloso. And you can see, you have a set stage which moves up. And under the set stage, there is a liquid, which gets solidified by the light. And slice by slice, you create the model, so you really pull it out of the liquid. And it just depends on how big your model is. Maybe you have 100 slices, 1,000 or 10,000 slices. So that's how it works. Of course, this is a much bigger machine than the microprinter, but it uses more or less the same principles, so that's what I want to show you. At the end, this head, this alien head, is attached to the building platform, and when the process is done, you just simply have to break the head from the support structure you need, and then everything is ready. So. OK, but what does the microprinter look like? Well, maybe some of you have already seen this picture. I also brought it to you in person, so I want to kindly introduce you to the 3-D microprinter, which looks like this. So it's very small, it's really a desktop version. It's a really affordable system. And we are really proud of it, actually, and — (Laughter) And you have this tiny little system; there are bigger ones. What can you do with a cheap, affordable system? For example, you all know these hearing aids? They have to be produced individually for each person, so this is a perfect example for using this technology to create the shell for a hearing aid. Normally, you go to the store, they scan your ear, they send the data to Germany via email, and — (Laughter) and then they print it out with a — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Then they print it out with a big machine, and then, when it's ready to send back to Vienna or wherever you are — via post — then they put in the electronics. When you have a microprinter in your store, you can go to the store, they scan your ear, they just press "Print," the 3-D model gets sliced, and you can go for a coffee, you can go to the university, whatever you want, and instead of five days, you can have your ear shell or your hearing aid in just one day. And that is an example of how these tiny little machines or other cheap 3-D printers could change our everyday lives. So thank you very much, and start printing whatever you want, whatever you need. (Applause)

What happens when an NGO admits failure

{0: 'David Damberger’s work with Engineers Without Borders has taken him from communities in India to Southern Africa to help build infrastructure -- and learn.'}

TEDxYYC

Meet Inook. He's a pretty happy guy. And I'd be pretty happy, too, if this was the first time my community had just gained access to fresh water. Inook is from the country of Malawi, the small sliver of a country in Southern Africa, known as "The Warm Heart of Africa." Over the past 10 years, five million more people like Inook in Malawi have gained access to fresh water. But what's unfortunate is that this picture is a lie. I'll come back to that in a second. Ten years ago, two Waterloo engineers sparked a movement across Canada, "Engineers Without Borders." This movement was based on the concept that it was completely unacceptable that 5 million people in Malawi did not have access to fresh water, when us engineers back in Canada were working on problems such as making a photocopier increase its speed from 149 pages a minute to 151 pages per minute. We needed to work on problems that mattered. I was fortunate, I founded the Calgary chapter here. I got to be the first director of overseas programs for Engineers Without Borders in Africa, where I worked for four years. And I got to work with hundreds of businesses, non-government organizations, governments, all working in this field of development. It was really fantastic working for Engineers Without Borders because even though we worked on hundred-million-dollar projects, we had this philosophy that if we were really going to understand the problems in local Africa, we needed to live like local Africans. So, as a lot of ex-patriots would spend most of the time in the capital cities and boardrooms, we'd spend our time in villages learning local languages, traveling on public transports. And what this allowed us to do was to get a really deep understanding of what was going on at the field level. Combined with this experience and hundreds of other Engineers Without Borders experiences, we got a really interesting perspective of what's going on in this aid industry. The aid industry has gotten a lot of attention lately. A lot of economists have become authors and have written about it. There's a lot of controversy about its effectiveness, some even asking the question, "Has aid failed?" It's a very interesting question. Now, I can confidently say on behalf of Engineers Without Borders staff members that, failed or not, we definitely feel that the aid system is broken. And when I say broken, I'm not talking about what the media usually talks about. It's not about corrupt dictators or about corruption. Those issues still happen in Africa, but they're much more the minority than they are the mainstream today. I'm talking about aid being broken in democratically elected, stable governments with no civil unrest, countries like Ghana, Malawi and Zambia. So, I talked about Malawi. The World Bank has stated that 80% of the people in Malawi have access to fresh water sources. So one of our staff members in Malawi, this is Owen, was visiting one of those water points. It was a gravity-fed system that was commissioned by the Canadian government and finished about a year and a half ago. A gravity-fed system basically is a bunch of pipes that pipe water down from an elevated region down into a number of communities where there are taps, and people can access that water. And he was going around turning on some of those taps, and some weren't working. So he asked the community, "How many of these aren't working?" And they said, "Well, out of 113, 81." 81? What's the problem? What's going on? He found out that a lot of the pipes had sprung leaks and broken down. All right, not a big deal, pipes break down everywhere. But the problem with this project was that, even though the infrastructure was built, there was no thinking about who was going to maintain the system. Some people really took initiative and tried to fix the pipes themselves, but there was a lack of affordable spare parts available. This situation is typical. This is a graphic showing one area of Malawi, I think it's an urban area, where the green dots are functional water points, yellow, are ones that are working but breaking down, and red are not functional. Hardly eighty percent. Actually, Engineers Without Borders has done some work and found out that even though there's 80% coverage of water points, 40% are not working. See, this issue is ... A lot of donors and projects end up focusing on the hardware side of the issue and not really realizing the importance of the software side of things. At first it's like, software — of course you have to do maintenance. But when you think about it as people donating to charities, it makes you feel a lot better if you know that your money went to something tangible, something like a well, something like a school, something like giving a family a goat. It's not as sexy and easy to tell your friends about how you helped fund a water committee or paid for teacher salaries. So when I say that this picture of Inook is a lie, it's not a lie when the picture is taken. It only becomes a lie a year or two afterwards. When looking at these pictures, one of my great colleagues said, "Everything people see from Africa doesn't matter. And everything that matters from Africa, people don't get to see." And this problem goes a lot further that just broken down water points. Owen, after seeing this water point, discovered not more than 30 feet away: "Hey there's another set of taps that look really broken down, too, but they're not attached to the system." And he asked the community, "What's that?" They said: "Oh, that's the American government gravity-fed water system." It was built over ten years ago. He said, "What happened to that?" They said, "Oh, it also broke down about a year and a half later." How is it that a project that failed ten years ago was rebuilt with almost the same technology, same process, and had exactly the same failure ten years later? I've recently joined a start-up company that sells goods online, a lot of them from Africa, fair-trade goods — it's sort of like the ethical eBay or Amazon. And what we've learned being a private sector start-up is, if we don't serve our customers and we don't provide them the product they need, they won't buy it. And then if we don't innovate, change and adapt to their needs, we go out of business. They have a power to hold us accountable. If we look to the public sector, it doesn't adapt and change quite as fast as the private sector, but at the end of the day, if the elected government doesn't meet the needs of its constituents, they have a chance to vote them out of power, therefore holding them accountable. But in the development sector, if they don't serve the needs of their beneficiaries — and they're not just NGOs, but governments and businesses as well — the beneficiaries have no power to vote them out or to fire them. The people who have that power are the donors. And when you look at the system, you can see some of the challenges. Development is the sector that focuses more on pleasing the donors and making them happy and communicating to them, as opposed to understanding the needs of the beneficiaries. Because of that, systematic challenge is very slow to innovate, there's very little change, and you get exactly the same project built ten years later that fails in exactly the same way. So what we do about this? First answer is easy: we invest in the private and public sectors in the developing world. They're inherently structurally built to be more sustainable and to allow beneficiaries to hold them accountable. However, 70% of people in sub-Saharan Africa still make less than two dollars a day and are still in poverty. And a lot of that reason is because the private and the public sector are not serving them appropriately. So we do need to invest in businesses and governments in Africa, but it's still going to take a long time for the problems to be fixed. Therefore, that leaves us with one option and we need to work with this system. Therefore, we have to fix it. We need to make it more accountable, more creative and more transparent. We need to start innovating, coming up with really neat ideas — ideas like giving beneficiaries a chance to rate their projects using their mobile phones — that donors and NGOs can understand. Or moving our donors closer to our beneficiaries. Currently, only 20% of the Canadian International Development Agency's African staff are based in Africa. Ideas like funding development sectors like VCs fund businesses: What would it be like if a donor funded ten projects and expected four of them to do OK, one of them to do fantastic and five of them to fail? And not all of the solutions need to be that complex. Engineers Without Borders is working on one that's actually quite simple; it's admitting failure. My first project with Engineers Without Borders was in India. I worked with a bunch of schools, the poorest schools in India, the untouchable caste. This is Bani, she was a girl who was in one of those schools and she and her classmates had to spend two to three hours a day walking to collect water to bring it back to the school so they could have fresh water to drink and for cooking and for going to the bathroom. My job in Engineers Without Borders was to help solve the problem. I worked with the communities; we came up with rainwater harvesting solutions to collect water from the rooftops during the monsoons, bring it through gutters, filter and store it for the dry season. I worked there for a number of months, and by the time I left, we had the project funded and being implemented. I returned back home to Canada almost a hero. My friends and family were like, "Wow, that's fantastic! You gave up your job in the oil and gas sector to go volunteer in India. That's really inspiring." A year later, I contacted my NGO to see how everything was going with the rainwater harvesting systems. And they told me that not a single one was still operating. The reason was because a lot of them had been built, but some of them had broken down because there was no maintenance schedule put in place. I had made the exact same mistake that I criticized earlier. When I thought of my friends and family back home who thought I was such a hero, I felt like an impostor. I thought of Bani, I didn't help her at all. Admitting failure is actually quite hard, and I didn't tell many people about this. And one of the only things that helped me feel better about this — and it's a bit of a shame to say this — was that I started to learn that other people in Engineers Without Borders had failed, too. But Engineers Without Borders has this culture of embracing failure openly and letting us talk about it. And it was only through a bunch of us talking about failure that we really got to see we're making a lot of mistakes, and we're making the same mistakes and can learn from them. And we started to innovate and change. Engineers Without Borders is drastically different now, 10 years later than what we thought Engineers should be doing in development. We don't build water points anymore; in fact, we don't build anything other than spreadsheets. We now have this innovative marketing campaign, "Sponsor an African spreadsheet," because we understand that the problems are not hardware problems; it's all about that software side of things. But it's a hard concept to get across to people; they want to fund wells and schools. But it's really about the software side of things, and it's a lot longer a process to fund those things. And it's not sexy, but it works. Our staff members were really exited to share this failure internally, but we still were not doing a good job of letting other people know. And some very courageous field staff were getting upset at the management because other projects were going to make the same failures; they weren't learning. So they pushed our management staff. And we were nervous publishing our failures, but for the last three years, Engineers Without Borders has published an annual failure report citing our biggest failures. At first, I was asked, "What do your donors think?" and I think, "How would my donors feel if they knew the money they had spent and saved up and generously donated had had no impact?" And you know, that's tough. And our donors felt that, too. But once they started reading the failures, they understood the power of those lessons learned and realized it's an injustice not to be sharing these. Then we realized that not everyone reads reports, so we built a website, admittingfailure.com. This is for all organizations to come and start admitting their failures, and to start having a discussion about failure. The concept is catching on. The Harvard Business Review, just last month, published their first review focused on failure. Two big companies lately have also dealt with failure. I talk to my friends in other sectors and they're like, "It's not just the development sector that has this challenge, it crosses into a lot of other sectors." Two companies had big failures lately. What's interesting about them is, one of them publicly admitted the failure and talked about what they learned from it and what they'll do next time. The other one kind of tried to not talk about it at all. It will be interesting looking forward to see which of those strategies works. I'd like to ask people to, first of all, think about: How does your organization think about and share failure? Maybe ask the person next to you, because I think it can generate some really interesting conversations. And lastly, I'd like to turn back to this question, "Has aid failed?" I think I'll say that, for me, the answer is "Yes," but only because it hasn't failed enough. Thank you. (Applause)

The hidden light of Afghanistan

{0: 'Monika Bulaj’s stunning, painting-like photographs blur religious and cultural divisions, exploding stereotypes. She is a TED Fellow.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

My travels to Afghanistan began many, many years ago on the eastern border of my country, my homeland, Poland. I was walking through the forests of my grandmother's tales. A land where every field hides a grave, where millions of people have been deported or killed in the 20th century. Behind the destruction, I found a soul of places. I met humble people. I heard their prayer and ate their bread. Then I have been walking East for 20 years — from Eastern Europe to Central Asia — through the Caucasus Mountains, Middle East, North Africa, Russia. And I ever met more humble people. And I shared their bread and their prayer. This is why I went to Afghanistan. One day, I crossed the bridge over the Oxus River. I was alone on foot. And the Afghan soldier was so surprised to see me that he forgot to stamp my passport. But he gave me a cup of tea. And I understood that his surprise was my protection. So I have been walking and traveling, by horses, by yak, by truck, by hitchhiking, from Iran's border to the bottom, to the edge of the Wakhan Corridor. And in this way I could find noor, the hidden light of Afghanistan. My only weapon was my notebook and my Leica. I heard prayers of the Sufi — humble Muslims, hated by the Taliban. Hidden river, interconnected with the mysticism from Gibraltar to India. The mosque where the respectful foreigner is showered with blessings and with tears, and welcomed as a gift. What do we know about the country and the people that we pretend to protect, about the villages where the only one medicine to kill the pain and to stop the hunger is opium? These are opium-addicted people on the roofs of Kabul 10 years after the beginning of our war. These are the nomad girls who became prostitutes for Afghan businessmen. What do we know about the women 10 years after the war? Clothed in this nylon bag, made in China, with the name of burqa. I saw one day, the largest school in Afghanistan, a girls' school. 13,000 girls studying here in the rooms underground, full of scorpions. And their love [for studying] was so big that I cried. What do we know about the death threats by the Taliban nailed on the doors of the people who dare to send their daughters to school as in Balkh? The region is not secure, but full of the Taliban, and they did it. My aim is to give a voice to the silent people, to show the hidden lights behind the curtain of the great game, the small worlds ignored by the media and the prophets of a global conflict. Thanks. (Applause)

Color-coded surgery

{0: 'Quyen Nguyen uses molecular probes that make tumors -- and just the tumors -- glow, as an extraordinary aid to surgeons.'}

TEDMED 2011

I want to talk to you about one of the biggest myths in medicine, and that is the idea that all we need are more medical breakthroughs and then all of our problems will be solved. Our society loves to romanticize the idea of the single, solo inventor who, working late in the lab one night, makes an earthshaking discovery, and voila, overnight everything's changed. That's a very appealing picture, however, it's just not true. In fact, medicine today is a team sport. And in many ways, it always has been. I'd like to share with you a story about how I've experienced this very dramatically in my own work. I'm a surgeon, and we surgeons have always had this special relationship with light. When I make an incision inside a patient's body, it's dark. We need to shine light to see what we're doing. And this is why, traditionally, surgeries have always started so early in the morning — to take advantage of daylight hours. And if you look at historical pictures of the early operating rooms, they have been on top of buildings. For example, this is the oldest operating room in the Western world, in London, where the operating room is actually on top of a church with a skylight coming in. And then this is a picture of one of the most famous hospitals in America. This is Mass General in Boston. And do you know where the operating room is? Here it is on the top of the building with plenty of windows to let light in. So nowadays in the operating room, we no longer need to use sunlight. And because we no longer need to use sunlight, we have very specialized lights that are made for the operating room. We have an opportunity to bring in other kinds of lights — lights that can allow us to see what we currently don't see. And this is what I think is the magic of fluorescence. So let me back up a little bit. When we are in medical school, we learn our anatomy from illustrations such as this where everything's color-coded. Nerves are yellow, arteries are red, veins are blue. That's so easy anybody could become a surgeon, right? However, when we have a real patient on the table, this is the same neck dissection — not so easy to tell the difference between different structures. We heard over the last couple days what an urgent problem cancer still is in our society, what a pressing need it is for us to not have one person die every minute. Well if cancer can be caught early, enough such that someone can have their cancer taken out, excised with surgery, I don't care if it has this gene or that gene, or if it has this protein or that protein, it's in the jar. It's done, it's out, you're cured of cancer. This is how we excise cancers. We do our best, based upon our training and the way the cancer looks and the way it feels and its relationship to other structures and all of our experience, we say, you know what, the cancer's gone. We've made a good job. We've taken it out. That's what the surgeon is saying in the operating room when the patient's on the table. But then we actually don't know that it's all out. We actually have to take samples from the surgical bed, what's left behind in the patient, and then send those bits to the pathology lab. In the meanwhile, the patient's on the operating room table. The nurses, anesthesiologist, the surgeon, all the assistants are waiting around. And we wait. The pathologist takes that sample, freezes it, cuts it, looks in the microscope one by one and then calls back into the room. And that may be 20 minutes later per piece. So if you've sent three specimens, it's an hour later. And very often they say, "You know what, points A and B are okay, but point C, you still have some residual cancer there. Please go cut that piece out." So we go back and we do that again, and again. And this whole process: "Okay you're done. We think the entire tumor is out." But very often several days later, the patient's gone home, we get a phone call: "I'm sorry, once we looked at the final pathology, once we looked at the final specimen, we actually found that there's a couple other spots where the margins are positive. There's still cancer in your patient." So now you're faced with telling your patient, first of all, that they may need another surgery, or that they need additional therapy such as radiation or chemotherapy. So wouldn't it be better if we could really tell, if the surgeon could really tell, whether or not there's still cancer on the surgical field? I mean, in many ways, the way that we're doing it, we're still operating in the dark. So in 2004, during my surgical residency, I had the great fortune to meet Dr. Roger Tsien, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2008. Roger and his team were working on a way to detect cancer, and they had a very clever molecule that they had come up with. The molecule they had developed had three parts. The main part of it is the blue part, polycation, and it's basically very sticky to every tissue in your body. So imagine that you make a solution full of this sticky material and inject it into the veins of someone who has cancer, everything's going to get lit up. Nothing will be specific. There's no specificity there. So they added two additional components. The first one is a polyanionic segment, which basically acts as a non-stick backing like the back of a sticker. So when those two are together, the molecule is neutral and nothing gets stuck down. And the two pieces are then linked by something that can only be cut if you have the right molecular scissors — for example, the kind of protease enzymes that tumors make. So here in this situation, if you make a solution full of this three-part molecule along with the dye, which is shown in green, and you inject it into the vein of someone who has cancer, normal tissue can't cut it. The molecule passes through and gets excreted. However, in the presence of the tumor, now there are molecular scissors that can break this molecule apart right there at the cleavable site. And now, boom, the tumor labels itself and it gets fluorescent. So here's an example of a nerve that has tumor surrounding it. Can you tell where the tumor is? I couldn't when I was working on this. But here it is. It's fluorescent. Now it's green. See, so every single one in the audience now can tell where the cancer is. We can tell in the operating room, in the field, at a molecular level, where is the cancer and what the surgeon needs to do and how much more work they need to do to cut that out. And the cool thing about fluorescence is that it's not only bright, it actually can shine through tissue. The light that the fluorescence emits can go through tissue. So even if the tumor is not right on the surface, you'll still be able to see it. In this movie, you can see that the tumor is green. There's actually normal muscle on top of it. See that? And I'm peeling that muscle away. But even before I peel that muscle away, you saw that there was a tumor underneath. So that's the beauty of having a tumor that's labeled with fluorescent molecules. That you can, not only see the margins right there on a molecular level, but you can see it even if it's not right on the top — even if it's beyond your field of view. And this works for metastatic lymph nodes also. Sentinel lymph node dissection has really changed the way that we manage breast cancer, melanoma. Women used to get really debilitating surgeries to excise all of the axillary lymph nodes. But when sentinel lymph node came into our treatment protocol, the surgeon basically looks for the single node that is the first draining lymph node of the cancer. And then if that node has cancer, the woman would go on to get the axillary lymph node dissection. So what that means is if the lymph node did not have cancer, the woman would be saved from having unnecessary surgery. But sentinel lymph node, the way that we do it today, is kind of like having a road map just to know where to go. So if you're driving on the freeway and you want to know where's the next gas station, you have a map to tell you that that gas station is down the road. It doesn't tell you whether or not the gas station has gas. You have to cut it out, bring it back home, cut it up, look inside and say, "Oh yes, it does have gas." So that takes more time. Patients are still on the operating room table. Anesthesiologists, surgeons are waiting around. That takes time. So with our technology, we can tell right away. You see a lot of little, roundish bumps there. Some of these are swollen lymph nodes that look a little larger than others. Who amongst us hasn't had swollen lymph nodes with a cold? That doesn't mean that there's cancer inside. Well with our technology, the surgeon is able to tell immediately which nodes have cancer. I won't go into this very much, but our technology, besides being able to tag tumor and metastatic lymph nodes with fluorescence, we can also use the same smart three-part molecule to tag gadolinium onto the system so you can do this noninvasively. The patient has cancer, you want to know if the lymph nodes have cancer even before you go in. Well you can see this on an MRI. So in surgery, it's important to know what to cut out. But equally important is to preserve things that are important for function. So it's very important to avoid inadvertent injury. And what I'm talking about are nerves. Nerves, if they are injured, can cause paralysis, can cause pain. In the setting of prostate cancer, up to 60 percent of men after prostate cancer surgery may have urinary incontinence and erectile disfunction. That's a lot of people to have a lot of problems — and this is even in so-called nerve-sparing surgery, which means that the surgeon is aware of the problem, and they are trying to avoid the nerves. But you know what, these little nerves are so small, in the context of prostate cancer, that they are actually never seen. They are traced just by their known anatomical path along vasculature. And they're known because somebody has decided to study them, which means that we're still learning about where they are. Crazy to think that we're having surgery, we're trying to excise cancer, we don't know where the cancer is. We're trying to preserve nerves; we can't see where they are. So I said, wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to see nerves with fluorescence? And at first this didn't get a lot of support. People said, "We've been doing it this way for all these years. What's the problem? We haven't had that many complications." But I went ahead anyway. And Roger helped me. And he brought his whole team with him. So there's that teamwork thing again. And we eventually discovered molecules that were specifically labeling nerves. And when we made a solution of this, tagged with the fluorescence and injected in the body of a mouse, their nerves literally glowed. You can see where they are. Here you're looking at a sciatic nerve of a mouse, and you can see that that big, fat portion you can see very easily. But in fact, at the tip of that where I'm dissecting now, there's actually very fine arborizations that can't really be seen. You see what looks like little Medusa heads coming out. We have been able to see nerves for facial expression, for facial movement, for breathing — every single nerve — nerves for urinary function around the prostate. We've been able to see every single nerve. When we put these two probes together ... So here's a tumor. Do you guys know where the margins of this tumor is? Now you do. What about the nerve that's going into this tumor? That white portion there is easy to see. But what about the part that goes into the tumor? Do you know where it's going? Now you do. Basically, we've come up with a way to stain tissue and color-code the surgical field. This was a bit of a breakthrough. I think that it'll change the way that we do surgery. We published our results in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Nature Biotechnology. We received commentary in Discover magazine, in The Economist. And we showed it to a lot of my surgical colleagues. They said, "Wow! I have patients who would benefit from this. I think that this will result in my surgeries with a better outcome and fewer complications." What needs to happen now is further development of our technology along with development of the instrumentation that allows us to see this sort of fluorescence in the operating room. The eventual goal is that we'll get this into patients. However, we've discovered that there's actually no straightforward mechanism to develop a molecule for one-time use. Understandably, the majority of the medical industry is focused on multiple-use drugs, such as long-term daily medications. We are focused on making this technology better. We're focused on adding drugs, adding growth factors, killing nerves that are causing problems and not the surrounding tissue. We know that this can be done and we're committed to doing it. I'd like to leave you with this final thought. Successful innovation is not a single breakthrough. It is not a sprint. It is not an event for the solo runner. Successful innovation is a team sport, it's a relay race. It requires one team for the breakthrough and another team to get the breakthrough accepted and adopted. And this takes the long-term steady courage of the day-in day-out struggle to educate, to persuade and to win acceptance. And that is the light that I want to shine on health and medicine today. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Put a value on nature!

{0: 'A banker by training, Pavan Sukhdev runs the numbers on greening up -- showing that green economies are an effective engine for creating jobs and creating wealth.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

I'm here to talk to you about the economic invisibility of nature. The bad news is that mother nature's back office isn't working yet, so those invoices don't get issued. But we need to do something about this problem. I began my life as a markets professional and continued to take an interest, but most of my recent effort has been looking at the value of what comes to human beings from nature, and which doesn't get priced by the markets. A project called TEEB was started in 2007, and it was launched by a group of environment ministers of the G8+5. And their basic inspiration was a stern review of Lord Stern. They asked themselves a question: If economics could make such a convincing case for early action on climate change, well why can't the same be done for conservation? Why can't an equivalent case be made for nature? And the answer is: Yeah, it can. But it's not that straightforward. Biodiversity, the living fabric of this planet, is not a gas. It exists in many layers, ecosystems, species and genes across many scales — international, national, local, community — and doing for nature what Lord Stern and his team did for nature is not that easy. And yet, we began. We began the project with an interim report, which quickly pulled together a lot of information that had been collected on the subject by many, many researchers. And amongst our compiled results was the startling revelation that, in fact, we were losing natural capital — the benefits that flow from nature to us. We were losing it at an extraordinary rate — in fact, of the order of two to four trillion dollars-worth of natural capital. This came out in 2008, which was, of course, around the time that the banking crisis had shown that we had lost financial capital of the order of two and a half trillion dollars. So this was comparable in size to that kind of loss. We then have gone on since to present for [the] international community, for governments, for local governments and for business and for people, for you and me, a whole slew of reports, which were presented at the U.N. last year, which address the economic invisibility of nature and describe what can be done to solve it. What is this about? A picture that you're familiar with — the Amazon rainforests. It's a massive store of carbon, it's an amazing store of biodiversity, but what people don't really know is this also is a rain factory. Because the northeastern trade winds, as they go over the Amazonas, effectively gather the water vapor. Something like 20 billion tons per day of water vapor is sucked up by the northeastern trade winds, and eventually precipitates in the form of rain across the La Plata Basin. This rainfall cycle, this rainfall factory, effectively feeds an agricultural economy of the order of 240 billion dollars-worth in Latin America. But the question arises: Okay, so how much do Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and indeed the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil pay for that vital input to that economy to the state of Amazonas, which produces that rainfall? And the answer is zilch, exactly zero. That's the economic invisibility of nature. That can't keep going on, because economic incentives and disincentives are very powerful. Economics has become the currency of policy. And unless we address this invisibility, we are going to get the results that we are seeing, which is a gradual degradation and loss of this valuable natural asset. It's not just about the Amazonas, or indeed about rainforests. No matter what level you look at, whether it's at the ecosystem level or at the species level or at the genetic level, we see the same problem again and again. So rainfall cycle and water regulation by rainforests at an ecosystem level. At the species level, it's been estimated that insect-based pollination, bees pollinating fruit and so on, is something like 190 billion dollars-worth. That's something like eight percent of the total agricultural output globally. It completely passes below the radar screen. But when did a bee actually ever give you an invoice? Or for that matter, if you look at the genetic level, 60 percent of medicines were prospected, were found first as molecules in a rainforest or a reef. Once again, most of that doesn't get paid. And that brings me to another aspect of this, which is, to whom should this get paid? That genetic material probably belonged, if it could belong to anyone, to a local community of poor people who parted with the knowledge that helped the researchers to find the molecule, which then became the medicine. They were the ones that didn't get paid. And if you look at the species level, you saw about fish. Today, the depletion of ocean fisheries is so significant that effectively it is effecting the ability of the poor, the artisanal fisher folk and those who fish for their own livelihoods, to feed their families. Something like a billion people depend on fish, the quantity of fish in the oceans. A billion people depend on fish for their main source for animal protein. And at this rate at which we are losing fish, it is a human problem of enormous dimensions, a health problem of a kind we haven't seen before. And finally, at the ecosystem level, whether it's flood prevention or drought control provided by the forests, or whether it is the ability of poor farmers to go out and gather leaf litter for their cattle and goats, or whether it's the ability of their wives to go and collect fuel wood from the forest, it is actually the poor who depend most on these ecosystem services. We did estimates in our study that for countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia, even though ecosystem services — these benefits that flow from nature to humanity for free — they're not very big in percentage terms of GDP — two, four, eight, 10, 15 percent — but in these countries, if we measure how much they're worth to the poor, the answers are more like 45 percent, 75 percent, 90 percent. That's the difference. Because these are important benefits for the poor. And you can't really have a proper model for development if at the same time you're destroying or allowing the degradation of the very asset, the most important asset, which is your development asset, that is ecological infrastructure. How bad can things get? Well here a picture of something called the mean species abundance. It's basically a measure of how many tigers, toads, ticks or whatever on average of biomass of various species are around. The green represents the percentage. If you start green, it's like 80 to 100 percent. If it's yellow, it's 40 to 60 percent. And these are percentages versus the original state, so to speak, the pre-industrial era, 1750. Now I'm going to show you how business as usual will affect this. And just watch the change in colors in India, China, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa as we move on and consume global biomass at a rate which is actually not going to be able to sustain us. See that again. The only places that remain green — and that's not good news — is, in fact, places like the Gobi Desert, like the tundra and like the Sahara. But that doesn't help because there were very few species and volume of biomass there in the first place. This is the challenge. The reason this is happening boils down, in my mind, to one basic problem, which is our inability to perceive the difference between public benefits and private profits. We tend to constantly ignore public wealth simply because it is in the common wealth, it's common goods. And here's an example from Thailand where we found that, because the value of a mangrove is not that much — it's about $600 over the life of nine years that this has been measured — compared to its value as a shrimp farm, which is more like $9,600, there has been a gradual trend to deplete the mangroves and convert them to shrimp farms. But of course, if you look at exactly what those profits are, almost 8,000 of those dollars are, in fact, subsidies. So you compare the two sides of the coin and you find that it's more like 1,200 to 600. That's not that hard. But on the other hand, if you start measuring, how much would it actually cost to restore the land of the shrimp farm back to productive use? Once salt deposition and chemical deposition has had its effects, that answer is more like $12,000 of cost. And if you see the benefits of the mangrove in terms of the storm protection and cyclone protection that you get and in terms of the fisheries, the fish nurseries, that provide fish for the poor, that answer is more like $11,000. So now look at the different lens. If you look at the lens of public wealth as against the lens of private profits, you get a completely different answer, which is clearly conservation makes more sense, and not destruction. So is this just a story from South Thailand? Sorry, this is a global story. And here's what the same calculation looks like, which was done recently — well I say recently, over the last 10 years — by a group called TRUCOST. And they calculated for the top 3,000 corporations, what are the externalities? In other words, what are the costs of doing business as usual? This is not illegal stuff, this is basically business as usual, which causes climate-changing emissions, which have an economic cost. It causes pollutants being issued, which have an economic cost, health cost and so on. Use of freshwater. If you drill water to make coke near a village farm, that's not illegal, but yes, it costs the community. Can we stop this, and how? I think the first point to make is that we need to recognize natural capital. Basically the stuff of life is natural capital, and we need to recognize and build that into our systems. When we measure GDP as a measure of economic performance at the national level, we don't include our biggest asset at the country level. When we measure corporate performances, we don't include our impacts on nature and what our business costs society. That has to stop. In fact, this was what really inspired my interest in this phase. I began a project way back called the Green Accounting Project. That was in the early 2000s when India was going gung-ho about GDP growth as the means forward — looking at China with its stellar growths of eight, nine, 10 percent and wondering, why can we do the same? And a few friends of mine and I decided this doesn't make sense. This is going to create more cost to society and more losses. So we decided to do a massive set of calculations and started producing green accounts for India and its states. That's how my interests began and went to the TEEB project. Calculating this at the national level is one thing, and it has begun. And the World Bank has acknowledged this and they've started a project called WAVES — Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services. But calculating this at the next level, that means at the business sector level, is important. And actually we've done this with the TEEB project. We've done this for a very difficult case, which was for deforestation in China. This is important, because in China in 1997, the Yellow River actually went dry for nine months causing severe loss of agriculture output and pain and loss to society. Just a year later the Yangtze flooded, causing something like 5,500 deaths. So clearly there was a problem with deforestation. It was associated largely with the construction industry. And the Chinese government responded sensibly and placed a ban on felling. A retrospective on 40 years shows that if we had accounted for these costs — the cost of loss of topsoil, the cost of loss of waterways, the lost productivity, the loss to local communities as a result of all these factors, desertification and so on — those costs are almost twice as much as the market price of timber. So in fact, the price of timber in the Beijing marketplace ought to have been three-times what it was had it reflected the true pain and the costs to the society within China. Of course, after the event one can be wise. The way to do this is to do it on a company basis, to take leadership forward, and to do it for as many important sectors which have a cost, and to disclose these answers. Someone once asked me, "Who is better or worse, is it Unilever or is it P&G when it comes to their impact on rainforests in Indonesia?" And I couldn't answer because neither of these companies, good though they are and professional though they are, do not calculate or disclose their externalities. But if we look at companies like PUMA — Jochen Zeitz, their CEO and chairman, once challenged me at a function, saying that he's going to implement my project before I finish it. Well I think we kind of did it at the same time, but he's done it. He's basically worked the cost to PUMA. PUMA has 2.7 billion dollars of turnover, 300 million dollars of profits, 200 million dollars after tax, 94 million dollars of externalities, cost to business. Now that's not a happy situation for them, but they have the confidence and the courage to come forward and say, "Here's what we are measuring. We are measuring it because we know that you cannot manage what you do not measure." That's an example, I think, for us to look at and for us to draw comfort from. If more companies did this, and if more sectors engaged this as sectors, you could have analysts, business analysts, and you could have people like us and consumers and NGOs actually look and compare the social performance of companies. Today we can't yet do that, but I think the path is laid out. This can be done. And I'm delighted that the Institute of Chartered Accountants in the U.K. has already set up a coalition to do this, an international coalition. The other favorite, if you like, solution for me is the creation of green carbon markets. And by the way, these are my favorites — externalities calculation and green carbon markets. TEEB has more than a dozen separate groups of solutions including protected area evaluation and payments for ecosystem services and eco-certification and you name it, but these are the favorites. What's green carbon? Today what we have is basically a brown carbon marketplace. It's about energy emissions. The European Union ETS is the main marketplace. It's not doing too well. We've over-issued. A bit like inflation: you over-issue currency, you get what you see, declining prices. But that's all about energy and industry. But what we're missing is also some other emissions like black carbon, that is soot. What we're also missing is blue carbon, which, by the way, is the largest store of carbon — more than 55 percent. Thankfully, the flux, in other words, the flow of emissions from the ocean to the atmosphere and vice versa, is more or less balanced. In fact, what's being absorbed is something like 25 percent of our emissions, which then leads to acidification or lower alkalinity in oceans. More of that in a minute. And finally, there's deforestation, and there's emission of methane from agriculture. Green carbon, which is the deforestation and agricultural emissions, and blue carbon together comprise 25 percent of our emissions. We have the means already in our hands, through a structure, through a mechanism, called REDD Plus — a scheme for the reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. And already Norway has contributed a billion dollars each towards Indonesia and Brazil to implement this Red Plus scheme. So we actually have some movement forward. But the thing is to do a lot more of that. Will this solve the problem? Will economics solve everything? Well I'm afraid not. There is an area that is the oceans, coral reefs. As you can see, they cut across the entire globe all the way from Micronesia across Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Madagascar and to the West of the Caribbean. These red dots, these red areas, basically provide the food and livelihood for more than half a billion people. So that's almost an eighth of society. And the sad thing is that, as these coral reefs are lost — and scientists tell us that any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 350 parts per million is too dangerous for the survival of these reefs — we are not only risking the extinction of the entire coral species, the warm water corals, we're not only risking a fourth of all fish species which are in the oceans, but we are risking the very lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million people who live in the developing world in poor countries. So in selecting targets of 450 parts per million and selecting two degrees at the climate negotiations, what we have done is we've made an ethical choice. We've actually kind of made an ethical choice in society to not have coral reefs. Well what I will say to you in parting is that we may have done that. Let's think about it and what it means, but please, let's not do more of that. Because mother nature only has that much in ecological infrastructure and that much natural capital. I don't think we can afford too much of such ethical choices. Thank you. (Applause)

Cooking as alchemy

{0: "The executive chef at Chicago's Moto restaurant, Homaro Cantu created postmodern cuisine and futuristic food delivery systems. ", 1: 'Ben Roche is the pastry chef at Moto, in Chicago, and was the co-host, with Homaro Cantu, of the TV show "Future Food."'}

TED2011

Ben Roche: So I'm Ben, by the way. Homaro Cantu: And I'm Homaro. BR: And we're chefs. So when Moto opened in 2004, people didn't really know what to expect. A lot of people thought that it was a Japanese restaurant, and maybe it was the name, maybe it was the logo, which was like a Japanese character, but anyway, we had all these requests for Japanese food, which is really not what we did. And after about the ten thousandth request for a maki roll, we decided to give the people what they wanted. So this picture is an example of printed food, and this was the first foray into what we like to call flavor transformation. So this is all the ingredients, all the flavor of, you know, a standard maki roll, printed onto a little piece of paper. HC: So our diners started to get bored with this idea, and we decided to give them the same course twice, so here we actually took an element from the maki roll and and took a picture of a dish and then basically served that picture with the dish. So this dish in particular is basically champagne with seafood. The champagne grapes that you see are actually carbonated grapes. A little bit of seafood and some crème fraiche and the picture actually tastes exactly like the dish. (Laughter) BR: But it's not all just edible pictures. We decided to do something a little bit different and transform flavors that were very familiar — so in this case, we have carrot cake. So we take a carrot cake, put it in a blender, and we have kind of like a carrot cake juice, and then that went into a balloon frozen in liquid nitrogen to create this hollow shell of carrot cake ice cream, I guess, and it comes off looking like, you know, Jupiter's floating around your plate. So yeah, we're transforming things into something that you have absolutely no reference for. HC: And here's something we have no reference to eat. This is a cigar, and basically it's a Cuban cigar made out of a Cuban pork sandwich, so we take these spices that go into the pork shoulder, we fashion that into ash. We take the sandwich and wrap it up in a collard green, put an edible label that bears no similarity to a Cohiba cigar label, and we put it in a dollar ninety-nine ashtray and charge you about twenty bucks for it. (Laughter) HC: Delicious. BR: That's not it, though. Instead of making foods that look like things that you wouldn't eat, we decided to make ingredients look like dishes that you know. So this is a plate of nachos. The difference between our nachos and the other guy's nachos, is that this is actually a dessert. So the chips are candied, the ground beef is made from chocolate, and the cheese is made from a shredded mango sorbet that gets shredded into liquid nitrogen to look like cheese. And after doing all of this dematerialization and reconfiguring of this, of these ingredients, we realized that it was pretty cool, because as we served it, we learned that the dish actually behaves like the real thing, where the cheese begins to melt. So when you're looking at this thing in the dining room, you have this sensation that this is actually a plate of nachos, and it's not really until you begin tasting it that you realize this is a dessert, and it's just kind of like a mind-ripper. (Laughter) HC: So we had been creating all of these dishes out of a kitchen that was more like a mechanic's shop than a kitchen, and the next logical step for us was to install a state-of-the-art laboratory, and that's what we have here. So we put this in the basement, and we got really serious about food, like serious experimentation. BR: One of the really cool things about the lab, besides that we have a new science lab in the kitchen, is that, you know, with this new equipment, and this new approach, all these different doors to creativity that we never knew were there began to open, and so the experiments and the food and the dishes that we created, they just kept going further and further out there. HC: Let's talk about flavor transformation, and let's actually make some cool stuff. You see a cow with its tongue hanging out. What I see is a cow about to eat something delicious. What is that cow eating? And why is it delicious? So the cow, basically, eats three basic things in their feed: corn, beets, and barley, and so what I do is I actually challenge my staff with these crazy, wild ideas. Can we take what the cow eats, remove the cow, and then make some hamburgers out of that? And basically the reaction tends to be kind of like this. (Laughter) BR: Yeah, that's our chef de cuisine, Chris Jones. This is not the only guy that just flips out when we assign a ridiculous task, but a lot of these ideas, they're hard to understand. They're hard to just get automatically. There's a lot of research and a lot of failure, trial and error — I guess, more error — that goes into each and every dish, so we don't always get it right, and it takes a while for us to be able to explain that to people. HC: So, after about a day of Chris and I staring at each other, we came up with something that was pretty close to the hamburger patty, and as you can see it basically forms like hamburger meat. This is made from three ingredients: beets, barley, corn, and so it actually cooks up like hamburger meat, looks and tastes like hamburger meat, and not only that, but it's basically removing the cow from the equation. So replicating food, taking it into that next level is where we're going. (Applause) BR: And it's definitely the world's first bleeding veggie burger, which is a cool side effect. And a miracle berry, if you're not familiar with it, is a natural ingredient, and it contains a special property. It's a glycoprotein called miraculin, a naturally occurring thing. It still freaks me out every time I eat it, but it has a unique ability to mask certain taste receptors on your tongue, so that primarily sour taste receptors, so normally things that would taste very sour or tart, somehow begin to taste very sweet. HC: You're about to eat a lemon, and now it tastes like lemonade. Let's just stop and think about the economic benefits of something like that. We could eliminate sugar across the board for all confectionary products and sodas, and we can replace it with all-natural fresh fruit. BR: So you see us here cutting up some watermelon. The idea with this is that we're going to eliminate tons of food miles, wasted energy, and overfishing of tuna by creating tuna, or any exotic produce or item from a very far-away place, with local, organic produce; so we have a watermelon from Wisconsin. HC: So if miracle berries take sour things and turn them into sweet things, we have this other pixie dust that we put on the watermelon, and it makes it go from sweet to savory. So after we do that, we put it into a vacuum bag, add a little bit of seaweed, some spices, and we roll it, and this starts taking on the appearance of tuna. So the key now is to make it behave like tuna. BR: And then after a quick dip into some liquid nitrogen to get that perfect sear, we really have something that looks, tastes and behaves like the real thing. HC: So the key thing to remember here is, we don't really care what this tuna really is. As long as it's good for you and good for the environment, it doesn't matter. But where is this going? How can we take this idea of tricking your tastebuds and leapfrog it into something that we can do today that could be a disruptive food technology? So here's the next challenge. I told the staff, let's just take a bunch of wild plants, think of them as food ingredients. As long as they're non-poisonous to the human body, go out around Chicago sidewalks, take it, blend it, cook it and then have everybody flavor-trip on it at Moto. Let's charge them a boatload of cash for this and see what they think. (Laughter) BR: Yeah, so you can imagine, a task like this — this is another one of those assignments that the kitchen staff hated us for. But we really had to almost relearn how to cook in general, because these are ingredients, you know, plant life that we're, one, unfamiliar with, and two, we have no reference for how to cook these things because people don't eat them. So we really had to think about new, creative ways to flavor, new ways to cook and to change texture — and that was the main issue with this challenge. HC: So this is where we step into the future and we leapfrog ahead. So developing nations and first-world nations, imagine if you could take these wild plants and consume them, food miles would basically turn into food feet. This disruptive mentality of what food is would essentially open up the encyclopedia of what raw ingredients are, even if we just swapped out, say, one of these for flour, that would eliminate so much energy and so much waste. And to give you a simple example here as to what we actually fed these customers, there's a bale of hay there and some crab apples. And basically we took hay and crab apples and made barbecue sauce out of those two ingredients. People swore they were eating barbecue sauce, and this is free food. BR: Thanks, guys. (Applause)

An unexpected place of healing

{0: 'Ramona Pierson develops tools to revolutionize learning management and assessment systems -- her fourth career after aviation, neuropsychology and software development.'}

TEDxDU 2011

I'm actually going to share something with you I haven't talked about probably in more than 10 years. So bear with me as I take you through this journey. When I was 22 years old, I came home from work, put a leash on my dog and went for my usual run. I had no idea that at that moment, my life was going to change forever. While I was preparing my dog for the run, a man was finishing drinking at a bar, picked up his car keys, got into a car and headed south, or wherever he was. I was running across the street, and the only thing that I actually remember is feeling like a grenade went off in my head. And I remember putting my hands on the ground and feeling my life's blood emptying out of my neck and my mouth. What had happened is, he ran a red light and hit me and my dog. She ended up underneath the car. I flew out in front of the car, and then he ran over my legs. My left leg got caught up in the wheel well — spun it around. The bumper of the car hit my throat, slicing it open. I ended up with blunt chest trauma. Your aorta comes up behind your heart, it's your major artery — and it was severed, so my blood was gurgling out of my mouth. It foamed, and ... horrible things were happening to me. I had no idea what was going on, but strangers intervened, kept my heart moving, beating. I say "moving," because it was quivering, and they were trying to put a beat back into it. Somebody was smart and put a Bic pen in my neck to open up my airway, so I could get some air in there. And my lung collapsed, so somebody cut me open and put a pen in there as well, to stop that catastrophic event from happening. Somehow I ended up at the hospital. I was wrapped in ice, and then eventually put into a drug-induced coma. Eighteen months later, I woke up. I was blind, I couldn't speak and I couldn't walk. I was 64 pounds. The hospital really has no idea what to do with people like that. And in fact, they started to call me a "gomer." That's another story we won't even get into. I had so many surgeries to put my neck back together, to repair my heart a few times. Some things worked, some things didn't. I had lots of titanium put in me; cadaver bones, to try to get my feet moving the right way. And I ended up with a plastic nose, porcelain teeth and all kinds of other things. But eventually, I started to look human again. But ... It's hard sometimes to talk about these things, so bear with me. I had more than 50 surgeries. But who's counting? (Laughter) So eventually, the hospital decided it was time for me to go. They needed to open up space for somebody else that they thought could come back from whatever they were going through. Everybody lost faith in me being able to recover. So they basically put a map up on the wall, threw a dart, and it landed at a senior home, here in Colorado. And I know all of you are scratching your head: "A senior citizens' home? What in the world are you going to do there?" But if you think about all of the skills and talent that are in this room right now, that's what a senior home has. So there were all these skills and talents that these seniors had. The one advantage they had over most of you is wisdom, because they had a long life. And I needed that wisdom at that moment in my life. But imagine what it was like for them when I showed up at their doorstep. At that point, I had gained four pounds, so I was 68 pounds. I was bald. I was wearing hospital scrubs. And somebody donated tennis shoes for me. And I had a white cane in one hand and a suitcase full of medical records in another hand. So the senior citizens realized that they needed to have an emergency meeting. (Laughter) So they pulled back and they were looking at each other, and they were going, "OK, what skills do we have in this room? This kid needs a lot of work." So they eventually started matching their talents and skills to all of my needs. But one of the first things they needed to do was assess what I needed right away. I needed to figure out how to eat like a normal human being, since I'd been eating through a tube in my chest and through my veins. So I had to go through trying to eat again. And they went through that process. And then they had to figure out: "Well, she needs furniture. She is sleeping in the corner of this apartment." So they went to their storage lockers and all gathered their extra furniture — gave me pots and pans, blankets — everything. And then the next thing that I needed was a makeover. (Laughter) So out went the green scrubs, and in came the polyester and floral prints. (Laughter) We're not going to talk about the hairstyles they tried to force on me once my hair grew back. But I did say no to the blue hair. (Laughter) So eventually, what went on is, they decided that, well, I need to learn to speak. You can't be an independent person if you're not able to speak and you can't see. So they figured not being able to see is one thing, but they need to get me to talk. So while Sally, the office manager, was teaching me to speak in the day — it's hard, because when you're a kid, you take things for granted. You learn things unconsciously. But for me, I was an adult and it was embarrassing, and I had to learn how to coordinate my new throat with my tongue and my new teeth and my lips, and capture the air and get the word out. So, I acted like a two-year-old, and refused to work. But the men had a better idea. They were going to make it fun for me. So they were teaching me cuss-word Scrabble at night. (Laughter) And then, secretly, how to swear like a sailor. (Laughter) I'm going to just leave it to your imagination as to what my first words were — (Laughter) when Sally finally got my confidence built. (Laughter) So I moved on from there. And a former teacher who happened to have Alzheimer's took on the task of teaching me to write. The redundancy was actually good for me. So, we'll just keep moving on. (Laughter) One of the pivotal times for me was actually learning to cross the street again as a blind person. So close your eyes. Now imagine you have to cross a street. You don't know how far that street is, and you don't know if you're going straight. And you hear cars whizzing back and forth, and you had a horrible accident that landed you in this situation. So there were two obstacles I had to get through. One was post-traumatic stress disorder. Every time I approached the corner or the curb, I would panic. And the second one was actually trying to figure out how to cross that street. So one of the seniors just came up to me, and she pushed me up to the corner and said, "When you think it's time to go, just stick the cane out there. If it's hit, don't cross the street." (Laughter) Made perfect sense. (Laughter) But by the third cane that went whizzing across the road — (Laughter) they realized that they needed to put their resources together, and they raised funds so that I could go to the Braille Institute and actually gain the skills to be a blind person, and also to go get a guide dog, who transformed my life. And I was able to return to college because of the senior citizens who invested in me, and also the guide dog and skill set I had gained. Ten years later, I gained my sight back. Not magically — I opted in for three surgeries, and one of them was experimental. It was actually robotic surgery that removed a hematoma from behind my eye. The biggest change for me was that the world moved forward, that there were innovations and all kinds of new things — cellphones, laptops, all these things that I had never seen before. And as a blind person, your visual memory fades, and is replaced with how you feel about things and how things sound and how things smell. So one day, I was in my room and I saw this thing sitting in my room. I thought it was a monster, so I was walking around it. And I go, "I'm just going to touch it." And I touched it and I went, "Oh my God, it's a laundry basket." (Laughter) Everything is different when you're a sighted person, because you take that for granted. But when you're blind, you have the tactile memory for things. The biggest change for me was looking down at my hands and seeing that I'd lost 10 years of my life. I thought that time had stood still for some reason and moved on for family and friends. But when I looked down, I realized that time marched on for me, too, and that I needed to get caught up. So I got going on it. We didn't have words like "crowdsourcing" and "radical collaboration" when I had my accident. But the concept held true — people working with people to rebuild me; people working with people to reeducate me. I wouldn't be standing here today if it wasn't for extreme radical collaboration. Thank you so much. (Applause)

My subversive (garden) plot

{0: 'Roger Doiron wants everyone to plant a garden. He’s the founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, a network of home gardeners.'}

TEDxDirigo

So, my name is Roger Doiron, and I have a subversive plot. (Laughter) (Applause) It is so subversive, in fact, that it has the potential to radically alter the balance of power, not only in our own country, but in the entire world. Now I realize, I'm sounding — (Laughter) a little bit like Dr. Evil now. I understand that. But trust me — we have very, very little in common. His plots are all about destruction and secrecy, whereas my plots are about creation and openness. In fact, my plot can only work if I share it with as many people as possible. So I'm going to share it with you now, but you have to promise me you're going to share it in turn. So here it is. Huh. That's not so good, is it? There's nothing particularly radical or revolutionary about a patch of grass. What starts to get interesting is when we turn it into this. Now, I would like to suggest to you all that gardening is a subversive activity. (Laughter) Think about this: food is a form of energy. It's what our body runs on, but it's also a form of power. And when we encourage people to grow some of their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their hands, power over their diet, power over their health and some power over their pocketbooks. So I think that's quite subversive, because we're also necessarily talking about taking that power away from someone else, from other actors in society that currently have power over food and health. You can think about who those actors might be. I also look at gardening as a sort of healthy gateway drug, you might say, to other forms of food freedom. It's not long after you plant a garden that you start to say, "Hey, I need to start to learn how to cook." (Laughter) "You know, I might want to look into food preservation or I might want to look up where my local farmer's market is located in my town." Now the other thing, of course, with planting a garden, especially a garden in front of a white house and on a sunny south lawn, is you never know who you might influence. (Laughter) Now, I'm not exactly sure what my white house garden's influence was on the First Lady's, but I can tell you this: she's had an enormous influence on me since planting hers. Now it hasn't been — (Laughter) it hasn't been in the area of fashion. I understand that she's just in a completely different league there, and I'm not even trying to compete. But she's really inspired me to think much more boldly about the role that I want to have in the garden movement. And so this is sort of what I'm aspiring to here. (Laughter) Now, pretty modest, right? I like this picture. I think it sort of captures me well, not that I have any divine connections whatsoever, but I like my facial expression there, because, if I've got a worried look on my face, it's not simply because I've got 20 pounds of squash over my head, but it's because I've got some pretty heavy topics on my mind. And I want to share some of those with you right now, starting off in the form of a very short video I've produced for you, which is my best effort to sum up the history of gastronomy in about 15 seconds. ("Also sprach Zarathustra" plays) (Laughter) So, here we are. (Applause) Now, that's a funny little clip, but it'd be even funnier if it weren't so tragic and if it weren't so true. The reality is that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic, and it's not simply limited to our country. It's spreading around the world right now. And in a sort of parallel universe, we're also seeing that hunger is on the rise. Over 900 million people right now are affected by it. That's three times the population of the United States. But at the same time, world food prices are rising and world population is rising and is set to reach 10 billion people by the end of the century. Now, another thing about the population is we know that it's increasing, but a lot of us don't realize that it's also changing. There's a fundamental shift taking place. As of 2007, we went from being a primarily rural planet to being a primarily urban one, and that has implications for how we're going to feed these people, how we're going to get the food to the people in the cities. Now, I imagine that there are some Stephen King fans in the audience here, and I'm one of them. But I can tell you, I haven't read anything scarier than this here, and that's this statistic: in order to keep up with the growing population, we're going to need to grow more food over the course of the next 50 years than we have grown over the course of the past 10,000 years combined. What makes this even more challenging is that we're going to need to grow all this food with less, and when I say less, I mean a number of things. Less oil, for example. Most reputable geologists believe that we've already reached peak oil production in the world. Now, you might not think in terms of oil and food as being linked, but there's a very strong link, in fact. It takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy in our highly industrialized food system in order to produce one calorie of food energy. We'll also need to grow more food with less water. These three images come from three very different parts of the planet, but they all tell the same story of catastrophic drought. We'll also need to grow more food with less farmland. Here, the pressures differ from one place to the next. In the Global South, we're seeing desertification, whereas in the north, we're seeing suburban sprawl. We'll also have to grow more food with less climate stability and less genetic diversity. Now, this is really important. We need our genetic varieties because they're a sort of insurance policy against climate change. We heard earlier today "not putting all of our eggs in one basket." Well, we shouldn't be doing the same with our tomatoes, either. We're also going to need to grow more food with less time. Now here, I'm not simply talking about the ticking time bomb that is the global population. I'm talking about the amount of time we all have in order to put a decent meal on the table. And that "31" figure there is not something arbitrary. That's the average amount of time the American family spends preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals per day. 31 minutes. So somewhere in there, we're going to need to also fit in growing food. Alright? And I think we do need to do that, but that's also going to mean that somewhere along the way, something's going to have to give. So it sort of leaves us feeling like this. (Laughter) You know? It's time to leave town or even perhaps leave planets. But where do we go? Where do we go when we only have one planet? And where do we go where the going gets tough? Well, if we were to listen to a lot of our political leaders over the years, we would simply go shopping. Right? Because we have this unwavering belief, especially in American political culture, that we can shop our way out of just about any problem. But the reality is something different. We're not going to solve our food problems and our health problems simply by switching from regular Coke to some future green iteration thereof. And although the large food companies would like us to believe that we can give our children all of the vitamins, minerals and immunity-building substances that they need without even leaving the chocolatey cereal aisle — (Laughter) the truth is something quite different. Now, what's become even more troublesome of late is that even the foods that ought to be healthy aren't always so, and we're starting to lose confidence in our food system, I think. The bigger it becomes and the more complex it becomes. And we've seen this time and time again. This is an image from the latest E. coli outbreak. In this case, it was in Europe, and we think it was started with bean sprouts, of all things. So we have this sort of shopper's dilemma right now. We have all of these different foods — 30,000 foods in the average big-box grocery store — but we have less confidence in those foods, and we have less confidence in the actors that are putting those foods on the shelves. I think we need to redefine what good food is. This is an interesting image from Berlin, Germany, where somebody started planting shopping carts and leaving them around. Those are potatoes, by the way. But in addition to redefining what good food is, I think we need to redefine our living spaces. Instead of seeing this as a yard, we need to think of it more as like a full-service greengrocer. That's, in fact, my yard, and that's how I look at it. That's what we transformed our yard into, and I think a really key message is this one: gardens grow good food. And when I say good food, I mean a number of different things. I mean food that is safe, food that is healthy, food that is absolutely gorgeous and delicious. Another important message is this one: gardens grow healthy kids and families. Those happen to be my two youngest sons, and they look healthy and they are healthy, and I think it has to do with the fact that they grew up in gardens and they know where good food comes from. And in fact, they know how to grow some of it themselves. But in the current economy, I think it's key to get this message out, that gardens also grow important economic savings for families. And you can pretty much take my word on this one, because in addition to crunching the vegetables a couple of years ago, my wife and I also crunched the numbers, and we found out that at the end, we had saved well over 2,000 dollars by growing our own food. So you could be asking this question now: If gardens grow all of these great things, how do we grow more gardens? That's, in fact, the question that my organization, Kitchen Gardens International, is both asking and answering. And our answer is essentially this one: we're going to need to leverage the resources and power that we have, the gardens and gardeners that we have, in order to grow and inspire even more. And as I said before, you never know who you might inspire. (Laughter) Now if this campaign was successful, I think it wasn't simply because we had a visionary First Lady taking up residence at the White House — that certainly was a major part of it — and it wasn't simply because we had some celebrity chefs and authors saying this would be a good idea to do. I think it was ultimately made possible by the fact that there were a lot of people who wanted it to happen. There was a movement that made it happen. And my organization tried to sort of channel some of that energy of the movement and direct it towards the White House. And we had a lot of luck in terms of getting our message out there to the media. We had a petition on Facebook, 110,000 signatures. We had viral images and videos, and we did crazy things like symbolically putting the White House lawn up for sale on eBay. But we need to do even more, and what we're trying to do in my organization is to connect people online, but also to connect people in person. This is an image from a little holiday we invented called "World Kitchen Garden Day." It's at the end of August each year, and it's just about bringing people together in gardens to learn from one another, to experience a garden as a community experience. We also need to grow the next generation of gardeners, and we're doing that in the United States and abroad. But there's still so much more that needs to be done, and I think this slide sort of captures where we need to go. We need a road map, and I picked this slide for a reason. We've got a bike garden on the left and a map of the Netherlands on the right. I was in the Netherlands early this year and was absolutely amazed by the amount of bikes on the road; 26 percent of all trips taken in the Netherlands are by bicycle, and it's gotten me thinking: How do we get that happening in terms of food and gardens? How would we get 26 percent of all produce coming from backyard gardens? That might sound like a lot, because we're probably at about two percent at the most right now. But if you take into consideration that at the peak of the victory garden movement last century, 40 percent of all produce was coming from gardens. We can get there again. And I think this is a really good start. The White House garden is certainly very inspirational. That's actually sort of a snapshot of what the garden looked like when it was planted earlier this spring — lots of diversity, lots of healthy crops. However, this is not a good representation of our federal agriculture policy. (Laughter) If we were to take the model here, the diagram of that particular garden, and sort of transpose it onto our federal agriculture policy, we'd get this: billions of billions of dollars going to support just a handful of commodity crops with just that tiny little bit at the top for fruits and vegetables. This is scandalous. This is scandalous. We need to do something about this. I think one place we could start is we could look at the tax code. We're already using the tax code to encourage green transport and green shelter. Why not green food? We're in the midst now of talking about another stimulus package. Why not a garden stimulus package? Why not? (Applause) In terms of other things that we need to be doing, we need to move down to the local level and we need to make sure that gardens are legal. This is an illegal garden. At least it was. It's from Michigan earlier this year. It was planted by a woman, a mother of four, and she nearly faced a 93-day jail sentence because she planted it in her front yard. We still have laws from the 20th century. We need to bring our codes up to the realities that we are facing now. We need to figure out also new ways of getting people into gardens, people who don't have yards. I think we also need to set garden entrepreneurism free, and I'm happy to say, as a Mainer, that we are leading the way in this area. Earlier this year, a number of Maine towns passed local food sovereignty laws that allow town residents to not only grow food where they want to grow it but to also sell it the way they want to sell it and to the people they want to sell it to. I think that's an incentive. There are a lot of gardeners out there that would be interested in scaling up their production if they could, if they had a financial incentive. I also think that we need to examine the composition of the movement right now. (Laughter) If the movement were a 1960s beach flick, it would be "Where The Boys Aren't." (Laughter) So I'm going to take you to task, guys. It's not right and it's not fair that the burden of this responsibility — feeding our country and the world — should be with the women. OK? (Applause) And I'm going to challenge the women to come up with really clever, creative ways of getting guys into the gardens, too. (Laughter) Perhaps wearing a bathing suit? (Laughter) But beyond that, I think we need to reexamine the infrastructure that we have in place for gardens. I think we need to create new infrastructure. And this is one of the things my organization is working on right now, sort of a local communications infrastructure, very place-based, that allows people in the same area to connect with one another and to help each other out. I think we're lacking this at the moment — (Laughter) but we can do it. The technology is certainly there. In addition to that, I think we need another type of infrastructure. It would be good if we could all get together. I think if we've learned anything through the TED experience, it's that there is power when we bring people together, and I think we need to bring people together at the local level as well. And I think we can take some inspiration from a previous movement, which was the grange movement, a rural movement which brought farmers together in a single building to meet and to recreate and learn how to become better farmers. I think we need a network of suburban granges now. I think one of the last things that we need is to not lose the fun of food. Food is at its best when it's delicious but shared as part of a community, and I think that gardens can get some of that community vibe back as well. So I'm going to leave with one last video, and I'm going to revisit the short video that I showed you before, but I'm going to suggest an alternative ending. And I think this ending is well within our reach, but it's really going to require that we all pull together. So here's the new history of gastronomy. ("Also sprach Zarathustra" plays) (Applause) (Applause and cheers) Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you.

Medicine for the 99 percent

{0: 'Philosopher Thomas Pogge wants to ensure medications get to those who need it most. He has published on a wide range of subjects such as global justice and human rights.'}

TEDxCanberra

I hope you're all healthy, and I hope we will all remain healthy for the indefinite future. But that hope is a little bit unrealistic, and so I've got a second back-up hope. The second back-up hope is that, insofar as we have health problems, we will have good medicines to take care of them. Medicines are very cheap to produce and they're very effective — much more pleasant, actually, than the alternatives: hospitalization, operations, emergency rooms, the morgue ... None of these are good things. So we should be very grateful that we have pharmacologists around, people who research these things and develop new medicines. And we should be grateful that we have a pharmaceutical industry that supports their activities. But there is a problem, and you can tell from the fact that the pharmaceutical industry isn't well-loved. In fact, in terms of popularity, they rank just about with the tobacco companies and the arms manufacturers. So that's the problem I want to talk with you about today. How would you organize the pharmaceutical industry? If we did it all over again, how would you do it? I think we would think of three main principles. The first one is: we want patients to have access to all the important medicines. Remember, these things are very cheap to produce. So everybody in the world should have access to all the important medicines. Secondly, we want innovative activities, the research and development that pharmaceutical companies do, to track the diseases that are the most important, the most damaging. We want them to aim for the greatest health impact. And thirdly, we want the whole system to be efficient. We want as little of the money that goes into the system to go to waste, to go for overhead, for red tape, and so on and so forth. Very simple three points. Now what about the existing system? I think it does poorly on all these three counts. First, universal access: forget about it. The vast majority of human beings do not have access to medicines, at least while they're still under patent. There are extremely high markups, and that's the problem. The problem is that even though these medicines are very cheap to produce, they cost a great amount of money during the time that they're under patent, and the reason for that is that rich people can pay a lot of money. Pharmaceutical companies have a temporary monopoly; they price for the rich, they forget about the poor. The second problem is innovation. Again, we don't focus on the diseases that do the most damage, and that's often put into the phrase "the 10/90 gap." Ten percent of all the money spent on pharmaceutical research is focusing on diseases that account for ninety percent of the global burden of disease. And vice versa — ninety percent of the money is spent on diseases that account for only ten percent of the global burden of disease. So there's a huge mismatch between where we spend the research money and where the greatest problems are. Now, both these problems — the problem with innovation and the problem with access — have to do with this: the distribution of money in the world. It's extremely unequal. The blue area here is the top quarter of the human population. They have more than ninety percent of the global household income. The bottom half of humanity, on the other hand, has not even three percent of global household income. So if you're a pharmaceutical company and you look for profit opportunities, you look at this sort of chart and say, "Where's the money? What am I going to research? Who am I going to provide with medicines?" And again, that is in the context of there being only one way in which pharmaceutical companies make money under the present system, that is, through patent-protected markups. That's how they make their money, through markups. And if you make money through markups, then obviously, you will go to where the people have the most income. Now in terms of overall efficiency, the system also does very, very poorly. A lot of money goes for lobbying politicians in order to extend patent periods — to "evergreen," as it's called. Data exclusivity and so on. A lot of money goes for gaming, where brand-name companies pay generic companies to delay entry, for example. A lot of money goes to take our patents in all the different jurisdictions. Money goes – even larger amounts – for litigation. They're litigating endlessly — brand-name company against brand-name company, brand-name company against generic company ... Enormous amounts go there. People say pharmaceutical companies make a lot of profit. Well, yes and no; they do, but a lot of it goes to these wasteful activities. Deadweight losses — I won't even tell you what they are, because it's too complicated. But there's also wasteful marketing. A lot of the money that pharmaceutical companies make goes into advertising campaigns, trying to win favor with doctors, trying to persuade patients to try this medicine. And these marketing battles, of course, are a pure waste, because what one company spends to get patients over to their drug, another company spends to win them back. And then there is counterfeiting in the developing countries. A lot of the drugs there, often more than fifty percent of what's sold, are counterfeit drugs, where people say, "Because the drug is so expensive, I can offer you a cheaper version." But of course it's not the real thing, it's either diluted or it's completely inert. So on the whole, all the money that is spent on pharmaceuticals — and it's roughly a trillion dollars now, per annum — much of that money is absolutely going to waste, it's not going to where it should be going, namely, to the development of new medicines and to the manufacturing of ones that we already have. Now, many people think that the solution to the problem is moral pressure on pharmaceutical companies. And, sure — pharmaceutical companies have moral obligations, just like we do. When we have to make a choice, often between having a little extra money and saving a human life, we often feel that we have a duty to spend the money and save the life. And why should pharmaceutical companies be any different? But really, it isn't realistic to expect pharmaceutical companies to act as well as you or maybe I might act. And the reason is threefold. One is that pharmaceutical companies are bound to their shareholders. The executive of such a company wouldn't last very long if he gave a lot of money away, or she, for good purposes, and thereby lost money for the shareholders. They would be replaced. Also, pharmaceutical companies stand in fierce competition with one another, and if you do more, if you are nicer than the other company, sooner or later, you'll be driven out of the market. You will not survive. The other company will gain market share. And finally, remember — the entire industry is dependent for its income on one thing and one thing only: markups. And ultimately, you have to be sustainable. If you spend a lot of money on helping poor people and you don't get paid for it, and you lose this money; you cannot continue with your innovative activities. So for these reasons, it's just unrealistic to expect that pharmaceutical companies will solve the problem on moral grounds. Who, then, should solve the problem? I suggest it has to be us. We, citizens and politicians, have to do better in terms of regulating the pharmaceutical industry, focusing them, giving them the right incentives, focusing them on the problems that really matter. The potential gains here are enormous. About one third of all deaths each day, each year, are due to the diseases of poverty in the developing world. Fifty thousand people every day die prematurely from these diseases. And that's not even counting all the diseases that we know only too well in the rich countries: cancer, heart disease and so on. Again, poor people die often much earlier, because they don't have good medical care, including good medicines. And even in rich countries, many patients are not getting the best medicine. That's sometimes due to the fact that insurance companies won't cover it, because the price is so absolutely ridiculous. And it's also due, sometimes, to the fact that doctors and patients are falsely influenced by advertising campaigns of pharmaceutical companies. So what can we do? How can we change the system? I want to show you a way in which we can better incentivize pharmaceutical innovation and the provision [of] medicines to poor people and rich alike. And that is the Health Impact Fund. The Health Impact Fund is basically opening up the second track with which pharmaceutical innovators can be rewarded for their activities. They have a choice. They can either go with the old system, with patent-protected markups, or they can go with the new system, being rewarded on the basis of the health impact of the medicines that they develop. And with each particular medicine, they have their choice. So they can be partly on one track, partly on the other, with different products. Now, how would the Health Impact Fund work? There would be a fixed reward pool every year. We start with maybe six billion dollars, but that can eventually be revved up. Remember that the total money that the world spends on pharmaceuticals is a trillion. So it's a thousand billion; six billion is a drop in the bucket. It's relatively small, but it would work with six billion, and we'd get a lot of bang for the buck if we introduced the Health Impact Fund with just six billion dollars. If you have a product and you want to register it with the Health Impact Fund, you will be rewarded for a period of 10 years. During these 10 years, you get a share of these annual reward pools. That share would be proportional to your share of the health impact achieved by all these registered products. So if your product accounts for eight percent of the health impact of all the registered products, you get eight percent of the reward money that year. That repeats for 10 years, and at the end of the 10 years, your product goes generic, so you basically lose any further income from it. Each year, the health impact from your product would be evaluated, and you would be paid on that basis. Now, if you take that reward from the Health Impact Fund, you can't claim the other reward, you can't mark up the price. You have to sell at cost. What does that mean? Well, it doesn't mean that the pharmaceutical company tells us what their cost is; but rather, our preferred way of determining what the real cost is of making a medicine, of manufacturing it, is to ask the registrant to put the production of the medicine out for tender, let generic companies compete for the production, and then the innovator would buy the product from the cheapest supplier and would sell it at that same lowest possible price to patients. So the innovator would make no money at all on selling the product, but would make all its money from the health impact rewards. Now, how do we assess the impact of the introduction of a medicine? Well, we assess it relative to the preceding state of the art. So some people, before the medicine came along, had no treatment at all. Now for the first time, they have treatment, because it's cheap; people can afford it. So here, the impact is the difference between being treated and not being treated. In other cases, the new product is better than the old products, and so a person gets switched over to a better product, and we pay for the impact, for the difference the new product makes. If you have a product on the Health Impact Fund and you simply switch somebody from an existing product to another product, to your product, and it's no better, you get no money. That's in stark contrast to the existing system, where you get a lot of money for switching somebody from one product to an equal product that is your product. The Health Impact Fund does not pay for that. We quantify health impact in terms of quality-adjusted life years. That method has been around for about 20 years, and it's very easy to explain. Just think of a human life as a kind of plank. It's eighty inches long, one inch high. And when you die prematurely before you reach 80, well, the plank is a little shorter. And if you're sick during the time that you live, the plank is a little bit thinner. And what diseases can nibble away, medicines can restore, or medicines can avert the taking away of these parts. And they get paid for that. That's the method, basically. Now, we look – of course, each year, we have to assess. We have to spend a considerable amount of money looking at how these various medicines that are registered with the Health Impact Fund are doing in various countries. And here, statistics is extremely helpful. You all know how exit polling works. This is a similar method. You look for a statistically significant sample, and then try to figure out what the health impact of the medicine is in different locations, in different demographic groups ... And, of course, you look very carefully at the actual world — this is in contrast to how medicines are today rewarded. Sometimes, there is a reward based on performance, but it's the performance in clinical trials, in the laboratory, if you like, and not the performance in the real world. The Health Impact Fund would look at real-world impact. It would look not just at the quality of a drug, but also at how widely it is distributed, whether the innovator manages to target those patients who can benefit the most, and also, how well the drug is used in the field. So innovators would have much stronger incentives than they do now to make sure that every patient who takes the drug knows exactly how to take it to optimal effect. Today, most packaged inserts are not even translated into local languages, and so it's not surprising that patients don't make the best use of the product. Now, how would the financing work? Basically, the Health Impact Fund, as I said, could start with something like six billion dollars. It's not nothing, but it's also not a lot of money, compared to what the world is already spending on pharmaceuticals. So the best way to think of it is as a new way of paying for what we are already paying for, namely, new medicines. You pay with one hand through the tax system, but you get something back with the other hand, because you also get these medicines for cheap. This is not just for poor people — everybody will have these Health Impact Fund registered medicines at cost, at a very low price. One very important hurdle here, politically, is that we have to make sure that we have long-term visibility for innovators, that innovators know that the money is actually there, and so we need governments to fund the Health Impact Fund, because only governments can make predictable commitments for a long period of time. Because the Health Impact Fund registration is voluntary, you basically have a self-adjusting reward rate. As the rate rises too high, innovators will come in and drive the rate down. Conversely, if the rate falls too low, innovators would be reluctant to register, and the rate will recover. So the rate will always be at a reasonable level. The Health Impact Fund is beneficial for all parties. It benefits innovators by giving them a new market, and most importantly, by overcoming their public relations problems that we started with. It benefits patients, because patients are much more likely to get the right medicine, and also for these medicines to be developed, the medicines that we most need. And it also benefits governments or taxpayers, if you like, because it creates a permanent source of pharmaceutical innovation that will be here for all future times. It's a kind of machine that always directs pharmaceutical innovation to where we have the greatest problems, maybe for diseases that don't even exist yet. The Health Impact Fund will always channel innovation in the direction where it's most needed. Now, we have a little bit of help already. You can see here the number of people who have agreed to help us, but we want your help as well. We want you to join us, maybe to talk with your government to help us with publicity, to help us with your ideas in perfecting the Health Impact Fund scheme. And what we most urgently need for the moment is to start a pilot. The pilot would introduce one medicine into one jurisdiction on the Health Impact Fund model. The innovator would get paid according to the cost of the medicine for the sales, and would then get additional money on the basis of the health impact. Here, we need funding for the rewards, funding for the assessment, and in particular, we need political support to get politicians to support a pilot of that sort. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to write us and contact us at this address. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The quest to understand consciousness

{0: "Antonio Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making. His work has had a major influence on current understanding of the neural systems, which underlie memory, language, consciousness."}

TED2011

I'm here to talk about the wonder and the mystery of conscious minds. The wonder is about the fact that we all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder. We should, in fact, because without having this possibility of conscious minds, we would have no knowledge whatsoever about our humanity; we would have no knowledge whatsoever about the world. We would have no pains, but also no joys. We would have no access to love or to the ability to create. And of course, Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness and even the possibility of transcendence. So much for the wonder, now for the mystery. This is a mystery that has really been extremely hard to elucidate. All the way back into early philosophy and certainly throughout the history of neuroscience, this has been one mystery that has always resisted elucidation, has got major controversies. And there are actually many people that think we should not even touch it; we should just leave it alone, it's not to be solved. I don't believe that, and I think the situation is changing. It would be ridiculous to claim that we know how we make consciousness in our brains, but we certainly can begin to approach the question, and we can begin to see the shape of a solution. And one more wonder to celebrate is the fact that we have imaging technologies that now allow us to go inside the human brain and be able to do, for example, what you're seeing right now. These are images that come from Hanna Damasio's lab, and which show you, in a living brain, the reconstruction of that brain. And this is a person who is alive. This is not a person that is being studied at autopsy. And even more — and this is something that one can be really amazed about — is what I'm going to show you next, which is going underneath the surface of the brain and actually looking in the living brain at real connections, real pathways. So all of those colored lines correspond to bunches of axons, the fibers that join cell bodies to synapses. And I'm sorry to disappoint you, they don't come in color. But at any rate, they are there. The colors are codes for the direction, from whether it is back to front or vice versa. At any rate, what is consciousness? What is a conscious mind? And we could take a very simple view and say, well, it is that which we lose when we fall into deep sleep without dreams, or when we go under anesthesia, and it is what we regain when we recover from sleep or from anesthesia. But what is exactly that stuff that we lose under anesthesia, or when we are in deep, dreamless sleep? Well first of all, it is a mind, which is a flow of mental images. And of course consider images that can be sensory patterns, visual, such as you're having right now in relation to the stage and me, or auditory images, as you are having now in relation to my words. That flow of mental images is mind. But there is something else that we are all experiencing in this room. We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now. We own our minds. And we have a sense that it's everyone of us that is experiencing this — not the person who is sitting next to you. So in order to have a conscious mind, you have a self within the conscious mind. So a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it. The self introduces the subjective perspective in the mind, and we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind. So what we need to know to even address this mystery is, number one, how are minds are put together in the brain, and, number two, how selves are constructed. Now the first part, the first problem, is relatively easy — it's not easy at all — but it is something that has been approached gradually in neuroscience. And it's quite clear that, in order to make minds, we need to construct neural maps. So imagine a grid, like the one I'm showing you right now, and now imagine, within that grid, that two-dimensional sheet, imagine neurons. And picture, if you will, a billboard, a digital billboard, where you have elements that can be either lit or not. And depending on how you create the pattern of lighting or not lighting, the digital elements, or, for that matter, the neurons in the sheet, you're going to be able to construct a map. This, of course, is a visual map that I'm showing you, but this applies to any kind of map — auditory, for example, in relation to sound frequencies, or to the maps that we construct with our skin in relation to an object that we palpate. Now to bring home the point of how close it is — the relationship between the grid of neurons and the topographical arrangement of the activity of the neurons and our mental experience — I'm going to tell you a personal story. So if I cover my left eye — I'm talking about me personally, not all of you — if I cover my left eye, I look at the grid — pretty much like the one I'm showing you. Everything is nice and fine and perpendicular. But sometime ago, I discovered that if I cover my left eye, instead what I get is this. I look at the grid and I see a warping at the edge of my central-left field. Very odd — I've analyzed this for a while. But sometime ago, through the help of an opthamologist colleague of mine, Carmen Puliafito, who developed a laser scanner of the retina, I found out the the following. If I scan my retina through the horizontal plane that you see there in the little corner, what I get is the following. On the right side, my retina is perfectly symmetrical. You see the going down towards the fovea where the optic nerve begins. But on my left retina there is a bump, which is marked there by the red arrow. And it corresponds to a little cyst that is located below. And that is exactly what causes the warping of my visual image. So just think of this: you have a grid of neurons, and now you have a plane mechanical change in the position of the grid, and you get a warping of your mental experience. So this is how close your mental experience and the activity of the neurons in the retina, which is a part of the brain located in the eyeball, or, for that matter, a sheet of visual cortex. So from the retina you go onto visual cortex. And of course, the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina. And in that image there, you see a variety of islands of what I call image-making regions in the brain. You have the green for example, that corresponds to tactile information, or the blue that corresponds to auditory information. And something else that happens is that those image-making regions where you have the plotting of all these neural maps, can then provide signals to this ocean of purple that you see around, which is the association cortex, where you can make records of what went on in those islands of image-making. And the great beauty is that you can then go from memory, out of those association cortices, and produce back images in the very same regions that have perception. So think about how wonderfully convenient and lazy the brain is. So it provides certain areas for perception and image-making. And those are exactly the same that are going to be used for image-making when we recall information. So far the mystery of the conscious mind is diminishing a little bit because we have a general sense of how we make these images. But what about the self? The self is really the elusive problem. And for a long time, people did not even want to touch it, because they'd say, "How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?" And I thought about a solution to this problem. It's the following. We generate brain maps of the body's interior and use them as the reference for all other maps. So let me tell you just a little bit about how I came to this. I came to this because, if you're going to have a reference that we know as self — the Me, the I in our own processing — we need to have something that is stable, something that does not deviate much from day to day. Well it so happens that we have a singular body. We have one body, not two, not three. And so that is a beginning. There is just one reference point, which is the body. But then, of course, the body has many parts, and things grow at different rates, and they have different sizes and different people; however, not so with the interior. The things that have to do with what is known as our internal milieu — for example, the whole management of the chemistries within our body are, in fact, extremely maintained day after day for one very good reason. If you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the midline of that life-permitting survival range, you go into disease or death. So we have an in-built system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity. I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day. Because if you don't have that sameness, physiologically, you're going to be sick or you're going to die. So that's one more element for this continuity. And the final thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulation of our body within the brain and the body itself, unlike any other coupling. So for example, I'm making images of you, but there's no physiological bond between the images I have of you as an audience and my brain. However, there is a close, permanently maintained bond between the body regulating parts of my brain and my own body. So here's how it looks. Look at the region there. There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord. And it is within that region that I'm going to highlight now that we have this housing of all the life-regulation devices of the body. This is so specific that, for example, if you look at the part that is covered in red in the upper part of the brain stem, if you damage that as a result of a stroke, for example, what you get is coma or vegetative state, which is a state, of course, in which your mind disappears, your consciousness disappears. What happens then actually is that you lose the grounding of the self, you have no longer access to any feeling of your own existence, and, in fact, there can be images going on, being formed in the cerebral cortex, except you don't know they're there. You have, in effect, lost consciousness when you have damage to that red section of the brain stem. But if you consider the green part of the brain stem, nothing like that happens. It is that specific. So in that green component of the brain stem, if you damage it, and often it happens, what you get is complete paralysis, but your conscious mind is maintained. You feel, you know, you have a fully conscious mind that you can report very indirectly. This is a horrific condition. You don't want to see it. And people are, in fact, imprisoned within their own bodies, but they do have a mind. There was a very interesting film, one of the rare good films done about a situation like this, by Julian Schnabel some years ago about a patient that was in that condition. So now I'm going to show you a picture. I promise not to say anything about this, except this is to frighten you. It's just to tell you that in that red section of the brain stem, there are, to make it simple, all those little squares that correspond to modules that actually make brain maps of different aspects of our interior, different aspects of our body. They are exquisitely topographic and they are exquisitely interconnected in a recursive pattern. And it is out of this and out of this tight coupling between the brain stem and the body that I believe — and I could be wrong, but I don't think I am — that you generate this mapping of the body that provides the grounding for the self and that comes in the form of feelings — primordial feelings, by the way. So what is the picture that we get here? Look at "cerebral cortex," look at "brain stem," look at "body," and you get the picture of the interconnectivity in which you have the brain stem providing the grounding for the self in a very tight interconnection with the body. And you have the cerebral cortex providing the great spectacle of our minds with the profusion of images that are, in fact, the contents of our minds and that we normally pay most attention to, as we should, because that's really the film that is rolling in our minds. But look at the arrows. They're not there for looks. They're there because there's this very close interaction. You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between cerebral cortex and brain stem. You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between the brain stem and the body. Another thing that is interesting is that the brain stem that we have is shared with a variety of other species. So throughout vertebrates, the design of the brain stem is very similar to ours, which is one of the reasons why I think those other species have conscious minds like we do. Except that they're not as rich as ours, because they don't have a cerebral cortex like we do. That's where the difference is. And I strongly disagree with the idea that consciousness should be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex. Only the wealth of our minds is, not the very fact that we have a self that we can refer to our own existence, and that we have any sense of person. Now there are three levels of self to consider — the proto, the core and the autobiographical. The first two are shared with many, many other species, and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species. It's the autobiographical self which some species have, I think. Cetaceans and primates have also an autobiographical self to a certain degree. And everybody's dogs at home have an autobiographical self to a certain degree. But the novelty is here. The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future. And the autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture — religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology. And it is within that culture that we really can get — and this is the novelty — something that is not entirely set by our biology. It is developed in the cultures. It developed in collectives of human beings. And this is, of course, the culture where we have developed something that I like to call socio-cultural regulation. And finally, you could rightly ask, why care about this? Why care if it is the brain stem or the cerebral cortex and how this is made? Three reasons. First, curiosity. Primates are extremely curious — and humans most of all. And if we are interested, for example, in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the Earth, why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings? Second, understanding society and culture. We should look at how society and culture in this socio-cultural regulation are a work in progress. And finally, medicine. Let's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression, Alzheimer's disease, drug addiction. Think of strokes that can devastate your mind or render you unconscious. You have no prayer of treating those diseases effectively and in a non-serendipitous way if you do not know how this works. So that's a very good reason beyond curiosity to justify what we're doing, and to justify having some interest in what is going on in our brains. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)

A prosthetic eye to treat blindness

{0: 'Sheila Nirenberg studies how the brain encodes information -- possibly allowing us to decode it, and maybe develop prosthetic sensory devices.'}

TEDMED 2011

I study how the brain processes information. That is, how it takes information in from the outside world, and converts it into patterns of electrical activity, and then how it uses those patterns to allow you to do things — to see, hear, to reach for an object. So I'm really a basic scientist, not a clinician, but in the last year and a half I've started to switch over, to use what we've been learning about these patterns of activity to develop prosthetic devices, and what I wanted to do today is show you an example of this. It's really our first foray into this. It's the development of a prosthetic device for treating blindness. So let me start in on that problem. There are 10 million people in the U.S. and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina, diseases like macular degeneration, and there's little that can be done for them. There are some drug treatments, but they're only effective on a small fraction of the population. And so, for the vast majority of patients, their best hope for regaining sight is through prosthetic devices. The problem is that current prosthetics don't work very well. They're still very limited in the vision that they can provide. And so, you know, for example, with these devices, patients can see simple things like bright lights and high contrast edges, not very much more, so nothing close to normal vision has been possible. So what I'm going to tell you about today is a device that we've been working on that I think has the potential to make a difference, to be much more effective, and what I wanted to do is show you how it works. Okay, so let me back up a little bit and show you how a normal retina works first so you can see the problem that we were trying to solve. Here you have a retina. So you have an image, a retina, and a brain. So when you look at something, like this image of this baby's face, it goes into your eye and it lands on your retina, on the front-end cells here, the photoreceptors. Then what happens is the retinal circuitry, the middle part, goes to work on it, and what it does is it performs operations on it, it extracts information from it, and it converts that information into a code. And the code is in the form of these patterns of electrical pulses that get sent up to the brain, and so the key thing is that the image ultimately gets converted into a code. And when I say code, I do literally mean code. Like this pattern of pulses here actually means "baby's face," and so when the brain gets this pattern of pulses, it knows that what was out there was a baby's face, and if it got a different pattern it would know that what was out there was, say, a dog, or another pattern would be a house. Anyway, you get the idea. And, of course, in real life, it's all dynamic, meaning that it's changing all the time, so the patterns of pulses are changing all the time because the world you're looking at is changing all the time too. So, you know, it's sort of a complicated thing. You have these patterns of pulses coming out of your eye every millisecond telling your brain what it is that you're seeing. So what happens when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration? What happens is is that, the front-end cells die, the photoreceptors die, and over time, all the cells and the circuits that are connected to them, they die too. Until the only things that you have left are these cells here, the output cells, the ones that send the signals to the brain, but because of all that degeneration they aren't sending any signals anymore. They aren't getting any input, so the person's brain no longer gets any visual information — that is, he or she is blind. So, a solution to the problem, then, would be to build a device that could mimic the actions of that front-end circuitry and send signals to the retina's output cells, and they can go back to doing their normal job of sending signals to the brain. So this is what we've been working on, and this is what our prosthetic does. So it consists of two parts, what we call an encoder and a transducer. And so the encoder does just what I was saying: it mimics the actions of the front-end circuitry — so it takes images in and converts them into the retina's code. And then the transducer then makes the output cells send the code on up to the brain, and the result is a retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output. So a completely blind retina, even one with no front-end circuitry at all, no photoreceptors, can now send out normal signals, signals that the brain can understand. So no other device has been able to do this. Okay, so I just want to take a sentence or two to say something about the encoder and what it's doing, because it's really the key part and it's sort of interesting and kind of cool. I'm not sure "cool" is really the right word, but you know what I mean. So what it's doing is, it's replacing the retinal circuitry, really the guts of the retinal circuitry, with a set of equations, a set of equations that we can implement on a chip. So it's just math. In other words, we're not literally replacing the components of the retina. It's not like we're making a little mini-device for each of the different cell types. We've just abstracted what the retina's doing with a set of equations. And so, in a way, the equations are serving as sort of a codebook. An image comes in, goes through the set of equations, and out comes streams of electrical pulses, just like a normal retina would produce. Now let me put my money where my mouth is and show you that we can actually produce normal output, and what the implications of this are. Here are three sets of firing patterns. The top one is from a normal animal, the middle one is from a blind animal that's been treated with this encoder-transducer device, and the bottom one is from a blind animal treated with a standard prosthetic. So the bottom one is the state-of-the-art device that's out there right now, which is basically made up of light detectors, but no encoder. So what we did was we presented movies of everyday things — people, babies, park benches, you know, regular things happening — and we recorded the responses from the retinas of these three groups of animals. Now just to orient you, each box is showing the firing patterns of several cells, and just as in the previous slides, each row is a different cell, and I just made the pulses a little bit smaller and thinner so I could show you a long stretch of data. So as you can see, the firing patterns from the blind animal treated with the encoder-transducer really do very closely match the normal firing patterns — and it's not perfect, but it's pretty good — and the blind animal treated with the standard prosthetic, the responses really don't. And so with the standard method, the cells do fire, they just don't fire in the normal firing patterns because they don't have the right code. How important is this? What's the potential impact on a patient's ability to see? So I'm just going to show you one bottom-line experiment that answers this, and of course I've got a lot of other data, so if you're interested I'm happy to show more. So the experiment is called a reconstruction experiment. So what we did is we took a moment in time from these recordings and asked, what was the retina seeing at that moment? Can we reconstruct what the retina was seeing from the responses from the firing patterns? So, when we did this for responses from the standard method and from our encoder and transducer. So let me show you, and I'm going to start with the standard method first. So you can see that it's pretty limited, and because the firing patterns aren't in the right code, they're very limited in what they can tell you about what's out there. So you can see that there's something there, but it's not so clear what that something is, and this just sort of circles back to what I was saying in the beginning, that with the standard method, patients can see high-contrast edges, they can see light, but it doesn't easily go further than that. So what was the image? It was a baby's face. So what about with our approach, adding the code? And you can see that it's much better. Not only can you tell that it's a baby's face, but you can tell that it's this baby's face, which is a really challenging task. So on the left is the encoder alone, and on the right is from an actual blind retina, so the encoder and the transducer. But the key one really is the encoder alone, because we can team up the encoder with the different transducer. This is just actually the first one that we tried. I just wanted to say something about the standard method. When this first came out, it was just a really exciting thing, the idea that you even make a blind retina respond at all. But there was this limiting factor, the issue of the code, and how to make the cells respond better, produce normal responses, and so this was our contribution. Now I just want to wrap up, and as I was mentioning earlier of course I have a lot of other data if you're interested, but I just wanted to give this sort of basic idea of being able to communicate with the brain in its language, and the potential power of being able to do that. So it's different from the motor prosthetics where you're communicating from the brain to a device. Here we have to communicate from the outside world into the brain and be understood, and be understood by the brain. And then the last thing I wanted to say, really, is to emphasize that the idea generalizes. So the same strategy that we used to find the code for the retina we can also use to find the code for other areas, for example, the auditory system and the motor system, so for treating deafness and for motor disorders. So just the same way that we were able to jump over the damaged circuitry in the retina to get to the retina's output cells, we can jump over the damaged circuitry in the cochlea to get the auditory nerve, or jump over damaged areas in the cortex, in the motor cortex, to bridge the gap produced by a stroke. I just want to end with a simple message that understanding the code is really, really important, and if we can understand the code, the language of the brain, things become possible that didn't seem obviously possible before. Thank you. (Applause)

The battle between your present and future self

{0: 'Daniel Goldstein studies how we make decisions about our financial selves -- both now and in the future,'}

TEDSalon NY2011

Do you remember the story of Odysseus and the Sirens from high school or junior high school? There was this hero, Odysseus, who's heading back home after the Trojan War. And he's standing on the deck of his ship, he's talking to his first mate, and he's saying, "Tomorrow, we will sail past those rocks, and on those rocks sit some beautiful women called Sirens. And these women sing an enchanting song, a song so alluring that all sailors who hear it crash into the rocks and die." Now you would expect, given that, that they would choose an alternate route around the Sirens, but instead Odysseus says, "I want to hear that song. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pour wax in the ears of you and all the men — stay with me — so that you can't hear the song, and then I'm going to have you tie me to the mast so that I can listen and we can all sail by unaffected." So this is a captain putting the life of every single person on the ship at risk so that he can hear a song. And I'd like to think if this was the case, they probably would have rehearsed it a few times. Odysseus would have said, "Okay, let's do a dry run. You tie me to the mast, and I'm going to beg and plead. And no matter what I say, you cannot untie me from the mast. All right, so tie me to the mast." And the first mate takes a rope and ties Odysseus to the mast in a nice knot. And Odysseus does his best job playacting and says, "Untie me. Untie me. I want to hear that song. Untie me." And the first mate wisely resists and doesn't untie Odysseus. And then Odysseus says, "I see that you can get it. All right, untie me now and we'll get some dinner." And the first mate hesitates. He's like, "Is this still the rehearsal, or should I untie him?" And the first mate thinks, "Well, I guess at some point the rehearsal has to end." So he unties Odysseus, and Odysseus flips out. He's like, "You idiot. You moron. If you do that tomorrow, I'll be dead, you'll be dead, every single one of the men will be dead. Now just don't untie me no matter what." He throws the first mate to the ground. This repeats itself through the night — rehearsal, tying to the mast, conning his way out of it, beating the poor first mate up mercilessly. Hilarity ensues. Tying yourself to a mast is perhaps the oldest written example of what psychologists call a commitment device. A commitment device is a decision that you make with a cool head to bind yourself so that you don't do something regrettable when you have a hot head. Because there's two heads inside one person when you think about it. Scholars have long invoked this metaphor of two selves when it comes to questions of temptation. There is first, the present self. This is like Odysseus when he's hearing the song. He just wants to get to the front row. He just thinks about the here and now and the immediate gratification. But then there's this other self, the future self. This is Odysseus as an old man who wants nothing more than to retire in a sunny villa with his wife Penelope outside of Ithaca — the other one. So why do we need commitment devices? Well resisting temptation is hard, as the 19th century English economist Nassau William Senior said, "To abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results, are among the most painful exertions of the human will." If you set goals for yourself and you're like a lot of other people, you probably realize it's not that your goals are physically impossible that's keeping you from achieving them, it's that you lack the self-discipline to stick to them. It's physically possible to lose weight. It's physically possible to exercise more. But resisting temptation is hard. The other reason that it's difficult to resist temptation is because it's an unequal battle between the present self and the future self. I mean, let's face it, the present self is present. It's in control. It's in power right now. It has these strong, heroic arms that can lift doughnuts into your mouth. And the future self is not even around. It's off in the future. It's weak. It doesn't even have a lawyer present. There's nobody to stick up for the future self. And so the present self can trounce all over its dreams. So there's this battle between the two selves that's being fought, and we need commitment devices to level the playing field between the two. Now I'm a big fan of commitment devices actually. Tying yourself to the mast is the oldest one, but there are other ones such as locking a credit card away with a key or not bringing junk food into the house so you won't eat it or unplugging your Internet connection so you can use your computer. I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers or I would have to give up five dollars. And when you try to execute these commitment devices, you realize the devil is really in the details. Because it's not that easy to get rid of five dollars. I mean, you can't burn it; that's illegal. And I thought, well I could give it to a charity or give it to my wife or something like that. But then I thought, oh, I'm sending myself mixed messages. Because not writing is bad, but giving to charity is good. So then I would kind of justify not writing by giving a gift. And then I kind of flipped that around and thought, well I could give it to the neo-Nazis. But then I was like, that's more bad than writing is good, and so that wouldn't work. So ultimately, I just decided I would leave it in an envelope on the subway. Sometimes a good person would find it, sometimes a bad person would find it. On average, it was just a completely pointless exchange of money that I would regret. (Laughter) Such it is with commitment devices. But despite my like for them, there's two nagging concerns that I've always had about commitment devices, and you might feel this if you use them yourself. So the first is, when you've got one of these devices going, such as this contract to write everyday or pay, it's just a constant reminder that you have no self-control. You're just telling yourself, "Without you, commitment device, I am nothing, I have no self-discipline." And then when you're ever in a situation where you don't have a commitment device in place — like, "Oh my God, that person's offering me a doughnut, and I have no defense mechanism," — you just eat it. So I don't like the way that they take the power away from you. I think self-discipline is something, it's like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. The other problem with commitment devices is that you can always weasel your way out of them. You say, "Well, of course I can't write today, because I'm giving a TEDTalk and I have five media interviews, and then I'm going to a cocktail party and then I'll be drunk after that. And so there's no way that this is going to work." So in effect, you are like Odysseus and the first mate in one person. You're putting yourself, you're binding yourself, and you're weaseling your way out of it, and then you're beating yourself up afterwards. So I've been working for about a decade now on finding other ways to change people's relationship to the future self without using commitment devices. In particular, I'm interested in the relationship to the future financial self. And this is a timely issue. I'm talking about the topic of saving. Now saving is a classic two selves problem. The present self does not want to save at all. It wants to consume. Whereas the future self wants the present self to save. So this is a timely problem. We look at the savings rate and it has been declining since the 1950s. At the same time, the Retirement Risk Index, the chance of not being able to meet your needs in retirement, has been increasing. And we're at a situation now where for every three baby boomers, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that two will not be able to meet their pre-retirement needs while they're in retirement. So what can we do about this? There's a philosopher, Derek Parfit, who said some words that were inspiring to my coauthors and I. He said that, "We might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination." That is to say, we somehow might not believe that we're going to get old, or we might not be able to imagine that we're going to get old some day. On the one hand, it sounds ridiculous. Of course, we know that we're going to get old. But aren't there things that we believe and don't believe at the same time? So my coauthors and I have used computers, the greatest tool of our time, to assist people's imagination and help them imagine what it might be like to go into the future. And I'll show you some of these tools right here. The first is called the distribution builder. It shows people what the future might be like by showing them a hundred equally probable outcomes that might be obtained in the future. Each outcome is shown by one of these markers, and each sits on a row that represents a level of wealth and retirement. Being up at the top means that you're enjoying a high income in retirement. Being down at the bottom means that you're struggling to make ends meet. When you make an investment, what you're really saying is, "I accept that any one of these 100 things could happen to me and determine my wealth." Now you can try to move your outcomes around. You can try to manipulate your fate, like this person is doing, but it costs you something to do it. It means that you have to save more today. Once you find an investment that you're happy with, what people do is they click "done" and the markers begin to disappear, slowly, one by one. It simulates what it is like to invest in something and to watch that investment pan out. At the end, there will only be one marker left standing and it will determine our wealth in retirement. Yes, this person retired at 150 percent of their working income in retirement. They're making more money while retired than they were making while they were working. If you're like most people, just seeing that gave you a small sense of elation and joy — just to think about making 50 percent more money in retirement than before. However, had you ended up on the very bottom, it might have given you a slight sense of dread and/or nausea thinking about struggling to get by in retirement. By using this tool over and over and simulating outcome after outcome, people can understand that the investments and savings that they undertake today determine their well-being in the future. Now people are motivated through emotions, but different people find different things motivating. This is a simulation that uses graphics, but other people find motivating what money can buy, not just numbers. So here I made a distribution builder where instead of showing numerical outcomes, I show people what those outcomes will get you, in particular apartments that you can afford if you're retiring on 3,000, 2,500, 2,000 dollars per month and so on. As you move down the ladder of apartments, you see that they get worse and worse. Some of them look like places I lived in as a graduate student. And as you get to the very bottom, you're faced with the unfortunate reality that if you don't save anything for retirement, you won't be able to afford any housing at all. Those are actual pictures of actual apartments renting for that amount as advertised on the Internet. The last thing I'll show you, the last behavioral time machine, is something that I created with Hal Hershfield, who was introduced to me by my coauthor on a previous project, Bill Sharpe. And what it is is an exploration into virtual reality. So what we do is we take pictures of people — in this case, college-age people — and we use software to age them and show these people what they'll look like when they're 60, 70, 80 years old. And we try to test whether actually assisting your imagination by looking at the face of your future self can change you investment behavior. So this is one of our experiments. Here we see the face of the young subject on the left. He's given a control that allows him to adjust his savings rate. As he moves his savings rate down, it means that he's saving zero when it's all the way here at the left. You can see his current annual income — this is the percentage of his paycheck that he can take home today — is quite high, 91 percent, but his retirement income is quite low. He's going to retire on 44 percent of what he earned while he was working. If he saves the maximum legal amount, his retirement income goes up, but he's unhappy because now he has less money on the left-hand side to spend today. Other conditions show people the future self. And from the future self's point of view, everything is in reverse. If you save very little, the future self is unhappy living on 44 percent of the income. Whereas if the present self saves a lot, the future self is delighted, where the income is close up near 100 percent. To bring this to a wider audience, I've been working with Hal and Allianz to create something we call the behavioral time machine, in which you not only get to see yourself in the future, but you get to see anticipated emotional reactions to different levels of retirement wealth. So for instance, here is somebody using the tool. And just watch the facial expressions as they move the slider. The younger face gets happier and happier, saving nothing. The older face is miserable. And slowly, slowly we're bringing it up to a moderate savings rate. And then it's a high savings rate. The younger face is getting unhappy. The older face is quite pleased with the decision. We're going to see if this has an effect on what people do. And what's nice about it is it's not something that biasing people actually, because as one face smiles, the other face frowns. It's not telling you which way to put the slider, it's just reminding you that you are connected to and legally tied to this future self. Your decisions today are going to determine its well-being. And that's something that's easy to forget. This use of virtual reality is not just good for making people look older. There are programs you can get to see how people might look if they smoke, if they get too much exposure to the sun, if they gain weight and so on. And what's good is, unlike in the experiments that Hal and myself ran with Russ Smith, you don't have to program these by yourself in order to see the virtual reality. There are applications you can get on smartphones for just a few dollars that do the same thing. This is actually a picture of Hal, my coauthor. You might recognize him from the previous demos. And just for kicks we ran his picture through the balding, aging and weight gain software to see how he would look. Hal is here, so I think we owe it to him as well as yourself to disabuse you of that last image. And I'll close it there. On behalf of Hal and myself, I wish all the best to your present and future selves. Thank you. (Applause)

How to stop torture

{0: "In too many countries, it's still normal to torture prisoners for confessions and information. Karen Tse works to end that."}

TEDGlobal 2011

In 1994, I walked into a prison in Cambodia, and I met a 12-year-old boy who had been tortured and was denied access to counsel. And as I looked into his eyes, I realized that for the hundreds of letters I had written for political prisoners, that I would never have written a letter for him, because he was not a 12-year-old boy who had done something important for anybody. He was not a political prisoner. He was a 12-year-old boy who had stolen a bicycle. What I also realized at that point was that it was not only Cambodia, but of the 113 developing countries that torture, 93 of these countries have all passed laws that say you have a right to a lawyer and you have a right not to be tortured. And what I recognized was that there was an incredible window of opportunity for us as a world community to come together and end torture as an investigative tool. We often think of torture as being political torture or reserved for just the worst, but, in fact, 95 percent of torture today is not for political prisoners. It is for people who are in broken-down legal systems, and unfortunately because torture is the cheapest form of investigation — it's cheaper than having a legal system, cheaper than having a lawyer and early access to counsel — it is what happens most of the time. I believe today that it is possible for us as a world community, if we make a decision, to come together and end torture as an investigative tool in our lifetime, but it will require three things. First is the training, empowerment, and connection of defenders worldwide. The second is insuring that there is systematic early access to counsel. And the third is commitment. So in the year 2000, I began to wonder, what if we came together? Could we do something for these 93 countries? And I founded International Bridges to Justice which has a specific mission of ending torture as an investigative tool and implementing due process rights in the 93 countries by placing trained lawyers at an early stage in police stations and in courtrooms. My first experiences, though, did come from Cambodia, and at the time I remember first coming to Cambodia and there were, in 1994, still less than 10 attorneys in the country because the Khmer Rouge had killed them all. And even 20 years later, there was only 10 lawyers in the country, so consequently you'd walk into a prison and not only would you meet 12-year-old boys, you'd meet women and you'd say, "Why are you here?" Women would say, "Well I've been here for 10 years because my husband committed a crime, but they can't find him." So it's just a place where there was no rule of law. The first group of defenders came together and I still remember, as I was training, I said, "Okay, what do you do for an investigation?" And there was silence in the class, and finally one woman stood up, [inaudible name], and she said "Khrew," which means "teacher." She said, "I have defended more than a hundred people, and I've never had to do any investigation, because they all come with confessions." And we talked about, as a class, the fact that number one, the confessions might not be reliable, but number two, we did not want to encourage the police to keep doing this, especially as it was now against the law. And it took a lot of courage for these defenders to decide that they would begin to stand up and support each other in implementing these laws. And I still remember the first cases where they came, all 25 together, she would stand up, and they were in the back, and they would support her, and the judges kept saying, "No, no, no, no, we're going to do things the exact same way we've been doing them." But one day the perfect case came, and it was a woman who was a vegetable seller, she was sitting outside of a house. She said she actually saw the person run out who she thinks stole whatever the jewelry was, but the police came, they got her, there was nothing on her. She was pregnant at the time. She had cigarette burns on her. She'd miscarried. And when they brought her case to the judge, for the first time he stood up and he said, "Yes, there's no evidence except for your torture confession and you will be released." And the defenders began to take cases over and over again and you will see, they have step by step began to change the course of history in Cambodia. But Cambodia is not alone. I used to think, well is it Cambodia? Or is it other countries? But it is in so many countries. In Burundi I walked into a prison and it wasn't a 12-year-old boy, it was an 8-year-old boy for stealing a mobile phone. Or a woman, I picked up her baby, really cute baby, I said "Your baby is so cute." It wasn't a baby, she was three. And she said "Yeah, but she's why I'm here," because she was accused of stealing two diapers and an iron for her baby and still had been in prison. And when I walked up to the prison director, I said, "You've got to let her out. A judge would let her out." And he said, "Okay, we can talk about it, but look at my prison. Eighty percent of the two thousand people here are without a lawyer. What can we do?" So lawyers began to courageously stand up together to organize a system where they can take cases. But we realized that it's not only the training of the lawyers, but the connection of the lawyers that makes a difference. For example, in Cambodia, it was that [inaudible name] did not go alone but she had 24 lawyers with her who stood up together. And in the same way, in China, they always tell me, "It's like a fresh wind in the desert when we can come together." Or in Zimbabwe, where I remember Innocent, after coming out of a prison where everybody stood up and said, "I've been here for one year, eight years, 12 years without a lawyer," he came and we had a training together and he said, "I have heard it said" — because he had heard people mumbling and grumbling — "I have heard it said that we cannot help to create justice because we do not have the resources." And then he said, "But I want you to know that the lack of resources is never an excuse for injustice." And with that, he successfully organized 68 lawyers who have been systematically taking the cases. The key that we see, though, is training and then early access. I was recently in Egypt, and was inspired to meet with another group of lawyers, and what they told me is that they said, "Hey, look, we don't have police on the streets now. The police are one of the main reasons why we had the revolution. They were torturing everybody all the time." And I said, "But there's been tens of millions of dollars that have recently gone in to the development of the legal system here. What's going on?" I met with one of the development agencies, and they were training prosecutors and judges, which is the normal bias, as opposed to defenders. And they showed me a manual which actually was an excellent manual. I said, "I'm gonna copy this." It had everything in it. Lawyers can come at the police station. It was perfect. Prosecutors were perfectly trained. But I said to them, "I just have one question, which is, by the time that everybody got to the prosecutor's office, what had happened to them?" And after a pause, they said, "They had been tortured." So the pieces are, not only the training of the lawyers, but us finding a way to systematically implement early access to counsel, because they are the safeguard in the system for people who are being tortured. And as I tell you this, I'm also aware of the fact that it sounds like, "Oh, okay, it sounds like we could do it, but can we really do it?" Because it sounds big. And there are many reasons why I believe it's possible. The first reason is the people on the ground who find ways of creating miracles because of their commitment. It's not only Innocent, who I told you about in Zimbabwe, but defenders all over the world who are looking for these pieces. We have a program called JusticeMakers, and we realized there are people that are courageous and want to do things, but how can we support them? So it's an online contest where it's only five thousand dollars if you come up with and innovative way of implementing justice. And there are 30 JusticeMakers throughout the world, from Sri Lanka to Swaziland to the DRC, who with five thousand dollars do amazing things, through SMS programs, through paralegal programs, through whatever they can do. And it's not only these JusticeMakers, but people we courageously see figure out who their networks are and how they can move it forward. So in China, for instance, great laws came out where it says police cannot torture people or they will be punished. And I was sitting side by side with one of our very courageous lawyers, and said, "How can we get this out? How can we make sure that this is implemented? This is fantastic." And he said to me, "Well, do you have money?" And I said, "No." And he said, "That's okay, we can still figure it out." And on December 4, he organized three thousand members of the Youth Communist League, from 14 of the top law schools, who organized themselves, developed posters with the new laws, and went to the police stations and began what he says is a non-violent legal revolution to protect citizen rights. So I talked about the fact that we need to train and support defenders. We need to systematically implement early access to counsel. But the third and most important thing is that we make a commitment to this. And people often say to me, "You know, this is great, but it's wildly idealistic. Never going to happen." And the reason that I think that those words are interesting is because those were the same kinds of words that were used for people who decided they would end slavery, or end apartheid. It began with a small group of people who decided they would commit. Now, there's one of our favorite poems from the defenders, which they share from each other, is: "Take courage friends, the road is often long, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high, but deep down, you are not alone." And I believe that if we can come together as a world community to support not only defenders, but also everyone in the system who is looking towards it, we can end torture as an investigative tool. I end always, because I'm sure the questions are — and I'd be happy to talk to you at any point — "But what can I really do?" Well, I would say this. First of all, you know what you can do. But second of all, I would leave you with the story of Vishna, who actually was my inspiration for starting International Bridges to Justice. Vishna was a 4-year-old boy when I met him who was born in a Cambodian prison in Kandal Province. But because he was born in the prison, everybody loved him, including the guards, so he was the only one who was allowed to come in and out of the bars. So, you know, there's bars. And by the time that Vishna was getting bigger, which means what gets bigger? Your head gets bigger. So he would come to the first bar, the second bar and then the third bar, and then really slowly move his head so he could fit through, and come back, third, second, first. And he would grab my pinkie, because what he wanted to do every day is he wanted to go visit. You know, he never quite made it to all of them every day, but he wanted to visit all 156 prisoners. And I would lift him, and he would put his fingers through. Or if they were dark cells, it was like iron corrugated, and he would put his fingers through. And most of the prisoners said that he was their greatest joy and their sunshine, and they looked forward to him. And I was like, here's Vishna. He's a 4-year-old boy. He was born in a prison with almost nothing, no material goods, but he had a sense of his own heroic journey, which I believe we are all born into. He said, "Probably I can't do everything. But I'm one. I can do something. And I will do the one thing that I can do." So I thank you for having the prophetic imagination to imagine the shaping of a new world with us together, and invite you into this journey with us. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

There are no scraps of men

{0: "Alberto Cairo leads the International Red Cross' orthopedic rehabilitation work in Afghanistan."}

TEDxRC2

I've been in Afghanistan for 21 years. I work for the Red Cross and I'm a physical therapist. My job is to make arms and legs — well it's not completely true. We do more than that. We provide the patients, the Afghan disabled, first with the physical rehabilitation then with the social reintegration. It's a very logical plan, but it was not always like this. For many years, we were just providing them with artificial limbs. It took quite many years for the program to become what it is now. Today, I would like to tell you a story, the story of a big change, and the story of the people who made this change possible. I arrived in Afghanistan in 1990 to work in a hospital for war victims. And then, not only for war victims, but it was for any kind of patient. I was also working in the orthopedic center, we call it. This is the place where we make the legs. At that time I found myself in a strange situation. I felt not quite ready for that job. There was so much to learn. There were so many things new to me. But it was a terrific job. But as soon as the fighting intensified, the physical rehabilitation was suspended. There were many other things to do. So the orthopedic center was closed because physical rehabilitation was not considered a priority. It was a strange sensation. Anyway, you know every time I make this speech — it's not the first time — but it's an emotion. It's something that comes out from the past. It's 21 years, but they are still all there. Anyway, in 1992, the Mujahideen took all Afghanistan. And the orthopedic center was closed. I was assigned to work for the homeless, for the internally displaced people. But one day, something happened. I was coming back from a big food distribution in a mosque where tens and tens of people were squatting in terrible conditions. I wanted to go home. I was driving. You know, when you want to forget, you don't want to see things, so you just want to go to your room, to lock yourself inside and say, "That's enough." A bomb fell not far from my car — well, far enough, but big noise. And everybody disappeared from the street. The cars disappeared as well. I ducked. And only one figure remained in the middle of the road. It was a man in a wheelchair desperately trying to move away. Well I'm not a particularly brave person, I have to confess it, but I could not just ignore him. So I stopped the car and I went to help. The man was without legs and only with one arm. Behind him there was a child, his son, red in the face in an effort to push the father. So I took him into a safe place. And I ask, "What are you doing out in the street in this situation?" "I work," he said. I wondered, what work? And then I ask an even more stupid question: "Why don't you have the prostheses? Why don't you have the artificial legs?" And he said, "The Red Cross has closed." Well without thinking, I told him "Come tomorrow. We will provide you with a pair of legs." The man, his name was Mahmoud, and the child, whose name was Rafi, left. And then I said, "Oh, my God. What did I say? The center is closed, no staff around. Maybe the machinery is broken. Who is going to make the legs for him?" So I hoped that he would not come. This is the streets of Kabul in those days. So I said, "Well I will give him some money." And so the following day, I went to the orthopedic center. And I spoke with a gatekeeper. I was ready to tell him, "Listen, if someone such-and-such comes tomorrow, please tell him that it was a mistake. Nothing can be done. Give him some money." But Mahmoud and his son were already there. And they were not alone. There were 15, maybe 20, people like him waiting. And there was some staff too. Among them there was my right-hand man, Najmuddin. And the gatekeeper told me, "They come everyday to see if the center will open." I said, "No. We have to go away. We cannot stay here." They were bombing — not very close — but you could hear the noise of the bombs. So, "We cannot stay here, it's dangerous. It's not a priority." But Najmuddin told me, "Listen now, we're here." At least we can start repairing the prostheses, the broken prostheses of the people and maybe try to do something for people like Mahmoud." I said, "No, please. We cannot do that. It's really dangerous. We have other things to do." But they insisted. When you have 20 people in front of you, looking at you and you are the one who has to decide ... So we started doing some repairs. Also one of the physical therapists reported that Mahmoud could be provided with a leg, but not immediately. The legs were swollen and the knees were stiff, so he needed a long preparation. Believe me, I was worried because I was breaking the rules. I was doing something that I was not supposed to do. In the evening, I went to speak with the bosses at the headquarters, and I told them — I lied — I told them, "Listen, we are going to start a couple of hours per day, just a few repairs." Maybe some of them are here now. (Laughter) So we started. I was working, I was going everyday to work for the homeless. And Najmuddin was staying there, doing everything and reporting on the patients. He was telling me, "Patients are coming." We knew that many more patients could not come, prevented by the fighting. But people were coming. And Mahmoud was coming every day. And slowly, slowly week after week his legs were improving. The stump or cast prosthesis was made, and he was starting the real physical rehabilitation. He was coming every day, crossing the front line. A couple of times I crossed the front line in the very place where Mahmoud and his son were crossing. I tell you, it was something so sinister that I was astonished he could do it every day. But finally, the great day arrived. Mahmoud was going to be discharged with his new legs. It was April, I remember, a very beautiful day. April in Kabul is beautiful, full of roses, full of flowers. We could not possibly stay indoors, with all these sandbags at the windows. Very sad, dark. So we chose a small spot in the garden. And Mahmoud put on his prostheses, the other patients did the same, and they started practicing for the last time before being discharged. Suddenly, they started fighting. Two groups of Mujahideen started fighting. We could hear in the air the bullets passing. So we dashed, all of us, towards the shelter. Mahmoud grabbed his son, I grabbed someone else. Everybody was grabbing something. And we ran. You know, 50 meters can be a long distance if you are totally exposed, but we managed to reach the shelter. Inside, all of us panting, I sat a moment and I heard Rafi telling his father, "Father, you can run faster than me." (Laughter) And Mahmoud, "Of course I can. I can run, and now you can go to school. No need of staying with me all the day pushing my wheelchair." Later on, we took them home. And I will never forget Mahmoud and his son walking together pushing the empty wheelchair. And then I understood, physical rehabilitation is a priority. Dignity cannot wait for better times. From that day on, we never closed a single day. Well sometimes we were suspended for a few hours, but we never, we never closed it again. I met Mahmoud one year later. He was in good shape — a bit thinner. He needed to change his prostheses — a new pair of prostheses. I asked about his son. He told me, "He's at school. He'd doing quite well." But I understood he wanted to tell me something. So I asked him, "What is that?" He was sweating. He was clearly embarrassed. And he was standing in front of me, his head down. He said, "You have taught me to walk. Thank you very much. Now help me not to be a beggar anymore." That was the job. "My children are growing. I feel ashamed. I don't want them to be teased at school by the other students." I said, "Okay." I thought, how much money do I have in my pocket? Just to give him some money. It was the easiest way. He read my mind, and he said, "I ask for a job." And then he added something I will never forget for the rest of my life. He said, "I am a scrap of a man, but if you help me, I'm ready to do anything, even if I have to crawl on the ground." And then he sat down. I sat down too with goosebumps everywhere. Legless, with only one arm, illiterate, unskilled — what job for him? Najmuddin told me, "Well we have a vacancy in the carpentry shop." "What?" I said, "Stop." "Well yes, we need to increase the production of feet. We need to employ someone to glue and to screw the sole of the feet. We need to increase the production." "Excuse me?" I could not believe. And then he said, "No, we can modify the workbench maybe to put a special stool, a special anvil, special vice, and maybe an electric screwdriver." I said, "Listen, it's insane. And it's even cruel to think of anything like this. That's a production line and a very fast one. It's cruel to offer him a job knowing that he's going to fail." But with Najmuddin, we cannot discuss. So the only things I could manage to obtain was a kind of a compromise. Only one week — one week try and not a single day more. One week later, Mahmoud was the fastest in the production line. I told Najmuddin, "That's a trick. I can't believe it." The production was up 20 percent. "It's a trick, it's a trick," I said. And then I asked for verification. It was true. The comment of Najmuddin was Mahmoud has something to prove. I understood that I was wrong again. Mahmoud had looked taller. I remember him sitting behind the workbench smiling. He was a new man, taller again. Of course, I understood that what made him stand tall — yeah they were the legs, thank you very much — but as a first step, it was the dignity. He has regained his full dignity thanks to that job. So of course, I understood. And then we started a new policy — a new policy completely different. We decided to employ as many disabled as possible to train them in any possible job. It became a policy of "positive discrimination," we call it now. And you know what? It's good for everybody. Everybody benefits from that — those employed, of course, because they get a job and dignity. But also for the newcomers. They are 7,000 every year — people coming for the first time. And you should see the faces of these people when they realize that those assisting them are like them. Sometimes you see them, they look, "Oh." And you see the faces. And then the surprise turns into hope. And it's easy for me as well to train someone who has already passed through the experience of disability. Poof, they learn much faster — the motivation, the empathy they can establish with the patient is completely different, completely. Scraps of men do not exist. People like Mahmoud are agents of change. And when you start changing, you cannot stop. So employing people, yes, but also we started programming projects of microfinance, education. And when you start, you cannot stop. So you do vocational training, home education for those who cannot go to school. Physical therapies can be done, not only in the orthopedic center, but also in the houses of the people. There is always a better way to do things. That's Najmuddin, the one with the white coat. Terrible Najmuddin, is that one. I have learned a lot from people like Najmuddin, Mahmoud, Rafi. They are my teachers. I have a wish, a big wish, that this way of working, this way of thinking, is going to be implemented in other countries. There are plenty of countries at war like Afghanistan. It is possible and it is not difficult. All we have to do is to listen to the people that we are supposed assist, to make them part of the decision-making process and then, of course, to adapt. This is my big wish. Well don't think that the changes in Afghanistan are over; not at all. We are going on. Recently we have just started a program, a sport program — basketball for wheelchair users. We transport the wheelchairs everywhere. We have several teams in the main part of Afghanistan. At the beginning, when Anajulina told me, "We would like to start it," I hesitated. I said, "No," you can imagine. I said, "No, no, no, no, we can't." And then I asked the usual question: "Is it a priority? Is it really necessary?" Well now you should see me. I never miss a single training session. The night before a match I'm very nervous. And you should see me during the match. I shout like a true Italian. (Laughter) What's next? What is going to be the next change? Well I don't know yet, but I'm sure Najmuddin and his friends, they have it already in mind. That was my story. Thank you very much. (Applause)

How healthy living nearly killed me

{0: "Immersing himself in alternate lifestyles and hilarious experiments (usually with himself as the guinea pig), writer A.J. Jacobs tests the limits of behavior, customs, culture -- and reports back on the wisdom and practical knowledge he's gained."}

TEDMED 2011

I've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation, hopefully for a good cause, which is self-improvement. And I've done this in three parts. So first I started with the mind. And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z — or, more precisely, from "a-ak" to "Zywiec." And here's a little image of that. And this was an amazing year. It was really a fascinating journey. It was painful at times, especially for those around me. My wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation. So it had its downsides. But after that, I decided to work on the spirit. As I mentioned last year, I grew up with no religion at all. I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. (Laughter) Not really. But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it. So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible. And from the Ten Commandments to growing my beard — because Leviticus says you cannot shave. So this is what I looked like by the end. Thank you for that reaction. (Laughter) I look a little like Moses, or Ted Kaczynski. I got both of them. So there was the topiary there. And there's the sheep. Now the final part of the trilogy was I wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person I could be, the healthiest person alive. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years. And I just finished a couple of months ago. And I have to say, thank God. Because living so healthily was killing me. (Laughter) It was so overwhelming, because the amount of things you have to do, it's just mind-boggling. I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers. And they were telling me all the things I had to do. I had to eat right, exercise, meditate, pet dogs, because that lowers the blood pressure. I wrote the book on a treadmill, and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book. I had to put on sunscreen. This was no small feat, because if you listen to dermatologists, they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen. And you have to reapply it every two to four hours. So I think half of my book advance went into sunscreen. I was like a glazed doughnut for most of the year. There was the washing of hands. I had to do that properly. And my immunologist told me that I should also wipe down all of the remote controls and iPhones in my house, because those are just orgies of germs. So that took a lot of time. I also tried to be the safest person I could be, because that's a part of health. I was inspired by the Danish Safety Council. They started a public campaign that says, "A walking helmet is a good helmet." So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking, but also for walking around. And you can see there they're shopping with their helmets. (Laughter) Well yeah, I tried that. Now it's a little extreme, I admit. But if you think about this, this is actually — the "Freakonomics" authors wrote about this — that more people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving. So something to think about tonight if you've had a couple. So I finished, and it was a success in a sense. All of the markers went in the right direction. My cholesterol went down, I lost weight, my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant. So that was nice. And it was successful overall. But I also learned that I was too healthy, and that was unhealthy. I was so focused on doing all these things that I was neglecting my friends and family. And as Dan Buettner can tell you, having a strong social network is so crucial to our health. So I finished. And I kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over. I went to the dark side, and I just indulged myself. It was like something out of Caligula. (Laughter) Without the sex part. Because I have three young kids, so that wasn't happening. But the over-eating and over-drinking, definitely. And I finally have stabilized. So now I'm back to adopting many — not all; I don't wear a helmet anymore — but dozens of healthy behaviors that I adopted during my year. It was really a life-changing project. And I, of course, don't have time to go into all of them. Let me just tell you two really quickly. The first is — and this was surprising to me; I didn't expect this to come out — but I live a much quieter life now. Because we live in such a noisy world. There's trains and planes and cars and Bill O'Reilly, he's very noisy. (Laughter) And this is a real underestimated, under-appreciated health hazard — not just because it harms our hearing, which it obviously does, but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response. A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going. And this, over the years, can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage. The World Health Organization just did a big study that they published this year. And it was done in Europe. And they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution. So they think it's actually very deadly. And by the way, it's also terrible for your brain. It really impairs cognition. And our Founding Fathers knew about this. When they wrote the Constitution, they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate. So without noise reduction technology, our country would not exist. So as a patriot, I felt it was important to — I wear all the earplugs and the earphones, and it's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way. And the second point I want to make, the final point, is that — and it's actually been a theme of TEDMED — that joy is so important to your health, that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there's some sense of pleasure and joy in them. And just to give you one instance of this: food. The junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what's the most pleasurable. But I think we can use their techniques and apply them to healthy food. To give just one example, we love crunchiness, mouthfeel. So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes — throw in some sunflower seeds. And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you're eating Doritos. (Laughter) And it has made me a healthier person. So that is it. The book about it comes out in April. It's called "Drop Dead Healthy." And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour. That's my greatest hope. So thank you very much. (Applause)

Life's third act

{0: 'Jane Fonda has had four extraordinary careers (so far): Oscar-winning actor, author, fitness guru and impassioned activist.'}

TEDxWomen 2011

There have been many revolutions over the last century, but perhaps none as significant as the longevity revolution. We are living on average today 34 years longer than our great-grandparents did — think about that. That's an entire second adult lifetime that's been added to our lifespan. And yet, for the most part, our culture has not come to terms with what this means. We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That's the metaphor, the old metaphor. You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude. (Laughter) Age as pathology. But many people today — philosophers, artists, doctors, scientists — are taking a new look at what I call "the third act" — the last three decades of life. They realize that this is actually a developmental stage of life with its own significance, as different from midlife as adolescence is from childhood. And they are asking — we should all be asking: How do we use this time? How do we live it successfully? What is the appropriate new metaphor for aging? I've spent the last year researching and writing about this subject. And I have come to find that a more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase — the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness, and authenticity. Age not at all as pathology. Age as potential. And guess what? This potential is not for the lucky few. It turns out, most people over 50 feel better, are less stressed, less hostile, less anxious. We tend to see commonalities more than differences. Some of the studies even say we're happier. (Laughter) This is not what I expected, trust me. I come from a long line of depressives. As I was approaching my late 40s, when I would wake up in the morning, my first six thoughts would all be negative. And I got scared. I thought, "Oh my gosh. I'm going to become a crotchety old lady." But now that I am actually smack-dab in the middle of my own third act, I realize I've never been happier. I have such a powerful feeling of well-being. And I've discovered that when you're inside oldness, as opposed to looking at it from the outside, fear subsides. You realize you're still yourself — maybe even more so. Picasso once said, "It takes a long time to become young." (Laughter) I don't want to romanticize aging. Obviously, there's no guarantee that it can be a time of fruition and growth. Some of it is a matter of luck. Some of it, obviously, is genetic. One third of it, in fact, is genetic. And there isn't much we can do about that. But that means that two-thirds of how well we do in the third act, we can do something about. We're going to discuss what we can do to make these added years really successful, and use them to make a difference. Now, let me say something about the staircase, which may seem like an odd metaphor for seniors, given the fact that many seniors are challenged by stairs. (Laughter) Myself included. As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy means that everything in the world — everything — is in a state of decline and decay — the arch. There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards, the staircase, bringing us into wholeness, authenticity, and wisdom. And here's an example of what I mean. This upward ascension can happen even in the face of extreme physical challenges. About three years ago, I read an article in the New York Times. It was about a man named Neil Selinger — 57 years old, a retired lawyer, who had joined the writers' group at Sarah Lawrence, where he found his writer's voice. Two years later, he was diagnosed with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It's a terrible disease. It's fatal. It wastes the body, but the mind remains intact. In this article, Mr. Selinger wrote the following to describe what was happening to him. And I quote: "As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger. As I slowly lost my speech, I gained my voice. As I diminished, I grew. As I lost so much, I finally started to find myself." Neil Selinger, to me, is the embodiment of mounting the staircase in his third act. Now we're all born with spirit, all of us, but sometimes it gets tamped down beneath the challenges of life, violence, abuse, neglect. Perhaps our parents suffered from depression. Perhaps they weren't able to love us beyond how we performed in the world. Perhaps we still suffer from a psychic pain, a wound. Perhaps we feel that many of our relationships have not had closure. And so we can feel unfinished. Perhaps the task of the third act is to finish up the task of finishing ourselves. For me, it began as I was approaching my third act, my 60th birthday. How was I supposed to live it? What was I supposed to accomplish in this final act? And I realized that, in order to know where I was going, I had to know where I'd been. And so I went back and I studied my first two acts, trying to see who I was then, who I really was, not who my parents or other people told me I was, or treated me like I was. But who was I? Who were my parents — not as parents, but as people? Who were my grandparents? How did they treat my parents? These kinds of things. I discovered, a couple of years later, that this process that I had gone through is called by psychologists "doing a life review." And they say it can give new significance and clarity and meaning to a person's life. You may discover, as I did, that a lot of things that you used to think were your fault, a lot of things you used to think about yourself, really had nothing to do with you. It wasn't your fault; you're just fine. And you're able to go back and forgive them. And forgive yourself. You're able to free yourself from your past. You can work to change your relationship to your past. Now while I was writing about this, I came upon a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl was a German psychiatrist who'd spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp. And he wrote that, while he was in the camp, he could tell, should they ever be released, which of the people would be OK, and which would not. And he wrote this: "Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. This is what determines the quality of the life we've lived — not whether we've been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities, what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger." Perhaps the central purpose of the third act is to go back and to try, if appropriate, to change our relationship to the past. It turns out that cognitive research shows when we are able to do this, it manifests neurologically — neural pathways are created in the brain. You see, if you have, over time, reacted negatively to past events and people, neural pathways are laid down by chemical and electrical signals that are sent through the brain. And over time, these neural pathways become hardwired. They become the norm — even if it's bad for us, because it causes us stress and anxiety. If, however, we can go back and alter our relationship, re-vision our relationship to past people and events, neural pathways can change. And if we can maintain the more positive feelings about the past, that becomes the new norm. It's like resetting a thermostat. It's not having experiences that makes us wise. It's reflecting on the experiences that we've had that makes us wise and that helps us become whole, brings wisdom and authenticity. It helps us become what we might have been. Women start off whole, don't we? I mean, as girls, we're feisty — "Yeah? Who says?" (Laughter) We have agency. We are the subjects of our own lives. But very often, many, if not most of us, when we hit puberty, we start worrying about fitting in and being popular. And we become the subjects and objects of other people's lives. But now, in our third acts, it may be possible for us to circle back to where we started, and know it for the first time. And if we can do that, it will not just be for ourselves. Older women are the largest demographic in the world. If we can go back and redefine ourselves and become whole, this will create a cultural shift in the world, and it will give an example to younger generations so that they can reconceive their own lifespan. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The global power shift

{0: 'Paddy Ashdown is a former member of the British Parliament and a diplomat with a lifelong commitment to international cooperation.'}

TEDxBrussels

There's a poem written by a very famous English poet at the end of the 19th century. It was said to echo in Churchill's brain in the 1930s. And the poem goes: "On the idle hill of summer, lazy with the flow of streams, hark I hear a distant drummer, drumming like a sound in dreams, far and near and low and louder on the roads of earth go by, dear to friend and food to powder, soldiers marching, soon to die." Those who are interested in poetry, the poem is "A Shropshire Lad" written by A.E. Housman. But what Housman understood, and you hear it in the symphonies of Nielsen too, was that the long, hot, silvan summers of stability of the 19th century were coming to a close, and that we were about to move into one of those terrifying periods of history when power changes. And these are always periods, ladies and gentlemen, accompanied by turbulence, and all too often by blood. And my message for you is that I believe we are condemned, if you like, to live at just one of those moments in history when the gimbals upon which the established order of power is beginning to change and the new look of the world, the new powers that exist in the world, are beginning to take form. And these are — and we see it very clearly today — nearly always highly turbulent times, highly difficult times, and all too often very bloody times. By the way, it happens about once every century. You might argue that the last time it happened — and that's what Housman felt coming and what Churchill felt too — was that when power passed from the old nations, the old powers of Europe, across the Atlantic to the new emerging power of the United States of America — the beginning of the American century. And of course, into the vacuum where the too-old European powers used to be were played the two bloody catastrophes of the last century — the one in the first part and the one in the second part: the two great World Wars. Mao Zedong used to refer to them as the European civil wars, and it's probably a more accurate way of describing them. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we live at one of those times. But for us, I want to talk about three factors today. And the first of these, the first two of these, is about a shift in power. And the second is about some new dimension which I want to refer to, which has never quite happened in the way it's happening now. But let's talk about the shifts of power that are occurring to the world. And what is happening today is, in one sense, frightening because it's never happened before. We have seen lateral shifts of power — the power of Greece passed to Rome and the power shifts that occurred during the European civilizations — but we are seeing something slightly different. For power is not just moving laterally from nation to nation. It's also moving vertically. What's happening today is that the power that was encased, held to accountability, held to the rule of law, within the institution of the nation state has now migrated in very large measure onto the global stage. The globalization of power — we talk about the globalization of markets, but actually it's the globalization of real power. And where, at the nation state level that power is held to accountability subject to the rule of law, on the international stage it is not. The international stage and the global stage where power now resides: the power of the Internet, the power of the satellite broadcasters, the power of the money changers — this vast money-go-round that circulates now 32 times the amount of money necessary for the trade it's supposed to be there to finance — the money changers, if you like, the financial speculators that have brought us all to our knees quite recently, the power of the multinational corporations now developing budgets often bigger than medium-sized countries. These live in a global space which is largely unregulated, not subject to the rule of law, and in which people may act free of constraint. Now that suits the powerful up to a moment. It's always suitable for those who have the most power to operate in spaces without constraint, but the lesson of history is that, sooner or later, unregulated space — space not subject to the rule of law — becomes populated, not just by the things you wanted — international trade, the Internet, etc. — but also by the things you don't want — international criminality, international terrorism. The revelation of 9/11 is that even if you are the most powerful nation on earth, nevertheless, those who inhabit that space can attack you even in your most iconic of cities one bright September morning. It's said that something like 60 percent of the four million dollars that was taken to fund 9/11 actually passed through the institutions of the Twin Towers which 9/11 destroyed. You see, our enemies also use this space — the space of mass travel, the Internet, satellite broadcasters — to be able to get around their poison, which is about destroying our systems and our ways. Sooner or later, sooner or later, the rule of history is that where power goes governance must follow. And if it is therefore the case, as I believe it is, that one of the phenomenon of our time is the globalization of power, then it follows that one of the challenges of our time is to bring governance to the global space. And I believe that the decades ahead of us now will be to a greater or lesser extent turbulent the more or less we are able to achieve that aim: to bring governance to the global space. Now notice, I'm not talking about government. I'm not talking about setting up some global democratic institution. My own view, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, is that this is unlikely to be done by spawning more U.N. institutions. If we didn't have the U.N., we'd have to invent it. The world needs an international forum. It needs a means by which you can legitimize international action. But when it comes to governance of the global space, my guess is this won't happen through the creation of more U.N. institutions. It will actually happen by the powerful coming together and making treaty-based systems, treaty-based agreements, to govern that global space. And if you look, you can see them happening, already beginning to emerge. The World Trade Organization: treaty-based organization, entirely treaty-based, and yet, powerful enough to hold even the most powerful, the United States, to account if necessary. Kyoto: the beginnings of struggling to create a treaty-based organization. The G20: we know now that we have to put together an institution which is capable of bringing governance to that financial space for financial speculation. And that's what the G20 is, a treaty-based institution. Now there's a problem there, and we'll come back to it in a minute, which is that if you bring the most powerful together to make the rules in treaty-based institutions, to fill that governance space, then what happens to the weak who are left out? And that's a big problem, and we'll return to it in just a second. So there's my first message, that if you are to pass through these turbulent times more or less turbulently, then our success in doing that will in large measure depend on our capacity to bring sensible governance to the global space. And watch that beginning to happen. My second point is, and I know I don't have to talk to an audience like this about such a thing, but power is not just shifting vertically, it's also shifting horizontally. You might argue that the story, the history of civilizations, has been civilizations gathered around seas — with the first ones around the Mediterranean, the more recent ones in the ascendents of Western power around the Atlantic. Well it seems to me that we're now seeing a fundamental shift of power, broadly speaking, away from nations gathered around the Atlantic [seaboard] to the nations gathered around the Pacific rim. Now that begins with economic power, but that's the way it always begins. You already begin to see the development of foreign policies, the augmentation of military budgets occurring in the other growing powers in the world. I think actually this is not so much a shift from the West to the East; something different is happening. My guess is, for what it's worth, is that the United States will remain the most powerful nation on earth for the next 10 years, 15, but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered; it has radically changed. We are coming out of 50 years, most unusual years, of history in which we have had a totally mono-polar world, in which every compass needle for or against has to be referenced by its position to Washington — a world bestrode by a single colossus. But that's not a usual case in history. In fact, what's now emerging is the much more normal case of history. You're beginning to see the emergence of a multi-polar world. Up until now, the United States has been the dominant feature of our world. They will remain the most powerful nation, but they will be the most powerful nation in an increasingly multi-polar world. And you begin to see the alternative centers of power building up — in China, of course, though my own guess is that China's ascent to greatness is not smooth. It's going to be quite grumpy as China begins to democratize her society after liberalizing her economy. But that's a subject of a different discussion. You see India, you see Brazil. You see increasingly that the world now looks actually, for us Europeans, much more like Europe in the 19th century. Europe in the 19th century: a great British foreign secretary, Lord Canning, used to describe it as the "European concert of powers." There was a balance, a five-sided balance. Britain always played to the balance. If Paris got together with Berlin, Britain got together with Vienna and Rome to provide a counterbalance. Now notice, in a period which is dominated by a mono-polar world, you have fixed alliances — NATO, the Warsaw Pact. A fixed polarity of power means fixed alliances. But a multiple polarity of power means shifting and changing alliances. And that's the world we're coming into, in which we will increasingly see that our alliances are not fixed. Canning, the great British foreign secretary once said, "Britain has a common interest, but no common allies." And we will see increasingly that even we in the West will reach out, have to reach out, beyond the cozy circle of the Atlantic powers to make alliances with others if we want to get things done in the world. Note, that when we went into Libya, it was not good enough for the West to do it alone; we had to bring others in. We had to bring, in this case, the Arab League in. My guess is Iraq and Afghanistan are the last times when the West has tried to do it themselves, and we haven't succeeded. My guess is that we're reaching the beginning of the end of 400 years — I say 400 years because it's the end of the Ottoman Empire — of the hegemony of Western power, Western institutions and Western values. You know, up until now, if the West got its act together, it could propose and dispose in every corner of the world. But that's no longer true. Take the last financial crisis after the Second World War. The West got together — the Bretton Woods Institution, World Bank, International Monetary Fund — the problem solved. Now we have to call in others. Now we have to create the G20. Now we have to reach beyond the cozy circle of our Western friends. Let me make a prediction for you, which is probably even more startling. I suspect we are now reaching the end of 400 years when Western power was enough. People say to me, "The Chinese, of course, they'll never get themselves involved in peace-making, multilateral peace-making around the world." Oh yes? Why not? How many Chinese troops are serving under the blue beret, serving under the blue flag, serving under the U.N. command in the world today? 3,700. How many Americans? 11. What is the largest naval contingent tackling the issue of Somali pirates? The Chinese naval contingent. Of course they are, they are a mercantilist nation. They want to keep the sea lanes open. Increasingly, we are going to have to do business with people with whom we do not share values, but with whom, for the moment, we share common interests. It's a whole new different way of looking at the world that is now emerging. And here's the third factor, which is totally different. Today in our modern world, because of the Internet, because of the kinds of things people have been talking about here, everything is connected to everything. We are now interdependent. We are now interlocked, as nations, as individuals, in a way which has never been the case before, never been the case before. The interrelationship of nations, well it's always existed. Diplomacy is about managing the interrelationship of nations. But now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico, it's a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down, the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia, food riots in Africa. We are all now deeply, deeply, deeply interconnected. And what that means is the idea of a nation state acting alone, not connected with others, not working with others, is no longer a viable proposition. Because the actions of a nation state are neither confined to itself, nor is it sufficient for the nation state itself to control its own territory, because the effects outside the nation state are now beginning to affect what happens inside them. I was a young soldier in the last of the small empire wars of Britain. At that time, the defense of my country was about one thing and one thing only: how strong was our army, how strong was our air force, how strong was our navy and how strong were our allies. That was when the enemy was outside the walls. Now the enemy is inside the walls. Now if I want to talk about the defense of my country, I have to speak to the Minister of Health because pandemic disease is a threat to my security, I have to speak to the Minister of Agriculture because food security is a threat to my security, I have to speak to the Minister of Industry because the fragility of our hi-tech infrastructure is now a point of attack for our enemies — as we see from cyber warfare — I have to speak to the Minister of Home Affairs because who has entered my country, who lives in that terraced house in that inner city has a direct effect on what happens in my country — as we in London saw in the 7/7 bombings. It's no longer the case that the security of a country is simply a matter for its soldiers and its ministry of defense. It's its capacity to lock together its institutions. And this tells you something very important. It tells you that, in fact, our governments, vertically constructed, constructed on the economic model of the Industrial Revolution — vertical hierarchy, specialization of tasks, command structures — have got the wrong structures completely. You in business know that the paradigm structure of our time, ladies and gentlemen, is the network. It's your capacity to network that matters, both within your governments and externally. So here is Ashdown's third law. By the way, don't ask me about Ashdown's first law and second law because I haven't invented those yet; it always sounds better if there's a third law, doesn't it? Ashdown's third law is that in the modern age, where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others. The most important bit about your structure — whether you're a government, whether you're an army regiment, whether you're a business — is your docking points, your interconnectors, your capacity to network with others. You understand that in industry; governments don't. But now one final thing. If it is the case, ladies and gentlemen — and it is — that we are now locked together in a way that has never been quite the same before, then it's also the case that we share a destiny with each other. Suddenly and for the very first time, collective defense, the thing that has dominated us as the concept of securing our nations, is no longer enough. It used to be the case that if my tribe was more powerful than their tribe, I was safe; if my country was more powerful than their country, I was safe; my alliance, like NATO, was more powerful than their alliance, I was safe. It is no longer the case. The advent of the interconnectedness and of the weapons of mass destruction means that, increasingly, I share a destiny with my enemy. When I was a diplomat negotiating the disarmament treaties with the Soviet Union in Geneva in the 1970s, we succeeded because we understood we shared a destiny with them. Collective security is not enough. Peace has come to Northern Ireland because both sides realized that the zero-sum game couldn't work. They shared a destiny with their enemies. One of the great barriers to peace in the Middle East is that both sides, both Israel and, I think, the Palestinians, do not understand that they share a collective destiny. And so suddenly, ladies and gentlemen, what has been the proposition of visionaries and poets down the ages becomes something we have to take seriously as a matter of public policy. I started with a poem, I'll end with one. The great poem of John Donne's. "Send not for whom the bell tolls." The poem is called "No Man is an Island." And it goes: "Every man's death affected me, for I am involved in mankind, send not to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." For John Donne, a recommendation of morality. For us, I think, part of the equation for our survival. Thank you very much. (Applause)

1,000 TED Talks in six words

{0: 'After making a splash in the field of bioinformatics, Sebastian Wernicke moved on to the corporate sphere, where he motivates and manages multidimensional projects.'}

TEDxZurich 2011

There's currently over a thousand TED Talks on the TED website. And I guess many of you here think that this is quite fantastic, except for me, I don't agree with this. I think we have a situation here. Because if you think about it, 1,000 TED Talks, that's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading. How on earth are you going to spread a thousand ideas? Even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head by watching all those thousand TED videos, it would actually currently take you over 250 hours to do so. And I did a little calculation of this. The damage to the economy for each one who does this is around $15,000. So having seen this danger to the economy, I thought, we need to find a solution to this problem. Here's my approach to it all. If you look at the current situation, you have a thousand TED Talks. Each of those TED Talks has an average length of about 2,300 words. Now take this together, and you end up with 2.3 million words of TED Talks, which is about three Bibles-worth of content. (Laughter) The obvious question here is, does a TED Talk really need 2,300 words? Isn't there something shorter? I mean, if you have an idea worth spreading, surely you can put it into something shorter than 2,300 words. The only question is, how short can you get? What's the minimum amount of words you would need to do a TED Talk? While I was pondering this question, I came across this urban legend about Ernest Hemingway, who allegedly said that these six words here: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," were the best novel he had ever written. And I also encountered a project called Six-Word Memoirs where people were asked, take your whole life and please sum this up into six words, such as these here: "Found true love, married someone else." Or "Living in existential vacuum; it sucks." I actually like that one. So if a novel can be put into six words and a whole memoir can be put into six words, you don't need more than six words for a TED Talk. We could have been done by lunch here. (Laughter) And if you did this for all thousand TED Talks, you would get from 2.3 million words down to 6,000. So I thought this was quite worthwhile. So I started asking all my friends, please take your favorite TED Talk and put that into six words. So here are some of the results that I received. I think they're quite nice. For example, Dan Pink's talk on motivation, which was pretty good, if you haven't seen it: "Drop carrot. Drop stick. Bring meaning." It's what he's basically talking about in those 18,5 minutes. Or some even included references to the speakers, such as Nathan Myhrvold's speaking style, or the one of Tim Ferriss, which might be considered a bit strenuous at times. The challenge here is, if I try to systematically do this, I would probably end up with a lot of summaries, but not with many friends in the end. So I had to find a different method, preferably involving total strangers. And luckily, there's a website for that, called Mechanical Turk, which is a website where you can post tasks that you don't want to do yourself, such as "Please summarize this text for me in six words." And I didn't allow any low-cost countries to work on this, but I found out I could get a six-word summary for just 10 cents, which I think is a pretty good price. Even then, unfortunately, it's not possible to summarize each TED Talk individually. Because if you do the math, you have a thousand TED Talks, you pay 10 cents each; you have to do more than one summary for each of those talks, because some of them will probably be, or are, really bad. So I would end up paying hundreds of dollars. So I thought of a different way, by thinking, well, the talks revolve around certain themes. So what if I don't let people summarize individual TED Talks to six words, but give them 10 TED Talks at the same time and say, "Please do a six-word summary for that one." I would cut my costs by 90 percent. So for $60, I could summarize a thousand TED Talks into just 600 summaries, which would actually be quite nice. Some of you might actually right now be thinking, it's downright crazy to have 10 TED Talks summarized into just six words. But it's actually not, because there's an example by statistics professor Hans Rosling. I guess many of you have seen one or more of his talks. He's got eight talks online, and those can basically be summed up into just four words, because that's all he's basically showing us, our intuition is really bad. He always proves us wrong. So people on the Internet, some didn't do so well. And when I asked them to summarize the 10 TED Talks at the same time, some took the easy route out. They just had some general comment. There were others — and I found this quite cheeky — They used their six words to talk back to me and ask me if I'd been too much on Google lately. (Laughter) And finally also, I never understood this, some people really came up with their own version of the truth. I don't know any TED Talk that contains this. But, oh well. In the end, however, and this is really amazing, for each of those 10 TED Talk clusters that I submitted, I actually received meaningful summaries. Here are some of my favorites. For example, for the TED Talks about food, someone summed this up into: "Food shaping body, brains and environment," which I think is pretty good. Or happiness: "Striving toward happiness = moving toward unhappiness." So here I was. I had started out with a thousand TED Talks and I had 600 six-word summaries for those. Actually, it sounded nice in the beginning, but when you look at 600 summaries, it's quite a lot, it's a huge list. (Laughter) So I thought, I probably have to take this one step further here and create summaries of the summaries, and this is exactly what I did. So I took the 600 summaries that I had, put them into nine groups according to the ratings that the talks had originally received on TED.com and asked people to do summaries of those. Again, there were some misunderstandings. For example, when I had a cluster of all the "Beautiful" talks, someone thought I was just trying to find the ultimate pick-up line. But in the end, amazingly, again, people were able to do it. For example, all the courageous TED Talks: "People dying" or "People suffering" was also one, "with easy solutions around." Or the recipe for the ultimate jaw-dropping TED Talk: "Flickr photos of intergalactic classical composer." I mean that's the essence of it all. Now I had my nine groups, but, I mean, it's already quite a reduction. But of course, once you are that far, you're not really satisfied. I wanted to go all the way, all the way down the distillery, starting out with a thousand TED Talks. I wanted to have a thousand TED Talks summarized into just six words — which would be a 99.9997 percent reduction in content. And I would only pay $99.50 — so stay even below $100 for it. So I had 50 overall summaries done. This time I paid 25 cents because I thought the task was a bit harder. And unfortunately, when I first received the answers — and here, you'll see six of the answers — I was a bit disappointed. Because I think you'll agree, they all summarize some aspect of TED, but to me, they felt a bit bland, or they just had a certain aspect of TED in them. So I was almost ready to give up when one night, I played around with these sentences and found out that there's actually a beautiful solution in here. So here it is, a crowd-sourced, six-word summary of a thousand TED Talks at the value of $99.50: "Why the worry? I'd rather wonder." Thank you very much. (Applause)

Can astronomers help doctors?

{0: 'Michelle Borkin is a PhD candidate in applied physics. She works with the Astronomical Medicine Project and interdisciplinary 3D visualization techniques.'}

TEDxBoston 2011

I believe that we can both unravel the mysteries of the universe and save human lives at the same time through interdisciplinary research. And I'm going to share with you today just one story, my story, that has crossed these paths. We start the in supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. It's one of the youngest ones in our galaxy, about 330 years old. An astronomy colleague approached me one day, and she had over eight years of magnificent data, just trying to understand the 3-D structure of this nebula, the supernova remnant. But she had no way to look at it. So I looked at the data with her and said, "I think I can help you." And although — and this is all real data you're seeing on the screen above me — this is the Hollywood rendering version, but the rough draft I made with her looks something more like this. And she was able to make novel discoveries about how supernovas explode and how shells explode within it, using a piece of software developed at Brigham and Women's Hospital here in Boston, called 3D Slicer. It was originally developed for looking at patients' brain scans, doing surgical planning and doing 3-D renderings of anatomy. Who knew our solution was lurking just across the river? Now, people don't believe me when I tell them that astronomy and medical imaging — these two seemingly different fields — are really similar. So we're going to play a little game I like to call "Which is which?" I play this with new doctors and astronomers I work with. I'm going to show you two images on the screen. One of them is biomedical and one of them is astronomical, and you have to pick them correctly in your head. So here is the first set. And again, one of these is biomedical and one is astronomical. I'll give you a second to make your little vote mentally. So it turns out the one on the left is some of the raw data of the supernova remnant we were just looking at, and on the right, we have an angiogram of a patient's heart and coronary arteries. OK, we're going to try another one. Now, this one is much closer to my daily bread and butter. Tell me which is which. And one of these is literally millimeters across, and the other is billions of miles. So, it turns out the one on the left is a confocal microscopy image of a human cornea, and on the right, we have a radio telescope image of the star-forming region NGC-1333. Now, aside from the fact that these images look similar and that doctors trying to find a tumor in a patient's brain or a young star forming is similar, the way the data comes from the machine or the telescope is remarkably similar. Here's an MRI scanner. And if you've never seen the raw data of a patient's brain, this is what it looks like. When the MRI scanner is acquiring the data, it goes in slices. So you can see the patient's nose, their eyes; it kind of progresses towards the middle of the head; you can start to see the cortex, and it steps through to the back of the brain. Now, believe it or not, telescopes, and particularly radio telescopes, operate in a similar manner. If we were to look at the raw data from these telescopes ... We're going to look at a nebula called M16. We start with this radio telescope at the front of the nebula, stepping back towards the middle of the nebula, just like the middle of the patient's brain — those bright regions are where young stars are forming — all the way to the back of the nebula, just like the back of the patient's head. Now, although the doctors are able to then take this data and look at it in 3-D and do surgical planning, this is cutting-edge, just about as good as you get with any astronomer, and this is what they have to look at to understand the 3-D structure and velocity's momentum in our universe. But we can do better. So, you might recognize this nebula more like this: the famous Hubble image of the Pillars of Creation or the Eagle Nebula. And, I'm going to fade this out onto a radio image, it's a false color in the background, and fade away the Hubble image you're used to. But we don't need to just look at this in 3-D, we can look at it in 2-D, and here I'm using a radiology tool kit called OsiriX. When I showed this to astronomer Marc Pound, whose data this is, he was amazed, because he had been trying so hard to study the impact of a young group of stars. And he had this theory that there's this wind crashing and tossing the pillars over, and it took him months to prove this with conventional visualization. But in one shot, you can see the shock wave of wind blasting through across to the left-hand side of the screen. Now, I don't think myself or any of my collaborators would've anticipated how far this has gone, and by sharing the medical technology with astronomy and astronomy with medical, we've been able to find new stars and supernova remnants, and revolutionize how you do heart diagnostics and look at data for different patients and organize it and data-mine it. I don't have time to show you all these great projects, but I'll show you one of them. This is a collaboration I've been working on, called The Multiscale Hemodynamics Project. I'm working with doctors at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Now, what this represents is a novel way of doing heart disease diagnostics. And instead of the conventional invasive angiography, this is just a CT scan. What you see here are the coronary arteries. So you have your heart, and the arteries wrap around the outside. These are the arteries you worry about getting blocked and giving you a heart attack and killing you. So it's really important that we look at them. Now, this is a CT scan of a patient with a blood-flow simulation — that's the coloring up there. That simulation was originally developed for studying the structure of DNA, and then the visualization was done with a tool kit called VisIt, originally developed for physics simulations. Interdisciplinary. My assignment was to try and come up with a new way of looking at this to make it optimal for the doctors and hospital: How can we make it the most efficient for them for a diagnosis? And I came up with this image. It's 2-D; I took the whole artery and collapsed everything into a 2-D plane. I got some very quizzical looks when I showed this to the doctors originally. But I was inspired to do this representation from my astronomy work, where we've been using these tree diagrams along the bottom to understand the structure of nebulae. Well, we were inspired in that work from the bioinformatics and genome community, where they use these tree diagrams to understand their gene expression data. They were inspired by the evolutionary biologists, who use these tree diagrams to understand how species evolve and are related, the first of which was drawn by Sir Charles Darwin. Here's an example from his "Origin of the Species." So, straight from Darwin, through biology, physics, astronomy, back to medical imaging. Interdisciplinary. One may say, "Well, is this 2-D representation better?" I did a study at Harvard Medical School to answer just that question. And it turns out, if you present the image on the left to a doctor, on average, they find about 39% of the high-risk regions that could explode or block your heart and kill you. On the right, we can do a little better, and they're able to find 62% of these high-risk, dangerous regions. But we can do even better, simply by changing the colors. The rainbow color map is a sin most doctors and astronomers and physicists are guilty of using. (Laughs) And it doesn't focus the best qualities of your visual system. The human system can see brightness variation, contrast ... not really good at that whole "green-yellow-blue" thing. But now, if you look in the shades of red and highlight the regions that are most diseased with dark red, now doctors can find 91% of the high-risk regions, simply by changing the colors. (Applause) And I would have never known the importance of color if it was not for my computer science and visualization collaborators showing this to me. So again: interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you even get a collaboration like this? In the case of astronomical medicine, it started with a Harvard Astronomy professor, Alyssa Goodman, serendipitously meeting a computer scientist and imaging specialist from Brigham and Woman’s Hospital, and their recruitment of a very adventurous, open-minded, young student. (Laughter) And from there, it has exploded: we've pulled in cardiologists and computer scientists and radiologists and astronomers, physicists, chemists, computational physicists — I mean, we've brought so many people together. And it's been enlightening to share domains and information across borders. And we're still going. And although most of the people up on the screen are from Harvard or Harvard Med, now we cross different institutions and continents to work together. All I can say is, it has just been wonderful. We're continuing to make new discoveries. And I just urge you: attend conferences not in your own domain, read books and journals not in your own discipline, watch TED talks and come to events like this and say hi to the neighbor sitting next to you, because you really never know where your next great idea is going to come from. Thank you. (Applause)

Be suspicious of simple stories

{0: "In his work, economist Tyler Cowen looks at clues from pop culture, art, food, to gather data and make observations on the world's globalizing culture and commerce. "}

TEDxMidAtlantic

I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I'd like to do is instead tell you why I'm suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often, the more nervous I get. (Laughter) So the best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is that they are a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter is that it always leaves the same things in. You're always left with the same few simple stories. There is the old saying that just about every story can be summed up as "a stranger came to town." There is a book by Christopher Booker, where he claims there are really just seven types of stories. There is monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, rebirth. You don't have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you're telling yourself the same things over and over again. There was a study done, we asked some people— people were asked to describe their lives. When asked to describe their lives, what is interesting is how few people said "mess". (Laughter) It's probably the best answer, I don't mean that in a bad way. "Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of drawing upon multiple strengths. But what people wanted to say was, "My life is a journey." 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that is a kind of story. 8% said, "My life is a novel." 5% said, "My life is a play." I don't think anyone said, "My life is a reality TV show." (Laughter) But again, we're imposing order on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and the thing is when something is in the form of a story, often, we remember it when we shouldn't. So how many of you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree? It's not obvious that is exactly what happened. The story of Paul Revere, it's not obvious that that is exactly the way it happened. So again, we should be suspicious of stories. We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they are like a candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels. When we read non-fiction books, we're really being fed stories. Non-fiction is, in a sense, the new fiction. The book may happen to say true things, but again, everything's taking the same form of these stories. So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like this instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple, for the point of a narrative is to strip it away, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you can present in a sentence or two. When you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good versus evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. I know some things actually are good versus evil, we all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good versus evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you're telling a good versus evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don't have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good versus evil story, and by pressing that button, you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more. Another set of stories that are popular— if you know Oliver Stone's movies, or Michael Moore's movies, you can't make a movie and say: "It was all a big accident." No, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together, because in a story, a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action, but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So when you hear stories about plots, or even stories about good people plotting things together, just like when you're watching movies, this, again, is reason to be suspicious. As a good rule of thumb, if you're asking: "When I hear a story, when should I be especially suspicious?" If you hear a story and you think: "Wow, that would make a great movie!" (Laughter) That's when the "uh-oh" reaction should pop in a bit more, and you should start thinking in terms of how the whole thing is maybe a bit of a mess. Another common story or storyline is the claim that we "have to get tough". You'll hear this in so many contexts. We have to get tough with the banks. We had to get tough with the labor unions. We need to get tough with some other country, some foreign dictator, someone we're negotiating with. Again, the point is not against getting tough. Sometimes we should get tough. That we got tough with the Nazis was a good thing. But this is again a story we fall back upon all too readily, all too quickly. When we don't really know why something happened, we blame someone, and we say: "We need to get tough with them!" As if it had never occurred to your predecessor, this idea of getting tough. I view it usually as a kind of mental laziness. It's a simple story you tell: "We need to get tough, we needed to get tough, we will have to get tough." Usually, that is a kind of warning signal. Another kind of problem with stories is you can only fit so many stories into your mind at once, or in the course of a day, or even over the course of a lifetime. So your stories are serving too many purposes. For instance, just to get out of bed in the morning, you tell yourself the story that your job is really important, what you're doing is really important (Laughter) and maybe it is, but I tell myself that story even when it's not. And you know what? That story works. It gets me out of bed. It's a kind of self-deception, but the problem comes when I need to change that story. The whole point of the story is that I grab onto it and I hold it, and it gets me out of bed. So when I'm really doing something that is actually just a waste of time, in my mess of a life, I'm too tied into my story that got me out of bed, and ideally, I ought to have some very complex story map in my mind, you know, with combinatorials and a matrix of computation, and the like, but that is not how stories work. Stories in order to work have to be simple, easily grasped, easily told to others, easily remembered. So stories will serve dual and conflicting purposes, and very often they will lead us astray. I used to think I was within the camp of economists, I was one of the good guys, and I was allied with other good guys, and we were fighting the ideas of the bad guys. I used to think that! And probably, I was wrong. Maybe sometimes, I'm one of the good guys, but on some issues, I finally realized: "Hey, I wasn't one of the good guys." I'm not sure I was the bad guy in the sense of having evil intent, but it was very hard for me to get away with that story. One interesting thing about cognitive biases is they are the subject of so many books these days. There's the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is that we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. Why don't these books tell us that? It's because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you're learning about some of your biases, but you're making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, like: "I bought this book. I won't be 'Predictably Irrational'." (Laughter) It's like people want to hear the worst, so psychologically, they can prepare for it or defend against it. It's why there is such a market for pessimism. But to think that by buying the book gets you somewhere, that's maybe the bigger fallacy. It's just like the evidence that shows that the most dangerous people are those who have been taught some financial literacy. They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It's the people who realize they don't know anything at all, that end up doing pretty well. A third problem with stories is that outsiders manipulate us using stories, and we all like to think advertising only works on the other guy, but, of course, that's not how it is, advertising works on all of us. So if you're too attached to stories, what will happen is people selling products come along, and they will bundle their product with a story. You're like, "Hey, a free story!" And you end up buying the product, because the product and the story go together. (Laugther) If you think about how capitalism works, there is a bias here. Let's consider two kinds of stories about cars. Story A is: "Buy this car, and you will have beautiful, romantic partners and a fascinating life." (Laughter) There are a lot of people who have a financial incentive to promote that story. But, say, the alternative story is: "You don't actually need a car as nice as your income would indicate. What you usually do is look at what your peers do and copy them. That is a good heuristic for lots of problems, but when it comes to cars, just buy a Toyota." (Laughter) Maybe Toyota has an incentive there, but even Toyota is making more money off the luxury cars, and less money off the cheaper cars. So if you think which set of stories you end up hearing, you end up hearing the glamor stories, the seductive stories, and again I'm telling you, don't trust them. There are people using your love of stories to manipulate you. Pull back and say: "What are the messages, what are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell?" Start telling yourself those, and then see if any of your decisions change. That is one simple way. You can never get out of the pattern of thinking in terms of stories, but you can improve the extent to which you think in stories, and make some better decisions. So if I'm thinking about this talk, I'm wondering, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? One story you might be like the story of the quest. "Tyler was a man on a quest. Tyler came here, and he told us not to think so much in terms of stories." That would be a story you could tell about this talk. (Laughter) It would fit a pretty well-known pattern. You might remember it. You could tell it to other people. "This weird guy came, and he said, 'Don't think in terms of stories. Let me tell you what happened today!'" (Laughter) And you tell your story. (Laugther) Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in terms of stories (Laughter) but then I heard Tyler Cowen (Laughter) and now I think less in terms of stories!" That too is a narrative you will remember, you can tell to other people, and again, it may stick. You also could tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came (Laughter) and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories (Laughter) about how other people think too much in terms of stories." (Laughter) So, today, which is it? Is it like quest, rebirth, tragedy? Or maybe some combination of the three? I'm really not sure, and I'm not here to tell you to burn your DVD player and throw out your Tolstoy. To think in terms of stories is fundamentally human. There is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez memoir "Living to Tell the Tale" that we use memory in stories to make sense of what we've done, to give meaning to our lives, to establish connections with other people. None of this will go away, should go away, or can go away. But again, as an economist, I'm thinking about life on the margin, the extra decision. Should we think more in terms of stories, or less in terms of stories? When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious? And what kind of stories should we be suspicious of? Again, I'm telling you it's the stories, very often, that you like the most, that you find the most rewarding, the most inspiring. The stories that don't focus on opportunity cost, or the complex, unintended consequences of human action, because that very often does not make for a good story. So often a story is a story of triumph, a story of struggle; there are opposing forces, which are either evil or ignorant; there is a person on a quest, someone making a voyage, and a stranger coming to town. And those are your categories, but don't let them make you too happy. (Laughter) As an alternative, at the margin - again, no burning of Tolstoy - but just be a little more messy. If I actually had to live those journeys, and quests, and battles, that would be so oppressive to me! It's like, my goodness, can't I just have my life in its messy, ordinary - I hesitate to use the word - glory but that it's fun for me? Do I really have to follow some kind of narrative? Can't I just live? So be more comfortable with messy. Be more comfortable with agnostic, and I mean this about the things that make you feel good. It's so easy to pick out a few areas to be agnostic in, and then feel good about it, like, "I am agnostic about religion, or politics." It's a kind of portfolio move you make to be more dogmatic elsewhere, right? (Laughter) Sometimes, the most intellectually trustworthy people are the ones who pick one area, and they are totally dogmatic in that, so pig-headedly unreasonable, that you think, "How can they possibly believe that?" But it soaks up their stubbornness, and then, on other things, they can be pretty open-minded. So don't fall into the trap of thinking because you're agnostic on some things, that you're being fundamentally reasonable about your self-deception, your stories, and your open-mindedness. (Laughter) [Think about] this idea of hovering, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, [and how] not everything ties up into a neat bow, and you're really not on a journey here. You're here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don't know what it is, and maybe I don't know what it is, but anyway, I'm happy to be invited, and thank you all for listening. (Laughter) (Applause)

Award-winning teenage science in action

{0: 'Lauren Hodge won the 2011 Google Science Fair in the age 13-14 category.', 1: 'Shree Bose was the grand prize winner at the 2011 Google Science Fair.', 2: 'Naomi Shah won the 2011 Google Science Fair in the age 15-16 category.'}

TEDxWomen 2011

Lauren Hodge: If you were going to a restaurant and wanted a healthier option, which would you choose, grilled or fried chicken? Now most people would answer grilled, and it's true that grilled chicken does contain less fat and fewer calories. However, grilled chicken poses a hidden danger. The hidden danger is heterocyclic amines — specifically phenomethylimidazopyridine, or PhIP — (laughter) which is the immunogenic or carcinogenic compound. A carcinogen is any substance or agent that causes abnormal growth of cells, which can also cause them to metastasize or spread. They are also organic compounds in which one or more of the hydrogens in ammonia is replaced with a more complex group. Studies show that antioxidants are known to decrease these heterocyclic amines. However, no studies exist yet that show how or why. These here are five different organizations that classify carcinogens. And as you can see, none of the organizations consider the compounds to be safe, which justifies the need to decrease them in our diet. Now you might wonder how a 13 year-old girl could come up with this idea. And I was led to it through a series of events. I first learned about it through a lawsuit I read about in my doctor's office — (Laughter) which was between the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine and seven different fast food restaurants. They weren't sued because there was carcinogens in the chicken, but they were sued because of California's Proposition 65, which stated that if there's anything dangerous in the products then the companies had to give a clear warning. So I was very surprised about this. And I was wondering why nobody knew more about this dangerous grilled chicken, which doesn't seem very harmful. But then one night, my mom was cooking grilled chicken for dinner, and I noticed that the edges of the chicken, which had been marinated in lemon juice, turned white. And later in biology class, I learned that it's due to a process called denaturing, which is where the proteins will change shape and lose their ability to chemically function. So I combined these two ideas and I formulated a hypothesis, saying that, could possibly the carcinogens be decreased due to a marinade and could it be due to the differences in PH? So my idea was born, and I had the project set up and a hypothesis, so what was my next step? Well obviously I had to find a lab to work at because I didn't have the equipment in my school. I thought this would be easy, but I emailed about 200 different people within a five-hour radius of where I lived, and I got one positive response that said that they could work with me. Most of the others either never responded back, said they didn't have the time or didn't have the equipment and couldn't help me. So it was a big commitment to drive to the lab to work multiple times. However, it was a great opportunity to work in a real lab — so I could finally start my project. The first stage was completed at home, which consisted of marinating the chicken, grilling the chicken, amassing it and preparing it to be transported to the lab. The second stage was completed at the Penn State University main campus lab, which is where I extracted the chemicals, changed the PH so I could run it through the equipment and separated the compounds I needed from the rest of the chicken. The final stages, when I ran the samples through a high-pressure liquid chromatography mass spectrometer, which separated the compounds and analyzed the chemicals and told me exactly how much carcinogens I had in my chicken. So when I went through the data, I had very surprising results, because I found that four out of the five marinating ingredients actually inhibited the carcinogen formation. When compared with the unmarinated chicken, which is what I used as my control, I found that lemon juice worked by far the best, which decreased the carcinogens by about 98 percent. The saltwater marinade and the brown sugar marinade also worked very well, decreasing the carcinogens by about 60 percent. Olive oil slightly decreased the PhIP formation, but it was nearly negligible. And the soy sauce results were inconclusive because of the large data range, but it seems like soy sauce actually increased the potential carcinogens. Another important factor that I didn't take into account initially was the time cooked. And I found that if you increase the time cooked, the amount of carcinogens rapidly increases. So the best way to marinate chicken, based on this, is to, not under-cook, but definitely don't over-cook and char the chicken, and marinate in either lemon juice, brown sugar or saltwater. (Applause) Based on these findings, I have a question for you. Would you be willing to make a simple change in your diet that could potentially save your life? Now I'm not saying that if you eat grilled chicken that's not marinated, you're definitely going to catch cancer and die. However, anything you can do to decrease the risk of potential carcinogens can definitely increase the quality of lifestyle. Is it worth it to you? How will you cook your chicken now? (Applause) Shree Bose: Hi everyone. I'm Shree Bose. I was the 17-18 year-old age category winner and then the grand prize winner. And I want all of you to imagine a little girl holding a dead blue spinach plant. And she's standing in front of you and she's explaining to you that little kids will eat their vegetables if they're different colors. Sounds ridiculous, right. But that was me years ago. And that was my first science fair project. It got a bit more complicated from there. My older brother Panaki Bose spent hours of his time explaining atoms to me when I barely understood basic algebra. My parents suffered through many more of my science fair projects, including a remote controlled garbage can. (Laughter) And then came the summer after my freshman year, when my grandfather passed away due to cancer. And I remember watching my family go through that and thinking that I never wanted another family to feel that kind of loss. So, armed with all the wisdom of freshman year biology, I decided I wanted to do cancer research at 15. Good plan. So I started emailing all of these professors in my area asking to work under their supervision in a lab. Got rejected by all except one. And then went on, my next summer, to work under Dr. Basu at the UNT Health Center at Fort Worth, Texas. And that is where the research began. So ovarian cancer is one of those cancers that most people don't know about, or at least don't pay that much attention to. But yet, it's the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States. In fact, one in 70 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer. One in 100 will die from it. Chemotherapy, one of the most effective ways used to treat cancer today, involves giving patients really high doses of chemicals to try and kill off cancer cells. Cisplatin is a relatively common ovarian cancer chemotherapy drug — a relatively simple molecule made in the lab that messes with the DNA of cancer cells and causes them to kill themselves. Sounds great, right? But here's the problem: sometimes patients become resistant to the drug, and then years after they've been declared to be cancer free, they come back. And this time, they no longer respond to the drug. It's a huge problem. In fact, it's one of the biggest problems with chemotherapy today. So we wanted to figure out how these ovarian cancer cells are becoming resistant to this drug called Cisplatin. And we wanted to figure this out, because if we could figure that out, then we might be able to prevent that resistance from ever happening. So that's what we set out to do. And we thought it had something to do with this protein called AMP kinase, an energy protein. So we ran all of these tests blocking the protein, and we saw this huge shift. I mean, on the slide, you can see that on our sensitive side, these cells that are responding to the drug, when we start blocking the protein, the number of dying cells — those colored dots — they're going down. But then on this side, with the same treatment, they're going up — interesting. But those are dots on a screen for you; what exactly does that mean? Well basically that means that this protein is changing from the sensitive cell to the resistant cell. And in fact, it might be changing the cells themselves to make the cells resistant. And that's huge. In fact, it means that if a patient comes in and they're resistant to this drug, then if we give them a chemical to block this protein, then we can treat them again with the same drug. And that's huge for chemotherapy effectiveness — possibly for many different types of cancer. So that was my work, and it was my way of reimagining the future for future research, with figuring out exactly what this protein does, but also for the future of chemotherapy effectiveness — so maybe all grandfathers with cancer have a little bit more time to spend with their grandchildren. But my work wasn't just about the research. It was about finding my passion. That's why being the grand prize winner of the Google Global Science Fair — cute picture, right — it was so exciting to me and it was such an amazing honor. And ever since then, I've gotten to do some pretty cool stuff — from getting to meet the president to getting to be on this stage to talk to all of you guys. But like I said, my journey wasn't just about the research, it was about finding my passion, and it was about making my own opportunities when I didn't even know what I was doing. It was about inspiration and determination and never giving up on my interest for science and learning and growing. After all, my story begins with a dried, withered spinach plant and it's only getting better from there. Thank you. (Applause) Naomi Shah: Hi everyone. I'm Naomi Shah, and today I'll be talking to you about my research involving indoor air quality and asthmatic patients. 1.6 million deaths worldwide. One death every 20 seconds. People spend over 90 percent of their lives indoors. And the economic burden of asthma exceeds that of HIV and tuberculosis combined. Now these statistics had a huge impact on me, but what really sparked my interest in my research was watching both my dad and my brother suffer from chronic allergies year-round. It confused me; why did these allergy symptoms persist well past the pollen season? With this question in mind, I started researching, and I soon found that indoor air pollutants were the culprit. As soon as I realized this, I investigated the underlying relationship between four prevalent air pollutants and their affect on the lung health of asthmatic patients. At first, I just wanted to figure out which of these four pollutants have the largest negative health impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients. But soon after, I developed a novel mathematical model that essentially quantifies the effect of these environmental pollutants on the lung health of asthmatic patients. And it surprises me that no model currently exists that quantifies the effect of environmental factors on human lung health, because that relationship seems so important. So with that in mind, I started researching more, I started investigating more, and I became very passionate. Because I realized that if we could find a way to target remediation, we could also find a way to treat asthmatic patients more effectively. For example, volatile organic compounds are chemical pollutants that are found in our schools, homes and workplaces. They're everywhere. These chemical pollutants are currently not a criteria air pollutant, as defined by the U.S. Clean Air Act. Which is surprising to me, because these chemical pollutants, through my research, I show that they had a very large negative impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients and thus should be regulated. So today I want to show you my interactive software model that I created. I'm going to show it to you on my laptop. And I have a volunteer subject in the audience today, Julie. And all of Julie's data has been pre-entered into my interactive software model. And this can be used by anyone. So I want you to imagine that you're in Julie's shoes, or someone who's really close to you who suffers from asthma or another lung disorder. So Julie's going to her doctor's office to get treated for her asthma. And the doctor has her sit down, and he takes her peak expiratory flow rate — which is essentially her exhalation rate, or the amount of air that she can breathe out in one breath. So that peak expiratory flow rate, I've entered it up into the interactive software model. I've also entered in her age, her gender and her height. I've assumed that she lives in an average household with average air pollutant levels. So any user can come in here and click on "lung function report" and it'll take them to this report that I created. And this report really drives home the crux of my research. So what it shows — if you want to focus on that top graph in the right-hand corner — it shows Julie's actual peak expiratory flow rate in the yellow bar. This is the measurement that she took in her doctor's office. In the blue bar at the bottom of the graph, it shows what her peak expiratory flow rate, what her exhalation rate or lung health, should be based on her age, gender and height. So the doctor sees this difference between the yellow bar and the blue bar, and he says, "Wow, we need to give her steroids, medication and inhalers." But I want everyone here to reimagine a world where instead of prescribing steroids, inhalers and medication, the doctor turns to Julie and says, "Why don't you go home and clean out your air filters. Clean out the air ducts in your home, in your workplace, in your school. Stop the use of incense and candles. And if you're remodeling your house, take out all the carpeting and put in hardwood flooring." Because these solutions are natural, these solutions are sustainable, and these solutions are long-term investments — long-term investments that we're making for our generation and for future generations. Because these environmental solutions that Julie can make in her home, her workplace and her school are impacting everyone that lives around her. So I'm very passionate about this research and I really want to continue it and expand it to more disorders besides asthma, more respiratory disorders, as well as more pollutants. But before I end my talk today, I want to leave you with one saying. And that saying is that genetics loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger. And that made a huge impact on me when I was doing this research. Because what I feel, is a lot of us think that the environment is at a macro level, that we can't do anything to change our air quality or to change the climate or anything. But if each one of us takes initiative in our own home, in our own school and in our own workplace, we can make a huge difference in air quality. Because remember, we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors. And air quality and air pollutants have a huge impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients, anyone with a respiratory disorder and really all of us in general. So I want you to reimagine a world with better air quality, better quality of life and better quality of living for everyone including our future generations. Thank you. (Applause) Lisa Ling: Right. Can I have Shree and Lauren come up really quickly? Your Google Science Fair champions. Your winners. (Applause)

In defense of dialogue

{0: "Jonas Gahr Støre is the Norwegian Foreign Minister, charged with working for Norway's interests internationally."}

TEDxRC2

Amongst all the troubling deficits we struggle with today — we think of financial and economic primarily — the ones that concern me most is the deficit of political dialogue — our ability to address modern conflicts as they are, to go to the source of what they're all about and to understand the key players and to deal with them. We who are diplomats, we are trained to deal with conflicts between states and issues between states. And I can tell you, our agenda is full. There is trade, there is disarmament, there is cross-border relations. But the picture is changing, and we are seeing that there are new key players coming onto the scene. We loosely call them "groups." They may represent social, religious, political, economic, military realities. And we struggle with how to deal with them. The rules of engagement: how to talk, when to talk, and how to deal with them. Let me show you a slide here which illustrates the character of conflicts since 1946 until today. You see the green is a traditional interstate conflict, the ones we used to read about. The red is modern conflict, conflicts within states. These are quite different, and they are outside the grasp of modern diplomacy. And the core of these key actors are groups who represent different interests inside countries. And the way they deal with their conflicts rapidly spreads to other countries. So in a way, it is everybody's business. Another acknowledgment we've seen during these years, recent years, is that very few of these domestic interstate, intrastate conflicts can be solved militarily. They may have to be dealt with with military means, but they cannot be solved by military means. They need political solutions. And we, therefore, have a problem, because they escape traditional diplomacy. And we have among states a reluctance in dealing with them. Plus, during the last decade, we've been in the mode where dealing with groups was conceptually and politically dangerous. After 9/11, either you were with us or against us. It was black or white. And groups are very often immediately label terrorists. And who would talk to terrorists? The West, as I would see it, comes out of that decade weakened, because we didn't understand the group. So we've spent more time on focusing on why we should not talk to others than finding out how we talk to others. Now I'm not naive. You cannot talk to everybody all the time. And there are times you should walk. And sometimes military intervention is necessary. I happen to believe that Libya was necessary and that military intervention in Afghanistan was also necessary. And my country relies on its security through military alliance, that's clear. But still we have a large deficit in dealing with and understanding modern conflict. Let us turn to Afghanistan. 10 years after that military intervention, that country is far from secure. The situation, to be honest, is very serious. Now again, the military is necessary, but the military is no problem-solver. When I first came to Afghanistan in 2005 as a foreign minister, I met the commander of ISAF, the international troops. And he told me that, "This can be won militarily, minister. We just have to persevere." Now four COM ISAF's later, we hear a different message: "This cannot be won militarily. We need military presence, but we need to move to politics. We can only solve this through a political solution. And it is not us who will solve it; Afghans have to solve it." But then they need a different political process than the one they were given in 2001, 2002. They need an inclusive process where the real fabric of this very complicated society can deal with their issues. Everybody seems to agree with that. It was very controversial to say three, four, five years ago. Now everybody agrees. But now, as we prepare to talk, we understand how little we know. Because we didn't talk. We didn't grasp what was going on. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC, is talking to everyone, and it is doing so because it is neutral. And that's one reason why that organization probably is the best informed key player to understand modern conflict — because they talk. My point is that you don't have to be neutral to talk. And you don't have to agree when you sit down with the other side. And you can always walk. But if you don't talk, you can't engage the other side. And the other side which you're going to engage is the one with whom you profoundly disagree. Prime Minister Rabin said when he engaged the Oslo process, "You don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies." It's hard, but it is necessary. Let me go one step further. This is Tahrir Square. There's a revolution going on. The Arab Spring is heading into fall and is moving into winter. It will last for a long, long time. And who knows what it will be called in the end. That's not the point. The point is that we are probably seeing, for the first time in the history of the Arab world, a revolution bottom-up — people's revolution. Social groups are taking to the streets. And we find out in the West that we know very little about what's happening. Because we never talk to the people in these countries. Most governments followed the dictate of the authoritarian leaders to stay away from these different groups, because they were terrorists. So now that they are emerging in the street and we salute the democratic revolution, we find out how little we know. Right now, the discussion goes, "Should we talk to the Muslim Brotherhood? Should we talk to Hamas? If we talk to them, we may legitimize them." I think that is wrong. If you talk in the right way, you make it very clear that talking is not agreeing. And how can we tell the Muslim Brotherhood, as we should, that they must respect minority rights, if we don't accept majority rights? Because they may turn out to be a majority. How can we escape [having] a double-standard, if we at the same time preach democracy and at the same time don't want to deal with the groups that are representative? How will we ever be interlocutors? Now my diplomats are instructed to talk to all these groups. But talking can be done in different ways. We make a distinction between talking from a diplomatic level and talking at the political level. Now talking can be accompanied with aid or not with aid. Talking can be accompanied with inclusion or not inclusion. There's a big array of the ways of dealing with this. So if we refuse to talk to these new groups that are going to be dominating the news in years to come, we will further radicalization, I believe. We will make the road from violent activities into politics harder to travel. And if we cannot demonstrate to these groups that if you move towards democracy, if you move towards taking part in civilized and normal standards among states, there are some rewards on the other side. The paradox here is that the last decade probably was a lost decade for making progress on this. And the paradox is that the decade before the last decade was so promising — and for one reason primarily. And the reason is what happened in South Africa: Nelson Mandela. When Mandela came out of prison after 27 years of captivity, if he had told his people, "It's time to take up the arms, it's time to fight," he would have been followed. And I think the international community would have said, "Fair enough. It's their right to fight." Now as you know, Mandela didn't do that. In his memoirs, "Long Road to Freedom," he wrote that he survived during those years of captivity because he always decided to look upon his oppressor as also being a human being, also being a human being. So he engaged a political process of dialogue, not as a strategy of the weak, but as a strategy of the strong. And he engaged talking profoundly by settling some of the most tricky issues through a truth and reconciliation process where people came and talked. Now South African friends will know that was very painful. So what can we learn from all of this? Dialogue is not easy — not between individuals, not between groups, not between governments — but it is very necessary. If we're going to deal with political conflict-solving of conflicts, if we're going to understand these new groups which are coming from bottom-up, supported by technology, which is available to all, we diplomats cannot be sitting back in the banquets believing that we are doing interstate relations. We have to connect with these profound changes. And what is dialogue really about? When I enter into dialogue, I really hope that the other side would pick up my points of view, that I would impress upon them my opinions and my values. I cannot do that unless I send the signals that I will be open to listen to the other side's signals. We need a lot more training on how to do that and a lot more practice on how that can take problem-solving forward. We know from our personal experiences that it's easy sometimes just to walk, and sometimes you may need to fight. And I wouldn't say that is the wrong thing in all circumstances. Sometimes you have to. But that strategy seldom takes you very far. The alternative is a strategy of engagement and principled dialogue. And I believe we need to strengthen this approach in modern diplomacy, not only between states, but also within states. We are seeing some new signs. We could never have done the convention against anti-personnel landmines and the convention that is banning cluster munitions unless we had done diplomacy differently, by engaging with civil society. All of a sudden, NGOs were not only standing in the streets, crying their slogans, but they were taking [them] into the negotiations, partly because they represented the victims of these weapons. And they brought their knowledge. And there was an interaction between diplomacy and the power coming bottom-up. This is perhaps a first element of a change. In the future, I believe, we should draw examples from these different illustrations, not to have diplomacy which is disconnected from people and civil society. And we have to go also beyond traditional diplomacy to the survival issue of our times, climate change. How are we going to solve climate change through negotiations, unless we are able to make civil society and people, not part of the problem, but part of the solution? It is going to demand an inclusive process of diplomacy very different from the one we are practicing today as we are heading to new rounds of difficult climate negotiations, but when we move toward something which has to be much more along a broad mobilization. It's crucial to understand, I believe, because of technology and because of globalization, societies from bottom-up. We as diplomats need to know the social capital of communities. What is it that makes people trust each other, not only between states, but also within states? What is the legitimacy of diplomacy, of the the solution we devise as diplomats if they cannot be reflected and understood by also these broader forces of societies that we now very loosely call groups? The good thing is that we are not powerless. We have never had as many means of communication, means of being connected, means of reaching out, means of including. The diplomatic toolbox is actually full of different tools we can use to strengthen our communication. But the problem is that we are coming out of a decade where we had a fear of touching it. Now, I hope, in the coming years, that we are able to demonstrate through some concrete examples that fear is receding and that we can take courage from that alliance with civil society in different countries to support their problem-solving, among the Afghans, inside the Palestinian population, between the peoples of Palestine and Israel. And as we try to understand this broad movement across the Arab world, we are not powerless. We need to improve the necessary skills, and we need the courage to use them. In my country, I have seen how the council of Islamist groups and Christian groups came together, not as a government initiative, but they came together on their own initiative to establish contact and dialogue in times where things were pretty low-key tension. And when tension increased, they already had that dialogue, and that was a strength to deal with different issues. Our modern Western societies are more complex than before, in this time of migration. How are we going to settle and build a bigger "We" to deal with our issues if we don't improve our skills of communication? So there are many reasons, and for all of these reasons, this is time and this is why we must talk. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)

Animations of unseeable biology

{0: 'Drew Berry creates stunning and scientifically accurate animations to illustrate how the molecules in our cell move and interact.'}

TEDxSydney

What I'm going to show you are the astonishing molecular machines that create the living fabric of your body. Now molecules are really, really tiny. And by tiny, I mean really. They're smaller than a wavelength of light, so we have no way to directly observe them. But through science, we do have a fairly good idea of what's going on down at the molecular scale. So what we can do is actually tell you about the molecules, but we don't really have a direct way of showing you the molecules. One way around this is to draw pictures. And this idea is actually nothing new. Scientists have always created pictures as part of their thinking and discovery process. They draw pictures of what they're observing with their eyes, through technology like telescopes and microscopes, and also what they're thinking about in their minds. I picked two well-known examples, because they're very well-known for expressing science through art. And I start with Galileo, who used the world's first telescope to look at the Moon. And he transformed our understanding of the Moon. The perception in the 17th century was the Moon was a perfect heavenly sphere. But what Galileo saw was a rocky, barren world, which he expressed through his watercolor painting. Another scientist with very big ideas, the superstar of biology is Charles Darwin. And with this famous entry in his notebook, he begins in the top left-hand corner with, "I think," and then sketches out the first tree of life, which is his perception of how all the species, all living things on Earth are connected through evolutionary history — the origin of species through natural selection and divergence from an ancestral population. Even as a scientist, I used to go to lectures by molecular biologists and find them completely incomprehensible, with all the fancy technical language and jargon that they would use in describing their work, until I encountered the artworks of David Goodsell, who is a molecular biologist at the Scripps Institute. And his pictures — everything's accurate and it's all to scale. And his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like. So this is a transection through blood. In the top left-hand corner, you've got this yellow-green area. The yellow-green area is the fluid of blood, which is mostly water, but it's also antibodies, sugars, hormones, that kind of thing. And the red region is a slice into a red blood cell. And those red molecules are hemoglobin. They are actually red; that's what gives blood its color. And hemoglobin acts as a molecular sponge to soak up the oxygen in your lungs and then carry it to other parts of the body. I was very much inspired by this image many years ago, and I wondered whether we could use computer graphics to represent the molecular world. What would it look like? And that's how I really began. So let's begin. This is DNA in its classic double helix form. And it's from X-ray crystallography, so it's an accurate model of DNA. If we unwind the double helix and unzip the two strands, you see these things that look like teeth. Those are the letters of genetic code, the 25,000 genes you've got written in your DNA. This is what they typically talk about — the genetic code — this is what they're talking about. But I want to talk about a different aspect of DNA science, and that is the physical nature of DNA. It's these two strands that run in opposite directions for reasons I can't go into right now. But they physically run in opposite directions, which creates a number of complications for your living cells, as you're about to see, most particularly when DNA is being copied. And so what I'm about to show you is an accurate representation of the actual DNA replication machine that's occurring right now inside your body, at least 2002 biology. So DNA's entering the production line from the left-hand side, and it hits this collection, these miniature biochemical machines, that are pulling apart the DNA strand and making an exact copy. So DNA comes in and hits this blue, doughnut-shaped structure and it's ripped apart into its two strands. One strand can be copied directly, and you can see these things spooling off to the bottom there. But things aren't so simple for the other strand because it must be copied backwards. So it's thrown out repeatedly in these loops and copied one section at a time, creating two new DNA molecules. Now you have billions of this machine right now working away inside you, copying your DNA with exquisite fidelity. It's an accurate representation, and it's pretty much at the correct speed for what is occurring inside you. I've left out error correction and a bunch of other things. (Laughter) This was work from a number of years ago— Thank you. (Applause) This is work from a number of years ago, but what I'll show you next is updated science, it's updated technology. So again, we begin with DNA. And it's jiggling and wiggling there because of the surrounding soup of molecules, which I've stripped away so you can see something. DNA is about two nanometers across, which is really quite tiny. But in each one of your cells, each strand of DNA is about 30 to 40 million nanometers long. So to keep the DNA organized and regulate access to the genetic code, it's wrapped around these purple proteins — or I've labeled them purple here. It's packaged up and bundled up. All this field of view is a single strand of DNA. This huge package of DNA is called a chromosome. And we'll come back to chromosomes in a minute. We're pulling out, we're zooming out, out through a nuclear pore, which is the gateway to this compartment that holds all the DNA, called the nucleus. All of this field of view is about a semester's worth of biology, and I've got seven minutes, So we're not going to be able to do that today? No, I'm being told, "No." This is the way a living cell looks down a light microscope. And it's been filmed under time-lapse, which is why you can see it moving. The nuclear envelope breaks down. These sausage-shaped things are the chromosomes, and we'll focus on them. They go through this very striking motion that is focused on these little red spots. When the cell feels it's ready to go, it rips apart the chromosome. One set of DNA goes to one side, the other side gets the other set of DNA — identical copies of DNA. And then the cell splits down the middle. And again, you have billions of cells undergoing this process right now inside of you. Now we're going to rewind and just focus on the chromosomes, and look at its structure and describe it. So again, here we are at that equator moment. The chromosomes line up. And if we isolate just one chromosome, we're going to pull it out and have a look at its structure. So this is one of the biggest molecular structures that you have, at least as far as we've discovered so far inside of us. So this is a single chromosome. And you have two strands of DNA in each chromosome. One is bundled up into one sausage. The other strand is bundled up into the other sausage. These things that look like whiskers that are sticking out from either side are the dynamic scaffolding of the cell. They're called microtubules, that name's not important. But we're going to focus on the region labeled red here — and it's the interface between the dynamic scaffolding and the chromosomes. It is obviously central to the movement of the chromosomes. We have no idea, really, as to how it's achieving that movement. We've been studying this thing they call the kinetochore for over a hundred years with intense study, and we're still just beginning to discover what it's about. It is made up of about 200 different types of proteins, thousands of proteins in total. It is a signal broadcasting system. It broadcasts through chemical signals, telling the rest of the cell when it's ready, when it feels that everything is aligned and ready to go for the separation of the chromosomes. It is able to couple onto the growing and shrinking microtubules. It's involved with the growing of the microtubules, and it's able to transiently couple onto them. It's also an attention-sensing system. It's able to feel when the cell is ready, when the chromosome is correctly positioned. It's turning green here because it feels that everything is just right. And you'll see, there's this one little last bit that's still remaining red. And it's walked away down the microtubules. That is the signal broadcasting system sending out the stop signal. And it's walked away — I mean, it's that mechanical. It's molecular clockwork. This is how you work at the molecular scale. So with a little bit of molecular eye candy, (Laughter) we've got kinesins, the orange ones. They're little molecular courier molecules walking one way. And here are the dynein, they're carrying that broadcasting system. And they've got their long legs so they can step around obstacles and so on. So again, this is all derived accurately from the science. The problem is we can't show it to you any other way. Exploring at the frontier of science, at the frontier of human understanding, is mind-blowing. Discovering this stuff is certainly a pleasurable incentive to work in science. But most medical researchers — discovering the stuff is simply steps along the path to the big goals, which are to eradicate disease, to eliminate the suffering and the misery that disease causes and to lift people out of poverty. Thank you. (Applause)

"Women of Hope"

{0: 'Recording artist, singer, and composer Morley weaves jazz, soul and folk traditions into a vocal and acoustic splendor and has graced stages from Nomad Women’s Festival to Carnegie Hall.'}

TEDxWomen 2011

(Music) ♫ They stood together ♫ ♫ under a tree in tall grass ♫ ♫ on TV ♫ ♫ telling the world ♫ ♫ their story ♫ ♫ We will be left to wander ♫ ♫ and fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and took our husbands ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ We will live on ♫ ♫ then fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and killed our children ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I believe ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ You've got something this little life ♫ ♫ can never take away ♫ ♫ Running through the darkness of night ♫ ♫ with a child by her side ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Daybreak brings a sign of new life ♫ ♫ with the power to stand ♫ ♫ Crossing the border ♫ ♫ she said, "You will grow free on this land" ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I can feel your power ♫ ♫ in these words she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on living ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on giving ♫ ♫ and forgiving ♫ ♫ Aung San Suu Kyi ♫ ♫ living under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ When her people asked her for a message ♫ ♫ she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ Now we know the words, let's sing. ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ People of hope ♫ ♫ People of change ♫ ♫ People of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty ♫ ♫ knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ Thank you. (Applause)

Thorium, an alternative nuclear fuel

{0: 'Kirk Sorensen stumbled across thorium while doing research on how to power a lunar community. Thorium is a cleaner, safer, and more abundant nuclear fuel -- one that Kirk believes will revolutionize how we produce our energy.'}

TEDxYYC

Nearly everyone in the world is part of some community, whether large or small. And all of these communities have similar needs. They need light, they need heat they need air-conditioning. People can't function very well when it's too hot or too cold. They need food to be grown or provided, distributed and stored safely. They need waste products to be collected, removed and processed. People in the community need to be able to get from one place to another as quickly as possible. And a supply of energy is the basis for all of these activities. Energy in the form of electricity provides light and air-conditioning. Energy in the form of heat keeps us warm. And energy in chemical form provides fertilizer; it drives farm machinery and transportation energy. Now, I spent 10 years working at NASA. In the beginning of my time there in 2000, I was very interested in communities. But this is the kind of community I was thinking of — a lunar community It had all of the same needs as a community on Earth would have, but it had some very unique constraints. And we had to think about how we would provide energy for this very unique community. There’s no coal on the Moon. There's no petroleum. There’s no natural gas. There's no atmosphere. There’s no wind, either. And solar power had a real problem: the Moon orbits the Earth once a month. For two weeks, the sun goes down, and your solar panels don't make any energy. If you want to try to store enough energy in batteries for two weeks, it just simply isn't practical. So nuclear energy was really the only choice. Now, back in 2000, I didn't really know too much about nuclear power, so I started trying to learn. Almost all of the nuclear power we use on Earth today uses water as a basic coolant. This has some advantages, but it has a lot of disadvantages. If you want to generate electricity, you have to get the water a lot hotter than you normally can. At normal pressures, water will boil at 100 degrees Celsius. This isn't nearly hot enough to generate electricity effectively. So water-cooled reactors have to run at much higher pressures than atmospheric pressure. Some water-cooled reactors run at over 70 atmospheres of pressure, and others have to run at as much as 150 atmospheres of pressure. There's no getting around this; it's simply what you have to do if you want to generate electricity using a water-cooled reactor. This means you have to build a water-cooled reactor as a pressure vessel, with steel walls over 20 centimeters thick. If that sounds heavy, that's because it is. Things get a lot worse if you have an accident where you lose pressure inside the reactor. If you have liquid water at 300 degrees Celsius and suddenly you depressurize it, it doesn't stay liquid for very long; it flashes into steam. So water-cooled reactors are built inside of big, thick concrete buildings called containment buildings, which are meant to hold all of the steam that would come out of the reactor if you had an accident where you lost pressure. Steam takes up about 1,000 times more volume than liquid water, so the containment building ends up being very large, relative to the size of the reactor. Another bad thing happens if you lose pressure and your water flashes to steam. If you don't get emergency coolant to the fuel in the reactor, it can overheat and melt. The reactors we have today use uranium oxide as a fuel. It's a ceramic material similar in performance to the ceramics we use to make coffee cups or cookware or the bricks we use to line fireplaces. They're chemically stable, but they're not very good at transferring heat. If you lose pressure, you lose your water, and soon your fuel will melt down and release the radioactive fission products within it. Making solid nuclear fuel is a complicated and expensive process. And we extract less than one percent of the energy for the nuclear fuel before it can no longer remain in the reactor. Water-cooled reactors have another additional challenge: they need to be near large bodies of water, where the steam they generate can be cooled and condensed. Otherwise, they can't generate electrical power. Now, there's no lakes or rivers on the Moon, so if all of this makes it sound like water-cooled reactors aren't such a good fit for a lunar community, I would tend to agree with you. (Laughter) I had the good fortune to learn about a different form of nuclear power that doesn't have all these problems, for a very simple reason: it's not based on water-cooling, and it doesn't use solid fuel. Surprisingly, it's based on salt. One day, I was at a friend's office at work, and I noticed this book on the shelf, "Fluid Fuel Reactors." I was interested and asked him if I could borrow it. Inside that book, I learned about research in the United States back in the 1950s, into a kind of reactor that wasn't based on solid fuel or on water-cooling. It didn't have the problems of the water-cooled reactor, and the reason why was pretty neat. It used a mixture of fluoride salts as a nuclear fuel, specifically, the fluorides of lithium, beryllium, uranium and thorium. Fluoride salts are remarkably chemically stable. They do not react with air and water. You have to heat them up to about 400 degrees Celsius to get them to melt. But that's actually perfect for trying to generate power in a nuclear reactor. Here's the real magic: they don't have to operate at high pressure. And that makes the biggest difference of all. This means they don't have to be in heavy, thick steel pressure vessels, they don't have to use water for coolant and there's nothing in the reactor that's going to make a big change in density, like water. So the containment building around the reactor can be much smaller and close-fitting. Unlike the solid fuels that can melt down if you stop cooling them, these liquid fluoride fuels are already melted, at a much, much lower temperature. In normal operation, you have a little plug here at the bottom of the reactor vessel. This plug is made out of a piece of frozen salt that you've kept frozen by blowing cool gas over the outside of the pipe. If there's an emergency and you lose all the power to your nuclear power plant, the little blower stops blowing, the frozen plug of salt melts, and the liquid fluoride fuel inside the reactor drains out of the vessel, through the line and into another vessel called a drain tank. Inside the drain tank, it's all configured to maximize the transfer of heat, so as to keep the salt passively cooled as its heat load drops over time. In water-cooled reactors, you generally have to provide power to the plant to keep the water circulating and to prevent a meltdown, as we saw in Japan. But in this reactor, if you lose the power to the reactor, it shuts itself down all by itself, without human intervention, and puts itself in a safe and controlled configuration. Now, this was sounding pretty good to me, and I was excited about the potential of using a liquid fluoride reactor to power a lunar community. But then I learned about thorium, and the story got even better. Thorium is a naturally occurring nuclear fuel that is four times more common in the Earth's crust than uranium. It can be used in liquid fluoride thorium reactors to produce electrical energy, heat and other valuable products. It's so energy-dense that you could hold a lifetime supply of thorium energy in the palm of your hand. Thorium is also common on the Moon and easy to find. Here's an actual map of where the lunar thorium is located. Thorium has an electromagnetic signature that makes it easy to find, even from a spacecraft. With the energy generated from a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, we could recycle all of the air, water and waste products within the lunar community. In fact, doing so would be an absolute requirement for success. We could grow the crops needed to feed the members of the community even during the two-week lunar night, using light and power from the reactor. It seemed like the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR, could be the power source that could make a self-sustainable lunar colony a reality. But I had a simple question: If it was such a great thing for a community on the Moon, why not a community on the Earth, a community of the future, self-sustaining and energy-independent? The same energy generation and recycling techniques that could have a powerful impact on surviving on the Moon could also have a powerful impact on surviving on the Earth. Right now, we're burning fossil fuels because they're easy to find and because we can. Unfortunately, they're making some parts of our planet look like the Moon. Using fossil fuels entangles us in conflict in unstable regions of the world and costs money and lives. Things could be very different if we were using thorium. You see, in a LFTR, we could use thorium about 200 times more efficiently than we're using uranium now. And because the LFTR is capable of almost completely releasing the energy in thorium, this reduces the waste generated over uranium by factors of hundreds, and by factors of millions over fossil fuels. We're still going to need liquid fuels for vehicles and machinery, but we could generate these liquid fuels from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and from water, much like nature does. We could generate hydrogen by splitting water and combining it with carbon harvested from CO2 in the atmosphere, making fuels like methanol, ammonia, and dimethyl ether, which could be a direct replacement for diesel fuels. Imagine carbon-neutral gasoline and diesel, sustainable and self-produced. Do we have enough thorium? Yes, we do. In fact, in the United States, we have over 3,200 metric tons of thorium that was stockpiled 50 years ago and is currently buried in a shallow trench in Nevada. This thorium, if used in LFTRs, could produce almost as much energy as the United States uses in three years. And thorium is not a rare substance, either. There are many sites like this one in Idaho, where an area the size of a football field would produce enough thorium each year to power the entire world. Using liquid fluoride thorium technology, we could move away from expensive and difficult aspects of current water-cooled, solid-fueled uranium nuclear power. We wouldn't need large, high-pressure nuclear reactors and big containment buildings that they go in. We wouldn't need large, low-efficiency steam turbines. We wouldn't need to have as many long-distance power transmission infrastructure, because thorium is a very portable energy source that can be located near to where it is needed. A liquid fluoride thorium reactor would be a compact facility, very energy-efficient and safe, that would produce the energy we need day and night, and without respect to weather conditions. In 2007, we used five billion tons of coal, 31 billion barrels of oil and five trillion cubic meters of natural gas, along with 65,000 tons of uranium to produce the world's energy. With thorium, we could do the same thing with 7,000 tons of thorium that could be mined at a single site. If all this sounds interesting to you, I invite you to visit our website, where a growing and enthusiastic online community of thorium advocates is working to tell the world about how we can realize a clean, safe and sustainable energy future, based on the energies of thorium. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The debut of the British Paraorchestra

{0: 'The British Paraorchestra is the first orchestra for world-class musicians of disability', 1: 'Charles Hazlewood dusts off and invigorates classical music, adding a youthful energy and modern twists to centuries-old masterworks. At TEDGlobal, he conducts the Scottish Ensemble.'}

TEDxBrussels

Music is the most universal language that we have, way more so than any dialect or tongue. You can play a melody to a child in China and the same melody to a child in South Africa. And despite the huge differences between those two children, they will still draw some of the same truths from that melody. Now, I think the reason why music has this universality, this way of speaking to each and every one of us, is that somehow it's capable of holding up a mirror to us that reveals, in some small or large way, a little bit of who or what we are. By logical extension of this, if music is this universal force, then surely groups of musicians — let's call them orchestras — should reflect every aspect of the community. Logical, but not necessarily true. At TEDxBrussels today, we've been looking forward to the future — 50 years from now. Well, I'm going to ask you to go in the other direction for a minute, to come back with me 50 years into the past, the early 1960s to be precise. And if you took a look at all the great orchestras of the world at that time, a snapshot, how many women do you think you would find playing in those orchestras? The answer: virtually none. Well, here we are 50 years on, in 2011, and pretty much every orchestra on the planet has a fantastic and healthy balance between the sexes. "Of course!" I hear you say, "Totally logical." But how about another aspect of the community? The disabled community. Do we find them well-represented in the great orchestras of our world? Well, I can tell you as a conductor, I work with orchestras around the world all the time, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of disabled musicians I've encountered in any orchestra, anywhere. Why is this? You can't tell me that there aren't millions upon millions of prodigiously gifted musicians of disability around the world. Where is their platform? Where is the infrastructure that creates a space for them so that they can collaborate with other great musicians? So, ladies and gentlemen, as you can probably tell, I'm on a bit of a mission. And this mission has a personal root to it. I have four children, the youngest of whom was born with cerebral palsy. She's now five, and through her glorious existence, I suppose I have now become a fully paid-up member of the amazing, dizzyingly wonderful disabled community. And I find myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking what an incredible model that is. It's taken a good five decades, actually, but I can say with hand on heart that when the Paralympics comes to London next year, there will not be an intelligent person anywhere on the planet who does not absolutely believe in the validity of disabled sportspeople. What an amazing position to be in! So, ladies and gentlemen, where the hell is music in all this? Apologies to any of you who are sports fans, but music is far more universal than sport. Where is the platform? Where is their voice? So, we in the UK are at the very early stages in forming what will be Britain's first-ever national disabled orchestra. We are going to call it the British Paraorchestra, because with the world's eyes on London next year and particularly on the Paralympics, we want to throw down the gauntlet to every single other country that is represented there, to say to them, "Here's our paraorchestra. Where's yours?" Every country should have a multiplicity of paraorchestras of all shapes and sizes, no question. Now, today is a very special day for me, because it is the first time that the first four members of my little embryonic paraorchestra are going to play in public; four extraordinary musicians of which the number will grow and grow. I hope in the end the Paraorchestra could even be as big as 50 musicians. We present to you today a little sonic adventure, a little piece of improvisational whimsy, if you like, a piece on which, of course, the ink is still wet, the clay is still wet. After all, improvisation is never a fixed thing. We decided what we wanted to share with you, at the heart of our improvisation, was a tune which is beloved of British people. It's one of the only folk melodies that we still recognize in our culture. And here's an interesting thing: folk music can tell you an awful lot about the cultural DNA of the country from which it originates. You see, we in Britain are quietly melancholic. You know, the rain ... it does rain. The food's not so good. (Laughter) Quietly melancholic. Not blackly so, just quietly so. And as Shakespeare put it so brilliantly in "Twelfth Night," he loves music that has "a dying fall." So this melody, "Greensleeves," is chock-full of "dying fall." You may know this tune. (Singing) Da, da, da da da da, dying fall. (Laughter) Da da da, da da da da, dying fall. Da dee, da da na na ... dying fall ... na na nee, na ah ah ah ah. Brief burst of sunshine, ladies and gentlemen, the chorus — (Singing) Ya da da da, dying fall ... (Laughter) (Singing) Da da dee, da da da da, dying fall ... Ya da da da, dying fall ... OK? It's like we need some melodic Viagra in our culture, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) (Applause) It goes without saying that we are very much at the starting gates with this project. We need your help, we need the global community to help us deliver this dream, so that this orchestra can be full steam ahead by summer 2012. If you think there's any way that you can help us, please, please, get in touch. And so, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me enormous pride, pleasure and joy to introduce to you, with a short improvisation upon that most melancholic tune, "Greensleeves," the first four members of the British Paraorchestra. (Applause) (Cheers) (Music) (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause)

Meet the Water Canary

{0: 'TED Fellow Sonaar Luthra is building a weather service for water to help businesses and communities manage 21st-century water risk.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Cholera was reported in Haiti for the first time in over 50 years last October. There was no way to predict how far it would spread through water supplies and how bad the situation would get. And not knowing where help was needed always ensured that help was in short supply in the areas that needed it most. We've gotten good at predicting and preparing for storms before they take innocent lives and cause irreversible damage, but we still can't do that with water, and here's why. Right now, if you want to test water in the field, you need a trained technician, expensive equipment like this, and you have to wait about a day for chemical reactions to take place and provide results. It's too slow to get a picture of conditions on the ground before they change, too expensive to implement in all the places that require testing. And it ignores the fact that, in the meanwhile, people still need to drink water. Most of the information that we collected on the cholera outbreak didn't come from testing water; it came from forms like this, which documented all the people we failed to help. Countless lives have been saved by canaries in coalmines — a simple and invaluable way for miners to know whether they're safe. I've been inspired by that simplicity as I've been working on this problem with some of the most hardworking and brilliant people I've ever known. We think there's a simpler solution to this problem — one that can be used by people who face conditions like this everyday. It's in its early stages, but this is what it looks like right now. We call it the Water Canary. It's a fast, cheap device that answers an important question: Is this water contaminated? It doesn't require any special training. And instead of waiting for chemical reactions to take place, it uses light. That means there's no waiting for chemical reactions to take place, no need to use reagents that can run out and no need to be an expert to get actionable information. To test water, you simply insert a sample and, within seconds, it either displays a red light, indicating contaminated water, or a green light, indicating the sample is safe. This will make it possible for anyone to collect life-saving information and to monitor water quality conditions as they unfold. We're also, on top of that, integrating wireless networking into an affordable device with GPS and GSM. What that means is that each reading can be automatically transmitted to servers to be mapped in real time. With enough users, maps like this will make it possible to take preventive action, containing hazards before they turn into emergencies that take years to recover from. And then, instead of taking days to disseminate this information to the people who need it most, it can happen automatically. We've seen how distributed networks, big data and information can transform society. I think it's time for us to apply them to water. Our goal over the next year is to get Water Canary ready for the field and to open-source the hardware so that anyone can contribute to the development and the evaluation, so we can tackle this problem together. Thank you. (Applause)

Atheism 2.0

{0: 'Through his witty and literate books -- and his new School of Life -- Alain de Botton helps others find fulfillment in the everyday. '}

TEDGlobal 2011

One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don't — into the religious and the atheists. And for the last decade or so, it's been quite clear what being an atheist means. There have been some very vocal atheists who've pointed out, not just that religion is wrong, but that it's ridiculous. These people, many of whom have lived in North Oxford, have argued — they've argued that believing in God is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game. Now I think it's too easy. I think it's too easy to dismiss the whole of religion that way. And it's as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. And what I'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist — if you like, a new version of atheism we could call Atheism 2.0. Now what is Atheism 2.0? Well it starts from a very basic premise: of course, there's no God. Of course, there are no deities or supernatural spirits or angels, etc. Now let's move on; that's not the end of the story, that's the very, very beginning. I'm interested in the kind of constituency that thinks something along these lines: that thinks, "I can't believe in any of this stuff. I can't believe in the doctrines. I don't think these doctrines are right. But," a very important but, "I love Christmas carols. I really like the art of Mantegna. I really like looking at old churches. I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament." Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about — people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine. Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice. It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart. So that's a sort of tough choice. I don't think we have to make that choice. I think there is an alternative. I think there are ways — and I'm being both very respectful and completely impious — of stealing from religions. If you don't believe in a religion, there's nothing wrong with picking and mixing, with taking out the best sides of religion. And for me, atheism 2.0 is about both, as I say, a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying, "What here could we use?" The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly, I would argue. And a thorough study of religion could give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well. And I'd like to run through a few of these today. I'd like to kick off by looking at education. Now education is a field the secular world really believes in. When we think about how we're going to make the world a better place, we think education; that's where we put a lot of money. Education is going to give us, not only commercial skills, industrial skills, it's also going to make us better people. You know the kind of thing a commencement address is, and graduation ceremonies, those lyrical claims that education, the process of education — particularly higher education — will make us into nobler and better human beings. That's a lovely idea. Interesting where it came from. In the early 19th century, church attendance in Western Europe started sliding down very, very sharply, and people panicked. They asked themselves the following question. They said, where are people going to find the morality, where are they going to find guidance, and where are they going to find sources of consolation? And influential voices came up with one answer. They said culture. It's to culture that we should look for guidance, for consolation, for morality. Let's look to the plays of Shakespeare, the dialogues of Plato, the novels of Jane Austen. In there, we'll find a lot of the truths that we might previously have found in the Gospel of Saint John. Now I think that's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea. They wanted to replace scripture with culture. And that's a very plausible idea. It's also an idea that we have forgotten. If you went to a top university — let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge — and you said, "I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live," they would show you the way to the insane asylum. This is simply not what our grandest and best institutes of higher learning are in the business of. Why? They don't think we need it. They don't think we are in an urgent need of assistance. They see us as adults, rational adults. What we need is information. We need data, we don't need help. Now religions start from a very different place indeed. All religions, all major religions, at various points call us children. And like children, they believe that we are in severe need of assistance. We're only just holding it together. Perhaps this is just me, maybe you. But anyway, we're only just holding it together. And we need help. Of course, we need help. And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning. You know, in the 18th century in the U.K., the greatest preacher, greatest religious preacher, was a man called John Wesley, who went up and down this country delivering sermons, advising people how they could live. He delivered sermons on the duties of parents to their children and children to their parents, the duties of the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich. He was trying to tell people how they should live through the medium of sermons, the classic medium of delivery of religions. Now we've given up with the idea of sermons. If you said to a modern liberal individualist, "Hey, how about a sermon?" they'd go, "No, no. I don't need one of those. I'm an independent, individual person." What's the difference between a sermon and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture? Well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition. The tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable, because we are in need of guidance, morality and consolation — and religions know that. Another point about education: we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. Sit them in a classroom, tell them about Plato at the age of 20, send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years, and that lesson will stick with them. Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it." That's what all religions tell us: "Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." Otherwise our minds are like sieves. So religions are cultures of repetition. They circle the great truths again and again and again. We associate repetition with boredom. "Give us the new," we're always saying. "The new is better than the old." If I said to you, "Okay, we're not going to have new TED. We're just going to run through all the old ones and watch them five times because they're so true. We're going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times because what she says is so clever," you'd feel cheated. Not so if you're adopting a religious mindset. The other things that religions do is to arrange time. All the major religions give us calendars. What is a calendar? A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas. In the Catholic chronology, Catholic calendar, at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor. You won't do that by accident; you will do that because you are guided to do that. Now we don't think that way. In the secular world we think, "If an idea is important, I'll bump into it. I'll just come across it." Nonsense, says the religious world view. Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time, we need to synchronize encounters. This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings. Take the Moon. It's really important to look at the Moon. You know, when you look at the Moon, you think, "I'm really small. What are my problems?" It sets things into perspective, etc., etc. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often. We don't. Why don't we? Well there's nothing to tell us, "Look at the Moon." But if you're a Zen Buddhist in the middle of September, you will be ordered out of your home, made to stand on a canonical platform and made to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi, where you will be given poems to read in honor of the Moon and the passage of time and the frailty of life that it should remind us of. You'll be handed rice cakes. And the Moon and the reflection on the Moon will have a secure place in your heart. That's very good. The other thing that religions are really aware of is: speak well — I'm not doing a very good job of this here — but oratory, oratory is absolutely key to religions. In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career. But the religious world doesn't think that way. What you're saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it. So if you go to an African-American Pentecostalist church in the American South and you listen to how they talk, my goodness, they talk well. After every convincing point, people will go, "Amen, amen, amen." At the end of a really rousing paragraph, they'll all stand up, and they'll go, "Thank you Jesus, thank you Christ, thank you Savior." If we were doing it like they do it — let's not do it, but if we were to do it — I would tell you something like, "Culture should replace scripture." And you would go, "Amen, amen, amen." And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up and you would go, "Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen." And we'd know that we had a real rhythm going. All right, all right. We're getting there. We're getting there. (Applause) The other thing that religions know is we're not just brains, we are also bodies. And when they teach us a lesson, they do it via the body. So for example, take the Jewish idea of forgiveness. Jews are very interested in forgiveness and how we should start anew and start afresh. They don't just deliver us sermons on this. They don't just give us books or words about this. They tell us to have a bath. So in Orthodox Jewish communities, every Friday you go to a Mikveh. You immerse yourself in the water, and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea. We don't tend to do that. Our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another. Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two. Let's look at art now. Now art is something that in the secular world, we think very highly of. We think art is really, really important. A lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums, etc. We sometimes hear it said that museums are our new cathedrals, or our new churches. You've heard that saying. Now I think that the potential is there, but we've completely let ourselves down. And the reason we've let ourselves down is that we're not properly studying how religions handle art. The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art: The first idea is that art should be for art's sake — a ridiculous idea — an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world. I couldn't disagree more. The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn't explain itself, that artists shouldn't say what they're up to, because if they said it, it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy. That's why a very common feeling when you're in a museum — let's admit it — is, "I don't know what this is about." But if we're serious people, we don't admit to that. But that feeling of puzzlement is structural to contemporary art. Now religions have a much saner attitude to art. They have no trouble telling us what art is about. Art is about two things in all the major faiths. Firstly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to love. And secondly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to fear and to hate. And that's what art is. Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith. So as you walk around a church, or a mosque or a cathedral, what you're trying to imbibe, what you're imbibing is, through your eyes, through your senses, truths that have otherwise come to you through your mind. Essentially it's propaganda. Rembrandt is a propagandist in the Christian view. Now the word "propaganda" sets off alarm bells. We think of Hitler, we think of Stalin. Don't, necessarily. Propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something. And if that thing is good, there's no problem with it at all. My view is that museums should take a leaf out of the book of religions. And they should make sure that when you walk into a museum — if I was a museum curator, I would make a room for love, a room for generosity. All works of art are talking to us about things. And if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we would be told, use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind, we would get a lot more out of art. Art would pick up the duty that it used to have and that we've neglected because of certain mis-founded ideas. Art should be one of the tools by which we improve our society. Art should be didactic. Let's think of something else. The people in the modern world, in the secular world, who are interested in matters of the spirit, in matters of the mind, in higher soul-like concerns, tend to be isolated individuals. They're poets, they're philosophers, they're photographers, they're filmmakers. And they tend to be on their own. They're our cottage industries. They are vulnerable, single people. And they get depressed and they get sad on their own. And they don't really change much. Now think about religions, think about organized religions. What do organized religions do? They group together, they form institutions. And that has all sorts of advantages. First of all, scale, might. The Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to the Wall Street Journal. These are massive machines. They're collaborative, they're branded, they're multinational, and they're highly disciplined. These are all very good qualities. We recognize them in relation to corporations. And corporations are very like religions in many ways, except they're right down at the bottom of the pyramid of needs. They're selling us shoes and cars. Whereas the people who are selling us the higher stuff — the therapists, the poets — are on their own and they have no power, they have no might. So religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind. Now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it. Books alone, books written by lone individuals, are not going to change anything. We need to group together. If you want to change the world, you have to group together, you have to be collaborative. And that's what religions do. They are multinational, as I say, they are branded, they have a clear identity, so they don't get lost in a busy world. That's something we can learn from. I want to conclude. Really what I want to say is for many of you who are operating in a range of different fields, there is something to learn from the example of religion — even if you don't believe any of it. If you're involved in anything that's communal, that involves lots of people getting together, there are things for you in religion. If you're involved, say, in a travel industry in any way, look at pilgrimage. Look very closely at pilgrimage. We haven't begun to scratch the surface of what travel could be because we haven't looked at what religions do with travel. If you're in the art world, look at the example of what religions are doing with art. And if you're an educator in any way, again, look at how religions are spreading ideas. You may not agree with the ideas, but my goodness, they're highly effective mechanisms for doing so. So really my concluding point is you may not agree with religion, but at the end of the day, religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Now this is actually a courageous talk, because you're kind of setting up yourself in some ways to be ridiculed in some quarters. AB: You can get shot by both sides. You can get shot by the hard-headed atheists, and you can get shot by those who fully believe. CA: Incoming missiles from North Oxford at any moment. AB: Indeed. CA: But you left out one aspect of religion that a lot of people might say your agenda could borrow from, which is this sense — that's actually probably the most important thing to anyone who's religious — of spiritual experience, of some kind of connection with something that's bigger than you are. Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0? AB: Absolutely. I, like many of you, meet people who say things like, "But isn't there something bigger than us, something else?" And I say, "Of course." And they say, "So aren't you sort of religious?" And I go, "No." Why does that sense of mystery, that sense of the dizzying scale of the universe, need to be accompanied by a mystical feeling? Science and just observation gives us that feeling without it, so I don't feel the need. The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. So one can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit. CA: Actually, let me just ask a question. How many people here would say that religion is important to them? Is there an equivalent process by which there's a sort of bridge between what you're talking about and what you would say to them? AB: I would say that there are many, many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged. It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things. It's so sad that we constantly say, "I don't believe so I can't have community, so I'm cut off from morality, so I can't go on a pilgrimage." One wants to say, "Nonsense. Why not?" And that's really the spirit of my talk. There's so much we can absorb. Atheism shouldn't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion. CA: It seems to me that there's plenty of people in the TED community who are atheists. But probably most people in the community certainly don't think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common. Are we foolish to be optimistic about the possibility of a world where, instead of religion being the great rallying cry of divide and war, that there could be bridging? AB: No, we need to be polite about differences. Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue. It's seen as hypocrisy. But we need to get to a stage when you're an atheist and someone says, "Well you know, I did pray the other day," you politely ignore it. You move on. Because you've agreed on 90 percent of things, because you have a shared view on so many things, and you politely differ. And I think that's what the religious wars of late have ignored. They've ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement. CA: And finally, does this new thing that you're proposing that's not a religion but something else, does it need a leader, and are you volunteering to be the pope? (Laughter) AB: Well, one thing that we're all very suspicious of is individual leaders. It doesn't need it. What I've tried to lay out is a framework and I'm hoping that people can just fill it in. I've sketched a sort of broad framework. But wherever you are, as I say, if you're in the travel industry, do that travel bit. If you're in the communal industry, look at religion and do the communal bit. So it's a wiki project. (Laughter) CA: Alain, thank you for sparking many conversations later. (Applause)

Three types of online attack

{0: "As computer access expands, Mikko Hypponen asks: What's the next killer virus, and will the world be able to cope with it? And also: How can we protect digital privacy in the age of government surveillance?"}

TEDxBrussels

In the 1980s, in communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. And this was done so the government could track where the text was coming from. If they found a paper which had the wrong kind of thought, they could track down who created that thought. And we in the West couldn't understand how anybody would do this, how much this would restrict freedom of speech. We would never do that in our own countries. But today, in 2011, if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer and print a page, that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page, in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer. This is happening to us today. And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it. And this is an example of the ways our own governments are using technology against us, the citizens. And this is one of the main three sources of online problems today. If we look at what's really happening in the online world, we can group the attacks based on the attackers. We have three main groups. We have online criminals. Like here, we have Mr. Dmitry Golubov, from the city of Kiev in Ukraine. And the motives of online criminals are very easy to understand. These guys make money. They use online attacks to make lots of money — and lots and lots of it. We actually have several cases of millionaires online, multimillionaires, who made money with their attacks. Here's Vladimir Tsastsin, from Tartu in Estonia. This is [Albert] Gonzalez. This is Stephen Watt. This is Bjorn Sundin. This is Matthew Anderson, Tariq Al-Daour and so on and so on. These guys make their fortunes online, but they make it through the illegal means of using things like banking Trojans to steal money from our bank accounts while we do online banking, or with keyloggers to collect our credit card information while we are doing online shopping from an infected computer. The US Secret Service, two months ago, froze the Swiss bank account of Mr. Sam Jain right here, and that bank account had 14.9 million US dollars in it when it was frozen. Mr. Jain himself is on the loose; nobody knows where he is. And I claim it's already today that it's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online than here in the real world. And it's very obvious that this is only going to get worse. In the future, the majority of crime will be happening online. The second major group of attackers that we are watching today are not motivated by money. They're motivated by something else — motivated by protests, motivated by an opinion, motivated by the laughs. Groups like Anonymous have risen up over the last 12 months and have become a major player in the field of online attacks. So those are the three main attackers: criminals who do it for the money, hacktivists like Anonymous doing it for the protest, but then the last group are nation states — governments doing the attacks. And then we look at cases like what happened in DigiNotar. This is a prime example of what happens when governments attack against their own citizens. DigiNotar is a certificate authority from the Netherlands — or actually, it was. It was running into bankruptcy last fall, because they were hacked into. Somebody broke in and they hacked it thoroughly. And I asked last week, in a meeting with Dutch government representatives, I asked one of the leaders of the team whether he found plausible that people died because of the DigiNotar hack. And his answer was: yes. So how do people die as the result of a hack like this? Well, DigiNotar is a CA. They sell certificates. What do you do with certificates? Well, you need a certificate if you have a website that has https, SSL encrypted services, services like Gmail. Now we all, or a big part of us, use Gmail or one of their competitors, but these services are especially popular in totalitarian states like Iran, where dissidents use foreign services like Gmail because they know they are more trustworthy than the local services and they are encrypted over SSL connections, so the local government can't snoop on their discussions. Except they can, if they hack into a foreign CA and issue rogue certificates. And this is exactly what happened with the case of DigiNotar. What about Arab Spring and things that have been happening, for example, in Egypt? Well, in Egypt, the rioters looted the headquarters of the Egyptian secret police in April 2011, and when they were looting the building, they found lots of papers. Among those papers was this binder entitled, "FinFisher." And within that binder were notes from a company based in Germany, which had sold to the Egyptian government a set of tools for intercepting, at a very large scale, all the communication of the citizens of the country. They had sold this tool for 280,000 euros to the Egyptian government. The company headquarters are right here. So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to do this against their own citizens. But Western governments are doing it to themselves as well. For example, in Germany, just a couple of weeks ago, the so-called "State Trojan" was found, which was a Trojan used by German government officials to investigate their own citizens. If you are a suspect in a criminal case, well, it's pretty obvious, your phone will be tapped. But today, it goes beyond that. They will tap your Internet connection. They will even use tools like State Trojan to infect your computer with a Trojan, which enables them to watch all your communication, to listen to your online discussions, to collect your passwords. Now, when we think deeper about things like these, the obvious response from people should be, "OK, well, that sounds bad, but that doesn't really affect me, because I'm a legal citizen. Why should I worry? Because I have nothing to hide." And this is an argument which doesn't make sense. Privacy is implied. Privacy is not up for discussion. This is not a question between privacy against security. It's a question of freedom against control. And while we might trust our governments right now, right here in 2011, any rights we give away will be given away for good. And do we trust, do we blindly trust, any future government, a government we might have 50 years from now? And these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years.

Why SOPA is a bad idea

{0: 'Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible -- with deep social and political implications.'}

TEDSalon NY2012

I'm going to start here. This is a hand-lettered sign that appeared in a mom and pop bakery in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn a few years ago. The store owned one of those machines that can print on plates of sugar. And kids could bring in drawings and have the store print a sugar plate for the top of their birthday cake. But unfortunately, one of the things kids liked to draw was cartoon characters. They liked to draw the Little Mermaid, they'd like to draw a smurf, they'd like to draw Micky Mouse. But it turns out to be illegal to print a child's drawing of Micky Mouse onto a plate of sugar. And it's a copyright violation. And policing copyright violations for children's birthday cakes was such a hassle that the College Bakery said, "You know what, we're getting out of that business. If you're an amateur, you don't have access to our machine anymore. If you want a printed sugar birthday cake, you have to use one of our prefab images — only for professionals." So there's two bills in Congress right now. One is called SOPA, the other is called PIPA. SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's from the Senate. PIPA is short for PROTECTIP, which is itself short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property — because the congressional aides who name these things have a lot of time on their hands. And what SOPA and PIPA want to do is they want to do this. They want to raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs. Now the way they propose to do this is to identify sites that are substantially infringing on copyright — although how those sites are identified is never fully specified in the bills — and then they want to remove them from the domain name system. They want to take them out of the domain name system. Now the domain name system is the thing that turns human-readable names, like Google.com, into the kinds of addresses machines expect — 74.125.226.212. Now the problem with this model of censorship, of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system, is that it won't work. And you'd think that would be a pretty big problem for a law, but Congress seems not to have let that bother them too much. Now the reason it won't work is that you can still type 74.125.226.212 into the browser or you can make it a clickable link and you'll still go to Google. So the policing layer around the problem becomes the real threat of the act. Now to understand how Congress came to write a bill that won't accomplish its stated goals, but will produce a lot of pernicious side effects, you have to understand a little bit about the back story. And the back story is this: SOPA and PIPA, as legislation, were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century. The 20th century was a great time to be a media company, because the thing you really had on your side was scarcity. If you were making a TV show, it didn't have to be better than all other TV shows ever made; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time — which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty. Which meant that if you fielded average content, you got a third of the U.S. public for free — tens of millions of users for simply doing something that wasn't too terrible. This is like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink. But technology moved on, as technology is wont to do. And slowly, slowly, at the end of the 20th century, that scarcity started to get eroded — and I don't mean by digital technology; I mean by analog technology. Cassette tapes, video cassette recorders, even the humble Xerox machine created new opportunities for us to behave in ways that astonished the media business. Because it turned out we're not really couch potatoes. We don't really like to only consume. We do like to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out we also like to produce and we like to share. And this freaked the media businesses out — it freaked them out every time. Jack Valenti, who was the head lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, once likened the ferocious video cassette recorder to Jack the Ripper and poor, helpless Hollywood to a woman at home alone. That was the level of rhetoric. And so the media industries begged, insisted, demanded that Congress do something. And Congress did something. By the early 90s, Congress passed the law that changed everything. And that law was called the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. What the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 said was, look, if people are taping stuff off the radio and then making mixtapes for their friends, that is not a crime. That's okay. Taping and remixing and sharing with your friends is okay. If you make lots and lots of high quality copies and you sell them, that's not okay. But this taping business, fine, let it go. And they thought that they clarified the issue, because they'd set out a clear distinction between legal and illegal copying. But that wasn't what the media businesses wanted. They had wanted Congress to outlaw copying full-stop. So when the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 was passed, the media businesses gave up on the idea of legal versus illegal distinctions for copying because it was clear that if Congress was acting in their framework, they might actually increase the rights of citizens to participate in our own media environment. So they went for plan B. It took them a while to formulate plan B. Plan B appeared in its first full-blown form in 1998 — something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was a complicated piece of legislation, a lot of moving parts. But the main thrust of the DMCA was that it was legal to sell you uncopyable digital material — except that there's no such things as uncopyable digital material. It would be, as Ed Felton once famously said, "Like handing out water that wasn't wet." Bits are copyable. That's what computers do. That is a side effect of their ordinary operation. So in order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits, the DMCA also made it legal to force you to use systems that broke the copying function of your devices. Every DVD player and game player and television and computer you brought home — no matter what you thought you were getting when you bought it — could be broken by the content industries, if they wanted to set that as a condition of selling you the content. And to make sure you didn't realize, or didn't enact their capabilities as general purpose computing devices, they also made it illegal for you to try to reset the copyability of that content. The DMCA marks the moment when the media industries gave up on the legal system of distinguishing between legal and illegal copying and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means. Now the DMCA had, and is continuing to have, a lot of complicated effects, but in this one domain, limiting sharing, it has mostly not worked. And the main reason it hasn't worked is the Internet has turned out to be far more popular and far more powerful than anyone imagined. The mixtape, the fanzine, that was nothing compared to what we're seeing now with the Internet. We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online. We share written things, we share images, we share audio, we share video. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've made. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've found. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've made out of what we've found, and all of it horrifies those industries. So PIPA and SOPA are round two. But where the DMCA was surgical — we want to go down into your computer, we want to go down into your television set, down into your game machine, and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store — PIPA and SOPA are nuclear and they're saying, we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content. Now the mechanism, as I said, for doing this, is you need to take out anybody pointing to those IP addresses. You need to take them out of search engines, you need to take them out of online directories, you need to take them out of user lists. And because the biggest producers of content on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo, they're us, we're the people getting policed. Because in the end, the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another. So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal concept, innocent until proven guilty, and reversing it — guilty until proven innocent. You can't share until you show us that you're not sharing something we don't like. Suddenly, the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities. And if it costs even a dime to police a user, that will crush a service with a hundred million users. So this is the Internet they have in mind. Imagine this sign everywhere — except imagine it doesn't say College Bakery, imagine it says YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. Imagine it says TED, because the comments can't be policed at any acceptable cost. The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects. The threat, in fact, is this inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share. And the people who provide those capabilities to us — the YouTubes, the Facebooks, the Twitters and TEDs — are in the business of having to police us, or being on the hook for contributory infringement. There's two things you can do to help stop this — a simple thing and a complicated thing, an easy thing and a hard thing. The simple thing, the easy thing, is this: if you're an American citizen, call your representative, call your senator. When you look at the people who co-signed on the SOPA bill, people who've co-signed on PIPA, what you see is that they have cumulatively received millions and millions of dollars from the traditional media industries. You don't have millions and millions of dollars, but you can call your representatives, and you can remind them that you vote, and you can ask not to be treated like a thief, and you can suggest that you would prefer that the Internet not be broken. And if you're not an American citizen, you can contact American citizens that you know and encourage them to do the same. Because this seems like a national issue, but it is not. These industries will not be content with breaking our Internet. If they break it, they will break it for everybody. That's the easy thing. That's the simple thing. The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA, which was purposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. Because the whole business of actually suggesting that someone is breaking the law and then gathering evidence and proving that, that turns out to be really inconvenient. "We'd prefer not to do that," says the content industries. And what they want is not to have to do that. They don't want legal distinctions between legal and illegal sharing. They just want the sharing to go away. PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming. Because until we convince Congress that the way to deal with copyright violation is the way copyright violation was dealt with with Napster, with YouTube, which is to have a trial with all the presentation of evidence and the hashing out of facts and the assessment of remedies that goes on in democratic societies. That's the way to handle this. In the meantime, the hard thing to do is to be ready. Because that's the real message of PIPA and SOPA. Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming — not producing, not sharing — and we should say, "No." Thank you. (Applause)

How to make choosing easier

{0: "Sheena Iyengar studies how people choose (and what makes us think we're good at it)."}

TEDSalon NY2011

Do you know how many choices you make in a typical day? Do you know how many choices you make in typical week? I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70 in a typical day. There was also recently a study done with CEOs in which they followed CEOs around for a whole week. And these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these CEOs engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks. And they found that the average CEO engaged in about 139 tasks in a week. Each task was made up of many, many, many sub-choices of course. 50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less. Only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time. Think about your own choices. Do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category? How well do you think you're doing at managing those choices? Today I want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have, which is the choice overload problem. I want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions. Now as I talk about this problem, I'm going to have some questions for you and I'm going to want to know your answers. So when I ask you a question, since I'm blind, only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories. (Laughter) Otherwise, when I ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, I'd like you to clap your hands. So for my first question for you today: Are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem? (Applause) Thank you. So when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I used to go to this very, very upscale grocery store; at least at that time it was truly upscale. It was a store called Draeger's. Now this store, it was almost like going to an amusement park. They had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water — and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water. I used to love going to this store, but on one occasion I asked myself, well how come you never buy anything? Here's their olive oil aisle. They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees. So I one day decided to pay a visit to the manager, and I asked the manager, "Is this model of offering people all this choice really working?" And he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday, with cameras ready usually. We decided to do a little experiment, and we picked jam for our experiment. Here's their jam aisle. They had 348 different kinds of jam. We set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store. We there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam, and we looked at two things: First, in which case were people more likely to stop, sample some jam? More people stopped when there were 24, about 60 percent, than when there were six, about 40 percent. The next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. Now we see the opposite effect. Of the people who stopped when there were 24, only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. Of the people who stopped when there were six, well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. Now if you do the math, people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24. Now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us — at least it's good for our waistlines — but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions. We choose not to choose, even when it goes against our best self-interests. So now for the topic of today: financial savings. Now I'm going to describe to you a study I did with Gur Huberman, Emir Kamenica, Wei Jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million Americans from about 650 plans all in the U.S. And what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan, the 401(k) plan, does that affect people's likelihood to save more for tomorrow. And what we found was that indeed there was a correlation. So in these plans, we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings. And what we found was that, the more funds offered, indeed, there was less participation rate. So if you look at the extremes, those plans that offered you two funds, participation rates were around in the mid-70s — still not as high as we want it to be. In those plans that offered nearly 60 funds, participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile. Now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present, even then, it has negative consequences. So for those people who did choose to participate, the more choices available, the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds. The more choices available, the more likely they were to put all their money in pure money market accounts. Now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you're considering their future financial well-being. Well, over the past decade, we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices. They're more likely to delay choosing — procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest. They're more likely to make worse choices — worse financial choices, medical choices. They're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better. The main reason for this is because, we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises, mustards, vinegars, jams, but we can't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display. So what I want to propose to you today are four simple techniques — techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues — that you can easily apply in your businesses. The first: Cut. You've heard it said before, but it's never been more true than today, that less is more. People are always upset when I say, "Cut." They're always worried they're going to lose shelf space. But in fact, what we're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut, get rid of those extraneous redundant options, well there's an increase in sales, there's a lowering of costs, there is an improvement of the choosing experience. When Proctor & Gamble went from 26 different kinds of Head & Shoulders to 15, they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent. When the Golden Cat Corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products, they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent — a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs. You know, the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products. The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products. But the ninth largest retailer, the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is Aldi, and it offers you only 1,400 products — one kind of canned tomato sauce. Now in the financial savings world, I think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that David Laibson was heavily involved in designing, which was the program that they have at Harvard. Every single Harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund. For those people who actually want to choose, they're given 20 funds, not 300 or more funds. You know, often, people say, "I don't know how to cut. They're all important choices." And the first thing I do is I ask the employees, "Tell me how these choices are different from one another. And if your employees can't tell them apart, neither can your consumers." Now before we started our session this afternoon, I had a chat with Gary. And Gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world. Here's a description of the road. And I'd like you to read it. And now I'll give you a few seconds to read it and then I want you to clap your hands if you're ready to take Gary up on his offer. (Light clapping) Okay. Anybody who's ready to take him up on his offer. Is that all? All right, let me show you some more about this. (Laughter) You guys knew there was a trick, didn't you. (Honk) Now who's ready to go on this trip. (Applause) (Laughter) I think I might have actually heard more hands. All right. Now in fact, you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around, but I would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around. Because the pictures made it feel more real to you. Which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem, which is concretization. That in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way, in a very concrete way. Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an ATM card or a credit card as opposed to cash? Because it doesn't feel like real money. And it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more. So a study that I did with Shlomo Benartzi and Alessandro Previtero, we did a study with people at ING — employees that are all working at ING — and now these people were all in a session where they're doing enrollment for their 401(k) plan. And during that session, we kept the session exactly the way it used to be, but we added one little thing. The one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more. By doing that simple thing, there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent. The third technique: Categorization. We can handle more categories than we can handle choices. So for example, here's a study we did in a magazine aisle. It turns out that in Wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor, the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664. But you know what? If I show you 600 magazines and I divide them up into 10 categories, versus I show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories, you believe that I have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if I gave you the 400 than if I gave you the 600. Because the categories tell me how to tell them apart. Here are two different jewelry displays. One is called "Jazz" and the other one is called "Swing." If you think the display on the left is Swing and the display on the right is Jazz, clap your hands. (Light Clapping) Okay, there's some. If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, clap your hands. Okay, a bit more. Now it turns out you're right. The one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, but you know what? This is a highly useless categorization scheme. (Laughter) The categories need to say something to the chooser, not the choice-maker. And you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds. Who are they actually supposed to be informing? My fourth technique: Condition for complexity. It turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can, we've just got to take it a little easier. We have to gradually increase the complexity. I'm going to show you one example of what I'm talking about. Let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car. Here's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car. You've got to make 60 different decisions, completely make up your car. Now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision. Car colors, exterior car colors — I've got 56 choices. Engines, gearshift — four choices. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear. So half of the customers are going to go from high choice, 56 car colors, to low choice, four gearshifts. The other half of the customers are going to go from low choice, four gearshifts, to 56 car colors, high choice. What am I going to look at? How engaged you are. If you keep hitting the default button per decision, that means you're getting overwhelmed, that means I'm losing you. What you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice, they're hitting that default button over and over and over again. We're losing them. They go from low choice to high choice, they're hanging in there. It's the same information. It's the same number of choices. The only thing that I have done is I have varied the order in which that information is presented. If I start you off easy, I learn how to choose. Even though choosing gearshift doesn't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor, it still prepares me for how to choose. It also gets me excited about this big product that I'm putting together, so I'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged. So let me recap. I have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload — cut — get rid of the extraneous alternatives; concretize — make it real; categorize — we can handle more categories, less choices; condition for complexity. All of these techniques that I'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices — better for you, you can use them on yourself, better for the people that you are serving. Because I believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing. And the more we're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The beautiful math behind the world's ugliest music

{0: 'Scott Rickard is passionate about mathematics, music -- and educating the next generation of scientists and mathematicians.'}

TEDxMIA

So what makes a piece of music beautiful? Well, most musicologists would argue that repetition is a key aspect of beauty, the idea that we take a melody, a motif, a musical idea, we repeat it, we set up the expectation for repetition, and then we either realize it or we break the repetition. And that's a key component of beauty. So if repetition and patterns are key to beauty, then what would the absence of patterns sound like, if we wrote a piece of music that had no repetition whatsoever in it? That's actually an interesting mathematical question. Is it possible to write a piece of music that has no repetition whatsoever? It's not random — random is easy. Repetition-free, it turns out, is extremely difficult, and the only reason that we can actually do it is because of a man who was hunting for submarines. It turns out, a guy who was trying to develop the world's perfect sonar ping solved the problem of writing pattern-free music. And that's what the topic of the talk is today. So, recall that in sonar, you have a ship that sends out some sound in the water, and it listens for it — an echo. The sound goes down, it echoes back, it goes down, echoes back. The time it takes the sound to come back tells you how far away it is: if it comes at a higher pitch, it's because the thing is moving toward you; if it comes back at a lower pitch, it's moving away from you. So how would you design a perfect sonar ping? Well, in the 1960s, a guy by the name of John Costas was working on the Navy's extremely expensive sonar system. It wasn't working, because the ping they were using was inappropriate. It was a ping much like the following here. You can think of this as the notes and this is time. (Piano notes play high to low) So that was the sonar ping they were using, a down chirp. It turns out that's a really bad ping. Why? Because it looks like shifts of itself. The relationship between the first two notes is the same as the second two, and so forth. So he designed a different kind of sonar ping, one that looks random. These look like a random pattern of dots, but they're not. If you look very carefully, you may notice that, in fact, the relationship between each pair of dots is distinct. Nothing is ever repeated. The first two notes and every other pair of notes have a different relationship. So the fact that we know about these patterns is unusual. John Costas is the inventor of these patterns. This is a picture from 2006, shortly before his death. He was the sonar engineer working for the Navy. He was thinking about these patterns, and he was, by hand, able to come up with them to size 12 — 12 by 12. He couldn't go any further and thought maybe they don't exist in any size bigger than 12. So he wrote a letter to the mathematician in the middle, a young mathematician in California at the time, Solomon Golomb. It turns out that Solomon Golomb was one of the most gifted discrete mathematicians of our time. John asked Solomon if he could tell him the right reference to where these patterns were. There was no reference. Nobody had ever thought about a repetition, a pattern-free structure before. So, Solomon Golomb spent the summer thinking about the problem. And he relied on the mathematics of this gentleman here, Évariste Galois. Now, Galois is a very famous mathematician. He's famous because he invented a whole branch of mathematics which bears his name, called Galois field theory. It's the mathematics of prime numbers. He's also famous because of the way that he died. The story is that he stood up for the honor of a young woman. He was challenged to a duel, and he accepted. And shortly before the duel occurred, he wrote down all of his mathematical ideas, sent letters to all of his friends, saying "Please, please" — this was 200 years ago — "Please, please, see that these things get published eventually." He then fought the duel, was shot and died at age 20. The mathematics that runs your cell phones, the internet, that allows us to communicate, DVDs, all comes from the mind of Évariste Galois, a mathematician who died 20 years young. When you talk about the legacy that you leave ... Of course, he couldn't have even anticipated the way that his mathematics would be used. Thankfully, his mathematics was eventually published. Solomon Golomb realized that that was exactly the mathematics needed to solve the problem of creating a pattern-free structure. So he sent a letter back to John saying, "It turns out you can generate these patterns using prime number theory." And John went about and solved the sonar problem for the Navy. So what do these patterns look like again? Here's a pattern here. This is an 88-by-88-sized Costas array. It's generated in a very simple way. Elementary school mathematics is sufficient to solve this problem. It's generated by repeatedly multiplying by the number three: 1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 243 ... When I get to a number that's larger than 89 which happens to be prime, I keep taking 89s away until I get back below. And this will eventually fill the entire grid, 88 by 88. There happen to be 88 notes on the piano. So today, we are going to have the world premiere of the world's first pattern-free piano sonata. So, back to the question of music: What makes music beautiful? Let's think about one of the most beautiful pieces ever written, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the famous "da na na na!" motif. That motif occurs hundreds of times in the symphony — hundreds of times in the first movement alone and also in all the other movements as well. So the setting up of this repetition is so important for beauty. If we think about random music as being just random notes here, and over here, somehow, Beethoven's Fifth in some kind of pattern, if we wrote completely pattern-free music, it would be way out on the tail. In fact, the end of the tail of music would be these pattern-free structures. This music that we saw before, those stars on the grid, is far, far, far from random. It's perfectly pattern-free. It turns out that musicologists — a famous composer by the name of Arnold Schoenberg — thought of this in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. His goal as a composer was to write music that would free music from tonal structure. He called it the "emancipation of the dissonance." He created these structures called "tone rows." This is a tone row there. It sounds a lot like a Costas array. Unfortunately, he died 10 years before Costas solved the problem of how you can mathematically create these structures. Today, we're going to hear the world premiere of the perfect ping. This is an 88-by-88-sized Costas array, mapped to notes on the piano, played using a structure called a Golomb ruler for the rhythm, which means the starting time of each pair of notes is distinct as well. This is mathematically almost impossible. Actually, computationally, it would be impossible to create. Because of the mathematics that was developed 200 years ago, through another mathematician recently and an engineer, we were able to actually compose this, or construct this, using multiplication by the number three. The point when you hear this music is not that it's supposed to be beautiful. This is supposed to be the world's ugliest piece of music. In fact, it's music that only a mathematician could write. (Laughter) When you're listening to this piece of music, I implore you: try and find some repetition. Try and find something that you enjoy, and then revel in the fact that you won't find it. (Laughter) So without further ado, Michael Linville, the [Dean] of Chamber Music at the New World Symphony, will perform the world premiere of the perfect ping. (Music) (Music ends) (Scott Rickard, off-screen) Thank you. (Applause)

Plant fuels that could power a jet

{0: 'Bilal Bomani runs NASA’s Greenlab research facility, where he is developing the next generation of biofuels.'}

TEDxNASA@SiliconValley

What I'm going to do is, I'm going to explain to you an extreme green concept that was developed at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. But before I do that, we have to go over the definition of what green is, 'cause a lot of us have a different definition of it. Green. The product is created through environmentally and socially conscious means. There's plenty of things that are being called green now. What does it actually mean? We use three metrics to determine green. The first metric is: Is it sustainable? Which means, are you preserving what you are doing for future use or for future generations? Is it alternative? Is it different than what is being used today, or does it have a lower carbon footprint than what's used conventionally? And three: Is it renewable? Does it come from Earth's natural replenishing resources, such as sun, wind and water? Now, my task at NASA is to develop the next generation of aviation fuels. Extreme green. Why aviation? The field of aviation uses more fuel than just about every other combined. We need to find an alternative. Also it's a national aeronautics directive. One of the national aeronautics goals is to develop the next generation of fuels, biofuels, using domestic and safe, friendly resources. Now, combating that challenge we have to also meet the big three metric — Actually, extreme green for us is all three together; that's why you see the plus there. I was told to say that. So it has to be the big three at GRC. That's another metric. Ninety-seven percent of the world's water is saltwater. How about we use that? Combine that with number three. Do not use arable land. Because crops are already growing on that land that's very scarce around the world. Number two: Don't compete with food crops. That's already a well established entity, they don't need another entry. And lastly the most precious resource we have on this Earth is fresh water. Don't use fresh water. If 97.5 percent of the world's water is saltwater, 2.5 percent is fresh water. Less than a half percent of that is accessible for human use. But 60 percent of the population lives within that one percent. So, combating my problem was, now I have to be extreme green and meet the big three. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the GreenLab Research Facility. This is a facility dedicated to the next generation of aviation fuels using halophytes. A halophyte is a salt-tolerating plant. Most plants don't like salt, but halophytes tolerate salt. We also are using weeds and we are also using algae. The good thing about our lab is, we've had 3,600 visitors in the last two years. Why do you think that's so? Because we are on to something special. So, in the lower you see the GreenLab obviously, and on the right hand side you'll see algae. If you are into the business of the next generation of aviation fuels, algae is a viable option, there's a lot of funding right now, and we have an algae to fuels program. There's two types of algae growing. One is a closed photobioreactor that you see here, and what you see on the other side is our species — we are currently using a species called Scenedesmus dimorphus. Our job at NASA is to take the experimental and computational and make a better mixing for the closed photobioreactors. Now the problems with closed photobioreactors are: They are quite expensive, they are automated, and it's very difficult to get them in large scale. So on large scale what do they use? We use open pond systems. Now, around the world they are growing algae, with this racetrack design that you see here. Looks like an oval with a paddle wheel and mixes really well, but when it gets around the last turn, which I call turn four — it's stagnant. We actually have a solution for that. In the GreenLab in our open pond system we use something that happens in nature: waves. We actually use wave technology on our open pond systems. We have 95 percent mixing and our lipid content is higher than a closed photobioreactor system, which we think is significant. There is a drawback to algae, however: It's very expensive. Is there a way to produce algae inexpensively? And the answer is: yes. We do the same thing we do with halophytes, and that is: climatic adaptation. In our GreenLab we have six primary ecosystems that range from freshwater all the way to saltwater. What we do: We take a potential species, we start at freshwater, we add a little bit more salt, when the second tank here will be the same ecosystem as Brazil — right next to the sugar cane fields you can have our plants — the next tank represents Africa, the next tank represents Arizona, the next tank represents Florida, and the next tank represents California or the open ocean. What we are trying to do is to come up with a single species that can survive anywhere in the world, where there's barren desert. We are being very successful so far. Now, here's one of the problems. If you are a farmer, you need five things to be successful: You need seeds, you need soil, you need water and you need sun, and the last thing that you need is fertilizer. Most people use chemical fertilizers. But guess what? We do not use chemical fertilizer. Wait a second! I just saw lots of greenery in your GreenLab. You have to use fertilizer. Believe it or not, in our analysis of our saltwater ecosystems 80 percent of what we need are in these tanks themselves. The 20 percent that's missing is nitrogen and phosphorous. We have a natural solution: fish. No we don't cut up the fish and put them in there. Fish waste is what we use. As a matter of fact we use freshwater mollies, that we've used our climatic adaptation technique from freshwater all the way to seawater. Freshwater mollies: cheap, they love to make babies, and they love to go to the bathroom. And the more they go to the bathroom, the more fertilizer we get, the better off we are, believe it or not. It should be noted that we use sand as our soil, regular beach sand. Fossilized coral. So a lot of people ask me, "How did you get started?" Well, we got started in what we call the indoor biofuels lab. It's a seedling lab. We have 26 different species of halophytes, and five are winners. What we do here is — actually it should be called a death lab, 'cause we try to kill the seedlings, make them rough — and then we come to the GreenLab. What you see in the lower corner is a wastewater treatment plant experiment that we are growing, a macro-algae that I'll talk about in a minute. And lastly, it's me actually working in the lab to prove to you I do work, I don't just talk about what I do. Here's the plant species. Salicornia virginica. It's a wonderful plant. I love that plant. Everywhere we go we see it. It's all over the place, from Maine all the way to California. We love that plant. Second is Salicornia bigelovii. Very difficult to get around the world. It is the highest lipid content that we have, but it has a shortcoming: It's short. Now you take europaea, which is the largest or the tallest plant that we have. And what we are trying to do with natural selection or adaptive biology — combine all three to make a high-growth, high-lipid plant. Next, when a hurricane decimated the Delaware Bay — soybean fields gone — we came up with an idea: Can you have a plant that has a land reclamation positive in Delaware? And the answer is yes. It's called seashore mallow. Kosteletzkya virginica — say that five times fast if you can. This is a 100 percent usable plant. The seeds: biofuels. The rest: cattle feed. It's there for 10 years; it's working very well. Now we get to Chaetomorpha. This is a macro-algae that loves excess nutrients. If you are in the aquarium industry you know we use it to clean up dirty tanks. This species is so significant to us. The properties are very close to plastic. We are trying right now to convert this macro-algae into a bioplastic. If we are successful, we will revolutionize the plastics industry. So, we have a seed to fuel program. We have to do something with this biomass that we have. And so we do G.C. extraction, lipid optimization, so on and so forth, because our goal really is to come up with the next generation of aviation fuels, aviation specifics, so on and so forth. So far we talked about water and fuel, but along the way we found out something interesting about Salicornia: It's a food product. So we talk about ideas worth spreading, right? How about this: In sub-Saharan Africa, next to the sea, saltwater, barren desert, how about we take that plant, plant it, half use for food, half use for fuel. We can make that happen, inexpensively. You can see there's a greenhouse in Germany that sells it as a health food product. This is harvested, and in the middle here is a shrimp dish, and it's being pickled. So I have to tell you a joke. Salicornia is known as sea beans, saltwater asparagus and pickle weed. So we are pickling pickle weed in the middle. Oh, I thought it was funny. (Laughter) And at the bottom is seaman's mustard. It does make sense, this is a logical snack. You have mustard, you are a seaman, you see the halophyte, you mix it together, it's a great snack with some crackers. And last, garlic with Salicornia, which is what I like. So, water, fuel and food. None of this is possible without the GreenLab team. Just like the Miami Heat has the big three, we have the big three at NASA GRC. That's myself, professor Bob Hendricks, our fearless leader, and Dr. Arnon Chait. The backbone of the GreenLab is students. Over the last two years we've had 35 different students from around the world working at GreenLab. As a matter fact my division chief says a lot, "You have a green university." I say, "I'm okay with that, 'cause we are nurturing the next generation of extreme green thinkers, which is significant." So, in first summary I presented to you what we think is a global solution for food, fuel and water. There's something missing to be complete. Clearly we use electricity. We have a solution for you — We're using clean energy sources here. So, we have two wind turbines connected to the GreenLab, we have four or five more hopefully coming soon. We are also using something that is quite interesting — there is a solar array field at NASA's Glenn Research Center, hasn't been used for 15 years. Along with some of my electrical engineering colleagues, we realized that they are still viable, so we are refurbishing them right now. In about 30 days or so they'll be connected to the GreenLab. And the reason why you see red, red and yellow, is a lot of people think NASA employees don't work on Saturday — This is a picture taken on Saturday. There are no cars around, but you see my truck in yellow. I work on Saturday. (Laughter) This is a proof to you that I'm working. 'Cause we do what it takes to get the job done, most people know that. Here's a concept with this: We are using the GreenLab for a micro-grid test bed for the smart grid concept in Ohio. We have the ability to do that, and I think it's going to work. So, GreenLab Research Facility. A self-sustainable renewable energy ecosystem was presented today. We really, really hope this concept catches on worldwide. We think we have a solution for food, water, fuel and now energy. Complete. It's extreme green, it's sustainable, alternative and renewable and it meets the big three at GRC: Don't use arable land, don't compete with food crops, and most of all, don't use fresh water. So I get a lot of questions about, "What are you doing in that lab?" And I usually say, "None of your business, that's what I'm doing in the lab." (Laughter) And believe it or not, my number one goal for working on this project is I want to help save the world.

Is there a real you?

{0: "Julian Baggini is a journalist and philosopher who studies the complexities of personal identity. He is the editor-in-chief of the Philosophers' Magazine."}

TEDxYouth@Manchester

Is there a real you? This might seem to you like a very odd question. Because, you might ask, how do we find the real you, how do you know what the real you is? And so forth. But the idea that there must be a real you, surely that's obvious. If there's anything real in the world, it's you. Well, I'm not quite sure. At least we have to understand a bit better what that means. Now certainly, I think there are lots of things in our culture around us which sort of reinforce the idea that for each one of us, we have a kind of a core, an essence. There is something about what it means to be you which defines you, and it's kind of permanent and unchanging. The most kind of crude way in which we have it, are things like horoscopes. You know, people are very wedded to these, actually. People put them on their Facebook profile as though they are meaningul, you even know your Chinese horoscope as well. There are also more scientific versions of this, all sorts of ways of profiling personality type, such as the Myers-Briggs tests, for example. I don't know if you've done those. A lot of companies use these for recruitment. You answer a lot of questions, and this is supposed to reveal something about your core personality. And of course, the popular fascination with this is enormous. In magazines like this, you'll see, in the bottom left corner, they'll advertise in virtually every issue some kind of personality thing. And if you pick up one of those magazines, it's hard to resist, isn't it? Doing the test to find what is your learning style, what is your loving style, or what is your working style? Are you this kind of person or that? So I think that we have a common-sense idea that there is a kind of core or essence of ourselves to be discovered. And that this is kind of a permanent truth about ourselves, something that's the same throughout life. Well, that's the idea I want to challenge. And I have to say now, I'll say it a bit later, but I'm not challenging this just because I'm weird, the challenge actually has a very, very long and distinguished history. Here's the common-sense idea. There is you. You are the individuals you are, and you have this kind of core. Now in your life, what happens is that you, of course, accumulate different experiences and so forth. So you have memories, and these memories help to create what you are. You have desires, maybe for a cookie, maybe for something that we don't want to talk about at 11 o'clock in the morning in a school. You will have beliefs. This is a number plate from someone in America. I don't know whether this number plate, which says "messiah 1," indicates that the driver believes in the messiah, or that they are the messiah. Either way, they have beliefs about messiahs. We have knowledge. We have sensations and experiences as well. It's not just intellectual things. So this is kind of the common-sense model, I think, of what a person is. There is a person who has all the things that make up our life experiences. But the suggestion I want to put to you today is that there's something fundamentally wrong with this model. And I can show you what's wrong with one click. Which is there isn't actually a "you" at the heart of all these experiences. Strange thought? Well, maybe not. What is there, then? Well, clearly there are memories, desires, intentions, sensations, and so forth. But what happens is these things exist, and they're kind of all integrated, they're overlapped, they're connected in various different ways. They're connecting partly, and perhaps even mainly, because they all belong to one body and one brain. But there's also a narrative, a story we tell about ourselves, the experiences we have when we remember past things. We do things because of other things. So what we desire is partly a result of what we believe, and what we remember is also informing us what we know. And so really, there are all these things, like beliefs, desires, sensations, experiences, they're all related to each other, and that just is you. In some ways, it's a small difference from the common-sense understanding. In some ways, it's a massive one. It's the shift between thinking of yourself as a thing which has all the experiences of life, and thinking of yourself as simply that collection of all experiences in life. You are the sum of your parts. Now those parts are also physical parts, of course, brains, bodies and legs and things, but they aren't so important, actually. If you have a heart transplant, you're still the same person. If you have a memory transplant, are you the same person? If you have a belief transplant, would you be the same person? Now this idea, that what we are, the way to understand ourselves, is as not of some permanent being, which has experiences, but is kind of a collection of experiences, might strike you as kind of weird. But actually, I don't think it should be weird. In a way, it's common sense. Because I just invite you to think about, by comparison, think about pretty much anything else in the universe, maybe apart from the very most fundamental forces or powers. Let's take something like water. Now my science isn't very good. We might say something like water has two parts hydrogen and one parts oxygen, right? We all know that. I hope no one in this room thinks that what that means is there is a thing called water, and attached to it are hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and that's what water is. Of course we don't. We understand, very easily, very straightforwardly, that water is nothing more than the hydrogen and oxygen molecules suitably arranged. Everything else in the universe is the same. There's no mystery about my watch, for example. We say the watch has a face, and hands, and a mechanism and a battery, But what we really mean is, we don't think there is a thing called the watch to which we then attach all these bits. We understand very clearly that you get the parts of the watch, you put them together, and you create a watch. Now if everything else in the universe is like this, why are we different? Why think of ourselves as somehow not just being a collection of all our parts, but somehow being a separate, permanent entity which has those parts? Now this view is not particularly new, actually. It has quite a long lineage. You find it in Buddhism, you find it in 17th, 18th-century philosophy going through to the current day, people like Locke and Hume. But interestingly, it's also a view increasingly being heard reinforced by neuroscience. This is Paul Broks, he's a clinical neuropsychologist, and he says this: "We have a deep intuition that there is a core, an essence there, and it's hard to shake off, probably impossible to shake off, I suspect. But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together." So when you look at the brain, and you look at how the brain makes possible a sense of self, you find that there isn't a central control spot in the brain. There is no kind of center where everything happens. There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently. But it's because of the way that they relate that we get this sense of self. The term I use in the book, I call it the ego trick. It's like a mechanical trick. It's not that we don't exist, it's just that the trick is to make us feel that inside of us is something more unified than is really there. Now you might think this is a worrying idea. You might think that if it's true, that for each one of us there is no abiding core of self, no permanent essence, does that mean that really, the self is an illusion? Does it mean that we really don't exist? There is no real you. Well, a lot of people actually do use this talk of illusion and so forth. These are three psychologists, Thomas Metzinger, Bruce Hood, Susan Blackmore, a lot of these people do talk the language of illusion, the self is an illusion, it's a fiction. But I don't think this is a very helpful way of looking at it. Go back to the watch. The watch isn't an illusion, because there is nothing to the watch other than a collection of its parts. In the same way, we're not illusions either. The fact that we are, in some ways, just this very, very complex collection, ordered collection of things, does not mean we're not real. I can give you a very sort of rough metaphor for this. Let's take something like a waterfall. These are the Iguazu Falls, in Argentina. Now if you take something like this, you can appreciate the fact that in lots of ways, there's nothing permanent about this. For one thing, it's always changing. The waters are always carving new channels. with changes and tides and the weather, some things dry up, new things are created. Of course the water that flows through the waterfall is different every single instance. But it doesn't mean that the Iguazu Falls are an illusion. It doesn't mean it's not real. What it means is we have to understand what it is as something which has a history, has certain things that keep it together, but it's a process, it's fluid, it's forever changing. Now that, I think, is a model for understanding ourselves, and I think it's a liberating model. Because if you think that you have this fixed, permanent essence, which is always the same, throughout your life, no matter what, in a sense you're kind of trapped. You're born with an essence, that's what you are until you die, if you believe in an afterlife, maybe you continue. But if you think of yourself as being, in a way, not a thing as such, but a kind of a process, something that is changing, then I think that's quite liberating. Because unlike the the waterfalls, we actually have the capacity to channel the direction of our development for ourselves to a certain degree. Now we've got to be careful here, right? If you watch the X-Factor too much, you might buy into this idea that we can all be whatever we want to be. That's not true. I've heard some fantastic musicians this morning, and I am very confident that I could in no way be as good as them. I could practice hard and maybe be good, but I don't have that really natural ability. There are limits to what we can achieve. There are limits to what we can make of ourselves. But nevertheless, we do have this capacity to, in a sense, shape ourselves. The true self, as it were then, is not something that is just there for you to discover, you don't sort of look into your soul and find your true self, What you are partly doing, at least, is actually creating your true self. And this, I think, is very, very significant, particularly at this stage of life you're at. You'll be aware of the fact how much of you changed over recent years. If you have any videos of yourself, three or four years ago, you probably feel embarrassed because you don't recognize yourself. So I want to get that message over, that what we need to do is think about ourselves as things that we can shape, and channel and change. This is the Buddha, again: "Well-makers lead the water, fletchers bend the arrow, carpenters bend a log of wood, wise people fashion themselves." And that's the idea I want to leave you with, that your true self is not something that you will have to go searching for, as a mystery, and maybe never ever find. To the extent you have a true self, it's something that you in part discover, but in part create. and that, I think, is a liberating and exciting prospect. Thank you very much.

A primer on 3D printing

{0: 'Lisa Harouni is the co-founder of Digital Forming, working in "additive manufacturing" -- or 3D printing.'}

TEDSalon London Spring 2011

It is actually a reality today that you can download products from the Web — product data, I should say, from the Web — perhaps tweak it and personalize it to your own preference or your own taste, and have that information sent to a desktop machine that will fabricate it for you on the spot. We can actually build for you, very rapidly, a physical object. And the reason we can do this is through an emerging technology called additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. This is a 3D printer. They have been around for almost 30 years now, which is quite amazing to think of, but they're only just starting to filter into the public arena. And typically, you would take data, like the data of a pen here, which would be a geometric representation of that product in 3D, and we would pass that data with material into a machine. And a process that would happen in the machine would mean layer by layer that product would be built. And we can take out the physical product, and ready to use, or to, perhaps, assemble into something else. But if these machines have been around for almost 30 years, why don't we know about them? Because typically they've been too inefficient, inaccessible, they've not been fast enough, they've been quite expensive. But today, it is becoming a reality that they are now becoming successful. Many barriers are breaking down. That means that you guys will soon be able to access one of these machines, if not this minute. And it will change and disrupt the landscape of manufacturing, and most certainly our lives, our businesses and the lives of our children. So how does it work? It typically reads CAD data, which is a product design data created on professional product design programs. And here you can see an engineer — it could be an architect or it could be a professional product designer — create a product in 3D. And this data gets sent to a machine that slices the data into two-dimensional representations of that product all the way through — almost like slicing it like salami. And that data, layer by layer, gets passed through the machine, starting at the base of the product and depositing material, layer upon layer, infusing the new layer of materials to the old layer in an additive process. And this material that's deposited either starts as a liquid form or a material powder form. And the bonding process can happen by either melting and depositing or depositing then melting. In this case, we can see a laser sintering machine developed by EOS. It's actually using a laser to fuse the new layer of material to the old layer. And over time — quite rapidly actually, in a number of hours — we can build a physical product, ready to take out of the machine and use. And this is quite an extraordinary idea, but it is reality today. So all these products that you can see on the screen were made in the same way. They were all 3D printed. And you can see, they're ranging from shoes, rings that were made out of stainless steal, phone covers out of plastic, all the way through to spinal implants, for example, that were created out of medical-grade titanium, and engine parts. But what you'll notice about all of these products is they're very, very intricate. The design is quite extraordinary. Because we're taking this data in 3D form, slicing it up before it gets past the machine, we can actually create structures that are more intricate than any other manufacturing technology — or, in fact, are impossible to build in any other way. And you can create parts with moving components, hinges, parts within parts. So in some cases, we can abolish totally the need for manual labor. It sounds great. It is great. We can have 3D printers today that build structures like these. This is almost three meters high. And this was built by depositing artificial sandstone layer upon layer in layers of about five millimeters to 10 mm in thickness — slowly growing this structure. This was created by an architectural firm called Shiro. And you can actually walk into it. And on the other end of the spectrum, this is a microstructure. It's created depositing layers of about four microns. So really the resolution is quite incredible. The detail that you can get today is quite amazing. So who's using it? Typically, because we can create products very rapidly, it's been used by product designers, or anyone who wanted to prototype a product and very quickly create or reiterate a design. And actually what's quite amazing about this technology as well is that you can create bespoke products en masse. There's very little economies of scale. So you can now create one-offs very easily. Architects, for example, they want to create prototypes of buildings. Again you can see, this is a building of the Free University in Berlin and it was designed by Foster and Partners. Again, not buildable in any other way. And very hard to even create this by hand. Now this is an engine component. It was developed by a company called Within Technologies and 3T RPD. It's very, very, very detailed inside with the design. Now 3D printing can break away barriers in design which challenge the constraints of mass production. If we slice into this product which is actually sitting here, you can see that it has a number of cooling channels pass through it, which means it's a more efficient product. You can't create this with standard manufacturing techniques even if you tried to do it manually. It's more efficient because we can now create all these cavities within the object that cool fluid. And it's used by aerospace and automotive. It's a lighter part and it uses less material waste. So it's overall performance and efficiency just exceeds standard mass produced products. And then taking this idea of creating a very detailed structure, we can apply it to honeycomb structures and use them within implants. Typically an implant is more effective within the body if it's more porous, because our body tissue will grow into it. There's a lower chance of rejection. But it's very hard to create that in standard ways. With 3D printing, we're seeing today that we can create much better implants. And in fact, because we can create bespoke products en masse, one-offs, we can create implants that are specific to individuals. So as you can see, this technology and the quality of what comes out of the machines is fantastic. And we're starting to see it being used for final end products. And in fact, as the detail is improving, the quality is improving, the price of the machines are falling and they're becoming quicker. They're also now small enough to sit on a desktop. You can buy a machine today for about $300 that you can create yourself, which is quite incredible. But then it begs the question, why don't we all have one in our home? Because, simply, most of us here today don't know how to create the data that a 3D printer reads. If I gave you a 3D printer, you wouldn't know how to direct it to make what you want it to. But there are more and more technologies, software and processes today that are breaking down those barriers. I believe we're at a tipping point where this is now something that we can't avoid. This technology is really going to disrupt the landscape of manufacturing and, I believe, cause a revolution in manufacturing. So today, you can download products from the Web — anything you would have on your desktop, like pens, whistles, lemon squeezers. You can use software like Google SketchUp to create products from scratch very easily. 3D printing can be also used to download spare parts from the Web. So imagine you have, say, a Hoover in your home and it has broken down. You need a spare part, but you realize that Hoover's been discontinued. Can you imagine going online — this is a reality — and finding that spare part from a database of geometries of that discontinued product and downloading that information, that data, and having the product made for you at home, ready to use, on your demand? And in fact, because we can create spare parts with things the machines are quite literally making themselves. You're having machines fabricate themselves. These are parts of a RepRap machine, which is a kind of desktop printer. But what interests my company the most is the fact that you can create individual unique products en masse. There's no need to do a run of thousands of millions or send that product to be injection molded in China. You can just make it physically on the spot. Which means that we can now present to the public the next generation of customization. This is something that is now possible today, that you can direct personally how you want your products to look. We're all familiar with the idea of customization or personalization. Brands like Nike are doing it. It's all over the Web. In fact, every major household name is allowing you to interact with their products on a daily basis — all the way from Smart Cars to Prada to Ray Ban, for example. But this is not really mass customization; it's known as variant production, variations of the same product. What you could do is really influence your product now and shape-manipulate your product. I'm not sure about you guys, but I've had experiences when I've walked into a store and I've know exactly what I've wanted and I've searched everywhere for that perfect lamp that I know where I want to sit in my house and I just can't find the right thing, or that perfect piece of jewelry as a gift or for myself. Imagine that you can now engage with a brand and interact, so that you can pass your personal attributes to the products that you're about to buy. You can today download a product with software like this, view the product in 3D. This is the sort of 3D data that a machine will read. This is a lamp. And you can start iterating the design. You can direct what color that product will be, perhaps what material. And also, you can engage in shape manipulation of that product, but within boundaries that are safe. Because obviously the public are not professional product designers. The piece of software will keep an individual within the bounds of the possible. And when somebody is ready to purchase the product in their personalized design, they click "Enter" and this data gets converted into the data that a 3D printer reads and gets passed to a 3D printer, perhaps on someone's desktop. But I don't think that that's immediate. I don't think that will happen soon. What's more likely, and we're seeing it today, is that data gets sent to a local manufacturing center. This means lower carbon footprint. We're now, instead of shipping a product across the world, we're sending data across the Internet. Here's the product being built. You can see, this came out of the machine in one piece and the electronics were inserted later. It's this lamp, as you can see here. So as long as you have the data, you can create the part on demand. And you don't necessarily need to use this for just aesthetic customization, you can use it for functional customization, scanning parts of the body and creating things that are made to fit. So we can run this through to something like prosthetics, which is highly specialized to an individual's handicap. Or we can create very specific prosthetics for that individual. Scanning teeth today, you can have your teeth scanned and dental coatings made in this way to fit you. While you wait at the dentist, a machine will quietly be creating this for you ready to insert in the teeth. And the idea of now creating implants, scanning data, an MRI scan of somebody can now be converted into 3D data and we can create very specific implants for them. And applying this to the idea of building up what's in our bodies. You know, this is pair of lungs and the bronchial tree. It's very intricate. You couldn't really create this or simulate it in any other way. But with MRI data, we can just build the product, as you can see, very intricately. Using this process, pioneers in the industry are layering up cells today. So one of the pioneers, for example, is Dr. Anthony Atala, and he has been working on layering cells to create body parts — bladders, valves, kidneys. Now this is not something that's ready for the public, but it is in working progress. So just to finalize, we're all individual. We all have different preferences, different needs. We like different things. We're all different sizes and our companies the same. Businesses want different things. Without a doubt in my mind, I believe that this technology is going to cause a manufacturing revolution and will change the landscape of manufacturing as we know it. Thank you. (Applause)

Extreme swimming with the world's most dangerous jellyfish

{0: 'A record-setting long-distance swimmer, Diana Nyad writes and thinks deeply about motivation.'}

TEDMED 2011

Yeah, so a couple of years ago I was turning 60, and I don't like being 60. (Laughter) And I started grappling with this existential angst of what little I had done with my life. It wasn't the resume of breaking this record here, it was more like, who had I become? How had I spent my valuable time? How could this have gone by like lightning? And I couldn't forgive myself for the countless, countless hours I had lost in negative thought — all the time I had spent beating myself up for losing my marriage and not stopping the sexual abuse when I was a kid and career moves and this and this and this. Just why, why didn't I do it better? Why? Why? Why? And then my mother died at 82. And so I starting thinking, not only am I not happy with the past, now I'm getting choked with, "I've only got 22 years left." What am I going to do with this short amount of time that's just fleeting? And I'm not in the present whatsoever. And I decided the remedy to all this malaise was going to be for me to chase an elevated dream, an extreme dream, something that would require utter conviction and unwavering passion, something that would make me be my best self in every aspect of my life, every minute of every day, because the dream was so big that I couldn't get there without that kind of behavior and that kind of conviction. And I decided, it was an old dream that was lingering, that was from so many years ago, three decades ago — the only sort of world class swim I had tried and failed at back in my 20s — was going from Cuba to Florida. It was deep in my imagination. No one's ever done it without a shark cage. It's daunting. It's more than a hundred miles across a difficult passage of ocean. It's probably, at my speed, at my age — for anybody's speed at anybody's age — going to take 60, maybe 70, hours of continuous swimming, never getting out on the boat. And I started to train. I hadn't swum for 31 years, not a stroke. And I had kept in good shape, but swimming's a whole different animal. As a matter of fact, this picture is supposed to be me during training. It's a smiling face. And when you're training for this sport, you are not smiling. (Laughter) It's an arduous, difficult sport, and I don't remember smiling at any time during this sport. As I said, I respect other sports, and I compare this sport sometimes to cycling and to mountain climbing and other of the expedition type events, but this is a sensory deprivation, a physical duress. And when I started in with the eight hours and the 10 hours and the 12 hours and the 14 hours and the 15 hours and the 24-hour swims, I knew I had it, because I was making it through these. And when I said I'm going to go out and do a 15-hour swim, and we're coming into the dock after a long day and it's now night, and we come in and it's 14 hours and 58 minutes and I can touch the dock and we're done, the trainer says, "That's great. It's 14 hours 58 minutes. Who cares the last two minutes?" I say, "No, it's got to be 15 hours," and I swim another minute out and another minute back to make the 15 hours. And I put together an expedition. It's not that I didn't have help, but honestly, I sort of led, I was the team leader. And to get the government permissions, you read in the paper, you think it's easy to get into Cuba everyday? Try going in with an armada like we had of 50 people and five boats and CNN's crew, etc. The navigation is difficult. There's a big river called the Gulf Stream that runs across and it's not going in the direction you are. It's going to the east and you'd like to go north. It's tricky. And there's dehydration. And there's hypothermia. And there are sharks. And there are all kinds of problems. And I gathered together, honestly, the world's leading experts in every possible way. And a month ago, the 23rd of September, I stood on that shore and I looked across to that long, long faraway horizon and I asked myself, do you have it? Are your shoulders ready? And they were. They were prepared. No stone left unturned. Was the mind ready? You know, you're swimming with the fogged goggles, you're swimming at 60 strokes a minute, so you're never really focused on anything, you don't see well. You've got tight bathing caps over your ears trying to keep the heat of the head, because it's where the hypothermia starts, and so you don't hear very well. You're really left alone with your own thoughts. And I had all kinds of counting systems ready there in English, followed by German, followed by Spanish, followed by French. You save the French for last. And I had songs, I had a playlist in my head — not through headphones, in my own head — of 65 songs. And I couldn't wait to get into the dark in the middle of the night, because that's when Neil Young comes out. (Laughter) And it's odd, isn't it? You'd think you'd be singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" out in the majesty of the ocean, not songs about heroin addiction in New York City. But no, for some reason I couldn't wait to get into the dark of the night and be singing, ♫ "A heard you knocking at my cellar door ♫ ♫ I love you baby and I want some more ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, the damage done" ♫ (Applause) The night before I started, I finished Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design." And I couldn't wait to trip the mind fantastic. About the 50th hour, I was going to start thinking about the edge of the universe. Is there an edge? Is this an envelope we're living inside of, or no, does it go onto infinity in both time and space? And there's nothing like swimming for 50 hours in the ocean that gets you thinking about things like this. I couldn't wait to prove the athlete I am, that nobody else in the world can do this swim. And I knew I could do it. And when I jumped into that water, I yelled in my mother's French, "Courage!" And I started swimming, and, oh my God, it was glassy. And we knew it, all 50 people on the boat, we all knew this was it, this was our time. And I reminded myself a couple hours in, you know, the sport is sort of a microcosm of life itself. First of all, you're going to hit obstacles. And even though you're feeling great at any one moment, don't take it for granted, be ready, because there's going to be pain, there's going to be suffering. It's not going to feel this good all the way across. And I was thinking of the hypothermia and maybe some shoulder pain and all the other things — the vomiting that comes from being in the saltwater. You're immersed in the liquid. Your body doesn't like the saltwater. After a couple of days, three days, you tend to rebel in a lot of physical ways. But no, two hours in, wham! Never in my life ... I knew there were Portuguese men o' war, all kinds of moon jellies, all kinds of things, but the box jellyfish from the southern oceans is not supposed to be in these waters. And I was on fire — excruciating, excruciating pain. I don't know if you can still see the red line here and up the arm. Evidently, a piece this big of tentacle has a hundred-thousand little barbs on it and each barb is not just stinging your skin, it's sending a venom. The most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish. And every one of those barbs is sending that venom into this central nervous system. So first I feel like boiling hot oil, I've been dipped in. And I'm yelling out, "Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Help me! Somebody help me!" And the next thing is paralysis. I feel it in the back and then I feel it in the chest up here, and I can't breathe. And now I'm not swimming with a nice long stroke, I'm sort of crabbing it this way. Then come convulsions. A young man on our boat is an EMT. He dives in to try to help me. He's stung. They drag him out on the boat, and he's — evidently, I didn't see any of this — but lying on the boat and giving himself epinephrine shots and crying out. He's 29 years old, very well-built, lean, he's six-foot, five, weighs 265 lbs., and he is down. And he is crying and he's yelling to my trainer who's trying to help me. And he's saying, "Bonnie, I think I'm going to die. My breath is down to three breaths a minute. I need help, and I can't help Diana." So that was at eight o'clock at night. The doctor, medical team from University of Miami arrived at five in the morning. So I swam through the night, and at dawn they got there and they started with prednisone shots. I didn't get out, but was in the water taking prednisone shots, taking Xanax, oxygen to the face. It was like an ICU unit in the water. (Laughter) And I guess the story is that even Navy SEALS who are stung by the box jelly, they're done. They either die or they quickly get to a hospital. And I swam through the night and I swam through the next day. And the next night at dusk, again, wham! The box jelly again — all across the neck, all across here. And this time, I don't like it, I didn't want to give into it, but there's a difference between a non-stop swim and a staged swim. And I gave in to the staged swim. And they got me out and they started again with the epinephrine and the prednisone and with the oxygen and with everything they had on board. And I got back in. And I swam through that night and into the next day. And at 41 hours, this body couldn't make it. The devastation of those stings had taken the respiratory system down so that I couldn't make the progress I wanted. And the dream was crushed. And how odd is this intelligent person who put this together and got all these world experts together. And I knew about the jellyfish, but I was sort of cavalier. A lot of athletes have this, you know, sort of invincibility. They should worry about me. I don't worry about them. I'll just swim right through them. We've got benadryl on board. If I get stung, I'll just grin and bear it. Well there was no grin and bearing this. As a matter of fact, the best advice I got was from an elementary school class in the Caribbean. And I was telling these kids, 120 of them — they were all in the school on the gymnasium floor — and I was telling them about the jellyfish and how they're gelatinous and you can't see them at night especially. And they have these long 30 to 40 to 50-ft. tentacles. And they do this wrapping. And they can send the poison into the system. And a little kid from the back was like this. And I said, "What's your name?" "Henry." "Henry, what's your question?" He said, "Well, I didn't have a question so much as I had a suggestion." He said, "You know those guys who really believe in what they believe in and so they wear bombs?" And I said, "Well it's odd that you've learned of this as a noble kind of pursuit, but yeah, I know those guys." He said, "That's what you need. You need like a school of fish that would swim in front of you like this." (Laughter) "And when the jellyfish come and they wrap their tentacles around the fish, they're going to be busy with them, and you'll just scoot around." I said, "Oh, it's like a suicide army." He said, "That's what I'm talking about. That's what you need." And little did I know, that you should listen to eight year-olds. And so I started that swim in a bathing suit like normal, and, no joke, this is it; it came from the shark divers. I finished the swim like this. I was swimming with this thing on. That's how scared of the jellyfish I was. So now what do I do? I wouldn't mind if every one of you came up on this stage tonight and told us how you've gotten over the big disappointments of your lives. Because we've all had them, haven't we? We've all had a heartache. And so my journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat. And I can look at the journey, not just the destination. I can feel proud. I can stand here in front of you tonight and say I was courageous. Yeah. (Applause) Thank you. And with all sincerity, I can say, I am glad I lived those two years of my life that way, because my goal to not suffer regrets anymore, I got there with that goal. When you live that way, when you live with that kind of passion, there's no time, there's no time for regrets, you're just moving forward. And I want to live every day of the rest of my life that way, swim or no swim. But the difference in accepting this particular defeat is that sometimes, if cancer has won, if there's death and we have no choice, then grace and acceptance are necessary. But that ocean's still there. This hope is still alive. And I don't want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years, and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida, and I will swim from Cuba to Florida. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) And so, what after that? Are you going to swim the Atlantic? No, that's the last swim. It's the only swim I'm interested in. But I'm ready. And by the way, a reporter called me the other day and he said he looked on Wikipedia and he said he saw my birthday was August 22nd 1949, and for some odd reason in Wikipedia, they had my death date too. (Laughter) He said, "Did you know you're going to die the same place you were born, New York City, and it's going to be in January of '35?" I said, "Nope. I didn't know." And now I'm going to live to 85. I have three more years than I thought. And so I ask myself, I'm starting to ask myself now, even before this extreme dream gets achieved for me, I'm asking myself, and maybe I can ask you tonight too, to paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver, she says, "So what is it, what is it you're doing, with this one wild and precious life of yours?" Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Live it large. Live it large.

Doctors make mistakes. Can we talk about that?

{0: 'Brian Goldman is an emergency-room physician in Toronto, and the host of CBC Radio’s "White Coat, Black Art."'}

TEDxToronto 2010

I think we have to do something about a piece of the culture of medicine that has to change. And I think it starts with one physician, and that's me. And maybe I've been around long enough that I can afford to give away some of my false prestige to be able to do that. Before I actually begin the meat of my talk, let's begin with a bit of baseball. Hey, why not? We're near the end, we're getting close to the World Series. We all love baseball, don't we? (Laughter) Baseball is filled with some amazing statistics. And there's hundreds of them. "Moneyball" is about to come out, and it's all about statistics and using statistics to build a great baseball team. I'm going to focus on one stat that I hope a lot of you have heard of. It's called batting average. So we talk about a 300, a batter who bats 300. That means that ballplayer batted safely, hit safely three times out of 10 at bats. That means hit the ball into the outfield, it dropped, it didn't get caught, and whoever tried to throw it to first base didn't get there in time and the runner was safe. Three times out of 10. Do you know what they call a 300 hitter in Major League Baseball? Good, really good, maybe an all-star. Do you know what they call a 400 baseball hitter? That's somebody who hit, by the way, four times safely out of every 10. Legendary — as in Ted Williams legendary — the last Major League Baseball player to hit over 400 during a regular season. Now let's take this back into my world of medicine where I'm a lot more comfortable, or perhaps a bit less comfortable after what I'm going to talk to you about. Suppose you have appendicitis and you're referred to a surgeon who's batting 400 on appendectomies. (Laughter) Somehow this isn't working out, is it? Now suppose you live in a certain part of a certain remote place and you have a loved one who has blockages in two coronary arteries and your family doctor refers that loved one to a cardiologist who's batting 200 on angioplasties. But, but, you know what? She's doing a lot better this year. She's on the comeback trail. And she's hitting a 257. Somehow this isn't working. But I'm going to ask you a question. What do you think a batting average for a cardiac surgeon or a nurse practitioner or an orthopedic surgeon, an OBGYN, a paramedic is supposed to be? 1,000, very good. Now truth of the matter is, nobody knows in all of medicine what a good surgeon or physician or paramedic is supposed to bat. What we do though is we send each one of them, including myself, out into the world with the admonition, be perfect. Never ever, ever make a mistake, but you worry about the details, about how that's going to happen. And that was the message that I absorbed when I was in med school. I was an obsessive compulsive student. In high school, a classmate once said that Brian Goldman would study for a blood test. (Laughter) And so I did. And I studied in my little garret at the nurses' residence at Toronto General Hospital, not far from here. And I memorized everything. I memorized in my anatomy class the origins and exertions of every muscle, every branch of every artery that came off the aorta, differential diagnoses obscure and common. I even knew the differential diagnosis in how to classify renal tubular acidosis. And all the while, I was amassing more and more knowledge. And I did well, I graduated with honors, cum laude. And I came out of medical school with the impression that if I memorized everything and knew everything, or as much as possible, as close to everything as possible, that it would immunize me against making mistakes. And it worked for a while, until I met Mrs. Drucker. I was a resident at a teaching hospital here in Toronto when Mrs. Drucker was brought to the emergency department of the hospital where I was working. At the time I was assigned to the cardiology service on a cardiology rotation. And it was my job, when the emergency staff called for a cardiology consult, to see that patient in emerg. and to report back to my attending. And I saw Mrs. Drucker, and she was breathless. And when I listened to her, she was making a wheezy sound. And when I listened to her chest with a stethoscope, I could hear crackly sounds on both sides that told me that she was in congestive heart failure. This is a condition in which the heart fails, and instead of being able to pump all the blood forward, some of the blood backs up into the lung, the lungs fill up with blood, and that's why you have shortness of breath. And that wasn't a difficult diagnosis to make. I made it and I set to work treating her. I gave her aspirin. I gave her medications to relieve the strain on her heart. I gave her medications that we call diuretics, water pills, to get her to pee out the access fluid. And over the course of the next hour and a half or two, she started to feel better. And I felt really good. And that's when I made my first mistake; I sent her home. Actually, I made two more mistakes. I sent her home without speaking to my attending. I didn't pick up the phone and do what I was supposed to do, which was call my attending and run the story by him so he would have a chance to see her for himself. And he knew her, he would have been able to furnish additional information about her. Maybe I did it for a good reason. Maybe I didn't want to be a high-maintenance resident. Maybe I wanted to be so successful and so able to take responsibility that I would do so and I would be able to take care of my attending's patients without even having to contact him. The second mistake that I made was worse. In sending her home, I disregarded a little voice deep down inside that was trying to tell me, "Goldman, not a good idea. Don't do this." In fact, so lacking in confidence was I that I actually asked the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker, "Do you think it's okay if she goes home?" And the nurse thought about it and said very matter-of-factly, "Yeah, I think she'll do okay." I can remember that like it was yesterday. So I signed the discharge papers, and an ambulance came, paramedics came to take her home. And I went back to my work on the wards. All the rest of that day, that afternoon, I had this kind of gnawing feeling inside my stomach. But I carried on with my work. And at the end of the day, I packed up to leave the hospital and walked to the parking lot to take my car and drive home when I did something that I don't usually do. I walked through the emergency department on my way home. And it was there that another nurse, not the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker before, but another nurse, said three words to me that are the three words that most emergency physicians I know dread. Others in medicine dread them as well, but there's something particular about emergency medicine because we see patients so fleetingly. The three words are: Do you remember? "Do you remember that patient you sent home?" the other nurse asked matter-of-factly. "Well she's back," in just that tone of voice. Well she was back all right. She was back and near death. About an hour after she had arrived home, after I'd sent her home, she collapsed and her family called 911 and the paramedics brought her back to the emergency department where she had a blood pressure of 50, which is in severe shock. And she was barely breathing and she was blue. And the emerg. staff pulled out all the stops. They gave her medications to raise her blood pressure. They put her on a ventilator. And I was shocked and shaken to the core. And I went through this roller coaster, because after they stabilized her, she went to the intensive care unit, and I hoped against hope that she would recover. And over the next two or three days, it was clear that she was never going to wake up. She had irreversible brain damage. And the family gathered. And over the course of the next eight or nine days, they resigned themselves to what was happening. And at about the nine day mark, they let her go — Mrs. Drucker, a wife, a mother and a grandmother. They say you never forget the names of those who die. And that was my first time to be acquainted with that. Over the next few weeks, I beat myself up and I experienced for the first time the unhealthy shame that exists in our culture of medicine — where I felt alone, isolated, not feeling the healthy kind of shame that you feel, because you can't talk about it with your colleagues. You know that healthy kind, when you betray a secret that a best friend made you promise never to reveal and then you get busted and then your best friend confronts you and you have terrible discussions, but at the end of it all that sick feeling guides you and you say, I'll never make that mistake again. And you make amends and you never make that mistake again. That's the kind of shame that is a teacher. The unhealthy shame I'm talking about is the one that makes you so sick inside. It's the one that says, not that what you did was bad, but that you are bad. And it was what I was feeling. And it wasn't because of my attending; he was a doll. He talked to the family, and I'm quite sure that he smoothed things over and made sure that I didn't get sued. And I kept asking myself these questions. Why didn't I ask my attending? Why did I send her home? And then at my worst moments: Why did I make such a stupid mistake? Why did I go into medicine? Slowly but surely, it lifted. I began to feel a bit better. And on a cloudy day, there was a crack in the clouds and the sun started to come out and I wondered, maybe I could feel better again. And I made myself a bargain that if only I redouble my efforts to be perfect and never make another mistake again, please make the voices stop. And they did. And I went back to work. And then it happened again. Two years later I was an attending in the emergency department at a community hospital just north of Toronto, and I saw a 25 year-old man with a sore throat. It was busy, I was in a bit of a hurry. He kept pointing here. I looked at his throat, it was a little bit pink. And I gave him a prescription for penicillin and sent him on his way. And even as he was walking out the door, he was still sort of pointing to his throat. And two days later I came to do my next emergency shift, and that's when my chief asked to speak to me quietly in her office. And she said the three words: Do you remember? "Do you remember that patient you saw with the sore throat?" Well it turns out, he didn't have a strep throat. He had a potentially life-threatening condition called epiglottitis. You can Google it, but it's an infection, not of the throat, but of the upper airway, and it can actually cause the airway to close. And fortunately he didn't die. He was placed on intravenous antibiotics and he recovered after a few days. And I went through the same period of shame and recriminations and felt cleansed and went back to work, until it happened again and again and again. Twice in one emergency shift, I missed appendicitis. Now that takes some doing, especially when you work in a hospital that at the time saw but 14 people a night. Now in both cases, I didn't send them home and I don't think there was any gap in their care. One I thought had a kidney stone. I ordered a kidney X-ray. When it turned out to be normal, my colleague who was doing a reassessment of the patient noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant and called the surgeons. The other one had a lot of diarrhea. I ordered some fluids to rehydrate him and asked my colleague to reassess him. And he did and when he noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant, called the surgeons. In both cases, they had their operations and they did okay. But each time, they were gnawing at me, eating at me. And I'd like to be able to say to you that my worst mistakes only happened in the first five years of practice as many of my colleagues say, which is total B.S. (Laughter) Some of my doozies have been in the last five years. Alone, ashamed and unsupported. Here's the problem: If I can't come clean and talk about my mistakes, if I can't find the still-small voice that tells me what really happened, how can I share it with my colleagues? How can I teach them about what I did so that they don't do the same thing? If I were to walk into a room — like right now, I have no idea what you think of me. When was the last time you heard somebody talk about failure after failure after failure? Oh yeah, you go to a cocktail party and you might hear about some other doctor, but you're not going to hear somebody talking about their own mistakes. If I were to walk into a room filled with my colleages and ask for their support right now and start to tell what I've just told you right now, I probably wouldn't get through two of those stories before they would start to get really uncomfortable, somebody would crack a joke, they'd change the subject and we would move on. And in fact, if I knew and my colleagues knew that one of my orthopedic colleagues took off the wrong leg in my hospital, believe me, I'd have trouble making eye contact with that person. That's the system that we have. It's a complete denial of mistakes. It's a system in which there are two kinds of physicians — those who make mistakes and those who don't, those who can't handle sleep deprivation and those who can, those who have lousy outcomes and those who have great outcomes. And it's almost like an ideological reaction, like the antibodies begin to attack that person. And we have this idea that if we drive the people who make mistakes out of medicine, what will we be left with, but a safe system. But there are two problems with that. In my 20 years or so of medical broadcasting and journalism, I've made a personal study of medical malpractice and medical errors to learn everything I can, from one of the first articles I wrote for the Toronto Star to my show "White Coat, Black Art." And what I've learned is that errors are absolutely ubiquitous. We work in a system where errors happen every day, where one in 10 medications are either the wrong medication given in hospital or at the wrong dosage, where hospital-acquired infections are getting more and more numerous, causing havoc and death. In this country, as many as 24,000 Canadians die of preventable medical errors. In the United States, the Institute of Medicine pegged it at 100,000. In both cases, these are gross underestimates, because we really aren't ferreting out the problem as we should. And here's the thing. In a hospital system where medical knowledge is doubling every two or three years, we can't keep up with it. Sleep deprivation is absolutely pervasive. We can't get rid of it. We have our cognitive biases, so that I can take a perfect history on a patient with chest pain. Now take the same patient with chest pain, make them moist and garrulous and put a little bit of alcohol on their breath, and suddenly my history is laced with contempt. I don't take the same history. I'm not a robot; I don't do things the same way each time. And my patients aren't cars; they don't tell me their symptoms in the same way each time. Given all of that, mistakes are inevitable. So if you take the system, as I was taught, and weed out all the error-prone health professionals, well there won't be anybody left. And you know that business about people not wanting to talk about their worst cases? On my show, on "White Coat, Black Art," I made it a habit of saying, "Here's my worst mistake," I would say to everybody from paramedics to the chief of cardiac surgery, "Here's my worst mistake," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, "What about yours?" and I would point the microphone towards them. And their pupils would dilate, they would recoil, then they would look down and swallow hard and start to tell me their stories. They want to tell their stories. They want to share their stories. They want to be able to say, "Look, don't make the same mistake I did." What they need is an environment to be able to do that. What they need is a redefined medical culture. And it starts with one physician at a time. The redefined physician is human, knows she's human, accepts it, isn't proud of making mistakes, but strives to learn one thing from what happened that she can teach to somebody else. She shares her experience with others. She's supportive when other people talk about their mistakes. And she points out other people's mistakes, not in a gotcha way, but in a loving, supportive way so that everybody can benefit. And she works in a culture of medicine that acknowledges that human beings run the system, and when human beings run the system, they will make mistakes from time to time. So the system is evolving to create backups that make it easier to detect those mistakes that humans inevitably make and also fosters in a loving, supportive way places where everybody who is observing in the health care system can actually point out things that could be potential mistakes and is rewarded for doing so, and especially people like me, when we do make mistakes, we're rewarded for coming clean. My name is Brian Goldman. I am a redefined physician. I'm human. I make mistakes. I'm sorry about that, but I strive to learn one thing that I can pass on to other people. I still don't know what you think of me, but I can live with that. And let me close with three words of my own: I do remember. (Applause)

Women entrepreneurs, example not exception

{0: 'Gayle Tzemach Lemmon writes about women around the world living their lives at war and in conflict zones.'}

TEDxWomen 2011

We do not invest in victims, we invest in survivors. And in ways both big and small, the narrative of the victim shapes the way we see women. You can't count what you don't see. And we don't invest in what's invisible to us. But this is the face of resilience. Six years ago, I started writing about women entrepreneurs during and after conflict. I set out to write a compelling economic story, one that had great characters, that no one else was telling, and one that I thought mattered. And that turned out to be women. I had left ABC news and a career I loved at the age of 30 for business school, a path I knew almost nothing about. None of the women I had grown up with in Maryland had graduated from college, let alone considered business school. But they had hustled to feed their kids and pay their rent. And I saw from a young age that having a decent job and earning a good living made the biggest difference for families who were struggling. So if you're going to talk about jobs, then you have to talk about entrepreneurs. And if you're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, then you must talk about women, because they are the population you have left. Rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide was 77 percent female. I want to introduce you to some of those entrepreneurs I've met and share with you some of what they've taught me over the years. I went to Afghanistan in 2005 to work on a Financial Times piece, and there I met Kamila, a young women who told me she had just turned down a job with the international community that would have paid her nearly $2,000 a month — an astronomical sum in that context. And she had turned it down, she said, because she was going to start her next business, an entrepreneurship consultancy that would teach business skills to men and women all around Afghanistan. Business, she said, was critical to her country's future. Because long after this round of internationals left, business would help keep her country peaceful and secure. And she said business was even more important for women because earning an income earned respect and money was power for women. So I was amazed. I mean here was a girl who had never lived in peace time who somehow had come to sound like a candidate from "The Apprentice." (Laughter) So I asked her, "How in the world do you know this much about business? Why are you so passionate?" She said, "Oh Gayle, this is actually my third business. My first business was a dressmaking business I started under the Taliban. And that was actually an excellent business, because we provided jobs for women all around our neighborhood. And that's really how I became an entrepreneur." Think about this: Here were girls who braved danger to become breadwinners during years in which they couldn't even be on their streets. And at a time of economic collapse when people sold baby dolls and shoe laces and windows and doors just to survive, these girls made the difference between survival and starvation for so many. I couldn't leave the story, and I couldn't leave the topic either, because everywhere I went I met more of these women who no one seemed to know about, or even wish to. I went on to Bosnia, and early on in my interviews I met with an IMF official who said, "You know, Gayle, I don't think we actually have women in business in Bosnia, but there is a lady selling cheese nearby on the side of the road. So maybe you could interview her." So I went out reporting and within a day I met Narcisa Kavazovic who at that point was opening a new factory on the war's former front lines in Sarajevo. She had started her business squatting in an abandoned garage, sewing sheets and pillow cases she would take to markets all around the city so that she could support the 12 or 13 family members who were counting on her for survival. By the time we met, she had 20 employees, most of them women, who were sending their boys and their girls to school. And she was just the start. I met women running essential oils businesses, wineries and even the country's largest advertising agency. So these stories together became the Herald Tribune business cover. And when this story posted, I ran to my computer to send it to the IMF official. And I said, "Just in case you're looking for entrepreneurs to feature at your next investment conference, here are a couple of women." (Applause) But think about this. The IMF official is hardly the only person to automatically file women under micro. The biases, whether intentional or otherwise, are pervasive, and so are the misleading mental images. If you see the word "microfinance," what comes to mind? Most people say women. And if you see the word "entrepreneur," most people think men. Why is that? Because we aim low and we think small when it comes to women. Microfinance is an incredibly powerful tool that leads to self-sufficiency and self-respect, but we must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women, because they have so much greater hopes for themselves. They want to move from micro to medium and beyond. And in many places, they're there. In the U.S., women-owned businesses will create five and a half million new jobs by 2018. In South Korea and Indonesia, women own nearly half a million firms. China, women run 20 percent of all small businesses. And in the developing world overall, That figure is 40 to 50 percent. Nearly everywhere I go, I meet incredibly interesting entrepreneurs who are seeking access to finance, access to markets and established business networks. They are often ignored because they're harder to help. It is much riskier to give a 50,000 dollar loan than it is to give a 500 dollar loan. And as the World Bank recently noted, women are stuck in a productivity trap. Those in small businesses can't get the capital they need to expand and those in microbusiness can't grow out of them. Recently I was at the State Department in Washington and I met an incredibly passionate entrepreneur from Ghana. She sells chocolates. And she had come to Washington, not seeking a handout and not seeking a microloan. She had come seeking serious investment dollars so that she could build the factory and buy the equipment she needs to export her chocolates to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and far beyond — capital that would help her to employ more than the 20 people that she already has working for her, and capital that would fuel her own country's economic climb. The great news is we already know what works. Theory and empirical evidence Have already taught us. We don't need to invent solutions because we have them — cash flow loans based in income rather than assets, loans that use secure contracts rather than collateral, because women often don't own land. And Kiva.org, the microlender, is actually now experimenting with crowdsourcing small and medium sized loans. And that's just to start. Recently it has become very much in fashion to call women "the emerging market of the emerging market." I think that is terrific. You know why? Because — and I say this as somebody who worked in finance — 500 billion dollars at least has gone into the emerging markets in the past decade. Because investors saw the potential for return at a time of slowing economic growth, and so they created financial products and financial innovation tailored to the emerging markets. How wonderful would it be if we were prepared to replace all of our lofty words with our wallets and invest 500 billion dollars unleashing women's economic potential? Just think of the benefits when it comes to jobs, productivity, employment, child nutrition, maternal mortality, literacy and much, much more. Because, as the World Economic Forum noted, smaller gender gaps are directly correlated with increased economic competitiveness. And not one country in all the world has eliminated its economic participation gap — not one. So the great news is this is an incredible opportunity. We have so much room to grow. So you see, this is not about doing good, this is about global growth and global employment. It is about how we invest and it's about how we see women. And women can no longer be both half the population and a special interest group. (Applause) Oftentimes I get into very interesting discussions with reporters who say to me, "Gayle, these are great stories, but you're really writing about the exceptions." Now that makes me pause for just a couple reasons. First of all, for exceptions, there are a lot of them and they're important. Secondly, when we talk about men who are succeeding, we rightly consider them icons or pioneers or innovators to be emulated. And when we talk about women, they are either exceptions to be dismissed or aberrations to be ignored. And finally, there is no society anywhere in all the world that is not changed except by its most exceptional. So why wouldn't we celebrate and elevate these change makers and job creators rather than overlook them? This topic of resilience is very personal to me and in many ways has shaped my life. My mom was a single mom who worked at the phone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night so that I could have every opportunity possible. We shopped double coupons and layaway and consignment stores, and when she got sick with stage four breast cancer and could no longer work, we even applied for food stamps. And when I would feel sorry for myself as nine or 10 year-old girls do, she would say to me, "My dear, on a scale of major world tragedies, yours is not a three." (Laughter) And when I was applying to business school and felt certain I couldn't do it and nobody I knew had done it, I went to my aunt who survived years of beatings at the hand of her husband and escaped a marriage of abuse with only her dignity intact. And she told me, "Never import other people's limitations." And when I complained to my grandmother, a World War II veteran who worked in film for 50 years and who supported me from the age of 13, that I was terrified that if I turned down a plum assignment at ABC for a fellowship overseas, I would never ever, ever find another job, she said, "Kiddo, I'm going to tell you two things. First of all, no one turns down a Fulbright, and secondly, McDonald's is always hiring." (Laughter) "You will find a job. Take the leap." The women in my family are not exceptions. The women in this room and watching in L.A. and all around the world are not exceptions. We are not a special interest group. We are the majority. And for far too long, we have underestimated ourselves and been undervalued by others. It is time for us to aim higher when it comes to women, to invest more and to deploy our dollars to benefit women all around the world. We can make a difference, and make a difference, not just for women, but for a global economy that desperately needs their contributions. Together we can make certain that the so-called exceptions begin to rule. When we change the way we see ourselves, others will follow. And it is time for all of us to think bigger. Thank you very much. (Applause)

What happens inside those massive warehouses?

{0: 'Mick Mountz is the founder and CEO of Kiva Systems, making high-tech products for fast, cheap and efficient inventory fulfillment. In March 2012, Kiva was acquired by Amazon.'}

TEDxBoston 2011

I want to talk to you about, or share with you, a breakthrough new approach for managing items of inventory inside of a warehouse. We're talking about a pick, pack and ship setting here. So as a hint, this solution involves hundreds of mobile robots, sometimes thousands of mobile robots, moving around a warehouse. And I'll get to the solution. But for a moment, just think about the last time that you ordered something online. You were sitting on your couch and you decided that you absolutely had to have this red t-shirt. So — click! — you put it into your shopping cart. And then you decided that green pair of pants looks pretty good too — click! And maybe a blue pair of shoes — click! So at this point you've assembled your order. You didn't stop to think for a moment that that might not be a great outfit. But you hit "submit order." And two days later, this package shows up on your doorstep. And you open the box and you're like, wow, there's my goo. Did you ever stop to think about how those items of inventory actually found their way inside that box in the warehouse? So I'm here to tell you it's that guy right there. So deep in the middle of that picture, you see a classic pick-pack worker in a distribution or order fulfillments setting. Classically these pick workers will spend 60 or 70 percent of their day wandering around the warehouse. They'll often walk as much as 5 or 10 miles in pursuit of those items of inventory. Not only is this an unproductive way to fill orders, it also turns out to be an unfulfilling way to fill orders. So let me tell you where I first bumped into this problem. I was out in the Bay area in '99, 2000, the dot com boom. I worked for a fabulously spectacular flame-out called Webvan. (Laughter) This company raised hundreds of millions of dollars with the notion that we will deliver grocery orders online. And it really came down to the fact that we couldn't do it cost effectively. Turns out e-commerce was something that was very hard and very costly. In this particular instance we were trying to assemble 30 items of inventory into a few totes, onto a van to deliver to the home. And when you think about it, it was costing us 30 dollars. Imagine, we had an 89¢ can of soup that was costing us one dollar to pick and pack into that tote. And that's before we actually tried to deliver it to the home. So long story short, during my one year at Webvan, what I realized by talking to all the material-handling providers was that there was no solution designed specifically to solve each base picking. Red item, green, blue, getting those three things in a box. So we said, there's just got to be a better way to do this. Existing material handling was set up to pump pallets and cases of goo to retail stores. Of course Webvan went out of business, and about a year and a half later, I was still noodling on this problem. It was still nagging at me. And I started thinking about it again. And I said, let me just focus briefly on what I wanted as a pick worker, or my vision for how it should work. (Laughter) I said, let's focus on the problem. I have an order here and what I want to do is I want to put red, green and blue in this box right here. What I need is a system where I put out my hand and — poof! — the product shows up and I pack it into the order, and now we're thinking, this would be a very operator-centric approach to solving the problem. This is what I need. What technology is available to solve this problem? But as you can see, orders can come and go, products can come and go. It allows us to focus on making the pick worker the center of the problem, and providing them the tools to make them as productive as possible. So how did I arrive at this notion? Well, actually it came from a brainstorming exercise, probably a technique that many of you use, It's this notion of testing your ideas. Take a blank sheet, of course, but then test your ideas at the limits — infinity, zero. In this particular case, we challenged ourselves with the idea: What if we had to build a distribution center in China, where it's a very, very low-cost market? And say, labor is cheap, land is cheap. And we said specifically, "What if it was zero dollars an hour for direct labor and we could build a million- square-foot distribution center?" So naturally that led to ideas that said, "Let's put lots of people in the warehouse." And I said, "Hold on, zero dollars per hour, what I would do is 'hire' 10,000 workers to come to the warehouse every morning at 8 a.m., walk into the warehouse and pick up one item of inventory and then just stand there. So you hold Captain Crunch, you hold the Mountain Dew, you hold the Diet Coke. If I need it, I'll call you, otherwise just stand there. But when I need Diet Coke and I call it, you guys talk amongst yourselves. Diet Coke walks up to the front — pick it, put it in the tote, away it goes." Wow, what if the products could walk and talk on their own? That's a very interesting, very powerful way that we could potentially organize this warehouse. So of course, labor isn't free, on that practical versus awesome spectrum. (Laughter) So we said mobile shelving — We'll put them on mobile shelving. We'll use mobile robots and we'll move the inventory around. And so we got underway on that and then I'm sitting on my couch in 2008. Did any of you see the Beijing Olympics, the opening ceremonies? I about fell out of my couch when I saw this. I'm like, that was the idea! (Laughter and Applause) We'll put thousands of people on the warehouse floor, the stadium floor. But interestingly enough, this actually relates to the idea in that these guys were creating some incredibly powerful, impressive digital art, all without computers, I'm told, it was all peer-to-peer coordination and communication. You stand up, I'll squat down. And they made some fabulous art. It speaks to the power of emergence in systems when you let things start to talk with each other. So that was a little bit of the journey. So of course, now what became the practical reality of this idea? Here is a warehouse. It's a pick, pack and ship center that has about 10,000 different SKUs. We'll call them red pens, green pens, yellow Post-It Notes. We send the little orange robots out to pick up the blue shelving pods. And we deliver them to the side of the building. So all the pick workers now get to stay on the perimeter. And the game here is to pick up the shelves, take them down the highway and deliver them straight to the pick worker. This pick worker's life is completely different. Rather than wandering around the warehouse, she gets to stay still in a pick station like this and every product in the building can now come to her. So the process is very productive. Reach in, pick an item, scan the bar code, pack it out. By the time you turn around, there's another product there ready to be picked and packed. So what we've done is take out all of the non-value added walking, searching, wasting, waited time, and we've developed a very high-fidelity way to pick these orders, where you point at it with a laser, scan the UPC barcode, and then indicate with a light which box it needs to go into. So more productive, more accurate and, it turns out, it's a more interesting office environment for these pick workers. They actually complete the whole order. So they do red, green and blue, not just a part of the order. And they feel a little bit more in control of their environment. So the side effects of this approach are what really surprised us. We knew it was going to be more productive. But we didn't realize just how pervasive this way of thinking extended to other functions in the warehouse. But what effectively this approach is doing inside of the DC is turning it into a massively parallel processing engine. So this is again a cross-fertilization of ideas. Here's a warehouse and we're thinking about parallel processing supercomputer architectures. The notion here is that you have 10 workers on the right side of the screen that are now all independent autonomous pick workers. If the worker in station three decides to leave and go to the bathroom, it has no impact on the productivity of the other nine workers. Contrast that, for a moment, with the traditional method of using a conveyor. When one person passes the order to you, you put something in and pass it downstream. Everyone has to be in place for that serial process to work. This becomes a more robust way to think about the warehouse. And then underneath the hoods gets interesting in that we're tracking the popularity of the products. And we're using dynamic and adaptive algorithms to tune the floor of the warehouse. So what you see here potentially the week leading up to Valentine's Day. All that pink chalky candy has moved to the front of the building and is now being picked into a lot of orders in those pick stations. Come in two days after Valentine's Day, and that candy, the leftover candy, has all drifted to the back of the warehouse and is occupying the cooler zone on the thermal map there. One other side effect of this approach using the parallel processing is these things can scale to ginormous. (Laughter) So whether you're doing two pick stations, 20 pick stations, or 200 pick stations, the path planning algorithms and all of the inventory algorithms just work. In this example you see that the inventory has now occupied all the perimeter of the building because that's where the pick stations were. They sorted it out for themselves. So I'll conclude with just one final video that shows how this comes to bear on the pick worker's actual day in the life of. So as we mentioned, the process is to move inventory along the highway and then find your way into these pick stations. And our software in the background understands what's going on in each station, we direct the pods across the highway and we're attempting to get into a queuing system to present the work to the pick worker. What's interesting is we can even adapt the speed of the pick workers. The faster pickers get more pods and the slower pickers get few. But this pick worker now is literally having that experience that we described before. She puts out her hand. The product jumps into it. Or she has to reach in and get it. She scans it and she puts it in the bucket. And all of the rest of the technology is kind of behind the scenes. So she gets to now focus on the picking and packing portion of her job. Never has any idle time, never has to leave her mat. And actually we think not only a more productive and more accurate way to fill orders. We think it's a more fulfilling way to fill orders. The reason we can say that, though, is that workers in a lot of these buildings now compete for the privilege of working in the Kiva zone that day. And sometimes we'll catch them on testimonial videos saying such things as, they have more energy after the day to play with their grandchildren, or in one case a guy said, "the Kiva zone is so stress-free that I've actually stopped taking my blood pressure medication." (Laughter) That was at a pharmaceutical distributor, so they told us not to use that video. (Laughter) So what I wanted to leave you with today is the notion that when you let things start to think and walk and talk on their own, interesting processes and productivities can emerge. And now I think next time you go to your front step and pick up that box that you just ordered online, you break it open and the goo is in there, you'll have some wonderment as to whether a robot assisted in the picking and packing of that order. Thank you. (Applause)

Why I chose a gun

{0: 'General Peter van Uhm is the Chief of the Netherlands Defence staff.'}

TEDxAmsterdam

As the highest military commander of the Netherlands, with troops stationed around the world, I'm really honored to be here today. When I look around this TEDxAmsterdam venue, I see a very special audience. You are the reason why I said yes to the invitation to come here today. When I look around, I see people who want to make a contribution. I see people who want to make a better world, by doing groundbreaking scientific work, by creating impressive works of art, by writing critical articles or inspiring books, by starting up sustainable businesses. And you all have chosen your own instruments to fulfill this mission of creating a better world. Some chose the microscope as their instrument. Others chose dancing or painting, or making music like we just heard. Some chose the pen. Others work through the instrument of money. Ladies and gentlemen, I made a different choice. Thanks. Ladies and gentlemen ... (Laughter) (Applause) I share your goals. I share the goals of the speakers you heard before. I did not choose to take up the pen, the brush, the camera. I chose this instrument. I chose the gun. For you, and you heard already, being so close to this gun may make you feel uneasy. It may even feel scary. A real gun at a few feet's distance. Let us stop for a moment and feel this uneasiness. You could even hear it. Let us cherish the fact that probably most of you have never been close to a gun. It means the Netherlands is a peaceful country. The Netherlands is not at war. It means soldiers are not needed to patrol our streets. Guns are not a part of our lives. In many countries, it is a different story. In many countries, people are confronted with guns. They are oppressed. They are intimidated — by warlords, by terrorists, by criminals. Weapons can do a lot of harm. They are the cause of much distress. Why then am I standing before you with this weapon? Why did I choose the gun as my instrument? Today I want to tell you why. Today I want to tell you why I chose the gun to create a better world. And I want to tell you how this gun can help. My story starts in the city of Nijmegen in the east of the Netherlands, the city where I was born. My father was a hardworking baker, but when he had finished work in the bakery, he often told me and my brother stories. And most of the time, he told me this story I'm going to share with you now. The story of what happened when he was a conscripted soldier in the Dutch armed forces at the beginning of the Second World War. The Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Their grim plans were evident. They meant to rule by means of repression. Diplomacy had failed to stop the Germans. Only brute force remained. It was our last resort. My father was there to provide it. As the son of a farmer who knew how to hunt, my father was an excellent marksman. When he aimed, he never missed. At this decisive moment in Dutch history my father was positioned on the bank of the river Waal near the city of Nijmegen. He had a clear shot at the German soldiers who came to occupy a free country, his country, our country. He fired. Nothing happened. He fired again. No German soldier fell to the ground. My father had been given an old gun that could not even reach the opposite riverbank. Hitler's troops marched on, and there was nothing my father could do about it. Until the day my father died, he was frustrated about missing these shots. He could have done something. But with an old gun, not even the best marksman in the armed forces could have hit the mark. So this story stayed with me. Then in high school, I was gripped by the stories of the Allied soldiers — soldiers who left the safety of their own homes and risked their lives to liberate a country and a people that they didn't know. They liberated my birth town. It was then that I decided I would take up the gun — out of respect and gratitude for those men and women who came to liberate us. From the awareness that sometimes only the gun can stand between good and evil. And that is why I took up the gun — not to shoot, not to kill, not to destroy, but to stop those who would do evil, to protect the vulnerable, to defend democratic values, to stand up for the freedom we have to talk here today in Amsterdam about how we can make the world a better place. Ladies and gentlemen, I do not stand here today to tell you about the glory of weapons. I do not like guns. And once you have been under fire yourself, it brings home even more clearly that a gun is not some macho instrument to brag about. I stand here today to tell you about the use of the gun as an instrument of peace and stability. The gun may be one of the most important instruments of peace and stability that we have in this world. Now this may sound contradictory to you. But not only have I seen with my own eyes during my deployments in Lebanon, Sarajevo and as the Netherlands' Chief of Defence, this is also supported by cold, hard statistics. Violence has declined dramatically over the last 500 years. Despite the pictures we are shown daily in the news, wars between developed countries are no longer commonplace. The murder rate in Europe has dropped by a factor of 30 since the Middle Ages. And occurrences of civil war and repression have declined since the end of the Cold War. Statistics show that we are living in a relatively peaceful era. Why? Why has violence decreased? Has the human mind changed? Well, we were talking about the human mind this morning. Did we simply lose our beastly impulses for revenge, for violent rituals, for pure rage? Or is there something else? In his latest book, Harvard professor Steven Pinker — and many other thinkers before him — concludes that one of the main drivers behind less violent societies is the spread of the constitutional state and the introduction, on a large scale, of the state monopoly on the legitimized use of violence — legitimized by a democratically elected government, legitimized by checks and balances and an independent judicial system. In other words, a state monopoly that has the use of violence well under control. Such a state monopoly on violence, first of all, serves as a reassurance. It removes the incentive for an arms race between potentially hostile groups in our societies. Secondly, the presence of penalties that outweigh the benefits of using violence tips the balance even further. Abstaining from violence becomes more profitable than starting a war. Now nonviolence starts to work like a flywheel. It enhances peace even further. Where there is no conflict, trade flourishes. And trade is another important incentive against violence. With trade, there's mutual interdependency and mutual gain between parties. And when there is mutual gain, both sides stand to lose more than they would gain if they started a war. War is simply no longer the best option, and that is why violence has decreased. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the rationale behind the existence of my armed forces. The armed forces implement the state monopoly on violence. We do this in a legitimized way only after our democracy has asked us to do so. It is this legitimate, controlled use of the gun that has contributed greatly to reducing the statistics of war, conflict and violence around the globe. It is this participation in peacekeeping missions that has led to the resolution of many civil wars. My soldiers use the gun as an instrument of peace. And this is exactly why failed states are so dangerous. Failed states have no legitimized, democratically controlled use of force. Failed states do not know of the gun as an instrument of peace and stability. That is why failed states can drag down a whole region into chaos and conflict. That is why spreading the concept of the constitutional state is such an important aspect of our foreign missions. That is why we are trying to build a judicial system right now in Afghanistan. That is why we train police officers, we train judges, we train public prosecutors around the world. And that is why — and in the Netherlands, we are very unique in that — that is why the Dutch constitution states that one of the main tasks of the armed forces is to uphold and promote the international rule of law. Ladies and gentlemen, looking at this gun, we are confronted with the ugly side of the human mind. Every day I hope that politicians, diplomats, development workers can turn conflict into peace and threat into hope. And I hope that one day armies can be disbanded and humans will find a way of living together without violence and oppression. But until that day comes, we will have to make ideals and human failure meet somewhere in the middle. Until that day comes, I stand for my father who tried to shoot the Nazis with an old gun. I stand for my men and women who are prepared to risk their lives for a less violent world for all of us. I stand for this soldier who suffered partial hearing loss and sustained permanent injuries to her leg, when she was hit by a rocket on a mission in Afghanistan. Ladies and gentlemen, until the day comes when we can do away with the gun, I hope we all agree that peace and stability do not come free of charge. It takes hard work, often behind the scenes. It takes good equipment and well-trained, dedicated soldiers. I hope you will support the efforts of our armed forces to train soldiers like this young captain and provide her with a good gun, instead of the bad gun my father was given. I hope you will support our soldiers when they are out there, when they come home and when they are injured and need our care. They put their lives on the line, for us, for you, and we cannot let them down. I hope you will respect my soldiers, this soldier with this gun. Because she wants a better world. Because she makes an active contribution to a better world, just like all of us here today. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Treating cancer with electric fields

{0: 'With his company Novocure, Bill Doyle works to bring breakthrough medical technologies to doctors and patients. '}

TEDMED 2011

Everybody in our society's life is touched by cancer — if not personally, then through a loved one, a family member, colleague, friend. And once our lives are touched by cancer, we quickly learn that there are basically three weapons, or three tools, that are available to fight the disease: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. And once we get involved in the therapeutic decisions, again either personally or with our loved ones and family members, we also very quickly learn the benefits, the trade-offs and the limitations of these tools. I'm very thankful to Jay and to Mark and the TEDMED team for inviting me today to describe a fourth tool, a new tool, that we call Tumor Treating Fields. Tumor Treating Fields were invented by Dr. Yoram Palti, professor emeritus at the Technion in Israel. And they use low-intensity electric fields to fight cancer. To understand how Tumor Treating Fields work, we first need to understand what are electric fields. Let me first address a few popular misconceptions. First of all, electric fields are not an electric current that is coursing through the tissue. Electric fields are not ionizing radiation, like X-rays or proton beams, that bombard tissue to disrupt DNA. And electric fields are not magnetism. What electric fields are are a field of forces. And these forces act on, attract, bodies that have an electrical charge. The best way to visualize an electric field is to think of gravity. Gravity is also a field of forces that act on masses. We can all picture astronauts in space. They float freely in three dimensions without any forces acting on them. But as that space shuttle returns to Earth, and as the astronauts enter the Earth's gravitational field, they begin to see the effects of gravity. They begin to be attracted towards Earth. And as they land, they're fully aligned in the gravitational field. We're, of course, all stuck in the Earth's gravitational field right now. That's why you're all in your chairs. And that's why we have to use our muscle energy to stand up, to walk around and to lift things. In cancer, cells rapidly divide and lead to uncontrolled tumor growth. We can think of a cell from an electrical perspective as if it's a mini space station. And in that space station we have the genetic material, the chromosomes, within a nucleus. And out in the cytoplasmic soup we have special proteins that are required for cell division that float freely in this soup in three dimensions. Importantly, those special proteins are among the most highly charged objects in our body. As cell division begins the nucleus disintegrates, the chromosomes line up in the middle of the cell and those special proteins undergo a three-dimensional sequence whereby they attach and they literally click into place end-on-end to form chains. These chains then progress and attach to the genetic material and pull the genetic material from one cell into two cells. And this is exactly how one cancer cell becomes two cancer cells, two cancer cells become four cancer cells, and we have ultimately uncontrolled tumor growth. Tumor Treating Fields use externally placed transducers attached to a field generator to create an artificial electric field on that space station. And when that cellular space station is within the electric field, it acts on those highly charged proteins and aligns them. And it prevents them from forming those chains, those mitotic spindles, that are necessary to pull the genetic material into the daughter cells. What we see is that the cells will attempt to divide for several hours. And they will either enter into this so-called cellular suicide, programmed cell death, or they will form unhealthy daughter cells and enter into apoptosis once they have divided. And we can observe this. What I'm going to show you next are two in vitro experiments. This is cultures, identical cultures, of cervical cancer cells. And we've stained these cultures with a green florescent dye so that we can look at these proteins that form these chains. The first clip shows a normal cell division without the Tumor Treating Fields. What we see are, first of all, a very active culture, a lot of divisions, and then very clear nuclei once the cells have separated. And we can see them dividing throughout. When we apply the fields — again, in the identical time-scale to the identical culture — you're going to see something different. The cells round up for division, but they're very static in that position. We'll see two cells in the upper part of the screen attempting to divide. The one within the circle manages. But see how much of the protein is still throughout the nucleus, even in the dividing cell. The one up there can't divide at all. And then this bubbling, this membrane bubbling, is the hallmark of apoptosis in this cell. Formation of healthy mitotic spindles is necessary for division in all cell types. We've applied Tumor Treating Fields to over 20 different cancers in the lab, and we see this effect in all of them. Now importantly, these Tumor Treating Fields have no effect on normal undividing cells. 10 years ago, Dr. Palti founded a company called Novocure to develop his discovery into a practical therapy for patients. In that time, Novocure's developed two systems — one system for cancers in the head and another system for cancers in the trunk of the body. The first cancer that we have focused on is the deadly brain cancer, GBM. GBM affects about 10,000 people in the U.S. each year. It's a death sentence. The expected five year survival is less than five percent. And the typical patient with optimal therapy survives just a little over a year, and only about seven months from the time that the cancer is first treated and then comes back and starts growing again. Novocure conducted its first phase three randomized trial in patients with recurrent GBM. So these are patients who had received surgery, high dose radiation to the head and first-line chemotherapy, and that had failed and their tumors had grown back. We divided the patients into two groups. The first group received second-line chemotherapy, which is expected to double the life expectancy, versus no treatment at all. And then the second group received only Tumor Treating Field therapy. What we saw in that trial is that that the life expectancies of both groups — so the chemotherapy treated group and the Tumor Treating Field group — was the same. But importantly, the Tumor Treating Field group suffered none of the side effects typical of chemotherapy patients. They had no pain, suffered none of the infections. They had no nausea, diarrhea, constipation, fatigue that would be expected. Based on this trial, in April of this year, the FDA approved Tumor Treating Fields for the treatment of patients with recurrent GBM. Importantly, it was the first time ever that the FDA included in their approval of an oncology treatment a quality of life claim. So I'm going to show you now one of the patients from this trial. Robert Dill-Bundi is a famous Swiss cycling champion. He won the gold medal in Moscow in the 4,000 meter pursuit. And five years ago, Robert was diagnosed with GBM. He received the standard treatments. He received surgery. He received high dose radiation to the head. And he received first-line chemotherapy. A year after this treatment — in fact, this is his baseline MRI. You can see that the black regions in the upper right quadrant are the areas where he had surgery. And a year after that treatment, his tumor grew back with a vengeance. That cloudy white mass that you see is the recurrence of the tumor. At this point, he was told by his doctors that he had about 3 months to live. He entered our trial. And here we can see him getting the therapy. First of all, these electrodes are noninvasive. They're attached to the skin in the area of the tumor. Here you can see that a technician is placing them on there much like bandages. The patients learn to do this themselves And then the patients can undergo all the activities of their daily life. There's none of the tiredness. There's none of what is called the "chemo head." There's no sensation. It doesn't interfere with computers or electrical equipment. And the therapy is delivered continuously at home, without having to go into the hospital either periodically or continually. These are Robert's MRIs, again, under only TTField treatment. This is a therapy that takes time to work. It's a medical device; it works when it's on. But what we can see is, by month six, the tumor has responded and it's begun to melt away. It's still there. By month 12, we could argue whether there's a little bit of material around the edges, but it's essentially completely gone. It's now five years since Robert's diagnosis, and he's alive, but importantly, he's healthy and he's at work. I'm going to let him, in this very short clip, describe his impressions of the therapy in his own words. (Video) Robert Dill-Bundi: My quality of life, I rate what I have today a bit different than what most people would assume. I am the happiest, the happiest person in the world. And every single morning I appreciate life. Every night I fall asleep very well, and I am, I repeat, the happiest man in the world, and I'm thankful I am alive. BD: Novocure's also working on lung cancer as the second target. We've run a phase two trial in Switzerland on, again, recurrent patients — patients who have received standard therapy and whose cancer has come back. I'm going to show you another clip of a woman named Lydia. Lydia's a 66 year-old farmer in Switzerland. She was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago. She underwent four different regimes of chemotherapy over two years, none of which had an effect. Her cancer continued to grow. Three years ago, she entered the Novocure lung cancer trial. You can see, in her case, she's wearing her transducer arrays, one of the front of her chest, one on the back, and then the second pair side-to-side over the liver. You can see the Tumor Treating Field field generator, but importantly you can also see that she is living her life. She is managing her farm. She's interacting with her kids and her grand kids. And when we talked to her, she said that when she was undergoing chemotherapy, she had to go to the hospital every month for her infusions. Her whole family suffered as her side effect profile came and went. Now she can run all of the activities of her farm. It's only the beginning. (Applause) In the lab, we've observed tremendous synergies between chemotherapy and Tumor Treating Fields. There's research underway now at Harvard Medical School to pick the optimum pairs to maximize that benefit. We also believe that Tumor Treating Fields will work with radiation and interrupt the self-repair mechanisms that we have. There's now a new research project underway at the Karolinska in Sweden to prove that hypothesis. We have more trials planned for lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer and breast cancer. And I firmly believe that in the next 10 years Tumor Treating Fields will be a weapon available to doctors and patients for all of these most-difficult-to-treat solid tumors. I'm also very hopeful that in the next decades, we will make big strides on reducing that death rate that has been so challenging in this disease. Thank you. (Applause)

The happy secret to better work

{0: 'Shawn Achor is the CEO of Good Think Inc., where he researches and teaches about positive psychology.'}

TEDxBloomington

When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. I was two years older than my sister at the time — I mean, I'm two years older than her now — but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. So we were up on top of our bunk beds. And on one side of the bunk bed, I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry. And on the other side were all my sister's My Little Ponies ready for a cavalry charge. There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story — (Laughter) which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side. Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground. I was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I played as safely and as quietly as possible. And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before — (Laughter) (Laughter ends) heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet, (Laughter) for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could — she didn't even see it coming — I was trying hard to be on my best behavior. And I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled. So I did the only thing my frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. And if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times. I said, "Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that. Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn." (Laughter) Now, that was cheating, because there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. Of course, this option was open to her brain at no point in the past. And you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. And the latter won. Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn — (Laughter) with one broken leg. What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven — we had no idea at the time — was was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. We had stumbled across something called positive psychology, which is the reason I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning. When I started talking about this research outside of academia, with companies and schools, the first thing they said to never do is to start with a graph. The first thing I want to do is start with a graph. This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. What we found is — (Laughter) If I got this data studying you, I would be thrilled, because there's a trend there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room — I know who you are, I saw you earlier — that's no problem. That's no problem, as most of you know, because I can just delete that dot. I can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. And we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data. (Laughter) So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? Which is fantastic if I'm trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking — two. But if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we're creating the cult of the average with science. If I asked a question like, "How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?" scientists change the answer to "How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?" and we tailor the class towards the average. If you fall below the average, then psychologists get thrilled, because that means you're depressed or have a disorder, or hopefully both. We're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have ten, so you keep coming back. We'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually we want to make you normal again. But normal is merely average. And positive psychology posits that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. Then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say, why? Why are some of you high above the curve in terms of intellectual, athletic, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, resiliency in the face of challenge, sense of humor? Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you. Because maybe we can glean information, not just how to move people up to the average, but move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide. The reason this graph is important to me is, on the news, the majority of the information is not positive. in fact it's negative. Most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. And very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. This creates "the medical school syndrome." During the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases, suddenly you realize you have all of them. (Laughter) I have a brother in-law named Bobo, which is a whole other story. Bobo married Amy the unicorn. Bobo called me on the phone — (Laughter) from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, "Shawn, I have leprosy." (Laughter) Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause. (Laughter) We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time. I applied to Harvard on a dare. I didn't expect to get in, and my family had no money for college. When I got a military scholarship two weeks later, they let me go. Something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality. I assumed everyone there would see it as a privilege as well, that they'd be excited to be there. Even in a classroom full of people smarter than you, I felt you'd be happy just to be in that classroom. But what I found is, while some people experience that, when I graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students — Harvard asked me to; I wasn't that guy. (Laughter) I was an officer to counsel students through the difficult four years. And in my research and my teaching, I found that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or physics, but on the competition, the workload, the hassles, stresses, complaints. When I first went in there, I walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from Waco, Texas, which is where I grew up — I know some of you know this. When they'd visit, they'd look around, and say, "This dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart's." It does, because that was Hogwart's and that's Harvard. And when they see this, they say, "Why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard? What does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?" Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we can then affect reality. What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat. I talked to a New England boarding school, probably the most prestigious one, and they said, "We already know that. So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we have a wellness week. And we're so excited. Monday night we have the world's leading expert will speak about adolescent depression. Tuesday night it's school violence and bullying. Wednesday night is eating disorders. Thursday night is illicit drug use. And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness." (Laughter) I said, "That's most people's Friday nights." (Laughter) (Applause) Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. Silence on the phone. And into the silence, I said, "I'd be happy to speak at your school, but that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. You've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive." The absence of disease is not health. Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And I found that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior. And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier. But our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You're 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way. We've found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. We've done these things in research now in every company that I've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first. Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network. And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The universal anesthesia machine

{0: 'At Gradian Health Systems, Erica Frenkel works to bring safe anesthesia to hospitals all over the world.'}

TEDxMidAtlantic

I'm going to talk to you today about the design of medical technology for low-resource settings. I study health systems in these countries. And one of the major gaps in care, almost across the board, is access to safe surgery. Now one of the major bottlenecks that we've found that's sort of preventing both the access in the first place, and the safety of those surgeries that do happen, is anesthesia. And actually, it's the model that we expect to work for delivering anesthesia in these environments. Here, we have a scene that you would find in any operating room across the US, or any other developed country. In the background there is a very sophisticated anesthesia machine. And this machine is able to enable surgery and save lives because it was designed with this environment in mind. In order to operate, this machine needs a number of things that this hospital has to offer. It needs an extremely well-trained anesthesiologist with years of training with complex machines to help her monitor the flows of the gas and keep her patients safe and anesthetized throughout the surgery. It's a delicate machine running on computer algorithms, and it needs special care, TLC, to keep it up and running, and it's going to break pretty easily. And when it does, it needs a team of biomedical engineers who understand its complexities, can fix it, can source the parts and keep it saving lives. It's a pretty expensive machine. It needs a hospital whose budget can allow it to support one machine costing upwards of 50 or $100,000. And perhaps most obviously, but also most importantly — and the path to concepts that we've heard about kind of illustrates this — it needs infrastructure that can supply an uninterrupted source of electricity, of compressed oxygen, and other medical supplies that are so critical to the functioning of this machine. In other words, this machine requires a lot of stuff that this hospital cannot offer. This is the electrical supply for a hospital in rural Malawi. In this hospital, there is one person qualified to deliver anesthesia, and she's qualified because she has 12, maybe 18 months of training in anesthesia. In the hospital and in the entire region there's not a single biomedical engineer. So when this machine breaks, the machines that they have to work with break, they've got to try and figure it out, but most of the time, that's the end of the road. Those machines go the proverbial junkyard. And the price tag of the machine that I mentioned could represent maybe a quarter or a third of the annual operating budget for this hospital. And finally, I think you can see that infrastructure is not very strong. This hospital is connected to a very weak power grid, one that goes down frequently. So it runs frequently, the entire hospital, just on a generator. And you can imagine, the generator breaks down or runs out of fuel. And the World Bank sees this and estimates that a hospital in this setting in a low-income country can expect up to 18 power outages per month. Similarly, compressed oxygen and other medical supplies are really a luxury, and can often be out of stock for months or even a year. So it seems crazy, but the model that we have right now is taking those machines that were designed for that first environment that I showed you and donating or selling them to hospitals in this environment. It's not just inappropriate, it becomes really unsafe. One of our partners at Johns Hopkins was observing surgeries in Sierra Leone about a year ago. And the first surgery of the day happened to be an obstetrical case. A woman came in, she needed an emergency C-section to save her life and the life of her baby. And everything began pretty auspiciously. The surgeon was on call and scrubbed in. The nurse was there. She was able to anesthetize her quickly, and it was important because of the emergency nature of the situation. And everything began well until the power went out. And now in the middle of this surgery, the surgeon is racing against the clock to finish his case, which he can do — he's got a headlamp. But the nurse is literally running around a darkened operating theater trying to find anything she can use to anesthetize her patient, to keep her patient asleep. Because her machine doesn't work when there's no power. This routine surgery that many of you have probably experienced, and others are probably the product of, has now become a tragedy. And what's so frustrating is this is not a singular event; this happens across the developing world. 35 million surgeries are attempted every year without safe anesthesia. My colleague, Dr. Paul Fenton, was living this reality. He was the chief of anesthesiology in a hospital in Malawi, a teaching hospital. He went to work every day in an operating theater like this one, trying to deliver anesthesia and teach others how to do so using that same equipment that became so unreliable, and frankly unsafe, in his hospital. And after umpteen surgeries and, you can imagine, really unspeakable tragedy, he just said, "That's it. I'm done. That's enough. There has to be something better." He took a walk down the hall to where they threw all those machines that had just crapped out on them, I think that's the scientific term, and he started tinkering. He took one part from here and another from there, and he tried to come up with a machine that would work in the reality that he was facing. And what he came up with: was this guy. The prototype for the Universal Anesthesia Machine — a machine that would work and anesthetize his patients no matter the circumstances that his hospital had to offer. Here it is, back at home at that same hospital, developed a little further, 12 years later, working on patients from pediatrics to geriatrics. Let me show you a little bit about how this machine works. Voila! Here she is. When you have electricity, everything in this machine begins in the base. There's a built-in oxygen concentrator down there. Now you've heard me mention oxygen a few times at this point. Essentially, to deliver anesthesia, you want as pure oxygen as possible, because eventually you're going to dilute it, essentially, with the gas. And the mixture that the patient inhales needs to be at least a certain percentage oxygen or else it can become dangerous. But so in here when there's electricity, the oxygen concentrator takes in room air. Now we know room air is gloriously free, it is abundant, and it's already 21 percent oxygen. So all this concentrator does is take that room air in, filter it and send 95 percent pure oxygen up and across here, where it mixes with the anesthetic agent. Now before that mixture hits the patient's lungs, it's going to pass by here — you can't see it, but there's an oxygen sensor here — that's going to read out on this screen the percentage of oxygen being delivered. Now if you don't have power, or, God forbid, the power cuts out in the middle of a surgery, this machine transitions automatically, without even having to touch it, to drawing in room air from this inlet. Everything else is the same. The only difference is that now you're only working with 21 percent oxygen. Now that used to be a dangerous guessing game, because you only knew if you gave too little oxygen once something bad happened. But we've put a long-life battery backup on here. This is the only part that's battery backed up. But this gives control to the provider, whether there's power or not, because they can adjust the flows based on the percentage of oxygen they see that they're giving the patient. In both cases, whether you have power or not, sometimes the patient needs help breathing. It's just a reality of anesthesia, the lungs can be paralyzed. And so we've just added this manual bellows. We've seen surgeries for three or four hours to ventilate the patient on this. So it's a straightforward machine. I shudder to say simple; it's straightforward. And it's by design. You do not need to be a highly trained, specialized anesthesiologist to use this machine, which is good because, in these rural district hospitals, you're not going to get that level of training. It's also designed for the environment that it will be used in. This is an incredibly rugged machine. It has to stand up to the heat and the wear and tear that happens in hospitals in these rural districts. And so it's not going to break very easily, but if it does, virtually every piece in this machine can be swapped out and replaced with a hex wrench and a screwdriver. And finally, it's affordable. This machine comes in at an eighth of the cost of the conventional machine that I showed you earlier. So in other words, what we have here is a machine that can enable surgery and save lives, because it was designed for its environment, just like the first machine I showed you. But we're not content to stop there. Is it working? Is this the design that's going to work in place? Well, we've seen good results so far. This is in 13 hospitals in four countries, and since 2010, we've done well over 2,000 surgeries with no clinically adverse events. So we're thrilled. This really seems like a cost-effective, scalable solution to a problem that's really pervasive. But we still want to be sure that this is the most effective and safe device that we can be putting into hospitals. So to do that, we've launched a number of partnerships with NGOs and universities, to gather data on the user interface, on the types of surgeries it's appropriate for, and ways we can enhance the device itself. One of those partnerships is with Johns Hopkins just here in Baltimore. They have a really cool anesthesia simulation lab out in Baltimore. So we're taking this machine and recreating some of the operating theater crises that this machine might face in one of the hospitals that it's intended for, and in a contained, safe environment, evaluating its effectiveness. We're then able to compare the results from that study with real-world experience, because we're putting two of these in hospitals that Johns Hopkins works with in Sierra Leone, including the hospital where that emergency C-section happened. So I've talked a lot about anesthesia, and I tend to do that. I think it is incredibly fascinating and an important component of health. And it really seems peripheral, we never think about it, until we don't have access to it, and then it becomes a gatekeeper. Who gets surgery and who doesn't? Who gets safe surgery and who doesn't? But you know, it's just one of so many ways that design, appropriate design, can have an impact on health outcomes. If more people in the health-delivery space really working on some of these challenges in low-income countries could start their design process, their solution search, from outside of that proverbial box and inside of the hospital — In other words, if we could design for the environment that exists in so many parts of the world, rather than the one that we wished existed — we might just save a lot of lives. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Back to the future (of 1994)

{0: 'Inventor, scientist, author, engineer -- over his broad career, Danny Hillis has turned his ever-searching brain on an array of subjects, with surprising results.'}

TED1994

Because I usually take the role of trying to explain to people how wonderful the new technologies that are coming along are going to be, and I thought that, since I was among friends here, I would tell you what I really think and try to look back and try to understand what is really going on here with these amazing jumps in technology that seem so fast that we can barely keep on top of it. So I'm going to start out by showing just one very boring technology slide. And then, so if you can just turn on the slide that's on. This is just a random slide that I picked out of my file. What I want to show you is not so much the details of the slide, but the general form of it. This happens to be a slide of some analysis that we were doing about the power of RISC microprocessors versus the power of local area networks. And the interesting thing about it is that this slide, like so many technology slides that we're used to, is a sort of a straight line on a semi-log curve. In other words, every step here represents an order of magnitude in performance scale. And this is a new thing that we talk about technology on semi-log curves. Something really weird is going on here. And that's basically what I'm going to be talking about. So, if you could bring up the lights. If you could bring up the lights higher, because I'm just going to use a piece of paper here. Now why do we draw technology curves in semi-log curves? Well the answer is, if I drew it on a normal curve where, let's say, this is years, this is time of some sort, and this is whatever measure of the technology that I'm trying to graph, the graphs look sort of silly. They sort of go like this. And they don't tell us much. Now if I graph, for instance, some other technology, say transportation technology, on a semi-log curve, it would look very stupid, it would look like a flat line. But when something like this happens, things are qualitatively changing. So if transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology, then the day after tomorrow, I would be able to get in a taxi cab and be in Tokyo in 30 seconds. It's not moving like that. And there's nothing precedented in the history of technology development of this kind of self-feeding growth where you go by orders of magnitude every few years. Now the question that I'd like to ask is, if you look at these exponential curves, they don't go on forever. Things just can't possibly keep changing as fast as they are. One of two things is going to happen. Either it's going to turn into a sort of classical S-curve like this, until something totally different comes along, or maybe it's going to do this. That's about all it can do. Now I'm an optimist, so I sort of think it's probably going to do something like that. If so, that means that what we're in the middle of right now is a transition. We're sort of on this line in a transition from the way the world used to be to some new way that the world is. And so what I'm trying to ask, what I've been asking myself, is what's this new way that the world is? What's that new state that the world is heading toward? Because the transition seems very, very confusing when we're right in the middle of it. Now when I was a kid growing up, the future was kind of the year 2000, and people used to talk about what would happen in the year 2000. Now here's a conference in which people talk about the future, and you notice that the future is still at about the year 2000. It's about as far as we go out. So in other words, the future has kind of been shrinking one year per year for my whole lifetime. Now I think that the reason is because we all feel that something's happening there. That transition is happening. We can all sense it. And we know that it just doesn't make too much sense to think out 30, 50 years because everything's going to be so different that a simple extrapolation of what we're doing just doesn't make any sense at all. So what I would like to talk about is what that could be, what that transition could be that we're going through. Now in order to do that I'm going to have to talk about a bunch of stuff that really has nothing to do with technology and computers. Because I think the only way to understand this is to really step back and take a long time scale look at things. So the time scale that I would like to look at this on is the time scale of life on Earth. So I think this picture makes sense if you look at it a few billion years at a time. So if you go back about two and a half billion years, the Earth was this big, sterile hunk of rock with a lot of chemicals floating around on it. And if you look at the way that the chemicals got organized, we begin to get a pretty good idea of how they do it. And I think that there's theories that are beginning to understand about how it started with RNA, but I'm going to tell a sort of simple story of it, which is that, at that time, there were little drops of oil floating around with all kinds of different recipes of chemicals in them. And some of those drops of oil had a particular combination of chemicals in them which caused them to incorporate chemicals from the outside and grow the drops of oil. And those that were like that started to split and divide. And those were the most primitive forms of cells in a sense, those little drops of oil. But now those drops of oil weren't really alive, as we say it now, because every one of them was a little random recipe of chemicals. And every time it divided, they got sort of unequal division of the chemicals within them. And so every drop was a little bit different. In fact, the drops that were different in a way that caused them to be better at incorporating chemicals around them, grew more and incorporated more chemicals and divided more. So those tended to live longer, get expressed more. Now that's sort of just a very simple chemical form of life, but when things got interesting was when these drops learned a trick about abstraction. Somehow by ways that we don't quite understand, these little drops learned to write down information. They learned to record the information that was the recipe of the cell onto a particular kind of chemical called DNA. So in other words, they worked out, in this mindless sort of evolutionary way, a form of writing that let them write down what they were, so that that way of writing it down could get copied. The amazing thing is that that way of writing seems to have stayed steady since it evolved two and a half billion years ago. In fact the recipe for us, our genes, is exactly that same code and that same way of writing. In fact, every living creature is written in exactly the same set of letters and the same code. In fact, one of the things that I did just for amusement purposes is we can now write things in this code. And I've got here a little 100 micrograms of white powder, which I try not to let the security people see at airports. (Laughter) But this has in it — what I did is I took this code — the code has standard letters that we use for symbolizing it — and I wrote my business card onto a piece of DNA and amplified it 10 to the 22 times. So if anyone would like a hundred million copies of my business card, I have plenty for everyone in the room, and, in fact, everyone in the world, and it's right here. (Laughter) If I had really been a egotist, I would have put it into a virus and released it in the room. (Laughter) So what was the next step? Writing down the DNA was an interesting step. And that caused these cells — that kept them happy for another billion years. But then there was another really interesting step where things became completely different, which is these cells started exchanging and communicating information, so that they began to get communities of cells. I don't know if you know this, but bacteria can actually exchange DNA. Now that's why, for instance, antibiotic resistance has evolved. Some bacteria figured out how to stay away from penicillin, and it went around sort of creating its little DNA information with other bacteria, and now we have a lot of bacteria that are resistant to penicillin, because bacteria communicate. Now what this communication allowed was communities to form that, in some sense, were in the same boat together; they were synergistic. So they survived or they failed together, which means that if a community was very successful, all the individuals in that community were repeated more and they were favored by evolution. Now the transition point happened when these communities got so close that, in fact, they got together and decided to write down the whole recipe for the community together on one string of DNA. And so the next stage that's interesting in life took about another billion years. And at that stage, we have multi-cellular communities, communities of lots of different types of cells, working together as a single organism. And in fact, we're such a multi-cellular community. We have lots of cells that are not out for themselves anymore. Your skin cell is really useless without a heart cell, muscle cell, a brain cell and so on. So these communities began to evolve so that the interesting level on which evolution was taking place was no longer a cell, but a community which we call an organism. Now the next step that happened is within these communities. These communities of cells, again, began to abstract information. And they began building very special structures that did nothing but process information within the community. And those are the neural structures. So neurons are the information processing apparatus that those communities of cells built up. And in fact, they began to get specialists in the community and special structures that were responsible for recording, understanding, learning information. And that was the brains and the nervous system of those communities. And that gave them an evolutionary advantage. Because at that point, an individual — learning could happen within the time span of a single organism, instead of over this evolutionary time span. So an organism could, for instance, learn not to eat a certain kind of fruit because it tasted bad and it got sick last time it ate it. That could happen within the lifetime of a single organism, whereas before they'd built these special information processing structures, that would have had to be learned evolutionarily over hundreds of thousands of years by the individuals dying off that ate that kind of fruit. So that nervous system, the fact that they built these special information structures, tremendously sped up the whole process of evolution. Because evolution could now happen within an individual. It could happen in learning time scales. But then what happened was the individuals worked out, of course, tricks of communicating. And for example, the most sophisticated version that we're aware of is human language. It's really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds basically, and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it. But we're taking something very complicated, turning it into sound, sequences of sounds, and producing something very complicated in your brain. So this allows us now to begin to start functioning as a single organism. And so, in fact, what we've done is we, humanity, have started abstracting out. We're going through the same levels that multi-cellular organisms have gone through — abstracting out our methods of recording, presenting, processing information. So for example, the invention of language was a tiny step in that direction. Telephony, computers, videotapes, CD-ROMs and so on are all our specialized mechanisms that we've now built within our society for handling that information. And it all connects us together into something that is much bigger and much faster and able to evolve than what we were before. So now, evolution can take place on a scale of microseconds. And you saw Ty's little evolutionary example where he sort of did a little bit of evolution on the Convolution program right before your eyes. So now we've speeded up the time scales once again. So the first steps of the story that I told you about took a billion years a piece. And the next steps, like nervous systems and brains, took a few hundred million years. Then the next steps, like language and so on, took less than a million years. And these next steps, like electronics, seem to be taking only a few decades. The process is feeding on itself and becoming, I guess, autocatalytic is the word for it — when something reinforces its rate of change. The more it changes, the faster it changes. And I think that that's what we're seeing here in this explosion of curve. We're seeing this process feeding back on itself. Now I design computers for a living, and I know that the mechanisms that I use to design computers would be impossible without recent advances in computers. So right now, what I do is I design objects at such complexity that it's really impossible for me to design them in the traditional sense. I don't know what every transistor in the connection machine does. There are billions of them. Instead, what I do and what the designers at Thinking Machines do is we think at some level of abstraction and then we hand it to the machine and the machine takes it beyond what we could ever do, much farther and faster than we could ever do. And in fact, sometimes it takes it by methods that we don't quite even understand. One method that's particularly interesting that I've been using a lot lately is evolution itself. So what we do is we put inside the machine a process of evolution that takes place on the microsecond time scale. So for example, in the most extreme cases, we can actually evolve a program by starting out with random sequences of instructions. Say, "Computer, would you please make a hundred million random sequences of instructions. Now would you please run all of those random sequences of instructions, run all of those programs, and pick out the ones that came closest to doing what I wanted." So in other words, I define what I wanted. Let's say I want to sort numbers, as a simple example I've done it with. So find the programs that come closest to sorting numbers. So of course, random sequences of instructions are very unlikely to sort numbers, so none of them will really do it. But one of them, by luck, may put two numbers in the right order. And I say, "Computer, would you please now take the 10 percent of those random sequences that did the best job. Save those. Kill off the rest. And now let's reproduce the ones that sorted numbers the best. And let's reproduce them by a process of recombination analogous to sex." Take two programs and they produce children by exchanging their subroutines, and the children inherit the traits of the subroutines of the two programs. So I've got now a new generation of programs that are produced by combinations of the programs that did a little bit better job. Say, "Please repeat that process." Score them again. Introduce some mutations perhaps. And try that again and do that for another generation. Well every one of those generations just takes a few milliseconds. So I can do the equivalent of millions of years of evolution on that within the computer in a few minutes, or in the complicated cases, in a few hours. At the end of that, I end up with programs that are absolutely perfect at sorting numbers. In fact, they are programs that are much more efficient than programs I could have ever written by hand. Now if I look at those programs, I can't tell you how they work. I've tried looking at them and telling you how they work. They're obscure, weird programs. But they do the job. And in fact, I know, I'm very confident that they do the job because they come from a line of hundreds of thousands of programs that did the job. In fact, their life depended on doing the job. (Laughter) I was riding in a 747 with Marvin Minsky once, and he pulls out this card and says, "Oh look. Look at this. It says, 'This plane has hundreds of thousands of tiny parts working together to make you a safe flight.' Doesn't that make you feel confident?" (Laughter) In fact, we know that the engineering process doesn't work very well when it gets complicated. So we're beginning to depend on computers to do a process that's very different than engineering. And it lets us produce things of much more complexity than normal engineering lets us produce. And yet, we don't quite understand the options of it. So in a sense, it's getting ahead of us. We're now using those programs to make much faster computers so that we'll be able to run this process much faster. So it's feeding back on itself. The thing is becoming faster and that's why I think it seems so confusing. Because all of these technologies are feeding back on themselves. We're taking off. And what we are is we're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas and we can't quite figure out what the hell this thing is we're creating. We're right at that point of transition. But I think that there really is something coming along after us. I think it's very haughty of us to think that we're the end product of evolution. And I think all of us here are a part of producing whatever that next thing is. So lunch is coming along, and I think I will stop at that point, before I get selected out. (Applause)

Hooked by an octopus

{0: 'Mike deGruy filmed in and on the ocean for more than three decades -- becoming almost as famous for his storytelling as for his glorious, intimate visions of the sea and the creatures who live in it.'}

Mission Blue Voyage

I first became fascinated with octopus at an early age. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama — somebody's got to be from Mobile, right? — and Mobile sits at the confluence of five rivers, forming this beautiful delta. And the delta has alligators crawling in and out of rivers filled with fish and cypress trees dripping with snakes, birds of every flavor. It's an absolute magical wonderland to live in — if you're a kid interested in animals, to grow up in. And this delta water flows to Mobile Bay, and finally into the Gulf of Mexico. And I remember my first real contact with octopus was probably at age five or six. I was in the gulf, and I was swimming around and saw a little octopus on the bottom. And I reached down and picked him up, and immediately became fascinated and impressed by its speed and its strength and agility. It was prying my fingers apart and moving to the back of my hand. It was all I could do to hold onto this amazing creature. Then it sort of calmed down in the palms of my hands and started flashing colors, just pulsing all of these colors. And as I looked at it, it kind of tucked its arms under it, raised into a spherical shape and turned chocolate brown with two white stripes. I'm going, "My gosh!" I had never seen anything like this in my life! So I marveled for a moment, and then decided it was time to release him, so I put him down. The octopus left my hands and then did the damnedest thing: It landed on the bottom in the rubble and — fwoosh! — vanished right before my eyes. And I knew, right then, at age six, that is an animal that I want to learn more about. So I did. And I went off to college and got a degree in marine zoology, and then moved to Hawaii and entered graduate school at the University of Hawaii. And while a student at Hawaii, I worked at the Waikiki Aquarium. And the aquarium had a lot of big fish tanks but not a lot of invertebrate displays, and being the spineless guy, I thought, well I'll just go out in the field and collect these wonderful animals I had been learning about as a student and bring them in, and I built these elaborate sets and put them on display. Now, the fish in the tanks were gorgeous to look at, but they didn't really interact with people. But the octopus did. If you walked up to an octopus tank, especially early in the morning before anyone arrived, the octopus would rise up and look at you and you're thinking, "Is that guy really looking at me? He is looking at me!" And you walk up to the front of the tank. Then you realize that these animals all have different personalities: Some of them would hold their ground, others would slink into the back of the tank and disappear in the rocks, and one in particular, this amazing animal ... I went up to the front of the tank, and he's just staring at me, and he had little horns come up above his eyes. So I went right up to the front of the tank — I was three or four inches from the front glass — and the octopus was sitting on a perch, a little rock, and he came off the rock and he also came down right to the front of the glass. So I was staring at this animal about six or seven inches away, and at that time I could actually focus that close; now as I look at my fuzzy fingers I realize those days are long gone. Anyway, there we were, staring at each other, and he reaches down and grabs an armful of gravel and releases it in the jet of water entering the tank from the filtration system, and — chk chk chk chk chk! — this gravel hits the front of the glass and falls down. He reaches up, takes another armful of gravel, releases it — chk chk chk chk chk! — same thing. Then he lifts another arm and I lift an arm. Then he lifts another arm and I lift another arm. And then I realize the octopus won the arms race, because I was out and he had six left. (Laughter) But the only way I can describe what I was seeing that day was that this octopus was playing, which is a pretty sophisticated behavior for a mere invertebrate. So, about three years into my degree, a funny thing happened on the way to the office, which actually changed the course of my life. A man came into the aquarium. It's a long story, but essentially he sent me and a couple of friends of mine to the South Pacific to collect animals for him, and as we left, he gave us two 16-millimeter movie cameras. He said, "Make a movie about this expedition." "OK, a couple of biologists making a movie — this'll be interesting," and off we went. And we did, we made a movie, which had to be the worst movie ever made in the history of movie making, but it was a blast. I had so much fun. And I remember that proverbial light going off in my head, thinking, "Wait a minute. Maybe I can do this all the time. Yeah, I'll be a filmmaker." So I literally came back from that job, quit school, hung my filmmaking shingle and just never told anyone that I didn't know what I was doing. It's been a good ride. And what I learned in school though was really beneficial. If you're a wildlife filmmaker and you're going out into the field to film animals, especially behavior, it helps to have a fundamental background on who these animals are, how they work and, you know, a bit about their behaviors. But where I really learned about octopus was in the field, as a filmmaker making films with them, where you're allowed to spend large periods of time with the animals, seeing octopus being octopus in their ocean homes. I remember I took a trip to Australia, went to an island called One Tree Island. And apparently, evolution had occurred at a pretty rapid rate on One Tree, between the time they named it and the time I arrived, because I'm sure there were at least three trees on that island when we were there. Anyway, one tree is situated right next to a beautiful coral reef. In fact, there's a surge channel where the tide is moving back and forth, twice a day, pretty rapidly. And there's a beautiful reef, very complex reef, with lots of animals, including a lot of octopus. And not uniquely but certainly, the octopus in Australia are masters at camouflage. As a matter of fact, there's one right there. So our first challenge was to find these things, and that was a challenge, indeed. But the idea is, we were there for a month and I wanted to acclimate the animals to us so that we could see behaviors without disturbing them. So the first week was pretty much spent just getting as close as we could, every day a little closer, a little closer, a little closer. And you knew what the limit was: they would start getting twitchy and you'd back up, come back in a few hours. And after the first week, they ignored us. It was like, "I don't know what that thing is, but he's no threat to me." So they went on about their business and from a foot away, we're watching mating and courting and fighting and it is just an unbelievable experience. And one of the most fantastic displays that I remember, or at least visually, was a foraging behavior. And they had a lot of different techniques that they would use for foraging, but this particular one used vision. And they would see a coral head, maybe 10 feet away, and start moving over toward that coral head. And I don't know whether they actually saw crab in it, or imagined that one might be, but whatever the case, they would leap off the bottom and go through the water and land right on top of this coral head, and then the web between the arms would completely engulf the coral head, and they would fish out, swim for crabs. And as soon as the crabs touched the arm, it was lights out. And I always wondered what happened under that web. So we created a way to find out, (Laughter) and I got my first look at that famous beak in action. It was fantastic. If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. And octopus are, they live in all the oceans. They also live deep. And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that. It's like nothing you've ever done. If you ever really want to get away from it all and see something that you have never seen, and have an excellent chance of seeing something no one has ever seen, get in a sub. You climb in, seal the hatch, turn on a little oxygen, turn on the scrubber, which removes the CO2 in the air you breathe, and they chuck you overboard. Down you go. There's no connection to the surface apart from a pretty funky radio. And as you go down, the washing machine at the surface calms down. And it gets quiet. And it starts getting really nice. And as you go deeper, that lovely, blue water you were launched in gives way to darker and darker blue. And finally, it's a rich lavender, and after a couple of thousand feet, it's ink black. And now you've entered the realm of the mid-water community. You could give an entire talk about the creatures that live in the mid-water. Suffice to say though, as far as I'm concerned, without question, the most bizarre designs and outrageous behaviors are in the animals that live in the mid-water community. But we're just going to zip right past this area, this area that includes about 95 percent of the living space on our planet and go to the mid-ocean ridge, which I think is even more extraordinary. The mid-ocean ridge is a huge mountain range, 40,000 miles long, snaking around the entire globe. And they're big mountains, thousands of feet tall, some of which are tens of thousands of feet and bust through the surface, creating islands like Hawaii. And the top of this mountain range is splitting apart, creating a rift valley. And when you dive into that rift valley, that's where the action is because literally thousands of active volcanoes are going off at any point in time all along this 40,000 mile range. And as these tectonic plates are spreading apart, magma, lava is coming up and filling those gaps, and you're looking land — new land — being created right before your eyes. And over the tops of them is 3,000 to 4,000 meters of water creating enormous pressure, forcing water down through the cracks toward the center of the earth, until it hits a magma chamber where it becomes superheated and supersaturated with minerals, reverses its flow and starts shooting back to the surface and is ejected out of the earth like a geyser at Yellowstone. In fact, this whole area is like a Yellowstone National Park with all of the trimmings. And this vent fluid is about 600 or 700 degrees F. The surrounding water is just a couple of degrees above freezing. So it immediately cools, and it can no longer hold in suspension all of the material that it's dissolved, and it precipitates out, forming black smoke. And it forms these towers, these chimneys that are 10, 20, 30 feet tall. And all along the sides of these chimneys is shimmering with heat and loaded with life. You've got black smokers going all over the place and chimneys that have tube worms that might be eight to 10 feet long. And out of the tops of these tube worms are these beautiful red plumes. And living amongst the tangle of tube worms is an entire community of animals: shrimp, fish, lobsters, crab, clams and swarms of arthropods that are playing that dangerous game between over here is scalding hot and freezing cold. And this whole ecosystem wasn't even known about until 33 years ago. And it completely threw science on its head. It made scientists rethink where life on Earth might have actually begun. And before the discovery of these vents, all life on Earth, the key to life on Earth, was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis. But down there, there is no sun, there is no photosynthesis; it's chemosynthetic environment down there driving it, and it's all so ephemeral. You might film this unbelievable hydrothermal vent, which you think at the time has to be on another planet. It's amazing to think that this is actually on earth; it looks like aliens in an alien environment. But you go back to the same vent eight years later and it can be completely dead. There's no hot water. All of the animals are gone, they're dead, and the chimneys are still there creating a really nice ghost town, an eerie, spooky ghost town, but essentially devoid of animals, of course. But 10 miles down the ridge... pshhh! There's another volcano going. And there's a whole new hydrothermal vent community that has been formed. And this kind of life and death of hydrothermal vent communities is going on every 30 or 40 years all along the ridge. And that ephemeral nature of the hydrothermal vent community isn't really different from some of the areas that I've seen in 35 years of traveling around, making films. Where you go and film a really nice sequence at a bay. And you go back, and I'm at home, and I'm thinking, "Okay, what can I shoot ... Ah! I know where I can shoot that. There's this beautiful bay, lots of soft corals and stomatopods." And you show up, and it's dead. There's no coral, algae growing on it, and the water's pea soup. You think, "Well, what happened?" And you turn around, and there's a hillside behind you with a neighborhood going in, and bulldozers are pushing piles of soil back and forth. And over here there's a golf course going in. And this is the tropics. It's raining like crazy here. So this rainwater is flooding down the hillside, carrying with it sediments from the construction site, smothering the coral and killing it. And fertilizers and pesticides are flowing into the bay from the golf course — the pesticides killing all the larvae and little animals, fertilizer creating this beautiful plankton bloom — and there's your pea soup. But, encouragingly, I've seen just the opposite. I've been to a place that was a pretty trashed bay. And I looked at it, just said, "Yuck," and go and work on the other side of the island. Five years later, come back, and that same bay is now gorgeous. It's beautiful. It's got living coral, fish all over the place, crystal clear water, and you go, "How did that happen?" Well, how it happened is the local community galvanized. They recognized what was happening on the hillside and put a stop to it; enacted laws and made permits required to do responsible construction and golf course maintenance and stopped the sediments flowing into the bay, and stopped the chemicals flowing into the bay, and the bay recovered. The ocean has an amazing ability to recover, if we'll just leave it alone. I think Margaret Mead said it best. She said that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. And a small group of thoughtful people changed that bay. I'm a big fan of grassroots organizations. I've been to a lot of lectures where, at the end of it, inevitably, one of the first questions that comes up is, "But, but what can I do? I'm an individual. I'm one person. And these problems are so large and global, and it's just overwhelming." Fair enough question. My answer to that is don't look at the big, overwhelming issues of the world. Look in your own backyard. Look in your heart, actually. What do you really care about that isn't right where you live? And fix it. Create a healing zone in your neighborhood and encourage others to do the same. And maybe these healing zones can sprinkle a map, little dots on a map. And in fact, the way that we can communicate today — where Alaska is instantly knowing what's going on in China, and the Kiwis did this, and then over in England they tried to ... and everybody is talking to everyone else — it's not isolated points on a map anymore, it's a network we've created. And maybe these healing zones can start growing, and possibly even overlap, and good things can happen. So that's how I answer that question. Look in your own backyard, in fact, look in the mirror. What can you do that is more responsible than what you're doing now? And do that, and spread the word. The vent community animals can't really do much about the life and death that's going on where they live, but up here we can. In theory, we're thinking, rational human beings. And we can make changes to our behavior that will influence and affect the environment, like those people changed the health of that bay. Now, Sylvia's TED Prize wish was to beseech us to do anything we could, everything we could, to set aside not pin pricks, but significant expanses of the ocean for preservation, "hope spots," she calls them. And I applaud that. I loudly applaud that. And it's my hope that some of these "hope spots" can be in the deep ocean, an area that has historically been seriously neglected, if not abused. The term "deep six" comes to mind: "If it's too big or too toxic for a landfill, deep six it!" So, I hope that we can also keep some of these "hope spots" in the deep sea. Now, I don't get a wish, but I certainly can say that I will do anything I can to support Sylvia Earle's wish. And that I do. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Let's bridge the digital divide!

{0: 'Through education and technology-focused community centers, Aleph Molinari empowers the 5 billion people who cannot access or use the Internet and other technologies.'}

TEDxSanMigueldeAllende

The digital divide is a mother that's 45 years old and can't get a job, because she doesn't know how to use a computer. It is an immigrant that doesn't know that he can call his family for free. It is a child who can't resolve his homework, because he doesn't have access to information. The digital divide is a new illiteracy. "Digital divide" is also defined as: the gap between individuals and communities that have access to information technologies and those that don't. Why does this happen? It happens because of 3 things. The first is that people can't get access to these technologies because they can't afford them. The second is because they don't know how to use them. The third is because they don't know the benefits derived from technology. So let's consider some very basic statistics. The population of the world is nearly seven billion people. Out of these, approximately two billion are digitally included. This is approximately 30% of the entire world population, which means that the remaining 70% of the world — close to five billion people — do not have access to a computer or the internet. Let's think about that number for a second. Five billion people; that's four times the population of India, that have never touched a computer, have never accessed the internet. So this is a digital abyss that we're talking about, this is not a digital divide. Here we can see a map by Chris Harrison that shows the internet connections around the world. What we can see is that most of the internet connections are centered on North America and Europe, while the rest of the world is engulfed in the dark shadow of digital divide. Next, we can see connections, city-to-city, around the world, and we can see that most of the information generated is being generated between North America and Europe, while the rest of the world is not broadcasting their ideas or information. So what does this mean? We are living in a world that seems to be having a digital revolution, a revolution that everyone here thinks that we're part of, but the 70% of the world that is digitally excluded is not part of this. What does this mean? Well, the people that will be digitally excluded won't be able to compete in the labor markets of the future, they won't be connected, they'll be less informed, they'll be less inspired and they'll be less responsible. Internet should not be a luxury, it should be a right, because it is a basic social necessity of the 21st century. We can't operate without it. (Applause) Thank you. It allows us to connect to the world. It empowers us. It gives us social participation. It is a tool for change. And so, how are we going to bridge this digital divide? Well, there are many models that try and bridge the digital divide, that try and include the population at large. But the question is: Are they really working? I'm sure everybody here knows One Laptop per Child, where one computer is given to one child. The problem with this is, do we really want children to take computers to their homes, homes that have adverse conditions? And we also must understand that by giving a child a computer, we're also transferring costs, very high costs, such as internet connection, electricity, maintenance, software, updates. So we must create different models, models that help the families rather than add a burden on them. Also, let's not forget about the carbon footprint. Imagine five billion laptops. What would the world look like then? Imagine the hazardous residue that would be generated from that. Imagine the trash. So if we give one computer to one person, and we multiply that times five billion, even if that laptop is a hundred dollars, then we would have 483 trillion dollars. Now let's consider we're only counting the youth, ages 10 to 24. That's approximately 30% of the digitally excluded population. Then that would be 145 trillion dollars. What nation has this amount of money? This is not a sustainable model. So with this in mind, we created a different model. We created the RIA, in Spanish, or in English, Learning and Innovation Network, which is a network of community centers that bring education through the use of technology. We wanted to increase the number of users per computer in such a way that we could dilute the cost of infrastructure, the cost per user, and that we could bring education and technology to everybody within these communities. Let's look at a basic comparison. The RIA has 1,650 computers. If we had used the One Laptop per Child model of a 1 to 1 ratio, then we would have benefited 1,650 users. What we did instead is set up centers that have longer hours of operation than schools, that also include all of the population — our youngest user is 3 years old, the oldest is 86 — and with this, in less than two years, we were able to reach 140,000 users, out of which — (Applause) Thank you. out of which, 34,000 have already graduated from our courses. Another thing with One Laptop per Child is that it doesn't guarantee the educational use of a computer. Technology is nothing without that content. We need to use it as a means, not as an end. How did we accomplish such a high impact? Well, you can't just go into a community and pretend to change it, you need to look at a lot of factors. So what we do is a thing we call "urban acupuncture." We first start by looking at the basic geography of a site. So take, for example, Ecatepec. This is one of the most densely populated municipalities in Mexico. It has a very low income level. So we look at the basic geography, we look at roads, streets, the flux of pedestrians and vehicles. Then we look at income, we look at education. Then we set up a center there in the place that's going to heal the body, a little needle to change the city body. And there we go. And so, there are four basic elements that we need to consider when we're using education through technology. The first one is we need to create spaces. We need to create a space that is welcoming to the community, a space that is according to the needs of the children and of the elders and of every possible person that lives within that community. So we create these spaces that are all made with recycled materials. We use modular architecture to lower the ecological impact. And second, connection. By connection, I mean not only a connection to the internet, that's too easy. We need to create a connection that's an interconnection of humans. The internet is a very complex organism that is fueled of the ideas, the thoughts and the emotions of human beings. We need to create networks that aid in exchanging information. Third, content. Education is nothing without content. And you can't pretend to have a relationship of only a computer with a child. So we create a route, a very basic learning route, where we teach people how to use a computer, how to use the internet, how to use office software, and in 72 hours, we create digital citizens. You can't pretend that people are just going to touch a computer and become digitally included, you need to have a process. And after this, then they can take on a longer educational route. And then fourth, training. We need to train not only the users, but we need to train the people that will facilitate learning for these people. When you're talking about the digital divide, people have stigmas, people have fears; people don't understand how it can complement their lives. So what we do is train facilitators so that they can help in breaking that digital barrier. So, we have four elements: we have a space that's created, we have a connection, we have content and we have training. We have created a digital learning community. But there is one more element, which is the benefits that technology can create, because it is not printed, static content. It is dynamic; it is modifiable. So we have we do is, we provide content, then we do training, then we analyze the user patterns so that we can improve content. So it creates a virtuous circle. It allows us to deliver education according to different types of intelligence and according to different user needs. With this in mind, we have to think that technology is something that can modify according to human processes. I want to share a story. In 2006, I went to live here. This is one of the poorest communities in all of Mexico. I went to film a documentary on the people that live off trash, entirely of trash — their houses are built with trash, they eat trash, they dress in trash. And after two months of living with them, of seeing the children and the way they work, I understood that the only thing that can change and that can break the poverty cycle is education. And we can use technology to bring education to these communities. Here is another shot. The main message is that technology is not going to save the world; we are, and we can use technology to help us. I'm sure everybody here has experienced it; what moves technology is human energy. So let's use this energy to make the world a better place. Thank you. (Applause)

The secret structure of great talks

{0: 'Nancy Duarte believes that ideas are the most powerful tools people have. Her passion is to help every person learn to communicate their world-changing idea effectively.'}

TEDxEast

It's really, really great to be here. You have the power to change the world. I’m not saying that to be cliché, you really have the power to change the world. Deep inside of you, every single one of you has the most powerful device known to man. And that's an idea. So a single idea, from the human mind, it could start a groundswell, it could be a flash point for a movement and it can actually rewrite our future. But an idea is powerless if it stays inside of you. If you never pull that idea out for others to contend with, it will die with you. Now, maybe some of you guys have tried to convey your idea and it wasn't adopted, it was rejected, and some other mediocre or average idea was adopted. And the only difference between those two is in the way it was communicated. Because if you communicate an idea in a way that resonates, change will happen, and you can change the world. In my family, we collect these vintage European posters. Every time we go to Maui, we go to the dealer there, and he turns these great big posters. I love them. They all have one idea and one really clear visual that conveys the idea. They are about the size of a mattress. They're really big. They're not as thick as a mattress, but they're big. And the guy will tell the story as he turns the pages. And this one time I was flanked by my two kids and he turns the page and this poster is underneath, and right when I lean forward and say, "Oh my God, I love this poster," both of my kids jumped back and they are like, "Oh my God, mom, it's you." And this is the poster. (Laughter) See, I'm like "Fire it up!" The thing I loved about this poster was the irony. Here's this chick all fired up, headed into battle — as the standard bearer — and she's holding these little Suavitos baking spices, like something so seemingly insignificant, though she's willing to risk, you know, life and limb to promote this thing. So if you are to swap out those little Suavitos baking spices with a presentation — Yeah, it's me, pretty fired up. I was fired up about presentations back when it wasn't cool to be fired up about presentations. I really think they have the power to change the world when you communicate effectively through them. And changing the world is hard. It won't happen with just one person with one single idea. That idea has got to spread, or it won't be effective. So it has to come out of you and out into the open for people to see. And the way that ideas are conveyed the most effectively is through story. You know, for thousands of years, illiterate generations would pass on their values and their culture from generation to generation, and they would stay intact. So there's something kind of magical about a story structure that makes it so that when it's assembled, it can be ingested and then recalled by the person who's receiving it. So basically a story, you get a physical reaction; your heart can race, your eyes can dilate, you could talk about, "Oh, I got a chill down my spine" or, "I could feel it in the pit of my stomach." We actually physically react when someone is telling us a story. So even though the stage is the same, a story can be told, but once a presentation is told, it completely flatlines. And I wanted to figure out why. Why is it that we physically sit with rapt attention during a story, but it just dies for a presentation. So I wanted to figure out, how do you incorporate story into presentations. So we've had thousands of presentations back at the shop — hundreds of thousands of presentations, actually, so I knew the context of a really bad presentation. I decided to study cinema and literature, and really dig in and figure out what was going on and why it was broken. So, I want to show you some of the findings that led up to what I've uncovered as a presentation form. So it was obvious to start with Aristotle, he had a three-act structure, a beginning, a middle and an end. We studied poetics and rhetoric, and a lot of presentations don't even have that in its most simple form. And then when I moved on to studying hero archetypes, I thought, "OK, the presenter is the hero, they're up on the stage, they're the star of the show." It's easy to feel, as the presenter, that you're the star of the show. I realized right away, that that's really broken. Because I have an idea, I can put it out there, but if you guys don't grab that idea and hold it as dear, the idea goes nowhere and the world is never changed. So in reality, the presenter isn't the hero, the audience is the hero of our idea. So if you look at Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, just in the front part, there were some really interesting insights there. So there is this likable hero in an ordinary world, and they get this call to adventure. So the world is kind of brought out of balance. And at first they're resistant. They're like, "I don't know if I want to jump into this," and then a mentor comes along and helps them move from their ordinary world into a special world. And that's the role of the presenter. It's to be the mentor. You're not Luke Skywalker, you're Yoda. You're the one that actually helps the audience move from one thing and into your new special idea, and that's the power of a story. So in its most simple structure, it's a three-part structure of a story. You have a likable hero who has a desire, they encounter a roadblock and ultimately they emerge, transform, and that's the basic structure. But it wasn't until I came across a Gustav Freytag's pyramid — he drew this shape in 1863. Now, he was a German dramatist ... he was a German dramatist and he believed there is a five-act structure, which has an exposition, a rising action, a climax, a falling action and a denouement, which is the unraveling or the resolution of the story. I love this shape. So we talk about shapes. A story has an arc — well, an arc is a shape. We talk about classical music having a shapeliness to it. So I thought, hey, if presentations had a shape, what would that shape be? And how did the greatest communicators use that shape, or do they use a shape? So I'll never forget, it was a Saturday morning. After all this study — it was a couple of years of study — I drew a shape. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, if this shape is real, I should be able to take two completely different presentations and overlay it, and it should be true." So I took the obvious, I took Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and I took Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone launch speech, I overlaid it over it, and it worked. I sat in my office, just astounded. I actually cried a little, because I was like, "I've been given this gift," and here it is, this is the shape of a great presentation. Isn't it amazing? (Laughter) I was crying. I want to walk you through it, it's pretty astounding. There is a beginning, a middle and an end, and I want to walk you through it. Because the greatest communicators — I went through speeches, everything — I can overlay the shape. Even the Gettysburg Address follows the shape. At the beginning of any presentation, you need to establish what is. You know, here's the status quo, here's what's going on. And then you need to compare that to what could be. You need to make that gap as big as possible, because there is this commonplace of the status quo, and you need to contrast that with the loftiness of your idea. So it's like, you know, here's the past, here's the present, but look at our future. Here's a problem, but look at that problem removed. Here's a roadblock, let's annihilate the roadblock. You need to really amplify that gap. This would be like the inciting incident in a movie. That's when suddenly the audience has to contend with what you just put out there: "Wow, do I want to agree with this and align with it or not?" And in the rest of your presentation should support that. So the middle goes back and forth, it traverses between what is and what could be, what is and what could be. Because what you are trying to do is make the status quo and the normal unappealing, and you're wanting to draw them towards what could be in the future with your idea adopted. Now, on your way to change the world, people are going to resist. They're not going to be excited, they may love the world the way it is. So you'll encounter resistance. That's why you have to move back and forth. It's similar to sailing. When you're sailing against the wind and there is wind resistance, you have to move your boat back and forth, and back and forth. That's so you can capture the wind. You have to actually capture the resistance coming against you when you're sailing. Now interesting, if you capture the wind just right and you set your sail just right, your ship will actually sail faster than the wind itself. It is a physics phenomenon. So by planting in there the way they're going to resist between what is and what can be, is actually going to draw them towards your idea quicker than should you not do that. So after you've moved back and forth between what is and what could be, the last turning point is a call to action, which every presentation should have, but at the very end. You need to describe the world as a new bliss. "This is utopia with my idea adopted." "This is the way the world is going to look, when we join together and we solve this big problem." You need to use that as your ending, in a very poetic and dramatic way. So, interestingly, when I was done, I was like, "You know what? I could use this as an analysis tool." I actually transcribe speeches, and I would actually map out, how much they map to this tool. So I want to show you some of that today, and I want to start with the very two people that I used when I first did. Here's Mr. Jobs, has completely changed the world. Changed the world of personal computing, changed the music industry and now he's on his way to change the mobile device industry. So he's definitely changed the world. And this is the shape of his iPhone launch 2007, when he launched his iPhone. It's a 90-minute talk and you can see he starts with what is, traverses back and forth and ends with what could be. So I want to zoom in on this: the white line is him speaking, he's talking. The next color line you'll see popped up there, that's when he cuts to video. So he's adding some variety and he cuts to demo. So it's not just him talking the whole time. And these lines are representative there. And then towards the end you'll see a blue line, which will be the guest speaker. So this is where it gets kind of interesting: every tick mark here is when he made them laugh. And every tick mark here is when he made them clap. They are so involved physically, they are physically reacting to what he is saying, which is actually fantastic, because then you know you have the audience in your hand. So he kicks off what could be with, "This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years." So he is launching a product that he's known about already for a couple of years. So this is not a new product to him. But look at this, he does this other thing: he marvels. He marvels at his own product. He marvels himself more than the audience laughs or claps. So he is like, "Isn't this awesome? Isn't this beautiful?" He is modeling for the audience what he wants them to feel. So he is actually doing a job of compelling them to feel a certain way. So he kicks off with what could be with, "Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything." So he starts to kick in and talk about his new product. Now, at the beginning of it, he actually keeps the phone off. You'll see that the line is pretty white up until this point, so he goes off between, "Here's this new phone, and here's the sucky competitors. Here's this new phone, and here's the sucky competitors." And then, right about here, he has the star moment — and that something we'll always remember. He turns the phone on. The audience sees scrolling for the first time, you can hear the oxygen sucked out of the room. They gasped. You can actually hear it. So he creates a moment that they'll always remember. So if we move along this model, you can see the blue, where the external speakers are going, and towards the bottom right, the line breaks. That's because his clicker broke. He wants to keep this heightened sense of excitement. He tells a personal story, right there, where the technology didn't work. So he's the master communicator, and he turns to story to keep the audience involved. So the top right he ends with the new bliss. He leaves them with the promise that Apple will continue to build revolutionary new products. And he says, "There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love: 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.' We've always tried to do that at Apple since the very beginning and we always will." So he ends with the new bliss. So let's look at Mr. King. He was an amazing visionary, a clergyman who spent his life working hard for equality. And this is the shape of the "I Have a Dream" speech. You can see he starts with what is, moves back and forth between what is and what could be, and ends with a very poetic new bliss, which is the famous part we all know. So I'm going to spread it out a little bit here, stretch it for you, and what I'm doing here is I put the actual transcript there along with the text. I know you can't read it. But at the end of every line break, I broke the line, because he took a breath and he paused. Now he was a Southern Baptist preacher, most people hadn't heard that, so he had a real cadence and a rhythm that was really new for people there. So I want to cover up these lines of text with a bar because I want to use this bar as an information device here. So let's walk through how he actually spoke to the people. The blue bars here are going to be when he used the actual rhetorical device of repetition. So he was repeating himself, he was using the same words and phrases, so people could remember and recall them. But then he also used a lot of metaphors and visual words. This was a way to take really complicated ideas and make them memorable and knowledgeable, so people got it. He actually created very — almost like scenes with his words to make it so they could envision what he was saying. And then there were also a lot of familiar songs and scriptures that he used. This is just the front end of it that you're seeing. And then he also made a lot of political references of the promises that were made to the people. So if we look at the very first end of what is, at the very end of what is was the very first time that people actually clapped and roared really loud. So the end of what is what he did is he said, "America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds." Well, everyone knows what it's like to not have money in your account. So he used the metaphor people were very familiar with. But when they really charged up, the very first time they really screamed was: "So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice." That's when they really clapped. It was when he compared what currently is to what could be. So when we move along a little farther in the model, you'll see it goes back and forth at a more frenzied pace. And this is when he goes back and forth, and back and forth. Now the audience was in a frenzy. They were all excited, and so you can actually do this to keep them in a heightened sense of excitement. So he says, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the meaning of its creed. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" So he uses the little orange text there to remind them of the promise that the politicians had made to him or that this country had made. Then he moves back and forth between "I have a dream that one day, I have a dream that one day, I have a dream that one day," and at the end, it gets really interesting. Because he uses — you can look at the four shades of green, there's a lot of blue there, which was a lot of repetition — he had a heightened sense of repetition. And the green was a heightened sense of songs and scriptures. So the first batch of green was the actual scripture from the Book of Isaiah. The second batch of green was "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Now, that's a familiar song that was specifically very significant for the black people at the time, because this song was the song they chose to change the words to as an outcry, saying that promises had not been kept. So the third batch of green was actually a stanza from "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." And then the fourth was a Negro spiritual. "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!" So what he did is he actually reached inside of the hearts of the audience. He pulled from scriptures, which is important. He pulled from songs that they'd sung together as an outcry against this outrage, and he used those as a device to connect and resonate with the audience. Ending — painting a picture of this new bliss, using the very things inside of them that they already held as sacred. So he was a great man. He had a big, big dream. There's a lot of people here, you guys have really big dreams. You have really big ideas inside of you that you need to get out. But you know what? We encounter hardships. It's not easy to change the world; it's a big job. You know he was — his house was bombed, he was stabbed with a letter opener, ultimately, he lost his life, you know, for what he cared about. But a lot of us aren't going to be required to pay that kind of sacrifice. But what happens is that it basically is a little bit like that basic story structure. Life can be like that. You know, you guys are all likable people, you have a desire, you encounter roadblocks, and we stop there. We're just like, you know, "I had this idea, but I'm not going to put it out there. It's been rejected." You know, we self-sabotage our own ideas, we just butt up against the roadblocks and butt up against the roadblocks instead of choosing to let the struggle transform us and choosing to go ahead and have a dream and make it real. And you know, if anyone — if I can do this, anybody can do this. I was raised in an economically and emotionally starved environment. First time I got to go to a camp with my sister, I was abused. Wasn't the first time I was abused, it was just the most aggressive. And my mom and dad — they married each other three times, (Audience murmurs) Yeah, that was tumultuous, and when they weren't fighting they were helping sober up some alcoholic that was living with us because they were both sober alcoholics. So my mom abandoned us when I was sixteen years old. And I took on a role of caretaker of my home and of my siblings. And I married. I met a man. Fell in love. I went to a year of college. I did what every single, bright, young girl should do — I got married when I was eighteen years old. And you know what? I knew, I knew that I was born for more than this. And right at the point in the story of my life I had a choice. I could let all these things push me down and I could let all my ideas die inside of me. I could just say, you know, life is too hard to change the world. It's just too tough. But I chose a different story for my life. (Laughter) Don't you know it? And so I feel like there's people in this room — you got those little Suavitos baking spices and you're just like, "You know, It's not that big a deal." "It's really not the whole world I can change." But you know, you can change your world. You can change your life. You can change the world that you have control over, you can change your sphere. I want to encourage you to do that. Because you know what? The future isn't a place that we're going to go. It's a place that you get to create. I want to thank you. Bless you. God bless you. (Applause)

How your brain tells you where you are

{0: 'At University College in London, Neil Burgess researches how patterns of electrical activity in brain cells guide us through space.'}

TEDSalon London Spring 2011

When we park in a big parking lot, how do we remember where we parked our car? Here's the problem facing Homer. And we're going to try to understand what's happening in his brain. So we'll start with the hippocampus, shown in yellow, which is the organ of memory. If you have damage there, like in Alzheimer's, you can't remember things including where you parked your car. It's named after Latin for "seahorse," which it resembles. And like the rest of the brain, it's made of neurons. So the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it. And the neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other. The hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells, which are very densely interconnected. And scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food. So we're going to imagine we're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here. And when it fires a little spike of electricity, there's going to be a red dot and a click. So what we see is that this neuron knows whenever the rat has gone into one particular place in its environment. And it signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike. So we could show the firing rate of that neuron as a function of the animal's location. And if we record from lots of different neurons, we'll see that different neurons fire when the animal goes in different parts of its environment, like in this square box shown here. So together they form a map for the rest of the brain, telling the brain continually, "Where am I now within my environment?" Place cells are also being recorded in humans. So epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring. And some of these patients played a video game where they drive around a small town. And place cells in their hippocampi would fire, become active, start sending electrical impulses whenever they drove through a particular location in that town. So how does a place cell know where the rat or person is within its environment? Well these two cells here show us that the boundaries of the environment are particularly important. So the one on the top likes to fire sort of midway between the walls of the box that their rat's in. And when you expand the box, the firing location expands. The one below likes to fire whenever there's a wall close by to the south. And if you put another wall inside the box, then the cell fires in both place wherever there's a wall to the south as the animal explores around in its box. So this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you — extended buildings and so on — is particularly important for the hippocampus. And indeed, on the inputs to the hippocampus, cells are found which project into the hippocampus, which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it's exploring around. So the cell on the left, you can see, it fires whenever the animal gets near to a wall or a boundary to the east, whether it's the edge or the wall of a square box or the circular wall of the circular box or even the drop at the edge of a table, which the animals are running around. And the cell on the right there fires whenever there's a boundary to the south, whether it's the drop at the edge of the table or a wall or even the gap between two tables that are pulled apart. So that's one way in which we think place cells determine where the animal is as it's exploring around. We can also test where we think objects are, like this goal flag, in simple environments — or indeed, where your car would be. So we can have people explore an environment and see the location they have to remember. And then, if we put them back in the environment, generally they're quite good at putting a marker down where they thought that flag or their car was. But on some trials, we could change the shape and size of the environment like we did with the place cell. In that case, we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment. And what you see, for example, if the flag was where that cross was in a small square environment, and then if you ask people where it was, but you've made the environment bigger, where they think the flag had been stretches out in exactly the same way that the place cell firing stretched out. It's as if you remember where the flag was by storing the pattern of firing across all of your place cells at that location, and then you can get back to that location by moving around so that you best match the current pattern of firing of your place cells with that stored pattern. That guides you back to the location that you want to remember. But we also know where we are through movement. So if we take some outbound path — perhaps we park and we wander off — we know because our own movements, which we can integrate over this path roughly what the heading direction is to go back. And place cells also get this kind of path integration input from a kind of cell called a grid cell. Now grid cells are found, again, on the inputs to the hippocampus, and they're a bit like place cells. But now as the rat explores around, each individual cell fires in a whole array of different locations which are laid out across the environment in an amazingly regular triangular grid. And if you record from several grid cells — shown here in different colors — each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment, and each cell's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells. So the red one fires on this grid and the green one on this one and the blue on on this one. So together, it's as if the rat can put a virtual grid of firing locations across its environment — a bit like the latitude and longitude lines that you'd find on a map, but using triangles. And as it moves around, the electrical activity can pass from one of these cells to the next cell to keep track of where it is, so that it can use its own movements to know where it is in its environment. Do people have grid cells? Well because all of the grid-like firing patterns have the same axes of symmetry, the same orientations of grid, shown in orange here, it means that the net activity of all of the grid cells in a particular part of the brain should change according to whether we're running along these six directions or running along one of the six directions in between. So we can put people in an MRI scanner and have them do a little video game like the one I showed you and look for this signal. And indeed, you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex, which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats. So back to Homer. He's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked. And that would be represented by the firing of boundary-detecting cells. He's also remembering the path he took out of the car park, which would be represented in the firing of grid cells. Now both of these kinds of cells can make the place cells fire. And he can return to the location where he parked by moving so as to find where it is that best matches the firing pattern of the place cells in his brain currently with the stored pattern where he parked his car. And that guides him back to that location irrespective of visual cues like whether his car's actually there. Maybe it's been towed. But he knows where it was, so he knows to go and get it. So beyond spatial memory, if we look for this grid-like firing pattern throughout the whole brain, we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks, like remembering the last time you went to a wedding, for example. So it may be that the neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene, at least, of the events that have happened to us when we want to imagine them. So if this was happening, your memories could start by place cells activating each other via these dense interconnections and then reactivating boundary cells to create the spatial structure of the scene around your viewpoint. And grid cells could move this viewpoint through that space. Another kind of cell, head direction cells, which I didn't mention yet, they fire like a compass according to which way you're facing. They could define the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery, so you can imagine what happened when you were at this wedding, for example. So this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Non-lethal weapons, a moral hazard?

{0: 'Stephen Coleman studies applied ethics, particularly the ethics of military and police force, and their application to human rights.'}

TEDxCanberra

What I want to talk to you about today is some of the problems that the military of the Western world — Australia, United States, the UK and so on — face in some of the deployments that they're dealing with in the modern world at this time. If you think about the sorts of things we've sent Australian military personnel to in recent years, we've got obvious things like Iraq and Afghanistan, but you've also got things like East Timor and the Solomon Islands, and so on. And a lot of these deployments that we're sending military personnel to these days aren't traditional wars. In fact, a lot of the jobs we're asking military personnel to do in those situations are ones that, in their own countries — Australia, the US and so on — would actually be done by police officers. So there's a bunch of problems that come up for military personnel in these situations, because they're doing things they haven't really been trained for. And they're doing things that those who do them in their own countries are trained very differently for and equipped very differently for. Now, there's a bunch of reasons why we send military personnel, rather than police, to do these jobs. If Australia had to send 1,000 people tomorrow to West Papua, for example, we don't have 1,000 police officers hanging around that could go tomorrow, and we do have 1,000 soldiers that could go. So when we have to send someone, we send the military — they're there, they're available, and heck, they're used to going off and doing these things and living by themselves and not having all this extra support. So they are able to do it in that sense. But they aren't trained the same way police officers are, and they're certainly not equipped the way police officers are, so this has raised a bunch of problems for them when dealing with these issues. One particular thing that's come up that I am especially interested in, is the question of whether, when we're sending military personnel to do these sorts of jobs, we ought to be equipping them differently; and in particular, whether we ought to be giving them access to some of the nonlethal weapons that police have. Since they're doing some of the same jobs, maybe they should have some of those things. And there's a range of places you'd think those things would be really useful. For example, when you've got military checkpoints. If people are approaching these checkpoints and the military personnel are unsure if this person's hostile or not, say this person approaching here, and they say, "Is this a suicide bomber or not? Is something hidden under their clothes? What's going to happen?" They don't know if the person is hostile or not. If the person doesn't follow directions, they may end up shooting them, and then find out afterwards either, yes, we shot the right person, or, no, this was just an innocent person who didn't understand what was going on. So if they had nonlethal weapons, then they would say, "We can use them in that sort of situation. If we shoot someone who wasn't hostile, at least we haven't killed them." Another situation: this photo is from one of the missions in the Balkans in the late 1990s. This situation is a little bit different, where maybe they know someone is hostile; they've got someone shooting at them or doing something else that's clearly hostile, throwing rocks, whatever. But if they respond, there's a range of other people around who are innocent people, who might also get hurt. It'd be collateral damage that the military often doesn't want to talk about. So again, they'd say, "With access to nonlethal weapons, if we've got someone we know is hostile, we can do something to deal with them, and know that if we hit anyone else, at least we're not going to kill them." Another suggestion has been, since we're putting so many robots in the field, we can see the time coming where they're actually going to send robots out in the field that are autonomous. They'll make their own decisions about who to shoot and who not to shoot, without a human in the loop. So the suggestion is, if we're going to send robots out and allow them to do this, maybe it would be a good idea if they were armed with nonlethal weapons, so if the robot makes a bad decision and shoots the wrong person, again, they haven't actually killed them. Now, there's a whole range of different sorts of nonlethal weapons, some of which are available now, some of which they're developing. You've got traditional things like pepper spray, OC spray up at the top there, or Tasers over here. The one on the top right here is actually a dazzling laser, intended to just blind the person momentarily and disorient them. You've got nonlethal shotgun rounds that contain rubber pellets instead of the traditional metal ones. And this one in the middle here, the large truck, is called the Active Denial System, something the US military is working on at the moment. It's essentially a big microwave transmitter. It's sort of your classic idea of a heat ray. It goes out to a really long distance, compared to any of these other sorts of things. Anybody who is hit with this feels a sudden burst of heat, and just wants to get out of the way. It is a lot more sophisticated than a microwave oven, but it basically is boiling the water molecules in the very surface level of your skin. So you feel this massive heat, and you go, "I want to get out of the way." And they think this will be really useful in places where we need to clear a crowd out of a particular area, if the crowd is being hostile. If we need to keep people away from a particular place, we can do that with these sorts of things. So there's a whole range of different nonlethal weapons we could give military personnel, and there's a whole range of situations where they're looking at them and saying, "These things would be really useful." But as I said, the military and the police are very different. (Laughter) Yes, you don't have to look very hard at this to recognize that they might be very different. In particular, the attitude to the use of force and the way they're trained to use force is especially different. The police — and knowing because I've actually helped to train police — police, particularly in Western jurisdictions at least, are trained to De-escalate force, to try and avoid using force wherever possible, and to use lethal force only as an absolute last resort. Military personnel are being trained for war. So they're trained that, as soon as things go bad, their first response is lethal force. The moment the fecal matter hits the rotating turbine — (Laughter) you can start shooting at people. So their attitudes to the use of lethal force are very different, and I think it's fairly obvious that their attitude to the use of nonlethal weapons would also be very different from what it is with the police. And since we've already had so many problems with police use of nonlethal weapons in various ways, I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of those things and relate it to the military context. I was very surprised when I started to do this to see that, in fact, even the people who advocated the use of nonlethal weapons by the military hadn't actually done that. They generally seemed to think, "Why would we care what's happened with the police? We're looking at something different," and didn't seem to recognize they were looking at pretty much the same stuff. So I started to investigate some of those issues, and have a look at the way police use nonlethal weapons when they're introduced, and some of the problems that might arise out of those sorts of things when they actually do introduce them. And of course, being Australian, I started looking at stuff in Australia, knowing from my own experience of various times when nonlethal weapons have been introduced in Australia. One of the things I particularly looked at was the use of OC spray — oleoresin capsicum spray, pepper spray — by Australian police, and seeing what had happened when that had been introduced, and those sorts of issues. And one study that I found, a particularly interesting one, was in Queensland, because they had a trial period for the use of pepper spray before they actually introduced it more broadly. And I went and had a look at some of the figures here. Now, when they introduced OC spray in Queensland, they were really explicit. The police minister's and a heap of public statements were made about it. They were saying, "This is explicitly intended to give police an option between shouting and shooting. This is something they can use instead of a firearm in situations where they would have previously had to shoot someone." So I looked at all of the police shooting figures. And you can't actually find them very easily for individual Australian states; I could only find these. This is from an Australian Institute of Criminology report. You can see, in the fine print at the top: "Police shooting deaths" means not just people shot by police, but people who have shot themselves in the presence of police. But these are the figures across the entire country, and the red arrow represents the point where Queensland said, "Yes, this is where we're going to give all police officers across the entire state access to OC spray." So you can see there were six deaths sort of leading up to it, every year for a number of years. There was a spike a few years before, but that wasn't actually Queensland. Anyone know where that was? Wasn't Port Arthur, no. Victoria? Yes, correct. That spike was all Victoria. (Laughter) So it wasn't that Queensland had a particular problem with deaths from police shootings and so on. So, six shootings across the whole country, fairly consistently over the years before. The next two years were the years they studied — 2001, 2002. Anyone want to take a stab at the number of times, given how they've introduced this, the number of times police in Queensland used OC spray in that period? Hundreds? One? Three? A thousand is getting better. Explicitly introduced as an alternative to the use of lethal force — an alternative between shouting and shooting. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if Queensland police didn't have OC spray, they wouldn't have shot 2,226 people in those two years. (Laughter) In fact, if you have a look at the studies they were looking at, the material they were collecting and examining, you can see the suspects were only armed in about 15 percent of cases where OC spray was used. It was routinely being used in this period, and, of course, still is routinely used — because there were no complaints about it, not within the context of this study, anyway — it was routinely being used to deal with people who were violent, who were potentially violent, and also quite frequently used to deal with people who were simply passively noncompliant. This person is not doing anything violent, but they just won't do what we want them to. They're not obeying the directions we're giving them, so we'll give them a shot of the OC spray — that'll speed them up. Everything will work out better that way. This was something explicitly introduced to be an alternative to firearms, but it's being routinely used to deal with a whole range of other sorts of problems. Now one of the particular issues that comes up with military use of nonlethal weapons — and people actually say, "There might be some problems" — there's a couple of particular problems that get focused on. One of those problems is: nonlethal weapons may be used indiscriminately. One of the fundamental principles of military use of force is that you have to be discriminate; you have to be careful about who you're shooting at. So one of the problems suggested with nonlethal weapons is that they might be used indiscriminately — that you would use them against a whole range of people, because you don't have to worry so much anymore. And in fact, one particular instance where I think that actually happens was the Dubrovka Theater siege in Moscow in 2002, which probably a lot of you, unlike most of my students at ADFA, are old enough to remember. So, Chechens had come in and taken control of the theater. They were holding something like 700 people hostage. They'd released a bunch of people, but they still had about 700 people hostage. And the Russian military police special forces, "Spetsnaz," came in and stormed the theater. The way they did it was to pump the whole thing full of anesthetic gas. And it turned out that lots of the hostages died as a result of inhaling the gas. It was used indiscriminately. They pumped the whole theater full of the gas. And it's no surprise that people died, because you don't know how much gas each person is going to inhale, what position they'll fall in when they become unconscious, and so on. There were, in fact, only a couple of people who got shot in this episode. So when they had a look at it afterward, there were only a couple of people who'd apparently been shot, by the hostage takers or by the police forces trying to deal with the situation. Virtually everybody that got killed got killed from inhaling the gas. The final toll of hostages is a little unclear, but it's certainly a few more than that, because other people died over the next few days. So this was one problem they talked about, that it might be used indiscriminately. A second problem people sometimes talk about with military use of nonlethal weapons — and it's actually why, in the chemical weapons convention, it's very clear that you can't use riot-control agents as weapons of warfare — is that it's seen that sometimes nonlethal weapons might be used not as an alternative to lethal force, but as a lethal force multiplier: that you use nonlethal weapons first, so your lethal weapons will actually be more effective. The people you'll be shooting at won't be able to get out of the way. They won't be aware of what's happening, and you can kill them better. And that's exactly what happened here. The hostage takers who had been rendered unconscious by the gas were not taken into custody; they were simply shot in the head. So this nonlethal weapon was being used in this case as a lethal force multiplier, to make killing more effective in this particular situation. Another problem I want to quickly mention is that there's a whole heap of problems with the way people are actually taught to use nonlethal weapons, and get trained about them and then tested and so on. Because they're tested in nice, safe environments, and are taught to use them in nice, safe environments — like this, where you can see exactly what's going on. The person spraying the OC spray is wearing a rubber glove to make sure they don't get contaminated, and so on. But they're never used like that. They're used out in the real world, like in Texas, like this: ["Police Taser Great-Grandmother During Traffic Stop"] I confess, this particular case was one that piqued my interest in this. It happened while I was working as a research fellow at the US Naval Academy. News reports started coming up about this situation, where this woman was arguing with a police officer. She wasn't violent. In fact, he was probably six inches taller than me, and she was about this tall. And eventually she said to him, "Well, I'm going to get back in my car." And he says, "If you get back in your car, I'm going to tase you." And she says, "Oh, go ahead. Tase me." And so he does. And it's all captured by the video camera running in the front of the police car. So, she's 72. And it's seen that this is the most appropriate way of dealing with her. And there are other examples of the same sorts of things, where you think, "Is this really an appropriate way to use nonlethal weapons?" "Police Chief Fires Taser into 14 year old Girl's Head." "She was running away. What else was I suppose to do?" (Laughter) Or Florida: "Police Taser 6-year-old Boy at Elementary School." And they clearly learned a lot from it, because in the same district: "Police Review Policy After Children Shocked: 2nd Child Shocked by Taser Stun Gun Within Weeks." Same police district. Another child within weeks of Tasering the six-year-old boy. Just in case you think it's only going to happen in the United States, it happened in Canada as well: ["Mounties Zap 11-year-old Boy"] And a colleague sent me this one from London: ["Arrested Man, 82, Shot with Taser"] But my personal favorite, I have to confess, does come from the US: "Officers Taser 86-year-old Disabled Woman in her Bed." (Laughter) I checked the reports on this one. I looked at it. I was really surprised. Apparently, she took up a more threatening position in her bed. (Laughter) I kid you not, that's exactly what it said: "She took up a more threatening position in her bed." OK. But I'd remind you — I'm talking about military uses of nonlethal weapons, so why is this relevant? Because police are actually more restrained in the use of force than the military are. They're trained to be more restrained in the use of force than the military are. They're trained to think more, to try and De-escalate. So if you have these problems with police officers with nonlethal weapons, what on earth would make you think it's going to be better with military personnel? The last thing that I would like to say: When I'm talking to the police about what a perfect nonlethal weapon would look like, they almost inevitably say the same thing. They say, "It's got to be something that's nasty enough that people don't want to be hit with this weapon. So if you threaten to use it, people are going to comply with it. But it's also going to be something that doesn't leave any lasting effects." In other words, your perfect nonlethal weapon is something that's perfect for abuse. What would these guys have done if they'd had access to Tasers, or to a manned, portable version of the Active Denial System — a small heat ray that you can use on people and not worry about. So I think yes, there may be ways that nonlethal weapons will be great in these situations, but there's also a whole heap of problems that need to be considered as well. Thanks very much. (Applause)

Globalizing the local, localizing the global

{0: "Sheikha Al Mayassa is the young and progressive force behind Qatar's mission to become the Middle East's foremost destination for the arts and culture. "}

TEDWomen 2010

Both myself and my brother belong to the under 30 demographic, which Pat said makes 70 percent, but according to our statistics it makes 60 percent of the region's population. Qatar is no exception to the region. It's a very young nation led by young people. We have been reminiscing about the latest technologies and the iPods, and for me the abaya, my traditional dress that I'm wearing today. Now this is not a religious garment, nor is it a religious statement. Instead, it's a diverse cultural statement that we choose to wear. Now I remember a few years ago, a journalist asked Dr. Sheikha, who's sitting here, president of Qatar University — who, by the way, is a woman — he asked her whether she thought the abaya hindered or infringed her freedom in any way. Her answer was quite the contrary. Instead, she felt more free, more free because she could wear whatever she wanted under the abaya. She could come to work in her pajamas and nobody would care. (Laughter) Not that you do; I'm just saying. (Laughter) My point is here, people have a choice — just like the Indian lady could wear her sari or the Japanese woman could wear her kimono. We are changing our culture from within, but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions. We know that modernization is happening. And yes, Qatar wants to be a modern nation. But at the same time we are reconnecting and reasserting our Arab heritage. It's important for us to grow organically. And we continuously make the conscious decision to reach that balance. In fact, research has shown that the more the world is flat, if I use Tom Friedman's analogy, or global, the more and more people are wanting to be different. And for us young people, they're looking to become individuals and find their differences amongst themselves. Which is why I prefer the Richard Wilk analogy of globalizing the local and localizing the global. We don't want to be all the same, but we want to respect each other and understand each other. And therefore tradition becomes more important, not less important. Life necessitates a universal world, however, we believe in the security of having a local identity. And this is what the leaders of this region are trying to do. We're trying to be part of this global village, but at the same time we're revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development. I'm a representation of that phenomenon. And I think a lot of people in this room, I can see a lot of you are in the same position as myself. And I'm sure, although we can't see the people in Washington, they are in the same position. We're continuously trying to straddle different worlds, different cultures and trying to meet the challenges of a different expectation from ourselves and from others. So I want to ask a question: What should culture in the 21st century look like? In a time where the world is becoming personalized, when the mobile phone, the burger, the telephone, everything has its own personal identity, how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others? How does that impact our desert culture? I'm not sure of how many of you in Washington are aware of the cultural developments happening in the region and, the more recent, Museum of Islamic Art opened in Qatar in 2008. I myself am personalizing these cultural developments, but I also understand that this has to be done organically. Yes, we do have all the resources that we need in order to develop new cultural institutions, but what I think is more important is that we are very fortunate to have visionary leaders who understand that this can't happen from outside, it has to come from within. And guess what? You might be surprised to know that most people in the Gulf who are leading these cultural initiatives happen to be women. I want to ask you, why do you think this is? Is it because it's a soft option; we have nothing else to do? No, I don't think so. I think that women in this part of the world realize that culture is an important component to connect people both locally and regionally. It's a natural component for bringing people together, discussing ideas — in the same way we're doing here at TED. We're here, we're part of a community, sharing out ideas and discussing them. Art becomes a very important part of our national identity. The existential and social and political impact an artist has on his nation's development of cultural identity is very important. You know, art and culture is big business. Ask me. Ask the chairpersons and CEOs of Sotheby's and Christie's. Ask Charles Saatchi about great art. They make a lot of money. So I think women in our society are becoming leaders, because they realize that for their future generations, it's very important to maintain our cultural identities. Why else do Greeks demand the return of the Elgin Marbles? And why is there an uproar when a private collector tries to sell his collection to a foreign museum? Why does it take me months on end to get an export license from London or New York in order to get pieces into my country? In few hours, Shirin Neshat, my friend from Iran who's a very important artist for us will be talking to you. She lives in New York City, but she doesn't try to be a Western artist. Instead, she tries to engage in a very important dialogue about her culture, nation and heritage. She does that through important visual forms of photography and film. In the same way, Qatar is trying to grow its national museums through an organic process from within. Our mission is of cultural integration and independence. We don't want to have what there is in the West. We don't want their collections. We want to build our own identities, our own fabric, create an open dialogue so that we share our ideas and share yours with us. In a few days, we will be opening the Arab Museum of Modern Art. We have done extensive research to ensure that Arab and Muslim artists, and Arabs who are not Muslims — not all Arabs are Muslims, by the way — but we make sure that they are represented in this new institution. This institution is government-backed and it has been the case for the past three decades. We will open the museum in a few days, and I welcome all of you to get on Qatar Airways and come and join us. (Laughter) Now this museum is just as important to us as the West. Some of you might have heard of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, but I doubt a lot of people know that this artist worked in Picasso's studio in Paris in the 1930s. For me it was a new discovery. And I think with time, in the years to come we'll be learning a lot about our Picassos, our Legers and our Cezannes. We do have artists, but unfortunately we have not discovered them yet. Now visual expression is just one form of culture integration. We have realized that recently more and more people are using the means of YouTube and social networking to express their stories, share their photos and tell their own stories through their own voices. In a similar way, we have created the Doha Film Institute. Now the Doha Film Institute is an organization to teach people about film and filmmaking. Last year we didn't have one Qatari woman filmmaker. Today I am proud to say we have trained and educated over 66 Qatari women filmmakers to edit, tell their own stories in their own voices. (Applause) Now if you'll allow me, I would love to share a one-minute film that has proven to show that a 60-sec film can be as powerful as a haiku in telling a big picture. And this is one of our filmmakers' products. (Video) Boy: Hey listen! Did you know that the stocks are up? Who are you playing? Girl: Uncle Khaled. Here, put on the headscarf. Khaled: Why would I want to put it on? Girl: Do as you're told, young girl. Boy: No, you play mom and I play dad. (Girl: But it's my game.) Play by yourself then. Girl: Women! One word and they get upset. Useless. Thank you. Thank you! (Applause) SM: Going back to straddling between East and West, last month we had our second Doha Tribeca Film Festival here in Doha. The Doha Tribeca Film Festival was held at our new cultural hub, Katara. It attracted 42,000 people, and we showcased 51 films. Now the Doha Tribeca Film Festival is not an imported festival, but rather an important festival between the cities of New York and Doha. It's important for two things. First, it allows us to showcase our Arab filmmakers and voices to one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, New York City. At the same time, we are inviting them to come and explore our part of the world. They're learning our culture, our language, our heritage and realizing we're just as different and just the same as each other. Now over and over again, people have said, "Let's build bridges," and frankly, I want to do more than that. I would like break the walls of ignorance between East and West — no, not the soft option that we have discussed before, but rather the soft power that Joseph Nye has spoken about before. Culture's a very important tool to bring people together. We should not underestimate it. "Know thyself," that is the journey of self-expression and self-realization that we are traveling. Now I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I know that me as an individual and we as a nation welcome this community of ideas worth spreading. This is a very interesting journey. I welcome you on board for us to engage and discuss new ideas of how to bring people together through cultural initiatives and discussions. Familiarity destroys and trumps fear. Try it. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Shokran. (Applause)

Where are the baby dinosaurs?

{0: "Jack Horner and his dig teams have discovered the first evidence of parental care in dinosaurs, extensive nesting grounds, evidence of dinosaur herds, and the world’s first dinosaur embryos. He's now exploring how to build a dinosaur."}

TEDxVancouver

Shall I ask for a show of hands or a clapping of people in different generations? I'm interested in how many are three to 12 years old. (Laughter) None, huh? (Laughter) All right. I'm going to talk about dinosaurs. Do you remember dinosaurs when you were that age? (Applause) Dinosaurs are kind of funny, you know. (Laughter) We're going to kind of go in a different direction right now. I hope you all realize that. So I'll just give you my message up front: Try not to go extinct. (Laughter) That's it. (Laughter) People ask me a lot — in fact, one of the most asked questions I get is, why do children like dinosaurs so much? What's the fascination? And I usually just say, "Well, dinosaurs were big, different and gone." They're all gone. Well that's not true, but we'll get to the goose in a minute. So that's sort of the theme: big, different and gone. The title of my talk: Shape-shifting Dinosaurs: The cause of a premature extinction. Now I assume that we remember dinosaurs. And there's lots of different shapes. Lots of different kinds. A long time ago, back in the early 1900s, museums were out looking for dinosaurs. They went out and gathered them up. And this is an interesting story. Every museum wanted a little bigger or better one than anybody else had. So if the museum in Toronto went out and collected a Tyrannosaur, a big one, then the museum in Ottawa wanted a bigger one, and a better one. And that happened for all museums. So everyone was out looking for all these bigger and better dinosaurs. And this was in the early 1900s. By about 1970, some scientists were sitting around and they thought, "What in the world — Look at these dinosaurs, they're all big. Where are all the little ones?" (Laughter) And they thought about it and they even wrote papers about it: "Where are the little dinosaurs?" (Laughter) Well, go to a museum, you'll see, see how many baby dinosaurs there are. People assumed — and this was actually a problem — people assumed that if they had little dinosaurs, if they had juvenile dinosaurs, they'd be easy to identify. You'd have a big dinosaur and a littler dinosaur. (Laughter) But all they had were big dinosaurs. And it comes down to a couple of things. First off, scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs. They like to name anything. Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named. (Laughter) And so every time they found something that looked a little different, they named it something different. And what happened, of course, is we ended up with a whole bunch of different dinosaurs. In 1975, a light went on in somebody's head. Dr. Peter Dodson at the University of Pennsylvania actually realized that dinosaurs grew kind of like birds do, which is different than the way reptiles grow. And in fact, he used the cassowary as an example. And it's kind of cool — if you look at the cassowary, or any of the birds that have crests on their heads, they grow to about 80 percent adult size before the crest starts to grow. Now think about that. They're basically retaining their juvenile characteristics very late in what we call ontogeny. So allometric cranial ontogeny is relative skull growth. So you can see that if you actually found one that was 80 percent grown and you didn't know that it was going to grow up to a cassowary, you would think they were two different animals. So this was a problem, and Peter Dodson pointed this out using some duck-billed dinosaurs then called Hypacrosaurus. And he showed that if you were to take a baby and an adult and make an average of what it should look like, if it grew in sort of a linear fashion, it would have a crest about half the size of the adult. But the actual subadult at 65 percent had no crest at all. So this was interesting. So this is where people went astray again. I mean, if they'd have just taken that, taken Peter Dodson's work, and gone on with that, then we would have a lot less dinosaurs than we have. But scientists have egos; they like to name things. And so they went on naming dinosaurs because they were different. Now we have a way of actually testing to see whether a dinosaur, or any animal, is a young one or an older one. And that's by actually cutting into their bones. But cutting into the bones of a dinosaur is hard to do, as you can imagine, because in museums, bones are precious. You go into a museum, and they take really good care of them. They put them in foam, little containers. They're very well taken care of. They don't like it if you come in and want to saw them open and look inside. (Laughter) So they don't normally let you do that. (Laughter) But I have a museum and I collect dinosaurs and I can saw mine open. So that's what I do. (Applause) So if you cut open a little dinosaur, it's very spongy inside, like A. And if you cut into an older dinosaur, it's very massive. You can tell it's mature bone. So it's real easy to tell them apart. So what I want to do is show you these. In North America in the northern plains of the United States and the southern plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan, there's this unit of rock called the Hell Creek Formation that produces the last dinosaurs that lived on Earth. And there are 12 of them that everyone recognizes — I mean the 12 primary dinosaurs that went extinct. And so we will evaluate them. And that's sort of what I've been doing. So my students, my staff, we've been cutting them open. Now as you can imagine, cutting open a leg bone is one thing, but when you go to a museum and say, "You don't mind if I cut open your dinosaur's skull, do you?" they say, "Go away." (Laughter) So here are 12 dinosaurs. And we want to look at these three first. So these are dinosaurs that are called Pachycephalosaurus. And everybody knows that these three animals are related. And the assumption is that they're related like cousins or whatever. But no one ever considered that they might be more closely related. In other words, people looked at them and they saw the differences. And you all know that if you are going to determine whether you're related to your brother or your sister, you can't do it by looking at differences. You can only determine relatedness by looking for similarities. So people were looking at these and they were talking about how different they are. Pachycephalosaurus has a big, thick dome on its head, and it's got some little bumps on the back of its head, and it's got a bunch of gnarly things on the end of its nose. And then Stygimoloch, another dinosaur from the same age, lived at the same time, has spikes sticking out the back of its head. It's got a little, tiny dome, and it's got a bunch of gnarly stuff on its nose. And then there's this thing called Dracorex hogwartsia. Guess where that came from? Dragon. So here's a dinosaur that has spikes sticking out of its head, no dome and gnarly stuff on its nose. Nobody noticed the gnarly stuff sort of looked alike. But they did look at these three and they said, "These are three different dinosaurs, and Dracorex is probably the most primitive of them. And the other one is more primitive than the other." It's unclear to me how they actually sorted these three of them out. But if you line them up, if you just take those three skulls and just line them up, they line up like this. Dracorex is the littlest one, Stygimoloch is the middle-size one, Pachycephalosaurus is the largest one. And one would think, that should give me a clue. (Laughter) But it didn't give them a clue. (Laughter) Because, well we know why. Scientists like to name things. So if we cut open Dracorex — I cut open our Dracorex — and look, it was spongy inside, really spongy inside. I mean, it is a juvenile and it's growing really fast. So it is going to get bigger. If you cut open Stygimoloch, it is doing the same thing. The dome, that little dome, is growing really fast. It's inflating very fast. What's interesting is the spike on the back of the Dracorex was growing very fast as well. The spikes on the back of the Stygimoloch are actually resorbing, which means they're getting smaller as that dome is getting bigger. And if we look at Pachycephalosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus has a solid dome and its little bumps on the back of its head were also resorbing. So just with these three dinosaurs, as a scientist, we can easily hypothesize that it is just a growth series of the same animal. Which of course means that Stygimoloch and Dracorex are extinct. (Laughter) OK. (Laughter) Which of course means we have 10 primary dinosaurs to deal with. So a colleague of mine at Berkeley — he and I were looking at Triceratops. And before the year 2000 — now remember, Triceratops was first found in the 1800s — before 2000, no one had ever seen a juvenile Triceratops. There's a Triceratops in every museum in the world, but no one had ever collected a juvenile. And we know why, right? Because everybody wants to have a big one. So everyone had a big one. So we went out and collected a whole bunch of stuff and we found a whole bunch of little ones. They're everywhere, they're all over the place. So we have a whole bunch of them at our museum. (Laughter) And everybody says it's because I have a little museum. When you have a little museum, you have little dinosaurs. (Laughter) If you look at the Triceratops, you can see it's changing, it's shape-shifting. As the juveniles are growing up, their horns actually curve backwards. And then as they get older, the horns grow forward. And that's pretty cool. If you look along the edge of the frill, they have these little triangular bones that actually grow big as triangles and then they flatten against the frill pretty much like the spikes do on the Pachycephalosaurs. And then, because the juveniles are in my collection, I cut them open ... (Laughter) and look inside. And the little one is really spongy. And the middle-size one is really spongy. But what was interesting was the adult Triceratops was also spongy. And this is a skull that is two meters long. It's a big skull. But there's another dinosaur that is found in this formation that looks like a Triceratops, except it's bigger, and it's called Torosaurus. And Torosaurus, when we cut into it, has mature bone. But it's got these big holes in its shield. And everybody says, "A Triceratops and a Torosaurus can't possibly be the same animal because one of them's bigger than the other one." (Laughter) "And it has holes in its frill." And I said, "Well do we have any juvenile Torosauruses?" And they said, "Well, no, but it has holes in its frill." So one of my graduate students, John Scannella, looked through our whole collection and he actually discovered that the hole starting to form in Triceratops and, of course it's open, in Torosaurus — so he found the transitional ones between Triceratops and Torosaurus, which was pretty cool. So now we know that Torosaurus is actually a grown-up Triceratops. Now when we name dinosaurs, when we name anything, the original name gets to stick and the second name is thrown out. So Torosaurus is extinct. Triceratops, if you've heard the news, a lot of the newscasters got it all wrong. They thought Torosaurus should be kept and Triceratops thrown out, but that's not going to happen. (Laughter) All right, so we can do this with a bunch of dinosaurs. I mean, here's Edmontosaurus and Anatotitan. Anatotitan: giant duck. It's a giant duck-bill dinosaur. Here's another one. So we look at the bone histology. The bone histology tells us that Edmontosaurus is a juvenile, or at least a subadult, and the other one is an adult, and we have an ontogeny. And we get rid of Anatotitan. So we can just keep doing this. And the last one is T. Rex. So there's these two dinosaurs, T. Rex and Nanotyrannus. (Laughter) Again, it makes you wonder. (Laughter) But they had a good question. They were looking at them and they said, "One's got 17 teeth, and the biggest one's got 12 teeth. And that doesn't make any sense at all, because we don't know of any dinosaurs that gain teeth as they get older. So it must be true — they must be different." So we cut into them. And sure enough, Nanotyrannus has juvenile bone and the bigger one has more mature bone. It looks like it could still get bigger. And at the Museum of the Rockies where we work, I have four T. rexes, so I can cut a whole bunch of them. But I didn't have to cut any of them really, because I just lined up their jaws and it turned out the biggest one had 12 teeth and the next smallest one had 13 and the next smallest had 14. And of course, Nano has 17. And we just went out and looked at other people's collections and we found one that has sort of 15 teeth. So again, real easy to say that Tyrannosaurus ontogeny included Nanotyrannus, and therefore we can take out another dinosaur. (Laughter) So when it comes down to our end Cretaceous, we have seven left. And that's a good number. That's a good number to go extinct, I think. Now as you can imagine, this is not very popular with fourth-graders. (Laughter) Fourth-graders love their dinosaurs, they memorize them. And they're not happy with this. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause)

Impossible photography

{0: 'Photographer Erik Johansson creates impossible but photorealistic images that capture an idea, not a moment.'}

TEDSalon London Fall 2011

I'm here to share my photography. Or is it photography? Because, of course, this is a photograph that you can't take with your camera. Yet, my interest in photography started as I got my first digital camera at the age of 15. It mixed with my earlier passion for drawing, but it was a bit different, because using the camera, the process was in the planning instead. And when you take a photograph with a camera, the process ends when you press the trigger. So to me it felt like photography was more about being at the right place and the right time. I felt like anyone could do that. So I wanted to create something different, something where the process starts when you press the trigger. Photos like this: construction going on along a busy road. But it has an unexpected twist. And despite that, it retains a level of realism. Or photos like these — both dark and colorful, but all with a common goal of retaining the level of realism. When I say realism, I mean photo-realism. Because, of course, it's not something you can capture really, but I always want it to look like it could have been captured somehow as a photograph. Photos where you will need a brief moment to think to figure out the trick. So it's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment really. But what's the trick that makes it look realistic? Is it something about the details or the colors? Is it something about the light? What creates the illusion? Sometimes the perspective is the illusion. But in the end, it comes down to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface. It's not really what is realistic, it's what we think looks realistic really. So I think the basics are quite simple. I just see it as a puzzle of reality where you can take different pieces of reality and put it together to create alternate reality. And let me show you a simple example. Here we have three perfectly imaginable physical objects, something we all can relate to living in a three-dimensional world. But combined in a certain way, they can create something that still looks three-dimensional, like it could exist. But at the same time, we know it can't. So we trick our brains, because our brain simply doesn't accept the fact that it doesn't really make sense. And I see the same process with combining photographs. It's just really about combining different realities. So the things that make a photograph look realistic, I think it's the things that we don't even think about, the things all around us in our daily lives. But when combining photographs, this is really important to consider, because otherwise it just looks wrong somehow. So I would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result. As you can see, these images aren't really special. But combined, they can create something like this. So the first rule is that photos combined should have the same perspective. Secondly, photos combined should have the same type of light. And these two images both fulfill these two requirements — shot at the same height and in the same type of light. The third one is about making it impossible to distinguish where the different images begin and end by making it seamless. Make it impossible to say how the image actually was composed. So by matching color, contrast and brightness in the borders between the different images, adding photographic defects like depth of field, desaturated colors and noise, we erase the borders between the different images and make it look like one single image, despite the fact that one image can contain hundreds of layers basically. So here's another example. (Laughter) One might think that this is just an image of a landscape and the lower part is what's manipulated. But this image is actually entirely composed of photographs from different locations. I personally think that it's easier to actually create a place than to find a place, because then you don't need to compromise with the ideas in your head. But it does require a lot of planning. And getting this idea during winter, I knew that I had several months to plan it, to find the different locations for the pieces of the puzzle basically. So for example, the fish was captured on a fishing trip. The shores are from a different location. The underwater part was captured in a stone pit. And yeah, I even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more Swedish. So to achieve a realistic result, I think it comes down to planning. It always starts with a sketch, an idea. Then it's about combining the different photographs. And here every piece is very well planned. And if you do a good job capturing the photos, the result can be quite beautiful and also quite realistic. So all the tools are out there, and the only thing that limits us is our imagination. Thank you. (Applause)

Everyday leadership

{0: 'Drew Dudley believes leadership is not a characteristic reserved for the extraordinary. He works to help people discover the leader within themselves.'}

TEDxToronto 2010

I wanted to just start by asking everyone a question: How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader? I've asked that question all across the country, and everywhere I ask it, no matter where, there's a huge portion of the audience that won't put up their hand. And I've come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us; something beyond us. We've made it about changing the world. We've taken this title of "leader" and treat it as something that one day we're going to deserve. But to give it to ourselves right now means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we're not comfortable with. And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do, that we've convinced ourselves those are the only things worth celebrating. We start to devalue the things we can do every day, We take moments where we truly are a leader and we don't let ourselves take credit for it, or feel good about it. I've been lucky enough over the last 10 years to work with amazing people who've helped me redefine leadership in a way that I think has made me happier. With my short time today, I want to share with you the one story that is probably most responsible for that redefinition. I went to a little school called Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. And on my last day there, a girl came up to me and said, "I remember the first time I met you." And she told me a story that had happened four years earlier. She said, "On the day before I started university, I was in the hotel room with my mom and dad, and I was so scared and so convinced that I couldn't do this, that I wasn't ready for university, that I just burst into tears. My mom and dad were amazing. They were like, "We know you're scared, but let's just go tomorrow, go to the first day, and if at any point you feel as if you can't do this, that's fine; tell us, and we'll take you home. We love you no matter what.'" She says, "So I went the next day. I was in line for registration, and I looked around and just knew I couldn't do it; I wasn't ready. I knew I had to quit. I made that decision and as soon as I made it, an incredible feeling of peace came over me. I turned to my mom and dad to tell them we needed to go home, and at that moment, you came out of the student union building wearing the stupidest hat I've ever seen in my life." (Laughter) "It was awesome. And you had a big sign promoting Shinerama," — which is Students Fighting Cystic Fibrosis, a charity I've worked with for years — "And you had a bucketful of lollipops. You were handing the lollipops out to people in line, and talking about Shinerama. All of the sudden, you got to me, and you just stopped. And you stared. It was creepy." (Laughter) This girl knows what I'm talking about. (Laughter) "Then you looked at the guy next to me, smiled, reached into your bucket, pulled out a lollipop, held it out to him and said, 'You need to give a lollipop to the beautiful woman next to you.'" She said, "I've never seen anyone get more embarrassed faster in my life. He turned beet red, he wouldn't even look at me. He just kind of held the lollipop out like this." (Laughter) "I felt so bad for this dude that I took the lollipop. As soon as I did, you got this incredibly severe look on your face, looked at my mom and dad and said, 'Look at that! Look at that! First day away from home, and already she's taking candy from a stranger?'" (Laughter) She said, "Everybody lost it. Twenty feet in every direction, everyone started to howl. I know this is cheesy, and I don't know why I'm telling you this, but in that moment when everyone was laughing, I knew I shouldn't quit. I knew I was where I was supposed to be; I knew I was home. And I haven't spoken to you once in the four years since that day. But I heard that you were leaving, and I had to come and tell you you've been an incredibly important person in my life. I'm going to miss you. Good luck." And she walks away, and I'm flattened. She gets six feet away, turns around, smiles and goes, "You should probably know this, too: I'm still dating that guy, four years later." (Laughter) A year and a half after I moved to Toronto, I got an invitation to their wedding. (Laughter) Here's the kicker: I don't remember that. I have no recollection of that moment. I've searched my memory banks, because that is funny and I should remember doing it and I don't. That was such an eye-opening, transformative moment for me, to think that maybe the biggest impact I'd ever had on anyone's life, a moment that had a woman walk up to a stranger four years later and say, "You've been an important person in my life," was a moment that I didn't even remember. How many of you guys have a lollipop moment, a moment where someone said or did something that you feel fundamentally made your life better? All right. How many of you have told that person they did it? See, why not? We celebrate birthdays, where all you have to do is not die for 365 days — (Laughter) Yet we let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it. Every single one of you has been the catalyst for a lollipop moment. You've made someone's life better by something you said or did. If you think you haven't, think of all the hands that didn't go up when I asked. You're just one of the people who hasn't been told. It's scary to think of ourselves as that powerful, frightening to think we can matter that much to other people. As long as we make leadership something bigger than us, as long as we keep leadership beyond us and make it about changing the world, we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day, from ourselves and from each other. Marianne Williamson said, "Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. [It] is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light and not our darkness that frightens us." My call to action today is that we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each other's lives. We need to get over it so we can move beyond it, and our little brothers and sisters and one day our kids — or our kids right now — can watch and start to value the impact we can have on each other's lives, more than money and power and titles and influence. We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments — how many of them we create, how many we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward and how many we say thank you for. Because we've made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world. There's only six billion understandings of it. And if you change one person's understanding of it, understanding of what they're capable of, understanding of how much people care about them, understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you've changed the whole thing. And if we can understand leadership like that, I think if we can redefine leadership like that, I think we can change everything. And it's a simple idea, but I don't think it's a small one. I want to thank you so much for letting me share it with you today.

Deaf in the military

{0: "Keith Nolan doesn't believe his deafness should be a barrier to serving his country -- and is making the case for increasing the role of citizens with disabilities in the military. "}

TEDxIslay

(Interpreter voice-over) Hello, everyone. My name is Keith Nolan. I’m a cadet private. My talk today is on the topic of the military. How many of you out there thought you’d ever like to join the military? I see a number of you nodding. And I thought the same thing ever since I was young. Growing up, I’d always wanted to join the military. I loved military history and I’ve read a great deal on the subject. Also, I have various family members, such as my grandfather and great uncle, who fought in World War II. And like them, I wanted the same thing: to serve my country. So the question is: Can I? No, I can’t. Why? Simply because I’m deaf. Regardless of that fact, I still had that longing to join the military. For example, after I graduated from high school, three months before 9/11 occurred, I went to a naval recruiting center with high hopes of joining the navy. I went in and a strapping naval man stood up and addressed me. As he was speaking to me, it was impossible for me to read his lips, so I said, “I'm sorry, I’m deaf.” He tore off a little piece of paper and wrote down three words: “Bad ear. Disqual.” He didn't even fully spell out "Disqualified," just: “Bad ear. Disqual.” So I went on my way. I tried various locations a number of different times, trying to join, but over and over again, I got the same response: “Sorry, you’re deaf. We can’t accept you.” So I shifted gears and decided to become a teacher. I completed a master's in deaf education and taught for almost two years, until this past spring, when three things occurred that changed that course, the first of which, while I was teaching a high school history class. I’d lectured on the Mexican-American War. The bell had rung, and I was seated at my desk, when one of my students, who is deaf, approached me and said that he’d like to join the military. I said, “Ah, sorry. You can’t. You're deaf.” Then I caught myself. It struck me that all along I had been told no, I can’t, and now I was perpetuating that same message to the next generation, to my own student. That realization had a large impact that really resonated with me. Now, the second thing that happened, my friend had just moved to Israel. Did you know that in Israel they accept deaf people into the military? How can deaf people be in the military, right? Could this really be true? Come on! Well, I went to Israel last summer to see for myself. I interviewed 10 deaf Israeli soldiers, all of those video interviews and questions I’ve compiled, and the findings, I’ll share with you later. Thirdly, CSUN here, my alma mater, had recently started up an Army ROTC program. ROTC, which stands for Reserve Officer Training Corps, allows students working on their college majors to concurrently participate in the ROTC program. Upon graduation, ROTC students have a military career ready and waiting for them. So if one joined the army, one could commission as a second lieutenant. That's generally the ROTC program here at CSUN. Having learned that, I was intrigued. I already had a profession as a teacher, but I went ahead anyway and sent an email off to the program, explaining that I was a teacher of the deaf, wondering if I could take a few classes with them and perhaps share their lessons with my students. I got an email response back, and surprisingly, it was the first time that I wasn't told, "Sorry, no, you can’t. You’re deaf." It said, "Well, that's interesting. I think maybe we can work something out and you can take a few classes with us." This was unprecedented. So naturally, I was shocked. Although I was teaching, I decided I had to grab the opportunity right away and get my foot in the door. Altogether, that's how it transpired. Now, with all my life experiences, having talked with all the people I had, and given everything I’ve read, I decided to write a research paper called “Deaf in the Military.” I'll share with you what those 98 pages entail. Here in America, we’ve actually had deaf soldiers serving in the past. In fact, during the Texas War of Independence, there was a key character named Deaf Smith, who made a large contribution to that war effort. For the American Civil War, Gallaudet University actually has archived a list of deaf soldiers in that war from the North and the South, showing that deaf soldiers were even fighting against each other. During World War II, there are a few rare examples of deaf people who made it into the military at that time and were able to serve their country as well. History illustrates the fact that America has had deaf soldiers, in contrast to today. In my paper, I also discuss the deaf Israeli soldiers. I learned that they serve in non-combat roles. The deaf soldiers are not on the front lines engaged in fire, but rather, are behind the lines serving in supportive roles. There are a plethora of various non-combat jobs accessible to the deaf: intelligence, computer technology, map drawing, supply, military dog training — the list goes on. The communication between deaf Israeli soldiers and other soldiers who are hearing is carried out with the same approaches deaf people in general use with the hearing public on a daily basis. You can use your voice, lip-read, gestures, sometimes another soldier knows sign language and that can be utilized, pen and paper, texts, computers, emails — seriously, there’s no magic wand necessary. It's the same thing we do every day. Interpreters are used there primarily for boot camp training. For the average work, it’s not necessary to have an interpreter by your side. The Israeli Army is comprised of small groups. Each of these units with deaf soldiers have developed their own way of communicating with each other, so there’s no need for interpreters. The top picture is of one soldier I met. The bottom photo is of Prime Minister Begin with a deaf soldier in Israel. Another part of my paper touches on disabled soldiers in the US Military. Obviously, military work can be dangerous and involve injury. One example here is Captain Luckett. Due to an explosion, he lost his leg. He’s recovered and currently has a prosthetic leg. Now that he’s strong, he's back in combat, still fighting in Afghanistan. It’s remarkable. And guess what? He’s not the only one. There are 40 other soldiers like him, amputees who are serving in combat zones. Incredible. Also, we have a blind soldier here. While he was in Iraq, an explosion from a suicide car bomber destroyed his eyesight. He’s recovered and hasn’t left the army. The army has retained him on active duty, and he’s currently running a hospital for wounded soldiers. I also found out online about another soldier, who is deaf in one ear. He’s developed civil programs in Iraq, one of which actually started a school for the deaf in Iraq. All of this is incredible. But I am going to ask all of you: If the US Military can retain their disabled soldiers, why can’t they accept disabled citizens as well? Moreover, out of all the US Military jobs, 80% are non-combat positions. There are many jobs that we in the Deaf community can do. If I were to be in the military, I’d like to do intelligence work. But there is an array of other things we can do, such as mechanics, finance, medicine, etc. So to summarize, I’ve presented three premises to support my argument, the first being, Israeli defense openly accepts deaf soldiers. If you have the qualities and skills required, they’ll take you. Secondly, the US Military has accommodations for retaining their disabled soldiers. And lastly, 80% of occupations in the military are non-combat. Now, can we Deaf Americans serve our country? Yes! Of course! Absolutely, without a doubt! Now I’ll explain a bit about my experience in the Army ROTC, which began last fall. I have been involved with that thus far and it’s still going on now. Really, I need to preface this by saying that this is the first time my battalion had ever had a deaf cadet. They had never experienced that before. So of course, they were taken aback, wondering, initially, how I would do this or that, how would we communicate and such, which is a natural reaction, considering that many of them had never interacted with a deaf person prior to me. Plus, I was taken aback by this — it was the real thing, the army. I had to learn a whole new world, full of military jargon, with its own culture and everything. So we started out slow, getting to know each other and learning how to work together, progressively. For example, on the first day of class, I had no uniform. So I showed up in regular clothes, while the other cadets were all in uniform. I found out that every morning at 5:30, there was physical training, PT. On Fridays, there would be field training — labs — off-campus, and occasionally, we would have weekend training at a military base. So I showed up, ready, each morning at 5:30, with all the cadets in uniform and me in civilian clothes. They told me, “Hey, you know, you don't need to work out. You can just simply take classes.” I told them I wanted to, anyway. They acknowledged that, and I continued to show up every morning to train. When Friday came, I asked if I could do the field training. I was told no, just stick with class. I insisted that I wanted to try. Somewhat reluctantly, they let me attend the lab, but only as an observer; I would only be allowed to sit and watch, not participate. Alright, so, I showed up on Friday, and watched as the cadets learned marching drill commands, like how to stand at attention, how to properly salute, and all the basics. I had to ask again if I could join. Finally, I got the go-ahead. I went to get in formation. I figured I better stand in the second line, so I could watch what the cadets were doing in the row ahead of me. But the officer who opened the door for me to join the ROTC program spotted me in the back and said, “Hey! Uh-uh. I want you in the front. You want to be a soldier? You've got to learn the commands just like the rest of them. You’re not going to follow other people. Learn it yourself!” I thought, "Wow. He’s viewing me like any person, giving dignity to who I am." I was impressed by that. So as the weeks went by, I still didn’t have a uniform. I asked if it would be possible to get one, but I was told it wasn't. So I continued on that way, until one day, I was informed that I’d be getting a uniform. "Please!" I said, “Really? Why? What changed?” I was told, “We see your motivation, you show up every morning, dedicated, and always gave a 110% effort.” They wanted to give me the uniform. It was remarkable. We went to the warehouse to get my uniform. I assumed I’d just get a uniform and a pair of boots, nothing more. But they filled two duffel bags chock-full of gear: helmet, ammo vest, shovel, sleeping bag — the whole nine yards. I was astonished. And I have to tell you, each morning that I get up and put on my uniform, I feel privileged. It’s truly an honor to wear the uniform. So, moving along, when it came time to train at the garrison base, at first, I was told I couldn’t go. There was concern on the ROTC's part that if the interpreter were to get injured during the training, it would be a liability issue. So we had to figure out all those issues and confusion, but we worked it out, and in the end, they let me go. That's how events were unfolding; I was permitted to do more and more. Once, at the garrison base, during one of the training days, a huge Chinook helicopter with its tandem rotors landed right down to us, forcefully spinning exhilaration in the air. All of us cadets were supposed to be getting on board. Everyone was geared up and ready. However, the cadre had decided I wasn’t going to be able to ride the Chinook. They were afraid if the pilot shouted out orders, how would I be able to follow the instructions? I’d potentially cause a disruption. So I had to stand aside, while the others were filing toward the helicopter. I could see the cadre huddled up, discussing, mulling it over. At the last minute, one of them said, “Come on! Get on the helicopter!” I rushed over and got in. It was such a thrill. And that was the spirit of learning about and supporting one another that carried over. And since then, I’ve been involved in everything they do, without any separation. This is where my passion lies. I love them. I’ll show you some pictures here. Bruin Battalion, Bravo Company — that’s the name of the group I belong to. The cadre are the officers and sergeants who oversee the ROTC program. In the beginning, you can see, it was a bit of an awkward phase. But once they learned more about me and what I’m capable of doing, there's been tremendous support and unity. The cadets, my fellow peers — well, when you train and sweat together, you feel the bond of camaraderie right away. A brother- or sisterly cohesiveness makes them like family. In training and military science classes, we learn theories of warfare, how to lead soldiers, how to do reconnaissance, strategies, how to knock out a bunker and land navigation, where you’re finding your way out in the mountains. As far as accommodations, I’ve been provided with interpreters through the National Center on Deafness, NCOD, here at CSUN. And I really have to thank them, because it's hard to find interpreters who are willing to wake up at 4:30 in the morning, or sometimes even 3:30 in the morning. That's the officer who emailed me back, saying I think you can have a few classes with us. That's Lieutenant Mendoza. That’s my interpreter there, before class starts. This is a picture from last fall, when we were new to training. This is Lieutenant Colonel Phelps, this being his name sign. He's the commanding officer of the entire Bruin Battalion. Every time I see him walk by, it’s rather inspiring. I mean, the way he presents himself, you can see he’s the epitome of a soldier. Plus, he doesn't view me as a deaf person. He looks at my skills and capabilities instead. He’s really pushed for me, and I respect him for all that. That’s me during one of the exercises. This is that Chinook helicopter I almost didn’t get on. Every cadet has a mentor. My mentor is Cinatl. He’s a really sharp soldier. He teaches me all the finer points and how to execute them ideally. This top picture is when a group of us went to Las Vegas to compete in a test, to see if we could match the German troops' physical training standards. It involved swimming, timed sprints, marksmanship and numerous fitness events. I passed them and satisfied the requirements to be awarded the gold German Armed Forces Proficiency Badge right here. This is one of the sergeants, Sergeant Richardson. I love this guy. He doesn't take baloney from any of us cadets. Here I am one morning, when we trekked seven and a half miles with a 40-pound rucksack in less than two hours. Here are a few of my fellow cadets. I've been with them long enough that I’ve developed name signs for them. On the right, here, is Trinidad. I gave him this name sign because he's always very sarcastic. He's a veteran, having served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The female is Frigo, whose nickname is "Refrigerator," hence her name sign. We’re always competing intellectually in class. The cadet on the end is Jarvy. He's a top athlete. I've given him this sign because of the scar he has here. Do you know who this is? This is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is the highest-ranking military officer and principal military advisor to President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates. He gave a talk at UCLA to a full house. Afterwards, I lined up to shake his hand. Having done so, I greeted him, “It’s a great pleasure to meet you.” I signed and my interpreter voiced for me. Admiral Mullen turned to the interpreter and said, “It’s nice to meet you,” addressing the interpreter, who refrained to clarify. He seemed a little confused and just quickly moved on to shake hands with the rest of the soldiers. So I’m not sure whether he really knew that I'm deaf or not. So everything’s been moving along, gung-ho, full speed ahead, until two weeks ago, when something occurred. Well, the ROTC has four levels. I’m currently doing the first two levels, which finishes up this May. The third level will begin in the fall. But in order to move up, you need to pass a medical exam. Obviously, I’m deaf, so I’d fail a hearing test. So we sat down, and I was told that if I wanted to continue to the third level, I couldn’t do any of the PT workouts in the morning, nor the Friday lab field trainings, nor the army base trainings. My uniform, I would have to give back as well. I could take the classes, audit them, and that’s all. It really hit me. It was a huge blow. Many of the officers and cadets have empathized with this sudden shock of disappointment, and are wondering why this has to be the case. Colonel Phelps has tried to speak with the higher-ups in the chain of command and explain to them that I’m one of the top cadets, having passed all the events and receiving high marks on my exams. But their response is unwavering: policy is policy, and if you’re deaf, you’re disqualified. I know that the cadre has tried to find various ways. They found out that there's a deaf cadet at The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina. That particular cadet will be completing his fourth year there and graduating this May. Yet, he's in the same predicament that I'm in — unable to join the army because he’s deaf. Yet, all of my fellow cadets and the officers have told me not to give up; the policy must change. I was advised to talk with my congressman. And I've brought this issue to Henry Waxman, the district congressman here in LA, to get the ball rolling with his advocacy for my cause. However, I need your help and support to lobby. All of us, you know? If you remember back in US history, African-Americans were told they couldn’t join the military, and now they serve. Women as well were banned, but now they've been allowed. The military has and is changing. Today is our time. Now it’s our turn. Hooah! (Applause)

The toxic baby

{0: 'Tyrone Hayes studies frogs and amphibians -- and the effects on their bodies of common farming chemicals.', 1: 'Penelope Jagessar Chaffer made the film "Toxic Baby," exploring environmental toxins through interviews and surreal imagery.'}

TEDWomen 2010

Penelope Jagessar Chaffer: I was going to ask if there's a doctor in the house. No, I'm just joking. It's interesting, because it was six years ago when I was pregnant with my first child that I discovered that the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body. Now it's very easy actually to get a chemical compound from products into the human body through the skin. And these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors. That was the start of my journey to make this film, "Toxic Baby." And it doesn't take much time to discover some really astonishing statistics with this issue. One is that you and I all have between 30 to 50,000 chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents didn't have. And many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronic childhood disease that we're seeing across industrialized nations. I'll show you some statistics. So for example, in the United Kingdom, the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by 20 percent just in a generation. Very similar statistic for childhood cancer in the U.S. In Canada, we're now looking at one in 10 Canadian children with asthma. That's a four-fold increase. Again, similar story around the world. In the United States, probably the most astonishing statistic is a 600 percent increase in autism and autistic spectrum disorders and other learning disabilities. Again, we're seeing that trend across Europe, across North America. And in Europe, there's certain parts of Europe, where we're seeing a four-fold increase in certain genital birth defects. Interestingly, one of those birth defects has seen a 200 percent increase in the U.S. So a real skyrocketing of chronic childhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes, premature puberty. So it's interesting for me, when I'm looking for someone who can really talk to me and talk to an audience about these things, that probably one of the most important people in the world who can discuss toxicity in babies is expert in frogs. (Laughter) Tyrone Hayes: It was a surprise to me as well that I would be talking about pesticides, that I'd be talking about public health, because, in fact, I never thought I would do anything useful. (Laughter) Frogs. In fact, my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when I was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if I would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians, or my frogs. It turns out, atrazine is the largest selling product for the largest chemical company in the world. It's the number one contaminant of groundwater, drinking water, rain water. In 2003, after my studies, it was banned in the European Union, but in that same year, the United States EPA re-registered the compound. We were a bit surprised when we found out that when we exposed frogs to very low levels of atrazine — 0.1 parts per billion — that it produced animals that look like this. These are the dissected gonads of an animal that has two testes, two ovaries, another large testis, more ovaries, which is not normal ... (Laughter) even for amphibians. In some cases, another species like the North American Leopard Frog showed that males exposed to atrazine grew eggs in their testes. And you can see these large, yolked-up eggs bursting through the surface of this male's testes. Now my wife tells me, and I'm sure Penelope can as well, that there's nothing more painful than childbirth — which that I'll never experience, I can't really argue that — but I would guess that a dozen chicken eggs in my testicle would probably be somewhere in the top five. (Laughter) In recent studies that we've published, we've shown that some of these animals when they're exposed to atrazine, some of the males grow up and completely become females. So these are actually two brothers consummating a relationship. And not only do these genetic males mate with other males, they actually have the capacity to lay eggs even though they're genetic males. What we proposed, and what we've now generated support for, is that what atrazine is doing is wreaking havoc causing a hormone imbalance. Normally the testes should make testosterone, the male hormone. But what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme, the machinery if you will, aromatase, that converts testosterone into estrogen. And as a result, these exposed males lose their testosterone, they're chemically castrated, and they're subsequently feminized because now they're making the female hormone. Now this is what brought me to the human-related issues. Because it turns out that the number one cancer in women, breast cancer, is regulated by estrogen and by this enzyme aromatase. So when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast, aromatase converts androgens into estrogens, and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads. In fact, this aromatase is so important in breast cancer that the latest treatment for breast cancer is a chemical called letrozole, which blocks aromatase, blocks estrogen, so that if you developed a mutated cell, it doesn't grow into a tumor. Now what's interesting is, of course, that we're still using 80 million pounds of atrazine, the number one contaminant in drinking water, that does the opposite — turns on aromatase, increases estrogen and promotes tumors in rats and is associated with tumors, breast cancer, in humans. What's interesting is, in fact, the same company that sold us 80 million pounds of atrazine, the breast cancer promoter, now sells us the blocker — the exact same company. And so I find it interesting that instead of treating this disease by preventing exposure to the chemicals that promote it, we simply respond by putting more chemicals into the environment. PJC: So speaking of estrogen, one of the other compounds that Tyrone talks about in the film is something called bisphenol A, BPA, which has been in the news recently. It's a plasticizer. It's a compound that's found in polycarbonate plastic, which is what baby bottles are made out of. And what's interesting about BPA is that it's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy. And there have been many, many, many studies that have shown that BPA leaches from babies' bottles into the formula, into the milk, and therefore into the babies. So we're dosing our babies, our newborns, our infants, with a synthetic estrogen. Now two weeks ago or so, the European Union passed a law banning the use of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. And for those of you who are not parents, sippy cups are those little plastic things that your child graduates to after using bottles. But just two weeks before that, the U.S. Senate refused to even debate the banning of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. So it really makes you realize the onus on parents to have to look at this and regulate this and police this in their own lives and how astonishing that is. (Video) PJC: With many plastic baby bottles now proven to leak the chemical bisphenol A, it really shows how sometimes it is only a parent's awareness that stands between chemicals and our children. The baby bottle scenario proves that we can prevent unnecessary exposure. However, if we parents are unaware, we are leaving our children to fend for themselves. TH: And what Penelope says here is even more true. For those of you who don't know, we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. Scientists agree now. We are losing species from the Earth faster than the dinosaurs disappeared, and leading that loss are amphibians. 80 percent of all amphibians are threatened and in come decline. And I believe, many scientists believe that pesticides are an important part of that decline. In part, amphibians are good indicators and more sensitive because they don't have protection from contaminants in the water — no eggshells, no membranes and no placenta. In fact, our invention — by "our" I mean we mammals — one of our big inventions was the placenta. But we also start out as aquatic organisms. But it turns out that this ancient structure that separates us from other animals, the placenta, cannot evolve or adapt fast enough because of the rate that we're generating new chemicals that it's never seen before. The evidence of that is that studies in rats, again with atrazine, show that the hormone imbalance atrazine generates causes abortion. Because maintaining a pregnancy is dependent on hormones. Of those rats that don't abort, atrazine causes prostate disease in the pups so the sons are born with an old man's disease. Of those that don't abort, atrazine causes impaired mammary, or breast, development in the exposed daughters in utero, so that their breast don't develop properly. And as a result, when those rats grow up, their pups experience retarded growth and development because they can't make enough milk to nourish their pups. So the pup you see on the bottom is affected by atrazine that its grandmother was exposed to. And given the life of many of these chemicals, generations, years, dozens of years, that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren's grandchildren by things that we're putting into the environment today. And this is not just philosophical, it's already known, that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen, PCBs, DDT cross the placenta and effectively determine the likelihood of developing breast cancer and obesity and diabetes already when the baby's in the womb. In addition to that, after the baby's born, our other unique invention as mammals is that we nourish our offspring after they're born. We already know that chemicals like DDT and DES and atrazine can also pass over into milk, again, affecting our babies even after their born. PJC: So when Tyrone tells me that the placenta is an ancient organ, I'm thinking, how do I demonstrate that? How do you show that? And it's interesting when you make a film like this, because you're stuck trying to visualize science that there's no visualization for. And I have to take a little bit of artistic license. (Video) (Ringing) Old man: Placenta control. What is it? Oh what? (Snoring) (Honk) Puffuffuff, what? Perflourooctanoic acid. Blimey. Never heard of it. PJC: And neither had I actually before I started making this film. And so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child, it made me start to think, what would my fetus say to me? What would our unborn children say to us when they have an exposure that's happening everyday, day after day? (Music) (Video) Child: Today, I had some octyphenols, some artificial musks and some bisphenol A. Help me. PJC: It's a very profound notion to know that we as women are at the vanguard of this. This is our issue, because we collect these compounds our entire life and then we end up dumping it and dumping them into our unborn children. We are in effect polluting our children. And this was something that was really brought home to me a year ago when I found out I was pregnant and the first scan revealed that my baby had a birth defect associated with exposure to estrogenic chemicals in the womb and the second scan revealed no heartbeat. So my child's death, my baby's death, really brought home the resonance of what I was trying to make in this film. And it's sometimes a weird place when the communicator becomes part of the story, which is not what you originally intend. And so when Tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment, this is my contaminated environment. This is my toxic baby. And that's something that's just profound and sad, but astonishing because so many of us don't actually know this. TH: One of this things that's exciting and appropriate for me to be here at TEDWomen is that, well, I think it was summed up best last night at dinner when someone said, "Turn to the man at your table and tell them, 'When the revolution starts, we've got your back.'" The truth is, women, you've had our back on this issue for a very long time, starting with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" to Theo Colborn's "Our Stolen Future" to Sandra Steingraber's books "Living Downstream" and "Having Faith." And perhaps it's the connection to our next generation — like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about 13 years ago — perhaps it's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area. But for the men here, I want to say it's not just women and children that are at risk. And the frogs that are exposed to atrazine, the testes are full of holes and spaces, because the hormone imbalance, instead of allowing sperm to be generated, such as in the testis here, the testicular tubules end up empty and fertility goes down by as much as 50 percent. It's not just my work in amphibians, but similar work has been shown in fish in Europe, holes in the testes and absence of sperm in reptiles in a group from South America and in rats, an absence of sperm in the testicular tubules as well. And of course, we don't do these experiments in humans, but just by coincidence, my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count, low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine. These are just men who live in an agricultural community. Men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine. And the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine, up to levels that are 24,000 times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men. Of course, most of them, 90 percent are Mexican, Mexican-American. And it's not just atrazine they're exposed to. They're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin, which was originally used as a nerve gas. And many of these workers have life expectancies of only 50. It shouldn't come to any surprise that the things that happen in wildlife are also a warning to us, just like Rachel Carson and others have warned. As evident in this slide from Lake Nabugabo in Uganda, the agricultural runoff from this crop, which goes into these buckets, is the sole source of drinking, cooking and bathing water for this village. Now if I told the men in this village that the frogs have pour immune function and eggs developing in their testes, the connection between environmental health and public health would be clear. You would not drink water that you knew was having this kind of impact on the wildlife that lived in it. The problem is, in my village, Oakland, in most of our villages, we don't see that connection. We turn on the faucet, the water comes out, we assume it's safe, and we assume that we are masters of our environment, rather than being part of it. PJC: So it doesn't take much to realize that actually this is an environmental issue. And I kept thinking over and over again this question. We know so much about global warming and climate change, and yet, we have no concept of what I've been calling internal environmentalism. We know what we're putting out there, we have a sense of those repercussions, but we are so ignorant of this sense of what happens when we put things, or things are put into our bodies. And it's my feeling and it's my urging being here to know that, as we women move forward as the communicators of this, but also as the ones who carry that burden of carrying the children, bearing the children, we hold most of the buying power in the household, is that it's going to be us moving forward to carry the work of Tyrone and other scientists around the world. And my urging is that when we think about environmental issues that we remember that it's not just about melting glaciers and ice caps, but it's also about our children as well. Thank you. (Applause)

What you don't know about marriage

{0: 'Jenna McCarthy writes about relationships, marriage and parenting.'}

TEDxAmericanRiviera

Every year in the United States alone, 2,077,000 couples make a legal and spiritual decision to spend the rest of their lives together — (Laughter) And not to have sex with anyone else. Ever. He buys a ring, she buys a dress. They go shopping for all sorts of things. She takes him to Arthur Murray for ballroom-dancing lessons. And the big day comes. And they'll stand before God and family and some guy her dad once did business with, and they'll vow that nothing — not abject poverty, not life-threatening illness, not complete and utter misery — will ever put the tiniest damper on their eternal love and devotion. (Laughter) These optimistic young bastards promise to honor and cherish each other through hot flashes and midlife crises and a cumulative 50-pound weight gain, until that far-off day, when one of them is finally able to rest in peace. (Laughter) You know, because they can't hear the snoring anymore. And then they'll get stupid drunk and smash cake in each other's faces and do the Macarena. And we'll be there, showering them with towels and toasters and drinking their free booze and throwing birdseed at them every single time ... even though we know, statistically, half of them will be divorced within a decade. (Laughter) Of course, the other half won't, right? They'll keep forgetting anniversaries and arguing about where to spend holidays and debating — (Laughter) Which way the toilet paper should come off of the roll. And some of them will even still be enjoying each other's company when neither of them can chew solid food anymore. And researchers want to know why. I mean, look — it doesn't take a double-blind, placebo-controlled study to figure out what makes a marriage not work: disrespect, boredom, too much time on Facebook, having sex with other people. But you can have the exact opposite of all of those things — respect, excitement, a broken Internet connection, mind-numbing monogamy — and the thing still can go to hell in a handbasket. So, what's going on when it doesn't? What do the folks who make it all the way to side-by-side burial plots have in common? What are they doing right? What can we learn from them? And if you're still happily sleeping solo, why should you stop what you're doing and make it your life's work to find that one special person that you can annoy for the rest of your life? Well, researchers spend billions of your tax dollars trying to figure that out. They stalk blissful couples and study their every move and mannerism. And they try to pinpoint what it is that sets them apart from their miserable neighbors and friends. And it turns out, the success stories share a few similarities, beyond that they don't have sex with other people. For instance, in the happiest marriages, the wife is thinner and better-looking than the husband. (Laughter) Obvious. Right? It's obvious that this leads to marital bliss, because women — we care a great deal about being thin and good-looking, whereas men mostly care about sex, ideally, with women who are thinner and better looking than they are. The beauty of this research, though, is that no one is suggesting that women have to be thin to be happy. We just have to be thinner than our partners. So instead of all that laborious dieting and exercising, we just need to wait for them to get fat — (Laughter) Maybe bake a few pies. This is good information to have, and it's not that complicated. (Laughter) Research also suggests that the happiest couples are the ones that focus on the positives. For example: the happy wife. Instead of pointing out her husband's growing gut or suggesting he go for a run, she might say, "Wow, honey, thank you for going out of your way to make me relatively thinner." (Laughter) These are couples who can find good in any situation. "Yeah, it was devastating when we lost everything in that fire. But it's kind of nice sleeping out here under the stars. And it's a good thing you've got all that body fat to keep us warm." (Laughter) One of my favorite studies found that the more willing a husband is to do housework, the more attractive his wife will find him. Because we needed a study to tell us this. (Laughter) But here's what's going on here. The more attractive she finds him, the more sex they have; the more sex they have, the nicer he is to her; the nicer he is to her, the less she nags him about leaving wet towels on the bed, and ultimately, they live happily ever after. In other words, men, you might want to pick it up a notch in the domestic department. Here's an interesting one. One study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce. This is an actual study, and let me clarify: the researchers were not looking at documented self-reports of childhood happiness, or even studying old journals. The data were based entirely on whether people looked happy in these early pictures. Now, I don't know how old all of you are, but when I was a kid, your parents took pictures with a special kind of camera that held something called "film." And, by God, film was expensive. They didn't take 300 shots of you in that rapid-fire digital video mode and then pick out the nicest, smiliest one for the Christmas card. Oh, no. They dressed you up, they lined you up, and you smiled for the fucking camera like they told you to or you could kiss your birthday party goodbye. But still, I have a huge pile of fake happy childhood pictures and I'm glad they make me less likely than some people to get a divorce. So, what else can you do to safeguard your marriage? Do not win an Oscar for best actress. (Laughter) I'm serious. Bettie Davis, Joan Crawford, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon — all of them single, soon after taking home that statue. They actually call it the Oscar curse. It is the marriage kiss of death and something that should be avoided. And it's not just successfully starring in films that's dangerous. It turns out, merely watching a romantic comedy causes relationship satisfaction to plummet. (Laughter) Apparently, the bitter realization that maybe it could happen to us, but it obviously hasn't and it probably never will, makes our lives seem unbearably grim in comparison. And theoretically, I suppose if we opt for a film where someone gets brutally murdered or dies in a fiery car crash, we are more likely to walk out of that theater feeling like we've got it pretty good. (Laughter) Drinking alcohol, it seems, is bad for your marriage. Yeah. I can't tell you anymore about that one because I stopped reading it at the headline. But here's a scary one: divorce is contagious. That's right, when you have a close couple friend split up, it increases your chances of getting a divorce by 75 percent. Now, I have to say, I don't get this one at all. My husband and I have watched quite a few friends divide their assets and then struggle with being our age and single in an age of sexting and Viagra and eHarmony. And I'm thinking they've done more for my marriage than a lifetime of therapy ever could. So now you may be wondering: Why does anyone get married ever? Well, the US federal government counts more than a thousand legal benefits to being someone's spouse. A list that includes visitation rights in jail, but hopefully, you'll never need that one. But beyond the profound federal perks, married people make more money. We're healthier, physically and emotionally. We produce happier, more stable and more successful kids. We have more sex than our supposedly swinging single friends, believe it or not. We even live longer, which is a pretty compelling argument for marrying someone you like a lot in the first place. (Laughter) Now, if you're not currently experiencing the joy of the joint tax return, I can't tell you how to find a chore-loving person of the approximately ideal size and attractiveness, who prefers horror movies and doesn't have a lot of friends hovering on the brink of divorce, but I can only encourage you to try, because the benefits, as I've pointed out, are significant. The bottom line is: whether you're in it or you're searching for it, I believe marriage is an institution worth pursuing and protecting. So I hope you'll use the information I've given you today to weigh your personal strengths against your own risk factors. For instance, in my marriage, I'd say I'm doing OK. One the one hand, I have a husband who's annoyingly lean and incredibly handsome. So I'm obviously going to need fatten him up. And like I said, we have those divorced friends who may secretly or subconsciously be trying to break us up. So we have to keep an eye on that. And we do like a cocktail or two. On the other hand, I have the fake happy picture thing. And also, my husband does a lot around the house, and would happily never see another romantic comedy as long as he lives. So I've got all those things going for me. But just in case, I plan to work extra hard to not win an Oscar anytime soon. And for the good of your relationships, I would encourage you to do the same. I'll see you at the bar. (Laughter) (Applause)

Crowdsource your health

{0: 'Lucien Engelen is a strategist and innovator in health(care) who is working to put patients into the healthcare team.'}

TEDxMaastricht

I would like to talk to you about why many ehealth projects fail. And I really think that the most important thing of it is that we stopped listening to patients. And one thing we did at Radboud University is we appointed a Chief Listening Officer. Not in a very scientific way — she puts up a little cup of coffee or a cup of tea and asks patients, family, relatives, "What's up? How could we help you?" And we think, we like to think, that this is one of the major problems why all — maybe not all — but most of the ehealth projects fail, since we stopped listening. This is my weight scale. It's a very simple thing. It's got one knob, on/off. And every morning I hop on it. And yes, I've got a challenge, as you might see. And I put my challenge on 95 kg. But the thing is that it's made this simple that whenever I hop on, it sends my data to Google Health as well. And it's collected by my general practitioner as well, so he can see what's my problem in weight, not on the very moment that I need cardiologic support or something like it, but also looking backward. But there's another thing. As some of you might know, I've got more than 4000 followers on Twitter. So every morning, I hop on my weight scale and before I'm in my car, people start talking to me, "I think you need a light lunch today, Lucien." (Laughter) But that's the nicest thing that could happen, since this is peer pressure. Peer pressure used to help patients — since this could be used for obesity, it could be used to stop patients from smoking. But on the other hand, it also could be used to get people out of their chairs and try to work together in some kind of gaming activity to get more control of their health. As of next week, it will soon be available, there will be this little blood-pressure meter connected to an iPhone or something or other. And people will be able, from their homes, to take their blood pressure, send it to their doctor and eventually share it with others, for instance, for over a 100 dollars. And this is the point where patients get into position and can collect, not only their own control again, be captain of their own ship, but also can help us in health care due to the challenges that we face, like health-care cost explosion, doubled demand and things like that, make techniques that are easy to use and start with this to embrace patients in the team. And you can do this with techniques like this, but also by crowdsourcing. And one of the things we did, that I would like to share with you introduced by a little video. (Music) (Heart-beat) We've all got navigation controls in our car. We maybe even have it in our cellphone. We perfectly know where all the ATMs are, just about the city of Maastricht. The other thing is we know where all the gas stations are. And sure, we could find fast food chains. But where would be the nearest AED to help this patient? We asked around, and nobody knew. Nobody knew where the nearest lifesaving AED was to be obtained right now. So what we did, we crowdsourced the Netherlands. We set up a website, and asked the crowd, "If you see an AED, please submit it, tell us where it is, tell us when it's open," since sometimes in office hours it's closed, of course. And over 10,000 AEDs in the Netherlands already have been submitted. The next step we took was to find the applications for it. And we built an iPad application. We made an application for Layar: Augmented Reality, to find these AEDs. And whenever you are in a city like Maastricht, and somebody collapses, you can use your iPhone, and within the next weeks also your Microsoft cellphone, to find the nearest AED, which can save lives. And as of today, we would like to introduce this, not only as AED4EU, which is what the product is called, but also AED4US. And we would like to start this on a worldwide level. And ask all of our colleagues in the rest of the world, colleague universities, to help us to find and work and act like a hub to crowdsource all these AEDs all around the world, that whenever you're on holiday and somebody collapses, might it be your own relative or someone just in front of you, you can find this. The other thing we would like to ask is of companies also all over the world that will be able to help us validate these AEDs. These might be courier services or cable guys, for instance, just to see whether the AED that is submitted is still in place. So please help us on this one and try to make not only health a little bit better, but take control of it. Thank you. (Applause)

How do you save a shark you know nothing about?

{0: 'Simon Berrow is a marine biologist dedicated to studying and preserving the basking shark.'}

TEDxDublin

Basking sharks are awesome creatures. They are just magnificent. They grow 10 meters long; some say bigger. They might weigh up to two tons. Some say up to five tons. They're the second-largest fish in the world. They're also harmless plankton-feeding animals. And they are thought to be able to filter a cubic kilometer of water every hour and can feed on 30 kilos of zoo plankton a day to survive. They're fantastic creatures. We're very lucky in Ireland, we have plenty of basking sharks and plenty of opportunities to study them. They were very important to coastal communities, going back hundreds of years, especially around the Claddaghduff, Connemara region where subsistence farmers used to sail out on their hookers and open boats, sometimes way offshore to a place called the Sunfish Bank, about 30 miles west of Achill Island, to kill the basking sharks. This is a woodcut from about the 1800s. They were very important, for the oil out of their liver. A third of the basking shark's size is their liver, and it's full of oil, gallons of oil. That oil was used especially for lighting, but also for dressing wounds and other things. In fact, the streetlights in 1742, of Galway, Dublin and Waterford, were lit with sunfish oil. "Sunfish" is one of the words for basking sharks. So they were incredibly important animals. They've been around a long time, very important to coastal communities. Probably the best-documented basking shark fishery in the world is that from Achill Island. This is Keem Bay up in Achill Island. Sharks used to come into the bay, and the fishermen would tie a net off the headland, string it out, an old Manila net, and as the shark came round, it would hit the net, the net would collapse on it. It would often drown and suffocate. Or at times, they would row out in their small curraghs and kill it with a lance through the back of the neck. And then they'd tow the sharks back to Purteen Harbour, boil them up, use the oil. They also used the flesh as well, for fertilizer and also would fin the sharks. This is probably the biggest threat to sharks worldwide — the finning of sharks. We're often frightened of sharks, thanks to "Jaws." Maybe five or six people get killed by sharks every year. There was someone recently, wasn't there? Just a couple weeks ago. We kill about 100 million sharks a year. So I don't know what the balance is, but I think sharks have more right to be fearful of us than we have of them. It was a well-documented fishery. As you can see here, it peaked in the '50s, where they were killing 1,500 sharks a year. And it declined very fast — a classic boom-and-bust fishery, which suggests that a stock has been depleted or there's low reproductive rates. They killed about 12,000 sharks within this period, literally just by stringing a Manila rope off the tip of Keem Bay up in Achill Island. Sharks were still killed up into the mid-80s, especially out of places like Dunmore East in County Waterford. About two and a half, 3,000 sharks were killed up till '85, mainly by Norwegian vessels. You can't really see, but these are Norwegian basking shark hunting vessels. The black line in the crow's nest signifies this is a shark vessel, rather than a whaling vessel. The importance of basking sharks to the coast communities is recognized through the language. I don't pretend to [know many Irish words], but in Kerry they were often known as "ainmhide Na seolta," "the monster with the sails." Another title would be "liop an dá lapa," "the unwieldy beast with two fins." "Liabhán mór," suggesting a big animal. Or my favorite, "liabhán chor gréine," "the great fish of the sun." That's a lovely, evocative name. On Tory Island — a strange place anyway — they were known as "muldoons." (Laughter) No one seems to know why. Hope there's no one from Tory here. Lovely place. But more commonly all around the island, they were known as the sunfish. And this represents their habit of basking on the surface when the sun is out. There's great concern that basking sharks are depleted all throughout the world. Some say it's not population decline, it might be a change in the distribution of plankton. It's been suggested that these sharks would make fantastic indicators of climate change, as they're basically continuous plankton recorders, swimming around with their mouth open. They're now listed as vulnerable under the IUCN. There's movements in Europe to try and stop catching them. There's now a ban on catching and even landing them, even landing ones caught accidentally. They're not protected in Ireland; in fact, they have no legislative status in Ireland whatsoever, despite our importance for the species and also the historical context within which basking sharks reside. We know very little about them. And most of what we do know is based on their habit of coming to the surface — we try and guess what they're doing from their behavior on the surface. I only found out last year, at a conference on the Isle of Man, just how unusual it is to live somewhere where basking sharks regularly, frequently and predictably come to the surface to "bask." It's a fantastic opportunity for a scientist to see and experience basking sharks. They are awesome creatures. It gives us a fantastic opportunity to study them, to get access to them. What we've been doing for a couple years — last year was a big year — is we started tagging sharks, so we could try to get some idea of sight fidelity and movement and things like that. So we concentrated mainly in North Donegal and West Kerry as the two areas where I was mainly active. And we tagged them very simply, not very high-tech, with a big, long pole. This is a beachcaster rod with a tag on the end. You go up in your boat and tag the shark. And we were very effective. We tagged 105 sharks last summer. We got 50 in three days off Inishowen Peninsula. Half the challenge to get access is to be in the right place at the right time. But it's a very simple, easy technique; I'll show you what it looks like. We use a pole camera on the boat to actually film the shark. One, it's to try and work out the gender of the shark. We also deployed some satellite tags, so we did use high-tech stuff as well. These are archival tags. What they do is store the data. A satellite tag only works when the air is clear of the water and can send a signal to the satellite. And sharks and fish are underwater most of the time, so this tag actually works out the locations of shark, depending on the timing and the setting of the sun, plus water temperature and depth. And you have to kind of reconstruct the path. What happens is, you set the tag to detach from the shark after a fixed period — in this case, eight months — and literally to the day, the tag popped off, drifted up, said hello to the satellite and sent, not all the data, but enough data for us to use. This is the only way to really work out their behavior and movements when they're underwater. And here's a couple of maps that we've done. In that one, you can see that we tagged both off Kerry. Basically, it spent all its time, the last eight months, in Irish waters. On Christmas, it was out on the shelf edge. Here's one we haven't ground-truthed yet with sea-surface temperature and water depth, but again, the second shark spent most of its time in and around the Irish Sea. Colleagues from the Isle of Man last year actually tagged one shark that went from the Isle of Man to Nova Scotia in about 90 days. Nine and a half thousand kilometers — we never thought that happened. Another colleague in the States tagged about 20 sharks off Massachusetts. His tags didn't really work. All he knows is where he tagged them, and where they popped off. His tags popped off in the Caribbean, and even in Brazil. We thought basking sharks were temperate animals and lived in our latitudes, but in actual fact, they're obviously crossing the equator as well. So very simple things like that, we're trying to learn about basking sharks. One thing that I think is a very surprising and strange thing is just how low the genetic diversity of sharks is. I'm not a geneticist, so I won't pretend to understand the genetics. And that's why it's great to have collaboration. Whereas I'm a field person, I get panic attacks if I have to spend too many hours in a lab with a white coat on. Take me away. So we can work with geneticists who understand that. So when they looked at the genetics of basking sharks, they found that the diversity was incredibly low. If you look at the first line, really, you can see that all these different shark species are all quite similar. I think this means they're all sharks and they've come from a common ancestry. But if you look at nucleotide diversity, which is more genetics that are passed on through the parents, you see that basking sharks, if you look at the first study, was order of magnitude less diverse even than other shark species. You can see this work was only done in 2006. Before 2006, we had no idea of the genetic variability of basking sharks. We had no idea: Did they distinguish into different populations? Were there subpopulations? And that's very important if you want to know what the population size is, and the status of the animals. So, Les Noble in Aberdeen kind of found this a bit unbelievable, really. So he did another study using microsatellites, which is much more expensive, much more time-consuming, and to his surprise, came up with almost identical results. So it does seem to be that basking sharks, for some reason, have incredibly low diversity. And it's thought maybe it was a genetic bottleneck, thought to have been 12,000 years ago, and this has caused a very low diversity. And yet, if you look at the whale shark, which is the other plankton-eating large shark, its diversity is much greater. So it doesn't really make sense at all. They found that there was no genetic differentiation between any of the world's oceans of basking sharks: even though they're found throughout the world, you couldn't tell the difference, genetically, from one from the Pacific, Atlantic, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa. They all basically seem the same. Which, again, is kind of surprising; you wouldn't expect that. I don't understand or pretend to understand this; I suspect most geneticists don't either, but they produce the numbers. So you can actually estimate the population size based on the diversity of the genetics. And Rus Hoelzel came up with an effective population size: 8,200 animals. That's it — 8,000 animals in the world. You're thinking, "That's ridiculous. No way." So Les did a finer study, and he found out it came out about 9,000. Using different microsatellites gave the different results, but the mean of all these studies is about 5,000, which I personally don't believe. But then, I am a skeptic. But even if you toss a few numbers around, you're probably talking an effective population of about 20,000 animals. Do you remember how many they killed off Achill in the 70s and the 50s? So what it tells us, actually, is that there's actually a risk of extinction of this species because its population is so small. In fact, of those 20,000, 8,000 were thought to be females. There's only 8,000 basking shark females in the world? I don't know. I don't believe it. The problem with this is they were constrained with samples. They didn't get enough samples to really explore the genetics in enough detail. So, where do you get samples from for your genetic analysis? Well, one obvious source is dead sharks — dead sharks, washed up. We might get two or three dead sharks washed up in Ireland a year, if we're kind of lucky. Another source would be fisheries' bycatch. We were getting quite a few caught in surface drift nets. That's banned now, and that'll be good news for the sharks. And some are caught in nets, in trawls. This is a shark that was actually landed in Howth just before Christmas — illegally, because you're not allowed to do that under EU law — and was actually sold for eight euros a kilo as shark steak. They even put a recipe up on the wall, until they were told it was illegal. They actually did get a fine for that. So if you look at all those studies I showed you, the total number of samples worldwide is 86, at present. So it's very important work, and they can ask some really good questions, and tell us about population size and subpopulations and structure, but they're constrained by lack of samples. When we were out tagging our sharks — this is how we tagged them on the front of a RIB, get in there fast — occasionally, the sharks do react. On one occasion, when we were up in Malin Head in Donegal, the shark smacked the side of the boat with his tail, more, I think, in startle to the fact that a boat came near it, rather than the tag going in. And that was fine. We got wet. No problem. And then when myself and Emmett got back to Malin Head, to the pier, I noticed some black slime on the front of the boat. I used to spend a lot of time on commercial fishing boats, and I remember fishermen saying they can tell when a basking shark has been caught in a net, because it leaves a black slime behind. So that must have come from the shark. Now, we had an interest in getting tissue samples for genetics because we knew they were very valuable. We would use conventional methods; I have a crossbow — you see it in my hand there, which we use to sample whales and dolphins for genetic studies as well. So I tried that, I tried many techniques. All it was doing was breaking my arrows, because the shark's skin is just so strong. There was no way we were going to get a sample from that. That wasn't going to work. So when I saw the black slime on the bow of the boat, I thought, "If you take what you're given in this world ..." So I scraped it off. I had a little tube with alcohol in it to send to the geneticists. So I scraped the slime off and sent it to Aberdeen, and said, "You might try that." And they sat on it for months. It was only because we had a conference on the Isle of Man. But I kept emailing Les, saying, "Have you had a chance to look at my slime?" And he was like, "Yeah, yeah. Later." He thought he'd better do it because I never met him before; he might lose face if he hadn't done the thing I sent him. And he was amazed that they actually got DNA from the slime. They amplified it and they tested it, and they found, yes, this was actually basking shark DNA, which was got from the slime. So he was very excited. It became known as "Simon's shark slime." And I thought, "Hey, you know, I can build on this." So we thought, OK, we're going to try to get out and get some slime. So having spent three-and-a-half thousand on satellite tags ... I then thought I'd invest 7.95 — the price is still on it — in my local hardware store in Kilrush for a mop handle, and even less money on some oven cleaners. And I wrapped the oven cleaner around the edge of the mop handle and ... (Laughter) I was desperate to have an opportunity to get some sharks. And this was into August now, and normally sharks peak in June, July, and you rarely see them, or rarely can be in the right place to find sharks into August. We were desperate, so we rushed out to the Blaskets as soon as we heard there were sharks there, and managed to find some sharks. So by just rubbing the mop handle down the shark as it swam under the boat — you see a shark running under the boat here — we managed to collect slime. And here it is. Look at that lovely black shark slime. And in about half an hour, we got five samples. Five individual sharks were sampled using Simon's Shark Slime Sampling System. (Laughter) (Applause) I've been working on whales and dolphins in Ireland for 20 years now, and they're a bit more dramatic. You probably saw the humpback whale footage we got a month or two ago off County Wexford. And you always think you might have some legacy you can leave the world behind, and I was thinking of humpback whales breaching and dolphins. But hey — sometimes these things are sent to you and you just have to take them when they come. So this is possibly going to be my legacy — Simon's Shark Slime. We got more money this year to carry on collecting more and more samples. One thing that is very useful is that we use a pole camera — this is my colleague, Joanne, with a pole camera — where you can look underneath the shark. What you're trying to look at is, the males have claspers, which kind of dangle out behind the back of the shark. So you can quite easily tell the gender of the shark. If we can tell the gender of the shark before we sample it, we can tell the geneticist this was taken from a male or a female. Because in the moment, they have no way, genetically, of telling the difference between a male and a female, which I find staggering, because they don't know what primers to look for. Being able to tell the gender of a shark is very important for things like policing the trade in basking shark and other species through the sightings, because it is illegal to trade in these sharks. And they are caught and are on the market. So as a field biologist, you just want to get encounters with these animals, and learn as much as you can. They're often quite brief, they're often very seasonally constrained. You just want to learn as much as you can as soon as you can. But isn't it fantastic that you can then offer these samples and opportunities to other disciplines, such as the geneticists, who can gain so much more from that. So as I said, these things are sent to you in strange ways. Grab them while you can. I'll take that as my scientific legacy. Hopefully, I might get something a bit more dramatic and romantic before I die. But for the time being, thank you for that. And keep an eye out for sharks. If you're more interested, we have a basking shark website now set up. So thank you and thank you for listening. (Applause)

How mobile phones power disaster relief

{0: 'Paul Conneally is the public communications manager for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and a leader in using digital technologies for humanitarian aid.'}

TEDxRC2

The humanitarian model has barely changed since the early 20th century. Its origins are firmly rooted in the analog age. And there is a major shift coming on the horizon. The catalyst for this change was the major earthquake that struck Haiti on the 12th of January in 2010. Haiti was a game changer. The earthquake destroyed the capital of Port-au-Prince, claiming the lives of some 320,000 people, rendering homeless about 1.2 million people. Government institutions were completely decapitated, including the presidential palace. I remember standing on the roof of the Ministry of Justice in downtown Port-au-Prince. It was about two meters high, completely squashed by the violence of the earthquake. For those of us on the ground in those early days, it was clear for even the most disaster-hardened veterans that Haiti was something different. Haiti was something we hadn't seen before. But Haiti provided us with something else unprecedented. Haiti allowed us to glimpse into a future of what disaster response might look like in a hyper-connected world where people have access to mobile smart devices. Because out of the urban devastation in Port-au-Prince came a torrent of SMS texts — people crying for help, beseeching us for assistance, sharing data, offering support, looking for their loved ones. This was a situation that traditional aid agencies had never before encountered. We were in one of the poorest countries on the planet, but 80 percent of the people had mobile devices in their hands. And we were unprepared for this, and they were shaping the aid effort. Outside Haiti also, things were looking different. Tens of thousands of so-called digital volunteers were scouring the Internet, converting tweets that had already been converted from texts and putting these into open-source maps, layering them with all sorts of important information — people like Crisis Mappers and Open Street Map — and putting these on the Web for everybody — the media, the aid organizations and the communities themselves — to participate in and to use. Back in Haiti, people were increasingly turning to the medium of SMS. People that were hungry and hurting were signaling their distress, were signaling their need for help. On street sides all over Port-au-Prince, entrepreneurs sprung up offering mobile phone charging stations. They understood more than we did people's innate need to be connected. Never having been confronted with this type of situation before, we wanted to try and understand how we could tap into this incredible resource, how we could really leverage this incredible use of mobile technology and SMS technology. We started talking with a local telecom provider called Voilà, which is a subsidiary of Trilogy International. We had basically three requirements. We wanted to communicate in a two-way form of communication. We didn't want to shout; we needed to listen as well. We wanted to be able to target specific geographic communities. We didn't need to talk to the whole country at the same time. And we wanted it to be easy to use. Out of this rubble of Haiti and from this devastation came something that we call TERA — the Trilogy Emergency Response Application — which has been used to support the aid effort ever since. It has been used to help communities prepare for disasters. It has been used to signal early warning in advance of weather-related disasters. It's used for public health awareness campaigns such as the prevention of cholera. And it is even used for sensitive issues such as building awareness around gender-based violence. But does it work? We have just published an evaluation of this program, and the evidence that is there for all to see is quite remarkable. Some 74 percent of people received the data. Those who were intended to receive the data, 74 percent of them received it. 96 percent of them found it useful. 83 percent of them took action — evidence that it is indeed empowering. And 73 percent of them shared it. The TERA system was developed from Haiti with support of engineers in the region. It is a user-appropriate technology that has been used for humanitarian good to great effect. Technology is transformational. Right across the developing world, citizens and communities are using technology to enable them to bring about change, positive change, in their own communities. The grassroots has been strengthened through the social power of sharing and they are challenging the old models, the old analog models of control and command. One illustration of the transformational power of technology is in Kibera. Kibera is one of Africa's largest slums. It's on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. It's home to an unknown number of people — some say between 250,000 and 1.2 million. If you were to arrive in Nairobi today and pick up a tourist map, Kibera is represented as a lush, green national park devoid of human settlement. Young people living in Kibera in their community, with simple handheld devices, GPS handheld devices and SMS-enabled mobile phones, have literally put themselves on the map. They have collated crowd-sourced data and rendered the invisible visible. People like Josh and Steve are continuing to layer information upon information, real-time information, Tweet it and text it onto these maps for all to use. You can find out about the latest impromptu music session. You can find out about the latest security incident. You can find out about places of worship. You can find out about the health centers. You can feel the dynamism of this living, breathing community. They also have their own news network on YouTube with 36,000 viewers at the moment. They're showing us what can be done with mobile, digital technologies. They're showing that the magic of technology can bring the invisible visible. And they are giving a voice to themselves. They are telling their own story, bypassing the official narrative. And we're seeing from all points on the globe similar stories. In Mongolia for instance, where 30 percent of the people are nomadic, SMS information systems are being used to track migration and weather patterns. SMS is even used to hold herder summits from remote participation. And if people are migrating into urban, unfamiliar, concrete environments, they can also be helped in anticipation with social supporters ready and waiting for them based on SMS knowledge. In Nigeria, open-source SMS tools are being used by the Red Cross community workers to gather information from the local community in an attempt to better understand and mitigate the prevalence of malaria. My colleague, Jason Peat, who runs this program, tells me it's 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the traditional way of doing things. And not only is it empowering to the communities, but really importantly, this information stays in the community where it is needed to formulate long-term health polices. We are on a planet of seven billion people, five billion mobile subscriptions. By 2015, there will be three billion smartphones in the world. The U.N. broadband commission has recently set targets to help broadband access in 50 percent of the Developing World, compared to 20 percent today. We are hurtling towards a hyper-connected world where citizens from all cultures and all social strata will have access to smart, fast mobile devices. People are understanding, from Cairo to Oakland, that there are new ways to come together, there are new ways to mobilize, there are new ways to influence. A transformation is coming which needs to be understood by the humanitarian structures and humanitarian models. The collective voices of people needs to be more integrated through new technologies into the organizational strategies and plans of actions and not just recycled for fundraising or marketing. We need to, for example, embrace the big data, the knowledge that is there from market leaders who understand what it means to use and leverage big data. One idea that I'd like you to consider, for instance, is to take a look at our IT departments. They're normally backroom or basement hardware service providers, but they need to be elevated to software strategists. We need people in our organizations who know what it's like to work with big data. We need technology as a core organizational principle. We need technological strategists in the boardroom who can ask and answer the question, "What would Amazon or Google do with all of this data?" and convert it to humanitarian good. The possibilities that new digital technologies are bringing can help humanitarian organizations, not only ensure that people's right to information is met, or that they have their right to communicate, but I think in the future, humanitarian organizations will also have to anticipate the right for people to access critical communication technologies in order to ensure that their voices are heard, that they're truly participating, that they're truly empowered in the humanitarian world. It has always been the elusive ideal to ensure full participation of people affected by disasters in the humanitarian effort. We now have the tools. We now have the possibilities. There are no more reasons not to do it. I believe we need to bring the humanitarian world from analog to digital. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The true cost of oil

{0: 'Garth Lenz’ touring exhibition, “The True Cost of Oil”, has played a major part in the fight against Alberta Tar Sands Mining.'}

TEDxVictoria

The world's largest and most devastating environmental and industrial project is situated in the heart of the largest and most intact forest in the world, Canada's boreal forest. It stretches right across Northern Canada, in Labrador, it's home to the largest remaining wild caribou herd in the world: the George River caribou herd, numbering approximately 400,000 animals. Unfortunately, when I was there, I couldn't find one of them, but you have the antlers as proof. All across the boreal, we're blessed with this incredible abundance of wetlands. Wetlands, globally, are one of the most endangered ecosystems. They're absolutely critical ecosystems, they clean air, they clean water, they sequester large amounts of greenhouse gases, and they're home to a huge diversity of species. In the boreal, they are also the home where almost 50 percent of the 800 bird species found in North America migrate north to breed and raise their young. In Ontario, the boreal marches down south to the north shore of Lake Superior. And these incredibly beautiful boreal forests were the inspiration for some of the most famous art in Canadian history, the Group of Seven were very inspired by this landscape, and so the boreal is not just a really key part of our natural heritage, but also an important part of our cultural heritage. In Manitoba, this is an image from the east side of Lake Winnipeg, and this is the home of the newly designated UNESCO Cultural Heritage site. In Saskatchewan, as across all of the boreal, home to some of our most famous rivers, an incredible network of rivers and lakes that every school-age child learns about, the Peace, the Athabasca, the Churchill here, the Mackenzie, and these networks were the historical routes for the voyageur and the coureur de bois, the first non-aboriginal explorers of Northern Canada that, taking from the First Nations people, used canoes and paddled to explore for a trade route, a Northwest Passage for the fur trade. In the North, the boreal is bordered by the tundra, and just below that, in Yukon, we have this incredible valley, the Tombstone Valley. And the Tombstone Valley is home to the Porcupine caribou herd. Now you've probably heard about the Porcupine caribou herd in the context of its breeding ground in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Well, the wintering ground is also critical and it also is not protected, and is potentially, could be potentially, exploited for gas and mineral rights. The western border of the boreal in British Columbia is marked by the Coast Mountains, and on the other side of those mountains is the greatest remaining temperate rainforest in the world, the Great Bear Rainforest, and we'll discuss that in a few minutes in a bit more detail. All across the boreal, it's home for a huge incredible range of indigenous peoples, and a rich and varied culture. And I think that one of the reasons why so many of these groups have retained a link to the past, know their native languages, the songs, the dances, the traditions, I think part of that reason is because of the remoteness, the span and the wilderness of this almost 95 percent intact ecosystem. And I think particularly now, as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis, we can learn so much from these people who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem for over 10,000 years. In the heart of this ecosystem is the very antithesis of all of these values that we've been talking about, and I think these are some of the core values that make us proud to be Canadians. This is the Alberta tar sands, the largest oil reserves on the planet outside of Saudi Arabia. Trapped underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta are these vast reserves of this sticky, tar-like bitumen. And the mining and the exploitation of that is creating devastation on a scale that the planet has never seen before. I want to try to convey some sort of a sense of the size of this. If you look at that truck there, it is the largest truck of its kind on the planet. It is a 400-ton-capacity dump truck and its dimensions are 45 feet long by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high. If I stand beside that truck, my head comes to around the bottom of the yellow part of that hubcap. Within the dimensions of that truck, you could build a 3,000-square-foot two-story home quite easily. I did the math. So instead of thinking of that as a truck, think of that as a 3,000-square-foot home. That's not a bad size home. And line those trucks / homes back and forth across there from the bottom all the way to the top. And then think of how large that very small section of one mine is. Now, you can apply that same kind of thinking here as well. Now, here you see — of course, as you go further on, these trucks become like a pixel. Again, imagine those all back and forth there. How large is that one portion of a mine? That would be a huge, vast metropolitan area, probably much larger than the city of Victoria. And this is just one of a number of mines, 10 mines so far right now. This is one section of one mining complex, and there are about another 40 or 50 in the approval process. No tar sands mine has actually ever been denied approval, so it is essentially a rubber stamp. The other method of extraction is what's called the in situ. And here, massive amounts of water are superheated and pumped through the ground, through these vasts networks of pipelines, seismic lines, drill paths, compressor stations. And even though this looks maybe not quite as repugnant as the mines, it's even more damaging in some ways. It impacts and fragments a larger part of the wilderness, where there is 90 percent reduction of key species, like woodland caribou and grizzly bears, and it consumes even more energy, more water, and produces at least as much greenhouse gas. So these in situ developments are at least as ecologically damaging as the mines. The oil produced from either method produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other oil. This is one of the reasons why it's called the world's dirtiest oil. It's also one of the reasons why it is the largest and fastest-growing single source of carbon in Canada, and it is also a reason why Canada is now number three in terms of producing carbon per person. The tailings ponds are the largest toxic impoundments on the planet. Oil sands — or rather, I should say tar sands — oil sands is a PR-created term so that the oil companies wouldn't be trying to promote something that sounds like a sticky tar-like substance that's the world's dirtiest oil. So they decided to call it oil sands. The tar sands consume more water than any other oil process, three to five barrels of water are taken, polluted and then returned into tailings ponds, the largest toxic impoundments on the planet. SemCrude, just one of the licensees, in just one of their tailings ponds, dumps 250,000 tons of this toxic gunk every single day. That's creating the largest toxic impoundments in the history of the planet. So far, this is enough toxin to cover the face of Lake Erie a foot deep. And the tailings ponds range in size up to 9,000 acres. That's two-thirds the size of the entire island of Manhattan. That's like from Wall Street at the southern edge of Manhattan up to maybe 120th Street. So this is one of the larger tailings ponds. This might be, what? I don't know, half the size of Manhattan. And you can see in the context, it's just a relatively small section of one of 10 mining complexes and another 40 to 50 on stream to be approved soon. And of course, these tailings ponds — well, you can't see many ponds from outer space and you can see these, so maybe we should stop calling them ponds — these massive toxic wastelands are built unlined and on the banks of the Athabasca River. And the Athabasca River drains downstream to a range of aboriginal communities. In Fort Chipewyan, the 800 people there, are finding toxins in the food chain, this has been scientifically proven. The tar sands toxins are in the food chain, and this is causing cancer rates up to 10 times what they are in the rest of Canada. In spite of that, people have to live, have to eat this food in order to survive. The incredibly high price of flying food into these remote Northern aboriginal communities and the high rate of unemployment makes this an absolute necessity for survival. And not that many years ago, I was lent a boat by a First Nations man, and he said, "When you go out on the river, do not under any circumstances eat the fish. It's carcinogenic." And yet, on the front porch of that man's cabin, I saw four fish. He had to feed his family to survive. And as a parent, I just can't imagine what that does to your soul. And that's what we're doing. The boreal forest is also perhaps our best defense against global warming and climate change. The boreal forest sequesters more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem. And this is absolutely key. So what we're doing is, we're taking the most concentrated greenhouse gas sink — twice as much greenhouse gases are sequestered in the boreal per acre than the tropical rainforests. And what we're doing is we're destroying this carbon sink, turning it into a carbon bomb. And we're replacing that with the largest industrial project in the history of the world, which is producing the most high-carbon greenhouse-gas emitting oil in the world. And we're doing this on the second largest oil reserves on the planet. This is one of the reasons why Canada, originally a climate change hero — we were one of the first signatories of the Kyoto Accord. Now we're the country that has full-time lobbyists in the European Union and Washington DC, threatening trade wars when these countries talk about wanting to bring in positive legislation to limit the import of high-carbon fuels, of greenhouse gas emissions, anything like this, at international conferences, whether they're in Copenhagen or Cancun, international conferences on climate change, we're the country that gets the dinosaur award every single day, as being the biggest obstacle to progress on this issue. Just 70 miles downstream is the world's largest freshwater delta, the Peace-Athabasca Delta, the only one at the juncture of all four migratory flyways. This is a globally significant wetland, perhaps the greatest on the planet. Incredible habitat for half the bird species you find in North America, migrating here. And also the last refuge for the largest herd of wild bison, and also, of course, critical habitat for another whole range of other species. But it too is being threatened by the massive amount of water being drawn from the Athabasca, which feeds these wetlands, and also the incredible toxic burden of the largest toxic unlined impoundments on the planet, which are leaching in to the food chain for all the species downstream. So as bad as all that is, things are going to get much worse — much, much worse. This is the infrastructure as we see it about now. This is what's planned for 2015. And you can see here the Keystone Pipeline, which would take tar sands raw down to the Gulf Coast, punching a pipeline through the agricultural heart of North America, of the United States, and securing the contract with the dirtiest fuel in the world by consumption of the United States, and promoting a huge disincentive to a sustainable clean-energy future for America. Here you see the route down the Mackenzie valley. This would put a pipeline to take natural gas from the Beaufort Sea through the heart of the third largest watershed basin in the world, and the only one which is 95 percent intact. And building a pipeline with an industrial highway would change forever this incredible wilderness, which is a true rarity on the planet today. So the Great Bear Rainforest is just over the hill there, within a few miles, we go from these dry boreal forests of 100-year-old trees, maybe 10 inches across, and soon, we're in the coastal temperate rainforest, rain-drenched, 1,000-year-old trees, 20 feet across, a completely different ecosystem. And the Great Bear Rainforest is generally considered to be the largest coastal temperate rainforest ecosystem in the world. Some of the greatest densities of some of the most iconic and threatened species on the planet. And yet there's a proposal, of course, to build a pipeline to take huge tankers, 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez, through some of the most difficult-to-navigate waters in the world, where only just a few years ago, a BC ferry ran aground. When one of these tar sands tankers, carrying the dirtiest oil, 10 times as much as the Exxon Valdez, eventually hits a rock and goes down, we're going to have one of the worst ecological disasters this planet has ever seen. And here we have the plan out to 2030. What they're proposing is an almost four-times increase in production, and that would industrialize an area the size of Florida. In doing so, we'll be removing a large part of our greatest carbon sink and replacing it with the most high greenhouse-gas emission oil in the future. The world does not need any more tar mines. The world does not need any more pipelines to wed our addiction to fossil fuels. And the world certainly does not need the largest toxic impoundments to grow and multiply and further threaten the downstream communities. And let's face it, we all live downstream in an era of global warming and climate change. What we need, is we all need to act to ensure that Canada respects the massive amounts of freshwater that we hold in this country. We need to ensure that these wetlands and forests that are our best and greatest and most critical defense against global warming are protected, and we are not releasing that carbon bomb into the atmosphere. And we need to all gather together and say no to the tar sands. And we can do that. there is a huge network all over the world, fighting to stop this project. And I quite simply think that this is not something that should be decided just in Canada. Everyone in this room, everyone across Canada, everyone listening to this presentation has a role to play and, I think, a responsibility. Because what we do here is going to change our history, it's going to color our possibility to survive, and for our children to survive and have a rich future. We have an incredible gift in the boreal, an incredible opportunity to preserve our best defense against global warming, but we could let that slip away. The tar sands could threaten not just a large section of the boreal. It compromises the life and the health of some of our most underprivileged and vulnerable people, the aboriginal communities that have so much to teach us. It could destroy the Athabasca Delta, the largest and possibly greatest freshwater delta in the planet. It could destroy the Great Bear Rainforest, the largest temperate rainforest in the world. And it could have huge impacts on the future of the agricultural heartland of North America. I hope that you will all, if you've been moved by this presentation, join with the growing international community to get Canada to step up to its responsibilities, to convince Canada to go back to being a climate change champion instead of a climate change villain, and to say no to the tar sands, and yes to a clean energy future for all. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Look up for a change

{0: 'Lucianne Walkowicz works on NASA\'s Kepler mission, studying starspots and "the tempestuous tantrums of stellar flares."'}

TEDxPhoenix

The sky is inherently democratic. It's accessible, in principle, anyway, by anyone, everywhere, just simply by the act of looking up. But like so many beautiful things around us, it's slipping away from us, and we haven't even noticed, because we're honestly not really looking. So what do we look at instead? Well, we look at our phones, we look at our computers, we look at screens of all kinds. And honestly, we rarely even take the trouble to look up enough to see each other, let alone taking that next step to looking up at the actual sky. Now, there's a tendency to think that the loss of our dark night skies is the inevitable outcome of progress, change, technology. And you know, that's just simply not true. Later on, I'll tell you why. But first, I want to tell you about my experience of the dark night sky. I never saw a truly dark night sky until I was 15. I was here, in Arizona. I was on a road trip; I pulled over somewhere. I have no idea where I was, except I know what state. And I looked up, and the sky was just filled with an impossible number of stars. You see, I'm from New York City, and in New York, you can see the moon, you can see a couple of stars. More often than not, they turn out to be airplanes when they land. (Laughter) But there's really not much else. As a result, most of my colleagues who are astronomers spent at least part of their youth looking up at the sky in their backyard. I never really had that experience, and, as a result, I'm really disappointing on camping trips. I don't really know many constellations. The ones I do know, you probably know them, too. But I'll never forget that experience of the first time I saw the dark night sky. And I was just flabbergasted at how many stars there were. And I felt tiny. Then I also felt like, "Where's this been hiding this whole time? Who's been hiding this sky from me?" Of course, the answer is obvious if you think about it or if you look at the picture on the left, where you're seeing the same neighborhood taken during a blackout versus on an ordinary night. You can't see the stars if you drown them out with light. Take a look at our planet. This is our planet from space. Unlike stars, which are hot and glow invisible light so we can see them, our planet is, astronomically speaking, pretty cold. So it doesn't really glow. When you see the planet looking like a blue-green marble the way it does in this picture, you're seeing it because the sunlight is reflecting off of it, and that's why you can see the oceans, the clouds, the land. So if the sun wasn't shining on it, we wouldn't be able to see the earth, right? Or would we? This is our earth at night, and it is one of the most striking examples of how we have affected our planet on a global scale. You can see light spidering out across the globe everywhere. Now, of course, there are broad expanses of ocean that are still dark, and in many underdeveloped areas there's still darkness. But you'll notice that this is a pretty global effect. We tend to think, when we think of places being lit up, of very extreme examples — Times Square, the Vegas Strip. But really what that picture shows you is that it's not just these extreme examples, it's anywhere that uses outdoor lighting. This tends to be a really dramatic effect on the ground. To understand why, all you really have to do is think about the shape of a lightbulb. The lightbulb, for all practical purposes, is more or less round. This is great for its original intended purpose of lighting up the indoors. You turn it on, light goes everywhere. An individual light bulb can light up your whole room, more or less. Now, that's great if you're lighting the indoors, but in its application in outdoor lighting, that traditional shape of the light bulb, the sort of globe that spreads light everywhere, is actually very inefficient. When you're outdoors, mostly what you care about is lighting the ground beneath you and your immediate surroundings. All of that light that gets scattered outwards and upwards doesn't actually help you light the area around you. What it does is scatters up into the sky and becomes what we call "light pollution." Even if you don't care anything about stargazing, this should worry you, because it means that 60-70% of the energy we use to light the outdoors is wasted by blotting out the stars. Now, like I said, I'm a big fan of technology. Obviously, I use technology every day; I'm a scientist. And there's this tendency to say that it's progress that — you know, I'm not suggesting we're going to all go live by candlelight. Indeed, technology is allowing us to access the sky in ways that are impossible otherwise. One of the greatest examples of this is, of course, the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble went up into space, it returns pictures daily, and it allows us to see things that we are incapable of seeing with our naked eye, in ways that we've never been able to do before in all of human history. Other examples of this would be planetarium shows. In the past couple of years, planetarium shows have become more high-tech with these great visualizations, and even though this isn't access directly to the sky, it's at least access to our knowledge about the sky. And indeed, we can experience the sky in a planetarium in a way that is impossible for us to do just sitting out and looking in the dark. All of you have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope and of planetariums. But there are also ways for technology to enable participation in people's experience of the sky that you may not be familiar with. These are called "citizen science projects." Citizen science is when large research projects put their data online, teach ordinary people, like you, to go and interact with that data and actually contribute to the research by making interesting or necessary characterizations about it. One such example of this is what I'm showing here, called "Galaxy Zoo." Galaxy Zoo is a project where people get a 20-minute — even less than that, actually — tutorial on how to interact with these images of galaxies. They learn to annotate the images, and within a couple of minutes, they're up and running, and they're making really useful categorizations and classifications of these galaxies. Now, it's easy to understand why Galaxy Zoo would be an easy sell for people to be involved with: it involves pretty pictures; galaxies are, generally speaking, pretty attractive. However, there are many other flavors of citizen science projects that people have delved into that have varying levels of abstraction, that you wouldn't necessarily think people would jump at. One such example of this is the citizen science project associated with the mission that I'm part of, called the Kepler Mission. Kepler is a space telescope and it looks for planets around other stars by measuring the light from those stars very precisely. And we're looking for the dimmings caused by stars blocking off some of that light. We have an associated citizen science project called "Planet Hunters." Planet Hunters gives you, like Galaxy Zoo, a short tutorial, and within a couple of minutes, you're up and running; you're looking at data from the Kepler Mission and looking for planets. The idea behind this is an easy sell, right? But the actual process of planet-hunting involves a lot of looking at graphs, like the one I'm showing you here, and annotating them. I do this all day and that doesn't even sound that interesting to me. However, not only are people interested in doing this, but the citizen scientists that work with Planet Hunters have actually found planets in the data that would have gone undiscovered otherwise. This is an author list from the paper that they published of the planet they discovered. You'll see that all the people who contributed are listed below, and it's sort of an odd amalgam of people's real names and their log-in names. You'll notice if you look carefully, this is the first academic acknowledgment of the importance of Irish coffee in the discovery process. (Laughter) I don't want to give you the idea that these are some out-of-work scientists or just a bunch of nerds that are really into this. There are 60,000 people who participate in these projects, and most of them don't have technical backgrounds. So clearly, what this is feeding into is people's curiosity and their willingness to be part of the scientific discovery process. People want to do this. But all of this technology and all these digitally mediated ways of experiencing the sky still have something of a feel to me like looking at an animal in a zoo. It's a valid way of experiencing that thing — indeed, the lion in the cage is still real, the Hubble images are indeed real, and you can get closer to a lion in a zoo than you can in the wild. However, it's missing something. It's missing that savage beauty of experiencing that very thing in the wild for yourself, unmediated by a screen. The experience of looking up and knowing that the sky you're looking at surrounds every known living thing in the universe is very profound. Think about that for a moment. We are the only planet we know of that has life on it. The sky that you see is shared by every other living thing that we know of in existence. One of the things that I really like about my work is that it allows me to step back from my every day and to experience the larger context, this feeling that just as we go out and try to find planets in the universe that might be like ours, it always reminds me of how precious what we have here is. Our night sky is like a natural resource, it's as though it's a park that you can visit without ever having to travel there. But like any natural resource, if we don't protect it, if we don't preserve it and treasure it, it will slip away from us and be gone. So if you're interested in this, and this is something you want to learn more about, I encourage you in particular to visit darksky.org and to learn more about the choices you can make that can protect the dark night sky, because it belongs to everyone, it belongs to all of us, and therefore, it's ours to experience as we wish. And it's also ours to lose. Thank you. (Applause)