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2600 years of history in one object

{0: 'The writer and presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series "A History of the World in 100 Objects" and the accompanying book. '}

TEDGlobal 2011

The things we make have one supreme quality — they live longer than us. We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many. I want this morning to talk about the story, the biography — or rather the biographies — of one particular object, one remarkable thing. It doesn't, I agree, look very much. It's about the size of a rugby ball. It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun. And as you can see, it's been knocked about a bit, which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879. But today, this thing is, I believe, a major player in the politics of the Middle East. And it's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet. The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change. And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with, Belshazzar's feast — because we're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 BC. And the parallels between the events of 539 BC and 2003 and in between are startling. What you're looking at is Rembrandt's painting, now in the National Gallery in London, illustrating the text from the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. And you all know roughly the story. Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon. Not only the Jews, he'd taken the temple vessels. He'd ransacked, desecrated the temple. And the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem had been taken to Babylon. Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast. And in order to make it even more exciting, he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun, and he brings out the temple vessels. He's already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia. And that night, Daniel tells us, at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall, "You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and the Persians." And that very night Cyrus, king of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell. It is, of course, a great moment in the history of the Jewish people. It's a great story. It's story we all know. "The writing on the wall" is part of our everyday language. What happened next was remarkable, and it's where our cylinder enters the story. Cyrus, king of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight — the great empire of Babylon, which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus. And Cyrus makes a declaration. And that is what this cylinder is, the declaration made by the ruler guided by God who had toppled the Iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people. In ringing Babylonian — it was written in Babylonian — he says, "I am Cyrus, king of all the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world." They're not shy of hyperbole as you can see. This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we've got. And it's written, as we'll see in due course, by very skilled P.R. consultants. So the hyperbole is not actually surprising. And what is the great king, the powerful king, the king of the four quarters of the world going to do? He goes on to say that, having conquered Babylon, he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians — Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar — have captured and enslaved go free. He'll let them return to their countries. And more important, he will let them all recover the gods, the statues, the temple vessels that had been confiscated. All the peoples that the Babylonians had repressed and removed will go home, and they'll take with them their gods. And they'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place. This is the decree, this object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews, after the exile in Babylon, the years they'd spent sitting by the waters of Babylon, weeping when they remembered Jerusalem, those Jews were allowed to go home. They were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple. It's a central document in Jewish history. And the Book of Chronicles, the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms. This is the Jewish version of the same story. "Thus said Cyrus, king of Persia, 'All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem. Who is there among you of his people? The Lord God be with him, and let him go up.'" "Go up" — aaleh. The central element, still, of the notion of return, a central part of the life of Judaism. As you all know, that return from exile, the second temple, reshaped Judaism. And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia, reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay. Two great texts, what about the politics? What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history. The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire. Cyrus begins in the 530s BC. And by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control. This empire is, in fact, the Middle East as we now know it, and it's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it. It was the largest empire the world had known until then. Much more important, it was the first multicultural, multifaith state on a huge scale. And it had to be run in a quite new way. It had to be run in different languages. The fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing. And it had to recognize their different habits, different peoples, different religions, different faiths. All of those are respected by Cyrus. Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational, multifaith, multicultural society. And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen, and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by Alexander. It left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together. The Greek invasions ended that. And of course, Alexander couldn't sustain a government and it fragmented. But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central. The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his book "Cyropaedia" promoting Cyrus as the great ruler. And throughout European culture afterward, Cyrus remained the model. This is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was. And Xenophon's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Jefferson was a great admirer — the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state. Meanwhile, back in Babylon, things had not been going well. After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost — until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon. And it enters now another story. It enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century: Are the scriptures reliable? Can we trust them? We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures. No other evidence. Suddenly, this appeared. And great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution, by geology, here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true. It's a great 19th century moment. But — and this, of course, is where it becomes complicated — the facts were true, hurrah for archeology, but the interpretation was rather more complicated. Because the cylinder account and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect. The Babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of Bablyon, Marduk. And, not surprisingly, they tell you that all this was done by Marduk. "Marduk, we hold, called Cyrus by his name." Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon. Marduk tells Cyrus that he will do these great, generous things of setting the people free. And this is why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk. The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised to learn, take a rather different view of this. For them, of course, it can't possibly by Marduk that made all this happen. It can only be Jehovah. And so in Isaiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this, not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel — the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people. It's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event, two different religious takeovers of a political fact. God, we know, is usually on the side of the big battalions. The question is, which god was it? And the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the Hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion. And it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk. And there's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this, because he says, this is God speaking, of course, "I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me." I think it's recognized that Cyrus doesn't realize that he's acting under orders from Jehovah. And equally, he'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from Marduk. Because interestingly, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts. (Laughter) That's 1879. 40 years on and we're in 1917, and the cylinder enters a different world. This time, the real politics of the contemporary world — the year of the Balfour Declaration, the year when the new imperial power in the Middle East, Britain, decides that it will declare a Jewish national home, it will allow the Jews to return. And the response to this by the Jewish population in Eastern Europe is rhapsodic. And across Eastern Europe, Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side — the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem. And the Cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan. You all know what happened. The state of Israel is setup, and 50 years later, in the late 60s, it's clear that Britain's role as the imperial power is over. And another story of the cylinder begins. The region, the U.K. and the U.S. decide, has to be kept safe from communism, and the superpower that will be created to do this would be Iran, the Shah. And so the Shah invents an Iranian history, or a return to Iranian history, that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the Cyrus cylinder. When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis, he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum, goes to Tehran, and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty. Cyrus cylinder: guarantor of the Shah. 10 years later, another story: Iranian Revolution, 1979. Islamic revolution, no more Cyrus; we're not interested in that history, we're interested in Islamic Iran — until Iraq, the new superpower that we've all decided should be in the region, attacks. Then another Iran-Iraq war. And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past, their great past when they fought Iraq and won. It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians — Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout. And the obvious emblem is Cyrus. So when the British Museum and Tehran National Musuem cooperate and work together, as we've been doing, the Iranians ask for one thing only as a loan. It's the only object they want. They want to borrow the Cyrus cylinder. And last year, the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time. It's shown being presented here, put into its case by the director of the National Museum of Tehran, one of the many women in Iran in very senior positions, Mrs. Ardakani. It was a huge event. This is the other side of that same picture. It's seen in Tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months. This is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the West. And it's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means, what Cyrus means, but above all, Cyrus as articulated through this cylinder — Cyrus as the defender of the homeland, the champion, of course, of Iranian identity and of the Iranian peoples, tolerant of all faiths. And in the current Iran, Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament, something to be very, very proud of. To see this object in Tehran, thousands of Jews living in Iran came to Tehran to see it. It became a great emblem, a great subject of debate about what Iran is at home and abroad. Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed? Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated? This is heady national rhetoric, and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return. Here you see this out-sized Cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from Iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of Iran. It was a narrative presented by the president himself. And for me, to take this object to Iran, to be allowed to take this object to Iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what Iran is, what different Irans there are and how the different histories of Iran might shape the world today. It's a debate that's still continuing, and it will continue to rumble, because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration. It stands with the American constitution. It certainly says far more about real freedoms than Magna Carta. It is a document that can mean so many things, for Iran and for the region. A replica of this is at the United Nations. In New York this autumn, it will be present when the great debates about the future of the Middle East take place. And I want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures. It will appear, certainly, in many more Middle Eastern stories. And what story of the Middle East, what story of the world, do you want to see reflecting what is said, what is expressed in this cylinder? The right of peoples to live together in the same state, worshiping differently, freely — a Middle East, a world, in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate. In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are, as you know, shrill. But I think it's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder. Thank you. (Applause)

Comedy is translation

{0: 'Chris Bliss explores the inherent challenge of communication, and how comedy opens paths to new perspectives. '}

TEDxRainier

Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite writers, for his storytelling, but even more, I think, for the beauty and precision of his prose. And whether it's the opening line from "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or the fantastical stream of consciousness in "Autumn of the Patriarch," where the words rush by, page after page of unpunctuated imagery sweeping the reader along like some wild river twisting through a primal South American jungle, reading Márquez is a visceral experience. Which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when I realized that I was being swept along on this remarkable, vivid journey in translation. Now I was a comparative literature major in college, which is like an English major, only instead of being stuck studying Chaucer for three months, we got to read great literature in translation from around the world. And as great as these books were, you could always tell that you were getting close to the full effect. But not so with Márquez who once praised his translator's versions as being better than his own, which is an astonishing compliment. So when I heard that the translator, Gregory Rabassa, had written his own book on the subject, I couldn't wait to read it. It's called apropos of the Italian adage that I lifted from his forward, "If This Be Treason." And it's a charming read. It's highly recommended for anyone who's interested in the translator's art. But the reason that I mention it is that early on, Rabassa offers this elegantly simple insight: "Every act of communication is an act of translation." Now maybe that's been obvious to all of you for a long time, but for me, as often as I'd encountered that exact difficulty on a daily basis, I had never seen the inherent challenge of communication in so crystalline a light. Ever since I can remember thinking consciously about such things, communication has been my central passion. Even as a child, I remember thinking that what I really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else. So no ego problems. It's funny, my wife, Daisy, whose family is littered with schizophrenics — and I mean littered with them — once said to me, "Chris, I already have a brother who thinks he's God. I don't need a husband who wants to be." (Laughter) Anyway, as I plunged through my 20s ever more aware of how unobtainable the first part of my childhood ambition was, it was that second part, being able to successfully communicate to others whatever knowledge I was gaining, where the futility of my quest really set in. Time after time, whenever I set out to share some great truth with a soon-to-be grateful recipient, it had the opposite effect. Interestingly, when your opening line of communication is, "Hey, listen up, because I'm about to drop some serious knowledge on you," it's amazing how quickly you'll discover both ice and the firing squad. Finally, after about 10 years of alienating friends and strangers alike, I finally got it, a new personal truth all my own, that if I was going to ever communicate well with other people the ideas that I was gaining, I'd better find a different way of going about it. And that's when I discovered comedy. Now comedy travels along a distinct wavelength from other forms of language. If I had to place it on an arbitrary spectrum, I'd say it falls somewhere between poetry and lies. And I'm not talking about all comedy here, because, clearly, there's plenty of humor that colors safely within the lines of what we already think and feel. What I want to talk about is the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives — comedy as the philosopher's stone. It takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world. Because that's what I take from the theme of this conference: Gained in Translation. That it's about communication that doesn't just produce greater understanding within the individual, but leads to real change. Which in my experience means communication that manages to speak to and expand our concept of self-interest. Now I'm big on speaking to people's self-interest because we're all wired for that. It's part of our survival package, and that's why it's become so important for us, and that's why we're always listening at that level. And also because that's where, in terms of our own self-interest, we finally begin to grasp our ability to respond, our responsibility to the rest of the world. Now as to what I mean by the best comedy and satire, I mean work that comes first and foremost from a place of honesty and integrity. Now if you think back on Tina Fey's impersonations on Saturday Night Live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, they were devastating. Fey demonstrated far more effectively than any political pundit the candidate's fundamental lack of seriousness, cementing an impression that the majority of the American public still holds today. And the key detail of this is that Fey's scripts weren't written by her and they weren't written by the SNL writers. They were lifted verbatim from Palin's own remarks. (Laughter) Here was a Palin impersonator quoting Palin word for word. Now that's honesty and integrity, and it's also why Fey's performances left such a lasting impression. On the other side of the political spectrum, the first time that I heard Rush Limbaugh refer to presidential hopeful John Edwards as the Breck girl I knew that he'd made a direct hit. Now it's not often that I'm going to associate the words honesty and integrity with Limbaugh, but it's really hard to argue with that punchline. The description perfectly captured Edwards' personal vanity. And guess what? That ended up being the exact personality trait that was at the core of the scandal that ended his political career. Now The Daily Show with John Stewart is by far the most — (Applause) (Laughter) it's by far the most well-documented example of the effectiveness of this kind of comedy. Survey after survey, from Pew Research to the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, has found that Daily Show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows. (Applause) Now whether this says more about the conflict between integrity and profitability of corporate journalism than it does about the attentiveness of Stewart's viewers, the larger point remains that Stewart's material is always grounded in a commitment to the facts — not because his intent is to inform. It's not. His intent is to be funny. It just so happens that Stewart's brand of funny doesn't work unless the facts are true. And the result is great comedy that's also an information delivery system that scores markedly higher in both credibility and retention than the professional news media. Now this is doubly ironic when you consider that what gives comedy its edge at reaching around people's walls is the way that it uses deliberate misdirection. A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick, where you think it's going over here and then all of a sudden you're transported over here. And there's this mental delight that's followed by the physical response of laughter, which, not coincidentally, releases endorphins in the brain. And just like that, you've been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses. This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic, all of the flight-or-fight responses, operate. Flight-or-fight releases adrenalin, which throws our walls up sky-high. And the comedy comes along, dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest — race, religion, politics, sexuality — only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view. Now let me give you an example from my act. I have some material about the so-called radical gay agenda, which starts off by asking, how radical is the gay agenda? Because from what I can tell, the three things gay Americans seem to want most are to join the military, get married and start a family. (Laughter) Three things I've tried to avoid my entire life. (Laughter) Have at it you radical bastards. The field is yours. (Laughter) And that's followed by these lines about gay adoption: What is the problem with gay adoption? Why is this remotely controversial? If you have a baby and you think that baby's gay, you should be allowed to put it up for adoption. (Laughter) You have given birth to an abomination. Remove it from your household. Now by taking the biblical epithet "abomination" and attaching it to the ultimate image of innocence, a baby, this joke short circuits the emotional wiring behind the debate and it leaves the audience with the opportunity, through their laughter, to question its validity. Misdirection isn't the only trick that comedy has up its sleeve. Economy of language is another real strong suit of great comedy. There are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline. Bill Hicks — and if you don't know his work, you should really Google him — Hicks had a routine about getting into one of those childhood bragging contests on the playground, where finally the other kid says to him, "Huh? Well my dad can beat up your dad," to which Hicks replies, "Really? How soon?" (Laughter) That's an entire childhood in three words. (Laughter) Not to mention what it reveals about the adult who's speaking them. And one last powerful attribute that comedy has as communication is that it's inherently viral. People can't wait to pass along that new great joke. And this isn't some new phenomenon of our wired world. Comedy has been crossing country with remarkable speed way before the Internet, social media, even cable TV. Back in 1980 when comedian Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident, I was in Los Angeles the day after it happened and then I was in Washington D.C. two days after that. And I heard the exact same punchline on both coasts — something about the Ignited Negro College Fund. Clearly, it didn't come out of a Tonight Show monologue. And my guess here — and I have no research on this — is that if you really were to look back at it and if you could research it, you'd find out that comedy is the second oldest viral profession. First there were drums and then knock-knock jokes. (Laughter) But it's when you put all of these elements together — when you get the viral appeal of a great joke with a powerful punchline that's crafted from honesty and integrity, it can have a real world impact at changing a conversation. Now I have a close friend, Joel Pett, who's the editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. And he used to be the USA Today Monday morning guy. I was visiting with Joel the weekend before the Copenhagen conference on climate change opened in December of 2009. And Joel was explaining to me that, because USA Today was one of America's four papers of record, it would be scanned by virtually everyone in attendance at the conference, which meant that, if he hit it out of the park with his cartoon on Monday, the opening day of the conference, it could get passed around at the highest level among actual decision-makers. So we started talking about climate change. And it turned out that Joel and I were both bothered by the same thing, which was how so much of the debate was still focused on the science and how complete it was or wasn't, which, to both of us, seems somewhat intentionally off point. Because first of all, there's this false premise that such a thing as complete science exists. Now Governor Perry of my newly-adopted state of Texas was pushing this same line this past summer at the beginning of his oops-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, proclaiming over and over that the science wasn't complete at the same time that 250 out of 254 counties in the state of Texas were on fire. And Perry's policy solution was to ask the people of Texas to pray for rain. Personally, I was praying for four more fires so we could finally complete the damn science. (Laughter) But back in 2009, the question Joel and I kept turning over and over was why this late in the game so much energy was being spent talking about the science when the policies necessary to address climate change were unequivocally beneficial for humanity in the long run regardless of the science. So we tossed it back and forth until Joel came up with this. Cartoon: "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" (Laughter) You've got to love that idea. (Applause) How about that? How about we create a better world for nothing? Not for God, not for country, not for profit — just as a basic metric for global decision-making. And this cartoon hit the bull's eye. Shortly after the conference was over, Joel got a request for a signed copy from the head of the EPA in Washington whose wall it now hangs on. And not long after that, he got another request for a copy from the head of the EPA in California who used it as part of her presentation at an international conference on climate change in Sacramento last year. And it didn't stop there. To date, Joel's gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups, in the United States, Canada and Europe. And earlier this year, he got a request from the Green Party in Australia who used it in their campaign where it became part of the debate that resulted in the Australian parliament adopting the most rigorous carbon tax regime of any country in the world. (Applause) That is a lot of punch for 14 words. So my suggestion to those of you out here who are seriously focused on creating a better world is to take a little bit of time each day and practice thinking funny, because you might just find the question that you've been looking for. Thank you. (Applause)

Using tech to enable dreaming

{0: 'Shilo Shiv Suleman is an illustrator, storyteller and iPad book creator.'}

INK Conference

My story begins right here actually in Rajasthan about two years ago. I was in the desert, under the starry skies with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali. And we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient Indian epic "The Mahabharata." So back in the day, when us Indians wanted to travel we'd jump into a chariot and we'd zoom across the sky. Now we do the same with airplanes. Back then, when Arjuna, the great Indian warrior prince, when he was thirsty, he'd take out a bow, he'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out. Now we do the same with drills and machines. The conclusion that we came to was that magic had been replaced by machinery. And this made me really sad. I found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe. I was terrified by this idea that I would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me, without tweeting it to my friends. And it felt like technology should enable magic, not kill it. When I was a little girl, my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch. And this piece of 50-year-old technology became the most magical thing to me. It became a gilded gateway into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks and images in my imagination. So I felt like our cellphones and our fancy watches and our cameras had stopped us from dreaming. They stopped us from being inspired. And so I jumped in, I jumped into this world of technology, to see how I could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it. I've been illustrating books since I was 16. And so when I saw the iPad, I saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world. It can know how we're holding it. It can know where we are. It brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch. Storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial. But what are we doing with it? So I'm actually just going to go in and launch Khoya, an interactive app for the iPad. So it says, "Place your fingers upon each light." And so — (Music) It says, "This box belongs to ... " And so I type in my name. And actually I become a character in the book. At various points, a little letter drops down to me — and the iPad knows where you live because of GPS — which is actually addressed to me. The child in me is really excited by these kinds of possibilities. Now I've been talking a lot about magic. And I don't mean wizards and dragons, I mean the kind of childhood magic, those ideas that we all harbored as children. This idea of fireflies in a jar, for some reason, was always really exciting to me. And so over here you need to tilt your iPad, take the fireflies out. And they actually illuminate your way through the rest of the book. Another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble. And so over here, each book and each world becomes a little marble that I drag in to this magical device within the device. And it opens up a map. All along, all fantasy books have always had maps, but these maps have been static. This is a map that grows and glows and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book. It reveals itself to you at certain points in the book as well. So I'm just going to enter in. Another thing that's actually really important to me is creating content that is Indian and yet very contemporary. Over here, these are the Apsaras. So we've all heard about fairies and we've all heard about nymphs, but how many people outside of India know about their Indian counterparts, the Apsaras? These poor Apsaras have been trapped inside Indra's chambers for thousands of years in an old and musty book. And so we're bringing them back in a contemporary story for children. And a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis. (Music) Speaking of the environmental crisis, I think a big problem has been in the last 10 years is that children have been locked inside their rooms, glued to their PCs, they haven't been able to get out. But now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology. One of the interactions in the book is that you're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside, take out your camera on the iPad and collect pictures of different natural objects. When I was a child, I had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells. And somehow kids don't do that anymore. So in bringing back this childhood ritual, you need to go out and, in one chapter, take a picture of a flower and then tag it. In another chapter, you need to take a picture of a piece of bark and then tag that. And what happens is that you actually create a digital collection of photographs that you can then put up online. A child in London puts up a picture of a fox and says, "Oh, I saw a fox today." A child in India says, "I saw a monkey today." And it creates this kind of social network around a collection of digital photographs that you've actually taken. In the possibilities of linking together magic, the earth and technology, there are multiple possibilities. In the next book, we plan on having an interaction where you take your iPad out with the video on and through augmented reality, you see this layer of animated pixies appear on a houseplant that's outside your house. At one point, your screen is filled up with leaves. And so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away and read the rest of the book. We're moving, we're all moving here, to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology, and magic and technology can come closer together. We're harnessing energy from the sun. We're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story. Thank you. (Applause)

Saving for tomorrow, tomorrow

{0: 'Shlomo Benartzi uses behavioral economics to study how and why we plan well for the future (or fail to), and uses that to develop new programs to encourage saving for retirement.'}

TEDSalon NY2011

I'm going to talk today about saving more, but not today, tomorrow. I'm going to talk about Save More Tomorrow. It's a program that Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago and I devised maybe 15 years ago. The program, in a sense, is an example of behavioral finance on steroids — how we could really use behavioral finance. Now you might ask, what is behavioral finance? So let's think about how we manage our money. Let's start with mortgages. It's kind of a recent topic, at least in the U.S. A lot of people buy the biggest house they can afford, and actually slightly bigger than that. And then they foreclose. And then they blame the banks for being the bad guys who gave them the mortgages. Let's also think about how we manage risks — for example, investing in the stock market. Two years ago, three years ago, about four years ago, markets did well. We were risk takers, of course. Then market stocks seize and we're like, "Wow. These losses, they feel, emotionally, they feel very different from what we actually thought about it when markets were going up." So we're probably not doing a great job when it comes to risk taking. How many of you have iPhones? Anyone? Wonderful. I would bet many more of you insure your iPhone — you're implicitly buying insurance by having an extended warranty. What if you lose your iPhone? What if you do this? How many of you have kids? Anyone? Keep your hands up if you have sufficient life insurance. I see a lot of hands coming down. I would predict, if you're a representative sample, that many more of you insure your iPhones than your lives, even when you have kids. We're not doing that well when it comes to insurance. The average American household spends 1,000 dollars a year on lotteries. And I know it sounds crazy. How many of you spend a thousand dollars a year on lotteries? No one. So that tells us that the people not in this room are spending more than a thousand to get the average to a thousand. Low-income people spend a lot more than a thousand on lotteries. So where does it take us? We're not doing a great job managing money. Behavioral finance is really a combination of psychology and economics, trying to understand the money mistakes people make. And I can keep standing here for the 12 minutes and 53 seconds that I have left and make fun of all sorts of ways we manage money, and at the end you're going to ask, "How can we help people?" And that's what I really want to focus on today. How do we take an understanding of the money mistakes people make, and then turning the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions? And what I'm going to talk about today is Save More Tomorrow. I want to address the issue of savings. We have on the screen a representative sample of 100 Americans. And we're going to look at their saving behavior. First thing to notice is, half of them do not even have access to a 401(k) plan. They cannot make savings easy. They cannot have money go away from their paycheck into a 401(k) plan before they see it, before they can touch it. What about the remaining half of the people? Some of them elect not to save. They're just too lazy. They never get around to logging into a complicated website and doing 17 clicks to join the 401(k) plan. And then they have to decide how they're going to invest in their 52 choices, and they never heard about what is a money market fund. And they get overwhelmed and the just don't join. How many people end up saving to a 401(k) plan? One third of Americans. Two thirds are not saving now. Are they saving enough? Take out those who say they save too little. One out of 10 are saving enough. Nine out of 10 either cannot save through their 401(k) plan, decide not to save — or don't decide — or save too little. We think we have a problem of people saving too much. Let's look at that. We have one person — well, actually we're going to slice him in half because it's less than one percent. Roughly half a percent of Americans feel that they save too much. What are we going to do about it? That's what I really want to focus on. We have to understand why people are not saving, and then we can hopefully flip the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions, and then see how powerful it might be. So let me divert for a second as we're going to identify the problems, the challenges, the behavioral challenges, that prevent people from saving. I'm going to divert and talk about bananas and chocolate. Suppose we had another wonderful TED event next week. And during the break there would be a snack and you could choose bananas or chocolate. How many of you think you would like to have bananas during this hypothetical TED event next week? Who would go for bananas? Wonderful. I predict scientifically 74 percent of you will go for bananas. Well that's at least what one wonderful study predicted. And then count down the days and see what people ended up eating. The same people that imagined themselves eating the bananas ended up eating chocolates a week later. Self-control is not a problem in the future. It's only a problem now when the chocolate is next to us. What does it have to do with time and savings, this issue of immediate gratification? Or as some economists call it, present bias. We think about saving. We know we should be saving. We know we'll do it next year, but today let us go and spend. Christmas is coming, we might as well buy a lot of gifts for everyone we know. So this issue of present bias causes us to think about saving, but end up spending. Let me now talk about another behavioral obstacle to saving having to do with inertia. But again, a little diversion to the topic of organ donation. Wonderful study comparing different countries. We're going to look at two similar countries, Germany and Austria. And in Germany, if you would like to donate your organs — God forbid something really bad happens to you — when you get your driving license or an I.D., you check the box saying, "I would like to donate my organs." Not many people like checking boxes. It takes effort. You need to think. Twelve percent do. Austria, a neighboring country, slightly similar, slightly different. What's the difference? Well, you still have choice. You will decide whether you want to donate your organs or not. But when you get your driving license, you check the box if you do not want to donate your organ. Nobody checks boxes. That's kind of too much effort. One percent check the box. The rest do nothing. Doing nothing is very common. Not many people check boxes. What are the implications to saving lives and having organs available? In Germany, 12 percent check the box. Twelve percent are organ donors. Huge shortage of organs, God forbid, if you need one. In Austria, again, nobody checks the box. Therefore, 99 percent of people are organ donors. Inertia, lack of action. What is the default setting if people do nothing, if they keep procrastinating, if they don't check the boxes? Very powerful. We're going to talk about what happens if people are overwhelmed and scared to make their 401(k) choices. Are we going to make them automatically join the plan, or are they going to be left out? In too many 401(k) plans, if people do nothing, it means they're not saving for retirement, if they don't check the box. And checking the box takes effort. So we've chatted about a couple of behavioral challenges. One more before we flip the challenges into solutions, having to do with monkeys and apples. No, no, no, this is a real study and it's got a lot to do with behavioral economics. One group of monkeys gets an apple, they're pretty happy. The other group gets two apples, one is taken away. They still have an apple left. They're really mad. Why have you taken our apple? This is the notion of loss aversion. We hate losing stuff, even if it doesn't mean a lot of risk. You would hate to go to the ATM, take out 100 dollars and notice that you lost one of those $20 bills. It's very painful, even though it doesn't mean anything. Those 20 dollars might have been a quick lunch. So this notion of loss aversion kicks in when it comes to savings too, because people, mentally and emotionally and intuitively frame savings as a loss because I have to cut my spending. So we talked about all sorts of behavioral challenges having to do with savings eventually. Whether you think about immediate gratification, and the chocolates versus bananas, it's just painful to save now. It's a lot more fun to spend now. We talked about inertia and organ donations and checking the box. If people have to check a lot of boxes to join a 401(k) plan, they're going to keep procrastinating and not join. And last, we talked about loss aversion, and the monkeys and the apples. If people frame mentally saving for retirement as a loss, they're not going to be saving for retirement. So we've got these challenges, and what Richard Thaler and I were always fascinated by — take behavioral finance, make it behavioral finance on steroids or behavioral finance 2.0 or behavioral finance in action — flip the challenges into solutions. And we came up with an embarrassingly simple solution called Save More, not today, Tomorrow. How is it going to solve the challenges we chatted about? If you think about the problem of bananas versus chocolates, we think we're going to eat bananas next week. We think we're going to save more next year. Save More Tomorrow invites employees to save more maybe next year — sometime in the future when we can imagine ourselves eating bananas, volunteering more in the community, exercising more and doing all the right things on the planet. Now we also talked about checking the box and the difficulty of taking action. Save More Tomorrow makes it easy. It's an autopilot. Once you tell me you would like to save more in the future, let's say every January you're going to be saving more automatically and it's going to go away from your paycheck to the 401(k) plan before you see it, before you touch it, before you get the issue of immediate gratification. But what are we going to do about the monkeys and loss aversion? Next January comes and people might feel that if they save more, they have to spend less, and that's painful. Well, maybe it shouldn't be just January. Maybe we should make people save more when they make more money. That way, when they make more money, when they get a pay raise, they don't have to cut their spending. They take a little bit of the increase in the paycheck home and spend more — take a little bit of the increase and put it in a 401(k) plan. So that is the program, embarrassingly simple, but as we're going to see, extremely powerful. We first implemented it, Richard Thaler and I, back in 1998. Mid-sized company in the Midwest, blue collar employees struggling to pay their bills repeatedly told us they cannot save more right away. Saving more today is not an option. We invited them to save three percentage points more every time they get a pay raise. And here are the results. We're seeing here a three and a half-year period, four pay raises, people who were struggling to save, were saving three percent of their paycheck, three and a half years later saving almost four times as much, almost 14 percent. And there's shoes and bicycles and things on this chart because I don't want to just throw numbers in a vacuum. I want, really, to think about the fact that saving four times more is a huge difference in terms of the lifestyle that people will be able to afford. It's real. It's not just numbers on a piece of paper. Whereas with saving three percent, people might have to add nice sneakers so they can walk, because they won't be able to afford anything else, when they save 14 percent they might be able to maybe have nice dress shoes to walk to the car to drive. This is a real difference. By now, about 60 percent of the large companies actually have programs like this in place. It's been part of the Pension Protection Act. And needless to say that Thaler and I have been blessed to be part of this program and make a difference. Let me wrap with two key messages. One is behavioral finance is extremely powerful. This is just one example. Message two is there's still a lot to do. This is really the tip of the iceberg. If you think about people and mortgages and buying houses and then not being able to pay for it, we need to think about that. If you're thinking about people taking too much risk and not understanding how much risk they're taking or taking too little risk, we need to think about that. If you think about people spending a thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets, we need to think about that. The average actually, the record is in Singapore. The average household spends $4,000 a year on lottery tickets. We've got a lot to do, a lot to solve, also in the retirement area when it comes to what people do with their money after retirement. One last question: How many of you feel comfortable that as you're planning for retirement you have a really solid plan when you're going to retire, when you're going to claim Social Security benefits, what lifestyle to expect, how much to spend every month so you're not going to run out of money? How many of you feel you have a solid plan for the future when it comes to post-retirement decisions. One, two, three, four. Less than three percent of a very sophisticated audience. Behavioral finance has a long way. There's a lot of opportunities to make it powerful again and again and again. Thank you. (Applause)

My immigration story

{0: "Tan Le is the founder & CEO of Emotiv, a bioinformatics company that's working on identifying biomarkers for mental and other neurological conditions using electroencephalography (EEG)."}

TEDxWomen 2011

How can I speak in 10 minutes about the bonds of women over three generations, about how the astonishing strength of those bonds took hold in the life of a four-year-old girl huddled with her young sister, her mother and her grandmother for five days and nights in a small boat in the China Sea more than 30 years ago. Bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl and never let go — that small girl now living in San Francisco and speaking to you today. This is not a finished story. It is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together. Let me tell you about some of the pieces. Imagine the first piece: a man burning his life's work. He is a poet, a playwright, a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country's unity and freedom. Imagine him as the communists enter Saigon — confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste. Words, for so long his friends, now mocked him. He retreated into silence. He died broken by history. He is my grandfather. I never knew him in real life. But our lives are much more than our memories. My grandmother never let me forget his life. My duty was not to allow it to have been in vain, and my lesson was to learn that, yes, history tried to crush us, but we endured. The next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn slipping silently out to sea. My mother, Mai, was 18 when her father died — already in an arranged marriage, already with two small girls. For her, life had distilled itself into one task: the escape of her family and a new life in Australia. It was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed. So after a four-year saga that defies fiction, a boat slipped out to sea disguised as a fishing vessel. All the adults knew the risks. The greatest fear was of pirates, rape and death. Like most adults on the boat, my mother carried a small bottle of poison. If we were captured, first my sister and I, then she and my grandmother would drink. My first memories are from the boat — the steady beat of the engine, the bow dipping into each wave, the vast and empty horizon. I don't remember the pirates who came many times, but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat, or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours. But I do remember the lights on the oil rig off the Malaysian coast and the young man who collapsed and died, the journey's end too much for him, and the first apple I tasted, given to me by the men on the rig. No apple has ever tasted the same. After three months in a refugee camp, we landed in Melbourne. And the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women across three generations shaping a new life together. We settled in Footscray, a working-class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants. Unlike the settled middle-class suburbs, whose existence I was oblivious of, there was no sense of entitlement in Footscray. The smells from shop doors were from the rest of the world. And the snippets of halting English were exchanged between people who had one thing in common: They were starting again. My mother worked on farms, then on a car assembly line, working six days, double shifts. Somehow, she found time to study English and gain IT qualifications. We were poor. All the dollars were allocated and extra tuition in English and mathematics was budgeted for regardless of what missed out, which was usually new clothes; they were always secondhand. Two pairs of stockings for school, each to hide the holes in the other. A school uniform down to the ankles, because it had to last for six years. And there were rare but searing chants of "slit-eye" and the occasional graffiti: "Asian, go home." Go home to where? Something stiffened inside me. There was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying, "I will bypass you." My mother, my sister and I slept in the same bed. My mother was exhausted each night, but we told one another about our day and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house. My mother suffered from nightmares, all about the boat. And my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came so I could wake her. She opened a computer store, then studied to be a beautician and opened another business. And the women came with their stories about men who could not make the transition, angry and inflexible, and troubled children caught between two worlds. Grants and sponsors were sought. Centers were established. I lived in parallel worlds. In one, I was the classic Asian student, relentless in the demands that I made on myself. In the other, I was enmeshed in lives that were precarious, tragically scarred by violence, drug abuse and isolation. But so many over the years were helped. And for that work, when I was a final-year law student, I was chosen as the Young Australian of the Year. And I was catapulted from one piece of the jigsaw to another, and their edges didn't fit. Tan Le, anonymous Footscray resident, was now Tan Le, refugee and social activist, invited to speak in venues she had never heard of and into homes whose existence she could never have imagined. I didn't know the protocols. I didn't know how to use the cutlery. I didn't know how to talk about wine. I didn't know how to talk about anything. I wanted to retreat to the routines and comfort of life in an unsung suburb — a grandmother, a mother and two daughters ending each day as they had for almost 20 years, telling one another the story of their day and falling asleep, the three of us still in the same bed. I told my mother I couldn't do it. She reminded me that I was now the same age she had been when we boarded the boat. "No" had never been an option. "Just do it," she said, "and don't be what you're not." So I spoke out on youth unemployment and education and the neglect of the marginalized and disenfranchised. And the more candidly I spoke, the more I was asked to speak. I met people from all walks of life, so many of them doing the thing they loved, living on the frontiers of possibility. And even though I finished my degree, I realized I could not settle into a career in law. There had to be another piece of the jigsaw. And I realized, at the same time, that it is OK to be an outsider, a recent arrival, new on the scene — and not just OK, but something to be thankful for, perhaps a gift from the boat. Because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons, can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province. I have stepped outside my comfort zone enough now to know that, yes, the world does fall apart, but not in the way that you fear. Possibilities that would not have been allowed were outrageously encouraged. There was an energy there, an implacable optimism, a strange mixture of humility and daring. So I followed my hunches. I gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label "It can't be done" was an irresistible challenge. For a year, we were penniless. At the end of each day, I made a huge pot of soup which we all shared. We worked well into each night. Most of our ideas were crazy, but a few were brilliant, and we broke through. I made the decision to move to the US after only one trip. My hunches again. Three months later, I had relocated, and the adventure has continued. Before I close, though, let me tell you about my grandmother. She grew up at a time when Confucianism was the social norm and the local mandarin was the person who mattered. Life hadn't changed for centuries. Her father died soon after she was born. Her mother raised her alone. At 17, she became the second wife of a mandarin whose mother beat her. With no support from her husband, she caused a sensation by taking him to court and prosecuting her own case, and a far greater sensation when she won. (Laughter) (Applause) "It can't be done" was shown to be wrong. I was taking a shower in a hotel room in Sydney the moment she died, 600 miles away, in Melbourne. I looked through the shower screen and saw her standing on the other side. I knew she had come to say goodbye. My mother phoned minutes later. A few days later, we went to a Buddhist temple in Footscray and sat around her casket. We told her stories and assured her that we were still with her. At midnight, the monk came and told us he had to close the casket. My mother asked us to feel her hand. She asked the monk, "Why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold?" "Because you have been holding it since this morning," he said. "You have not let it go." If there is a sinew in our family, it runs through the women. Given who we were and how life had shaped us, we can now see that the men that might have come into our lives would have thwarted us. Defeat would have come too easily. Now I would like to have my own children, and I wonder about the boat. Who could ever wish it on their own? Yet I am afraid of privilege, of ease, of entitlement. Can I give them a bow in their lives, dipping bravely into each wave, the unperturbed and steady beat of the engine, the vast horizon that guarantees nothing? I don't know. But if I could give it and still see them safely through, I would. (Applause) Trevor Neilson: And also, Tan's mother is here today, in the fourth or fifth row. (Applause)

All your devices can be hacked

{0: 'Avi Rubin is a professor of computer science and director of the Health and Medical Security Lab at Johns Hopkins University. His research is focused on the security of electronic records -- including medical and voting records.'}

TEDxMidAtlantic

I'm a computer science professor, and my area of expertise is computer and information security. When I was in graduate school, I had the opportunity to overhear my grandmother describing to one of her fellow senior citizens what I did for a living. Apparently, I was in charge of making sure that no one stole the computers from the university. (Laughter) And, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable thing for her to think, because I told her I was working in computer security, and it was interesting to get her perspective. But that's not the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say about my work. The most ridiculous thing I ever heard is, I was at a dinner party, and a woman heard that I work in computer security, and she asked me if — she said her computer had been infected by a virus, and she was very concerned that she might get sick from it, that she could get this virus. (Laughter) And I'm not a doctor, but I reassured her that it was very, very unlikely that this would happen, but if she felt more comfortable, she could be free to use latex gloves when she was on the computer, and there would be no harm whatsoever in that. I'm going to get back to this notion of being able to get a virus from your computer, in a serious way. What I'm going to talk to you about today are some hacks, some real world cyberattacks that people in my community, the academic research community, have performed, which I don't think most people know about, and I think they're very interesting and scary, and this talk is kind of a greatest hits of the academic security community's hacks. None of the work is my work. It's all work that my colleagues have done, and I actually asked them for their slides and incorporated them into this talk. So the first one I'm going to talk about are implanted medical devices. Now medical devices have come a long way technologically. You can see in 1926 the first pacemaker was invented. 1960, the first internal pacemaker was implanted, hopefully a little smaller than that one that you see there, and the technology has continued to move forward. In 2006, we hit an important milestone from the perspective of computer security. And why do I say that? Because that's when implanted devices inside of people started to have networking capabilities. One thing that brings us close to home is we look at Dick Cheney's device, he had a device that pumped blood from an aorta to another part of the heart, and as you can see at the bottom there, it was controlled by a computer controller, and if you ever thought that software liability was very important, get one of these inside of you. Now what a research team did was they got their hands on what's called an ICD. This is a defibrillator, and this is a device that goes into a person to control their heart rhythm, and these have saved many lives. Well, in order to not have to open up the person every time you want to reprogram their device or do some diagnostics on it, they made the thing be able to communicate wirelessly, and what this research team did is they reverse engineered the wireless protocol, and they built the device you see pictured here, with a little antenna, that could talk the protocol to the device, and thus control it. In order to make their experience real — they were unable to find any volunteers, and so they went and they got some ground beef and some bacon and they wrapped it all up to about the size of a human being's area where the device would go, and they stuck the device inside it to perform their experiment somewhat realistically. They launched many, many successful attacks. One that I'll highlight here is changing the patient's name. I don't know why you would want to do that, but I sure wouldn't want that done to me. And they were able to change therapies, including disabling the device — and this is with a real, commercial, off-the-shelf device — simply by performing reverse engineering and sending wireless signals to it. There was a piece on NPR that some of these ICDs could actually have their performance disrupted simply by holding a pair of headphones onto them. Now, wireless and the Internet can improve health care greatly. There's several examples up on the screen of situations where doctors are looking to implant devices inside of people, and all of these devices now, it's standard that they communicate wirelessly, and I think this is great, but without a full understanding of trustworthy computing, and without understanding what attackers can do and the security risks from the beginning, there's a lot of danger in this. Okay, let me shift gears and show you another target. I'm going to show you a few different targets like this, and that's my talk. So we'll look at automobiles. This is a car, and it has a lot of components, a lot of electronics in it today. In fact, it's got many, many different computers inside of it, more Pentiums than my lab did when I was in college, and they're connected by a wired network. There's also a wireless network in the car, which can be reached from many different ways. So there's Bluetooth, there's the FM and XM radio, there's actually wi-fi, there's sensors in the wheels that wirelessly communicate the tire pressure to a controller on board. The modern car is a sophisticated multi-computer device. And what happens if somebody wanted to attack this? Well, that's what the researchers that I'm going to talk about today did. They basically stuck an attacker on the wired network and on the wireless network. Now, they have two areas they can attack. One is short-range wireless, where you can actually communicate with the device from nearby, either through Bluetooth or wi-fi, and the other is long-range, where you can communicate with the car through the cellular network, or through one of the radio stations. Think about it. When a car receives a radio signal, it's processed by software. That software has to receive and decode the radio signal, and then figure out what to do with it, even if it's just music that it needs to play on the radio, and that software that does that decoding, if it has any bugs in it, could create a vulnerability for somebody to hack the car. The way that the researchers did this work is, they read the software in the computer chips that were in the car, and then they used sophisticated reverse engineering tools to figure out what that software did, and then they found vulnerabilities in that software, and then they built exploits to exploit those. They actually carried out their attack in real life. They bought two cars, and I guess they have better budgets than I do. The first threat model was to see what someone could do if an attacker actually got access to the internal network on the car. Okay, so think of that as, someone gets to go to your car, they get to mess around with it, and then they leave, and now, what kind of trouble are you in? The other threat model is that they contact you in real time over one of the wireless networks like the cellular, or something like that, never having actually gotten physical access to your car. This is what their setup looks like for the first model, where you get to have access to the car. They put a laptop, and they connected to the diagnostic unit on the in-car network, and they did all kinds of silly things, like here's a picture of the speedometer showing 140 miles an hour when the car's in park. Once you have control of the car's computers, you can do anything. Now you might say, "Okay, that's silly." Well, what if you make the car always say it's going 20 miles an hour slower than it's actually going? You might produce a lot of speeding tickets. Then they went out to an abandoned airstrip with two cars, the target victim car and the chase car, and they launched a bunch of other attacks. One of the things they were able to do from the chase car is apply the brakes on the other car, simply by hacking the computer. They were able to disable the brakes. They also were able to install malware that wouldn't kick in and wouldn't trigger until the car was doing something like going over 20 miles an hour, or something like that. The results are astonishing, and when they gave this talk, even though they gave this talk at a conference to a bunch of computer security researchers, everybody was gasping. They were able to take over a bunch of critical computers inside the car: the brakes computer, the lighting computer, the engine, the dash, the radio, etc., and they were able to perform these on real commercial cars that they purchased using the radio network. They were able to compromise every single one of the pieces of software that controlled every single one of the wireless capabilities of the car. All of these were implemented successfully. How would you steal a car in this model? Well, you compromise the car by a buffer overflow of vulnerability in the software, something like that. You use the GPS in the car to locate it. You remotely unlock the doors through the computer that controls that, start the engine, bypass anti-theft, and you've got yourself a car. Surveillance was really interesting. The authors of the study have a video where they show themselves taking over a car and then turning on the microphone in the car, and listening in on the car while tracking it via GPS on a map, and so that's something that the drivers of the car would never know was happening. Am I scaring you yet? I've got a few more of these interesting ones. These are ones where I went to a conference, and my mind was just blown, and I said, "I have to share this with other people." This was Fabian Monrose's lab at the University of North Carolina, and what they did was something intuitive once you see it, but kind of surprising. They videotaped people on a bus, and then they post-processed the video. What you see here in number one is a reflection in somebody's glasses of the smartphone that they're typing in. They wrote software to stabilize — even though they were on a bus and maybe someone's holding their phone at an angle — to stabilize the phone, process it, and you may know on your smartphone, when you type a password, the keys pop out a little bit, and they were able to use that to reconstruct what the person was typing, and had a language model for detecting typing. What was interesting is, by videotaping on a bus, they were able to produce exactly what people on their smartphones were typing, and then they had a surprising result, which is that their software had not only done it for their target, but other people who accidentally happened to be in the picture, they were able to produce what those people had been typing, and that was kind of an accidental artifact of what their software was doing. I'll show you two more. One is P25 radios. P25 radios are used by law enforcement and all kinds of government agencies and people in combat to communicate, and there's an encryption option on these phones. This is what the phone looks like. It's not really a phone. It's more of a two-way radio. Motorola makes the most widely used one, and you can see that they're used by Secret Service, they're used in combat, it's a very, very common standard in the U.S. and elsewhere. So one question the researchers asked themselves is, could you block this thing, right? Could you run a denial-of-service, because these are first responders? So, would a terrorist organization want to black out the ability of police and fire to communicate at an emergency? They found that there's this GirlTech device used for texting that happens to operate at the same exact frequency as the P25, and they built what they called My First Jammer. (Laughter) If you look closely at this device, it's got a switch for encryption or cleartext. Let me advance the slide, and now I'll go back. You see the difference? This is plain text. This is encrypted. There's one little dot that shows up on the screen, and one little tiny turn of the switch. And so the researchers asked themselves, "I wonder how many times very secure, important, sensitive conversations are happening on these two-way radios where they forget to encrypt and they don't notice that they didn't encrypt?" So they bought a scanner. These are perfectly legal and they run at the frequency of the P25, and what they did is they hopped around frequencies and they wrote software to listen in. If they found encrypted communication, they stayed on that channel and they wrote down, that's a channel that these people communicate in, these law enforcement agencies, and they went to 20 metropolitan areas and listened in on conversations that were happening at those frequencies. They found that in every metropolitan area, they would capture over 20 minutes a day of cleartext communication. And what kind of things were people talking about? Well, they found the names and information about confidential informants. They found information that was being recorded in wiretaps, a bunch of crimes that were being discussed, sensitive information. It was mostly law enforcement and criminal. They went and reported this to the law enforcement agencies, after anonymizing it, and the vulnerability here is simply the user interface wasn't good enough. If you're talking about something really secure and sensitive, it should be really clear to you that this conversation is encrypted. That one's pretty easy to fix. The last one I thought was really, really cool, and I just had to show it to you, it's probably not something that you're going to lose sleep over like the cars or the defibrillators, but it's stealing keystrokes. Now, we've all looked at smartphones upside down. Every security expert wants to hack a smartphone, and we tend to look at the USB port, the GPS for tracking, the camera, the microphone, but no one up till this point had looked at the accelerometer. The accelerometer is the thing that determines the vertical orientation of the smartphone. And so they had a simple setup. They put a smartphone next to a keyboard, and they had people type, and then their goal was to use the vibrations that were created by typing to measure the change in the accelerometer reading to determine what the person had been typing. Now, when they tried this on an iPhone 3GS, this is a graph of the perturbations that were created by the typing, and you can see that it's very difficult to tell when somebody was typing or what they were typing, but the iPhone 4 greatly improved the accelerometer, and so the same measurement produced this graph. Now that gave you a lot of information while someone was typing, and what they did then is used advanced artificial intelligence techniques called machine learning to have a training phase, and so they got most likely grad students to type in a whole lot of things, and to learn, to have the system use the machine learning tools that were available to learn what it is that the people were typing and to match that up with the measurements in the accelerometer. And then there's the attack phase, where you get somebody to type something in, you don't know what it was, but you use your model that you created in the training phase to figure out what they were typing. They had pretty good success. This is an article from the USA Today. They typed in, "The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that Rahm Emanuel is eligible to run for Mayor of Chicago" — see, I tied it in to the last talk — "and ordered him to stay on the ballot." Now, the system is interesting, because it produced "Illinois Supreme" and then it wasn't sure. The model produced a bunch of options, and this is the beauty of some of the A.I. techniques, is that computers are good at some things, humans are good at other things, take the best of both and let the humans solve this one. Don't waste computer cycles. A human's not going to think it's the Supreme might. It's the Supreme Court, right? And so, together we're able to reproduce typing simply by measuring the accelerometer. Why does this matter? Well, in the Android platform, for example, the developers have a manifest where every device on there, the microphone, etc., has to register if you're going to use it so that hackers can't take over it, but nobody controls the accelerometer. So what's the point? You can leave your iPhone next to someone's keyboard, and just leave the room, and then later recover what they did, even without using the microphone. If someone is able to put malware on your iPhone, they could then maybe get the typing that you do whenever you put your iPhone next to your keyboard. There's several other notable attacks that unfortunately I don't have time to go into, but the one that I wanted to point out was a group from the University of Michigan which was able to take voting machines, the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs that were going to be used in New Jersey in the election that were left in a hallway, and put Pac-Man on it. So they ran the Pac-Man game. What does this all mean? Well, I think that society tends to adopt technology really quickly. I love the next coolest gadget. But it's very important, and these researchers are showing, that the developers of these things need to take security into account from the very beginning, and need to realize that they may have a threat model, but the attackers may not be nice enough to limit themselves to that threat model, and so you need to think outside of the box. What we can do is be aware that devices can be compromised, and anything that has software in it is going to be vulnerable. It's going to have bugs. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The sibling bond

{0: 'A senior editor of science and technology reporting at TIME magazine, Jeffrey Kluger has written books on a wide range of science subjects, including the Polio vaccine, Apollo 13 and the effect of sibling relationships.'}

TEDxAsheville

TED has already persuaded me to change my life in one small way, by persuading me to change the opening of my speech. I love this idea of engagement. So, when you leave here today, I'm going to ask you to engage or re-engage with some of the most important people in your lives: your brothers and sisters. It can be a profoundly life-affirming thing to do, even if it isn't always easy. This is a man named Elliot, for whom things were very difficult. Elliot was a drunk. He spent most of his life battling alcoholism, depression, morphine addiction, and that life ended when he was just 34 years old. What made things harder for Elliot is that his last name was Roosevelt. And he could never quite get past the comparisons with his big brother Teddy, for whom things always seemed to come a little bit easier. It wasn't easy being Bobby, either. He was also the sibling of a president. But he adored his brother, Jack. He fought for him, he worked for him. And when Jack died, he bled for him, too. In the years that followed, Bobby would smile, but it seemed labored. He'd lose himself in his work, but it seemed tortured. Bobby's own death, so similar to John's, seems somehow fitting. John Kennedy was robbed of his young life; Bobby seemed almost to have been relieved of his. There may be no relationship that effects us more profoundly, that's closer, finer, harder, sweeter, happier, sadder, more filled with joy or fraught with woe than the relationship we have with our brothers and sisters. There's power in the sibling bond. There's pageantry. There's petulance, too, as when Neil Bush, sibling of both a president and a governor, famously griped, "I've lost patience for being compared to my older brothers," as if Jeb and George W were somehow responsible for the savings and loan scandal and the messy divorce that marked Neil in the public eye. But more important than all of these things, the sibling bond can be a thing of abiding love. Our parents leave us too early, our spouse and our children come along too late. Our siblings are the only ones who are with us for the entire ride. Over the arc of decades, there may be nothing that defines us and forms us more powerfully than our relationship with our sisters and brothers. It was true for me, it's true for your children and if you have siblings, it's true for you, too. This picture was taken when Steve, on the left, was eight years old. I was six, our brother Gary was five and my brother Bruce was four. I will not say what year it was taken. It was not this year. (Laughter) I open my new book, "The Sibling Effect," on a Saturday morning, not long before this picture was taken, when the three older brothers decided that it might be a very good idea to lock the younger brother in a fuse cabinet in our playroom. (Laughter) We were, believe it or not, trying to keep him safe. Our father was a hotheaded man, somebody who didn't take kindly to being disturbed on Saturday mornings. I don't know what he thought his life would be like on Saturday mornings when he had four sons, ages four years old or younger when the youngest one was born, but they weren't quiet. He did not take to that well. And he would react to being disturbed on a Saturday morning by stalking into the playroom and administering a very freewheeling form of a corporal punishment, lashing out at whoever was within arms' reach. We were by no means battered children but we did get hit, and we found it terrifying. So we devised a sort of scatter-and-hide drill. (Laughter) As soon as we saw or heard the footsteps coming, Steve, the oldest, would wriggle under the couch, I would dive into the closet in the playroom, Gary would dive into a window-seat toy chest, but not before we closed Bruce inside the fuse box. We told him it was Alan Shepard's space capsule, and that somehow made it work better. (Laughter) I dare say my father was never fooled by this ruse. And it was only in later years that I began to think perhaps it wasn't a good idea to squeeze a four-year-old up against a panel of old-style, un-screwable high-voltage fuses. (Laughter) But my brothers and I, even through those unhappy times, came through them, with something that was clear and hard and fine: a primal appreciation for the bond we shared. We were a unit — a loud, messy brawling, loyal, loving, lasting unit. We felt much stronger that way than we ever could as individuals. And we knew that as our lives went on, we could always be able to call on that strength. We're not alone. Until 15 years ago, scientists didn't really pay much attention to the sibling bond. And with good reason: you have just one mother, you have just one father if you do marriage right, you have one spouse for life. Siblings can claim none of that uniqueness. They're interchangeable, fungible, a kind of household commodity. Parents set up shop and begin stocking their shelves with inventory, the only limitation being sperm, egg and economics. (Laughter) As long as you can keep breathing, you may as well keep stocking. Now, nature is perfectly happy with that arrangement, because our primal directive here is to get as many of our genes as possible into the next generation. Animals wrestle with these same issues, too, but they have a more straightforward way of dealing with things. A crested penguin that has laid two eggs will take a good look at them and boot the smaller one out of the nest, the better to focus her attentions on the presumably heartier chick in the bigger shell. A black eagle will allow all of her chicks to hatch and then stand back while the bigger ones fight it out with the little ones, typically ripping them to ribbons and then settling back to grow up in peace. Piglets, cute as they are, are born with a strange little outward set of pointing teeth, that they use to jab at one another as they compete for the choicest nursing spots. The problem for scientists was that this whole idea of siblings as second-class citizens never really seemed to hold up. After the researchers had learned all they could from the relationships in the family, mothers and other relationships, they still came up with some temperamental dark matter that was pulling at us, exerting a gravity all its own. And that could only be our siblings. Humans are no different from animals. After we are born, we do whatever we can to attract the attention of our parents, determining what our strongest selling points are and marketing them ferociously. Someone's the funny one, someone's the pretty one, someone's the athlete, someone's the smart one. Scientists call this "deidentification." If my older brother is a high-school football player — which, if you saw my older brother, you'd know he was not — I could become a high-school football player, too and get at most 50 percent of the applause in my family for doing that. Or, I could become student council president or specialize in the arts and get 100 percent of the attention in that area. Sometimes parents contaminate the deidentification process, communicating to their kids subtly or not, that only certain kinds of accomplishments will be applauded in the home. Joe Kennedy was famous for this, making it clear to his nine children that they were expected to compete with one another in athletics and were expected to win, lest they be made to eat in the kitchen with the help, rather than in the dining room with the family. It's no wonder that scrawny second-born Jack Kennedy fought so hard to compete with his fitter firstborn brother, Joe, often at his peril, at one point, engaging in a bicycle race around the house that resulted in a collision costing John 28 stitches. Joe walked away essentially unharmed. Parents exacerbate this problem further when they exhibit favoritism, which they do overwhelmingly, no matter how much they admit it. A study I cite in this TIME magazine covering in the book "The Sibling Effect," found 70 percent of fathers and 65 percent of mothers exhibit a preference for at least one child. And keep in mind here — the keyword is "exhibit." The remaining parents may simply be doing a better job of concealing things. (Laughter) I like to say that 95 percent of all parents have a favorite, five percent are lying about it. The exception is my wife and me. Honestly, we do not have a favorite. (Laughter) It's not parents' fault that they harbor feelings of favoritism. And here, too, our natural wiring is at work. Firstborns are the first products on the familial assembly line. Parents typically get two years of investing dollars, calories and so many other resources in them, so that by the time the second born comes along, the firstborn is already ... it's what corporations call "sunk costs," you don't want to disinvest in this one and launch the R&D on the new product. (Laughter) So what we begin to do is say, "I'm going to lean to the Mac OS X and let the Mac OS XI come out in a couple of years." So we tend to lean in that direction. (Laughter) But there are other forces at work, too. One of the same studies I looked at both here and in the book found that, improbably, the most common favorite for a father is the last-born daughter. The most common favorite for a mother is the firstborn son. Now, this isn't Oedipal; never mind what the Freudians would have told us a hundred years ago. And it's not just that fathers are habitually wrapped around the fingers of their little girls, though I can tell you that, as the father of two girls, that part definitely plays a role. Rather, there is a certain reproductive narcissism at work. Your opposite-gender kids can never resemble you exactly. But if somehow they can resemble you temperamentally, you'll love them all the more. As the result, the father who is a businessman will just melt at the idea of his MBA daughter with a tough-as-nails worldview. The mother who is a sensitive type will go gooey over her son the poet. (Laughter) Birth order, another topic I covered for TIME, and another topic I cover in the book, plays out in other ways as well. Long before scientists began looking at this, parents noticed that there are certain temperamental templates associated with all birth rankings: the serious, striving firstborn; the caught-in-a-thicket's middle born; the wild child of a last born. And once again, when science did crack this field, they found out mom and dad are right. Firstborns across history have tended to be bigger and healthier than later borns, in part, because of the head start they got on food in an area in which it could be scarce. Firstborns are also vaccinated more reliably and tend to have more follow-up visits to doctors when they get sick. And this pattern continues today. This IQ question is, sadly — I can say this as a second-born — a very real thing. Firstborns have a three-point IQ advantage over second borns and second borns have a 1.5 IQ advantage over later borns, partly because of the exclusive attention firstborns get from mom and dad, and partly because they get a chance to mentor the younger kids. All of this explains why firstborns are likelier to be CEOs, they are likelier to be senators, they are likelier to be astronauts, and they are likelier to earn more than other kids are. Last borns come into the world with a whole different set of challenges. The smallest and weakest cubs in the den, they're at the greatest risk of getting eaten alive, so they have to develop what are called "low-power skills" — the ability to charm and disarm, to intuit what's going on in someone else's head, the better to duck the punch before it lands. (Laughter) They're also flat-out funnier, which is another thing that comes in handy, because a person who's making you laugh is a very hard person to slug. (Laughter) It's perhaps no coincidence that over the course of history, some of our greatest satirists — Swift, Twain, Voltaire, Colbert — (Laughter) are either the last borns or among the last in very large families. Most middle borns don't get quite as sweet a deal. I think of us as the flyover states. We are — (Laughter) we're the ones who fight harder for recognition in the home. We're the ones who are always raising our hands while someone else at the table is getting called on. We're the ones who tend to take a little longer to find their direction in life. And there can be self-esteem issues associated with that, notwithstanding the fact that I've been asked to do TED, so I feel much better about these things right now. (Laughter) But the upside for middle borns is that they also tend to develop denser and richer relationships outside the home. But that advantage comes also from something of a disadvantage, simply because their needs weren't met as well in the home. The feuds in the playroom that play out over favoritism, birth order and so many other issues are as unrelenting as they seem. In one study I cite in the book, children in the two-to-four age group engage in one fight every 6.3 minutes, or 9.5 fights an hour. That's not fighting — that's performance art. (Laughter) That's extraordinary. One reason for this is that there are a lot more people in your home than you think there are, or at least a lot more relationships. Every person in your house has a discrete one-on-one relationship with every other person, and those pairings or dyads add up fast. In a family with two parents and two kids, there are six dyads: Mom has a relationship with child A and B, Dad has a relationship with child A and B. There's the marital relationship, and there is the relationship between the kids themselves. The formula for this looks very chilly but it's real. K equals the number of people in your household, and X equals the number of dyads. In a five-person family, there are ten discrete dyads. The eight-person Brady Bunch — never mind the sweetness here — there were 28 dyads in that family. The original Kennedy family with nine kids had 55 different relationships. And Bobby Kennedy, who grew up to have 11 children of his own, had a household with a whopping 91 dyads. This overpopulation of relationships makes fights unavoidable. And far and away the biggest trigger for all sibling fights is property. Studies have found that over 95 percent of the fights among small children concern somebody touching, playing with, looking at the other person's stuff. (Laughter) This in its own way is healthy if it's very noisy, and the reason is that small children come into the world with absolutely no control. They are utterly helpless. The only way they have of projecting their very limited power is through the objects they can call their own. When somebody crosses that very erasable line, they're going to go nuts, and that's what happens. Another very common casus belli among children is the idea of fairness, as any parent who hears 14 times a day, "But that's unfair!" can tell you. In a way this is good, too, though. Kids are born with a very innate sense of right and wrong, of a fair deal versus an unfair one, and this teaches them powerful lessons. Do you want to know how powerfully encoded fairness is in the human genome? We process that phenomenon through the same lobe in our brain that processes disgust, meaning we react to the idea of somebody being cheated the same way we react to putrefied meat. (Laughter) Any wonder that this fellow, Bernie Madoff, is unpopular? All of these dramas played out day to day, moment to moment, serve as a real-time, total-immersion exercise for life. Siblings teach each other conflict avoidance and conflict resolution, when to stand up for themselves, when to stand down; they learn love, loyalty, honesty, sharing, caring, compromise, the disclosure of secrets and much more important, the keeping of confidences. I listen to my young daughters — aren’t they adorable? — I listen to my young daughters talking late into the night, the same way my parents, no doubt, listened to my brothers and me talking, and sometimes I intervene, but usually I don't. They're part of a conversation I am not part of, nobody else in the world is part of, and it's a conversation that can and should go on for the rest of their lives. From this will come a sense of constancy, a sense of having a permanent traveling companion, somebody with whom they road-tested life before they ever had to get out and travel it on their own. Brothers and sisters aren't the sine qua non of a happy life; plenty of adult sibling relationships are fatally broken and need to be abandoned for the sanity of everybody involved. And only-children, throughout history, have shown themselves to be creatively, brilliantly capable of getting their socialization and comradeship skills through friends, through cousins, through classmates. But having siblings and not making the most of those bonds is, I believe, folly of the first order. If relationships are broken and are fixable, fix them. If they work, make them even better. Failing to do so is a little like having a thousand acres of fertile farmland and never planting it. Yes, you can always get your food at the supermarket, but think what you're allowing to lie fallow. Life is short, it's finite, and it plays for keeps. Siblings may be among the richest harvests of the time we have here. Thank you. (Applause)

Why videos go viral

{0: "Kevin Allocca is YouTube's expert on the intersection of web video and global culture"}

TEDYouth 2011

Hi. I'm Kevin Allocca, I'm the trends manager at YouTube, and I professionally watch YouTube videos. It's true. So we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters. We all want to be stars — celebrities, singers, comedians — and when I was younger, that seemed so very, very hard to do. But now Web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world's culture. Any one of you could be famous on the Internet by next Saturday. But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. And of that, only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment. So how does it happen? Three things: tastemakers, communities of participation and unexpectedness. All right, let's go. (Video) Bear Vasquez: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God! Wooo! Ohhhhh, wowwww! KA: Last year, Bear Vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in Yosemite National Park. In 2010, it was viewed 23 million times. (Laughter) This is a chart of what it looked like when it first became popular last summer. But he didn't actually set out to make a viral video, Bear. He just wanted to share a rainbow. Because that's what you do when your name is Yosemite Mountain Bear. (Laughter) And he had posted lots of nature videos in fact. And this video had actually been posted all the way back in January. So what happened here? Jimmy Kimmel actually. Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become. Because tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience. (Video) Rebecca Black: ♫ It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. ♫ ♫ Everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend. ♫ ♫ Friday, Friday. Gettin' down on Friday. ♫ KA: So you didn't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video I hope. Rebecca Black's "Friday" is one of the most popular videos of the year. It's been seen nearly 200 million times this year. This is a chart of what it looked like. And similar to "Double Rainbow," it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere. So what happened on this day? Well it was a Friday, this is true. And if you're wondering about those other spikes, those are also Fridays. (Laughter) But what about this day, this one particular Friday? Well Tosh.0 picked it up, a lot of blogs starting writing about. Michael J. Nelson from Mystery Science Theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on Twitter. But what's important is that an individual or a group of tastemakers took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience, accelerating the process. And so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it. And now there are 10,000 parodies of "Friday" on YouTube. Even in the first seven days, there was one parody for every other day of the week. (Laughter) Unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century, this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon — either by spreading it or by doing something new with it. (Music) So "Nyan Cat" is a looped animation with looped music. It's this, just like this. It's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year. And if you think that that is weird, you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that's been viewed four million times. (Laughter) Even cats were watching this video. (Laughter) Cats were watching other cats watch this video. (Laughter) But what's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie, geeky Internet culture. There were remixes. (Laughter) Someone made an old timey version. (Laughter) And then it went international. (Laughter) An entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of. Because we don't just enjoy now, we participate. And who could have predicted any of this? Who could have predicted "Double Rainbow" or Rebecca Black or "Nyan Cat?" What scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it? In a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute, only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have. When a friend of mine told me that I needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in New York City, I admit I wasn't very interested. (Video) Casey Niestat: So I got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane, but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane. (Laughter) KA: By being totally surprising and humorous, Casey Niestat got his funny idea and point seen five million times. And so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively. And so it all brings us to one big question ... (Video) Bear Vasquez: What does this mean? Ohhhh. (Laughter) KA: What does it mean? Tastemakers, creative participating communities, complete unexpectedness, these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity. I mean, as mentioned earlier, one of the biggest stars in the world right now, Justin Bieber, got his start on YouTube. No one has to green-light your idea. And we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture. And these are not characteristics of old media, and they're barely true of the media of today, but they will define the entertainment of the future. Thank you. (Applause)

The ocean's shifting baseline

{0: "Daniel Pauly is the principal investigator at the Sea Around Us Project, which studies the impact of the world's fisheries on marine ecosystems. The software he's helped develop is used around the world to model and track the ocean."}

Mission Blue Voyage

I'm going to speak about a tiny, little idea. And this is about shifting baseline. And because the idea can be explained in one minute, I will tell you three stories before to fill in the time. And the first story is about Charles Darwin, one of my heroes. And he was here, as you well know, in '35. And you'd think he was chasing finches, but he wasn't. He was actually collecting fish. And he described one of them as very "common." This was the sailfin grouper. A big fishery was run on it until the '80s. Now the fish is on the IUCN Red List. Now this story, we have heard it lots of times on Galapagos and other places, so there is nothing particular about it. But the point is, we still come to Galapagos. We still think it is pristine. The brochures still say it is untouched. So what happens here? The second story, also to illustrate another concept, is called shifting waistline. (Laughter) Because I was there in '71, studying a lagoon in West Africa. I was there because I grew up in Europe and I wanted later to work in Africa. And I thought I could blend in. And I got a big sunburn, and I was convinced that I was really not from there. This was my first sunburn. And the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees, as you can see, and a few mangrove. And it had tilapia about 20 centimeters, a species of tilapia called blackchin tilapia. And the fisheries for this tilapia sustained lots of fish and they had a good time and they earned more than average in Ghana. When I went there 27 years later, the fish had shrunk to half of their size. They were maturing at five centimeters. They had been pushed genetically. There were still fishes. They were still kind of happy. And the fish also were happy to be there. So nothing has changed, but everything has changed. My third little story is that I was an accomplice in the introduction of trawling in Southeast Asia. In the '70s — well, beginning in the '60s — Europe did lots of development projects. Fish development meant imposing on countries that had already 100,000 fishers to impose on them industrial fishing. And this boat, quite ugly, is called the Mutiara 4. And I went sailing on it, and we did surveys throughout the southern South China sea and especially the Java Sea. And what we caught, we didn't have words for it. What we caught, I know now, is the bottom of the sea. And 90 percent of our catch were sponges, other animals that are fixed on the bottom. And actually most of the fish, they are a little spot on the debris, the piles of debris, were coral reef fish. Essentially the bottom of the sea came onto the deck and then was thrown down. And these pictures are extraordinary because this transition is very rapid. Within a year, you do a survey and then commercial fishing begins. The bottom is transformed from, in this case, a hard bottom or soft coral into a muddy mess. This is a dead turtle. They were not eaten, they were thrown away because they were dead. And one time we caught a live one. It was not drowned yet. And then they wanted to kill it because it was good to eat. This mountain of debris is actually collected by fishers every time they go into an area that's never been fished. But it's not documented. We transform the world, but we don't remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there. If you generalize this, something like this happens. You have on the y axis some good thing: biodiversity, numbers of orca, the greenness of your country, the water supply. And over time it changes — it changes because people do things, or naturally. Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. But they don't perceive what happened before as a loss. You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were. Now one should think this problem affected people certainly when in predatory societies, they killed animals and they didn't know they had done so after a few generations. Because, obviously, an animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. So you don't lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore they're not perceived as a big loss. Over time, we concentrate on large animals, and in a sea that means the big fish. They become rarer because we fish them. Over time we have a few fish left and we think this is the baseline. And the question is, why do people accept this? Well because they don't know that it was different. And in fact, lots of people, scientists, will contest that it was really different. And they will contest this because the evidence presented in an earlier mode is not in the way they would like the evidence presented. For example, the anecdote that some present, as Captain so-and-so observed lots of fish in this area cannot be used or is usually not utilized by fishery scientists, because it's not "scientific." So you have a situation where people don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past. And hence, the enormous role that a marine protected area can play. Because with marine protected areas, we actually recreate the past. We recreate the past that people cannot conceive because the baseline has shifted and is extremely low. That is for people who can see a marine protected area and who can benefit from the insight that it provides, which enables them to reset their baseline. How about the people who can't do that because they have no access — the people in the Midwest for example? There I think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap, and simulation. This is a simulation of Chesapeake Bay. There were gray whales in Chesapeake Bay a long time ago — 500 years ago. And you will have noticed that the hues and tones are like "Avatar." (Laughter) And if you think about "Avatar," if you think of why people were so touched by it — never mind the Pocahontas story — why so touched by the imagery? Because it evokes something that in a sense has been lost. And so my recommendation, it's the only one I will provide, is for Cameron to do "Avatar II" underwater. Thank you very much. (Applause)

A census of the ocean

{0: 'Paul Snelgrove led the group that pulled together the findings of the Census of Marine Life -- synthesizing 10 years and 540 expeditions into a book of wonders.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

The oceans cover some 70 percent of our planet. And I think Arthur C. Clarke probably had it right when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet Planet Ocean. And the oceans are hugely productive, as you can see by the satellite image of photosynthesis, the production of new life. In fact, the oceans produce half of the new life every day on Earth as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe. In addition to that, it harbors a lot of the biodiversity on Earth, and much of it we don't know about. But I'll tell you some of that today. That also doesn't even get into the whole protein extraction that we do from the ocean. That's about 10 percent of our global needs and 100 percent of some island nations. If you were to descend into the 95 percent of the biosphere that's livable, it would quickly become pitch black, interrupted only by pinpoints of light from bioluminescent organisms. And if you turn the lights on, you might periodically see spectacular organisms swim by, because those are the denizens of the deep, the things that live in the deep ocean. And eventually, the deep sea floor would come into view. This type of habitat covers more of the Earth's surface than all other habitats combined. And yet, we know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about this habitat, despite the fact that we have yet to extract a gram of food, a breath of oxygen or a drop of water from those bodies. And so 10 years ago, an international program began called the Census of Marine Life, which set out to try and improve our understanding of life in the global oceans. It involved 17 different projects around the world. As you can see, these are the footprints of the different projects. And I hope you'll appreciate the level of global coverage that it managed to achieve. It all began when two scientists, Fred Grassle and Jesse Ausubel, met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts where both were guests at the famed oceanographic institute. And Fred was lamenting the state of marine biodiversity and the fact that it was in trouble and nothing was being done about it. Well, from that discussion grew this program that involved 2,700 scientists from more than 80 countries around the world who engaged in 540 ocean expeditions at a combined cost of 650 million dollars to study the distribution, diversity and abundance of life in the global ocean. And so what did we find? We found spectacular new species, the most beautiful and visually stunning things everywhere we looked — from the shoreline to the abyss, form microbes all the way up to fish and everything in between. And the limiting step here wasn't the unknown diversity of life, but rather the taxonomic specialists who can identify and catalog these species that became the limiting step. They, in fact, are an endangered species themselves. There are actually four to five new species described everyday for the oceans. And as I say, it could be a much larger number. Now, I come from Newfoundland in Canada — It's an island off the east coast of that continent — where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters in human history. And so this photograph shows a small boy next to a codfish. It's around 1900. Now, when I was a boy of about his age, I would go out fishing with my grandfather and we would catch fish about half that size. And I thought that was the norm, because I had never seen fish like this. If you were to go out there today, 20 years after this fishery collapsed, if you could catch a fish, which would be a bit of a challenge, it would be half that size still. So what we're experiencing is something called shifting baselines. Our expectations of what the oceans can produce is something that we don't really appreciate because we haven't seen it in our lifetimes. Now most of us, and I would say me included, think that human exploitation of the oceans really only became very serious in the last 50 to, perhaps, 100 years or so. The census actually tried to look back in time, using every source of information they could get their hands on. And so anything from restaurant menus to monastery records to ships' logs to see what the oceans looked like. Because science data really goes back to, at best, World War II, for the most part. And so what they found, in fact, is that exploitation really began heavily with the Romans. And so at that time, of course, there was no refrigeration. So fishermen could only catch what they could either eat or sell that day. But the Romans developed salting. And with salting, it became possible to store fish and to transport it long distances. And so began industrial fishing. And so these are the sorts of extrapolations that we have of what sort of loss we've had relative to pre-human impacts on the ocean. They range from 65 to 98 percent for these major groups of organisms, as shown in the dark blue bars. Now for those species the we managed to leave alone, that we protect — for example, marine mammals in recent years and sea birds — there is some recovery. So it's not all hopeless. But for the most part, we've gone from salting to exhausting. Now this other line of evidence is a really interesting one. It's from trophy fish caught off the coast of Florida. And so this is a photograph from the 1950s. I want you to notice the scale on the slide, because when you see the same picture from the 1980s, we see the fish are much smaller and we're also seeing a change in terms of the composition of those fish. By 2007, the catch was actually laughable in terms of the size for a trophy fish. But this is no laughing matter. The oceans have lost a lot of their productivity and we're responsible for it. So what's left? Actually quite a lot. There's a lot of exciting things, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about them. And I want to start with a bit on technology, because, of course, this is a TED Conference and you want to hear something on technology. So one of the tools that we use to sample the deep ocean are remotely operated vehicles. So these are tethered vehicles we lower down to the sea floor where they're our eyes and our hands for working on the sea bottom. So a couple of years ago, I was supposed to go on an oceanographic cruise and I couldn't go because of a scheduling conflict. But through a satellite link I was able to sit at my study at home with my dog curled up at my feet, a cup of tea in my hand, and I could tell the pilot, "I want a sample right there." And that's exactly what the pilot did for me. That's the sort of technology that's available today that really wasn't available even a decade ago. So it allows us to sample these amazing habitats that are very far from the surface and very far from light. And so one of the tools that we can use to sample the oceans is acoustics, or sound waves. And the advantage of sound waves is that they actually pass well through water, unlike light. And so we can send out sound waves, they bounce off objects like fish and are reflected back. And so in this example, a census scientist took out two ships. One would send out sound waves that would bounce back. They would be received by a second ship, and that would give us very precise estimates, in this case, of 250 billion herring in a period of about a minute. And that's an area about the size of Manhattan Island. And to be able to do that is a tremendous fisheries tool, because knowing how many fish are there is really critical. We can also use satellite tags to track animals as they move through the oceans. And so for animals that come to the surface to breathe, such as this elephant seal, it's an opportunity to send data back to shore and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean. And so from that we can produce these tracks. For example, the dark blue shows you where the elephant seal moved in the north Pacific. Now I realize for those of you who are colorblind, this slide is not very helpful, but stick with me nonetheless. For animals that don't surface, we have something called pop-up tags, which collect data about light and what time the sun rises and sets. And then at some period of time it pops up to the surface and, again, relays that data back to shore. Because GPS doesn't work under water. That's why we need these tools. And so from this we're able to identify these blue highways, these hot spots in the ocean, that should be real priority areas for ocean conservation. Now one of the other things that you may think about is that, when you go to the supermarket and you buy things, they're scanned. And so there's a barcode on that product that tells the computer exactly what the product is. Geneticists have developed a similar tool called genetic barcoding. And what barcoding does is use a specific gene called CO1 that's consistent within a species, but varies among species. And so what that means is we can unambiguously identify which species are which even if they look similar to each other, but may be biologically quite different. Now one of the nicest examples I like to cite on this is the story of two young women, high school students in New York City, who worked with the census. They went out and collected fish from markets and from restaurants in New York City and they barcoded it. Well what they found was mislabeled fish. So for example, they found something which was sold as tuna, which is very valuable, was in fact tilapia, which is a much less valuable fish. They also found an endangered species sold as a common one. So barcoding allows us to know what we're working with and also what we're eating. The Ocean Biogeographic Information System is the database for all the census data. It's open access; you can all go in and download data as you wish. And it contains all the data from the census plus other data sets that people were willing to contribute. And so what you can do with that is to plot the distribution of species and where they occur in the oceans. What I've plotted up here is the data that we have on hand. This is where our sampling effort has concentrated. Now what you can see is we've sampled the area in the North Atlantic, in the North Sea in particular, and also the east coast of North America fairly well. That's the warm colors which show a well-sampled region. The cold colors, the blue and the black, show areas where we have almost no data. So even after a 10-year census, there are large areas that still remain unexplored. Now there are a group of scientists living in Texas, working in the Gulf of Mexico who decided really as a labor of love to pull together all the knowledge they could about biodiversity in the Gulf of Mexico. And so they put this together, a list of all the species, where they're known to occur, and it really seemed like a very esoteric, scientific type of exercise. But then, of course, there was the Deep Horizon oil spill. So all of a sudden, this labor of love for no obvious economic reason has become a critical piece of information in terms of how that system is going to recover, how long it will take and how the lawsuits and the multi-billion-dollar discussions that are going to happen in the coming years are likely to be resolved. So what did we find? Well, I could stand here for hours, but, of course, I'm not allowed to do that. But I will tell you some of my favorite discoveries from the census. So one of the things we discovered is where are the hot spots of diversity? Where do we find the most species of ocean life? And what we find if we plot up the well-known species is this sort of a distribution. And what we see is that for coastal tags, for those organisms that live near the shoreline, they're most diverse in the tropics. This is something we've actually known for a while, so it's not a real breakthrough. What is really exciting though is that the oceanic tags, or the ones that live far from the coast, are actually more diverse at intermediate latitudes. This is the sort of data, again, that managers could use if they want to prioritize areas of the ocean that we need to conserve. You can do this on a global scale, but you can also do it on a regional scale. And that's why biodiversity data can be so valuable. Now while a lot of the species we discovered in the census are things that are small and hard to see, that certainly wasn't always the case. For example, while it's hard to believe that a three kilogram lobster could elude scientists, it did until a few years ago when South African fishermen requested an export permit and scientists realized that this was something new to science. Similarly this Golden V kelp collected in Alaska just below the low water mark is probably a new species. Even though it's three meters long, it actually, again, eluded science. Now this guy, this bigfin squid, is seven meters in length. But to be fair, it lives in the deep waters of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so it was a lot harder to find. But there's still potential for discovery of big and exciting things. This particular shrimp, we've dubbed it the Jurassic shrimp, it's thought to have gone extinct 50 years ago — at least it was, until the census discovered it was living and doing just fine off the coast of Australia. And it shows that the ocean, because of its vastness, can hide secrets for a very long time. So, Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out. If we look at distributions, in fact distributions change dramatically. And so one of the records that we had was this sooty shearwater, which undergoes these spectacular migrations all the way from New Zealand all the way up to Alaska and back again in search of endless summer as they complete their life cycles. We also talked about the White Shark Cafe. This is a location in the Pacific where white shark converge. We don't know why they converge there, we simply don't know. That's a question for the future. One of the things that we're taught in high school is that all animals require oxygen in order to survive. Now this little critter, it's only about half a millimeter in size, not terribly charismatic. But it was only discovered in the early 1980s. But the really interesting thing about it is that, a few years ago, census scientists discovered that this guy can thrive in oxygen-poor sediments in the deep Mediterranean Sea. So now they know that, in fact, animals can live without oxygen, at least some of them, and that they can adapt to even the harshest of conditions. If you were to suck all the water out of the ocean, this is what you'd be left behind with, and that's the biomass of life on the sea floor. Now what we see is huge biomass towards the poles and not much biomass in between. We found life in the extremes. And so there were new species that were found that live inside ice and help to support an ice-based food web. And we also found this spectacular yeti crab that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at Easter Island. And this particular species really captured the public's attention. We also found the deepest vents known yet — 5,000 meters — the hottest vents at 407 degrees Celsius — vents in the South Pacific and also in the Arctic where none had been found before. So even new environments are still within the domain of the discoverable. Now in terms of the unknowns, there are many. And I'm just going to summarize just a few of them very quickly for you. First of all, we might ask, how many fishes in the sea? We actually know the fishes better than we do any other group in the ocean other than marine mammals. And so we can actually extrapolate based on rates of discovery how many more species we're likely to discover. And from that, we actually calculate that we know about 16,500 marine species and there are probably another 1,000 to 4,000 left to go. So we've done pretty well. We've got about 75 percent of the fish, maybe as much as 90 percent. But the fishes, as I say, are the best known. So our level of knowledge is much less for other groups of organisms. Now this figure is actually based on a brand new paper that's going to come out in the journal PLoS Biology. And what is does is predict how many more species there are on land and in the ocean. And what they found is that they think that we know of about nine percent of the species in the ocean. That means 91 percent, even after the census, still remain to be discovered. And so that turns out to be about two million species once all is said and done. So we still have quite a lot of work to do in terms of unknowns. Now this bacterium is part of mats that are found off the coast of Chile. And these mats actually cover an area the size of Greece. And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye. But you can imagine the biomass that represents. But the really intriguing thing about the microbes is just how diverse they are. A single drop of seawater could contain 160 different types of microbes. And the oceans themselves are thought potentially to contain as many as a billion different types. So that's really exciting. What are they all doing out there? We actually don't know. The most exciting thing, I would say, about this census is the role of global science. And so as we see in this image of light during the night, there are lots of areas of the Earth where human development is much greater and other areas where it's much less, but between them we see large dark areas of relatively unexplored ocean. The other point I'd like to make about this is that this ocean's interconnected. Marine organisms do not care about international boundaries; they move where they will. And so the importance then of global collaboration becomes all the more important. We've lost a lot of paradise. For example, these tuna that were once so abundant in the North Sea are now effectively gone. There were trawls taken in the deep sea in the Mediterranean, which collected more garbage than they did animals. And that's the deep sea, that's the environment that we consider to be among the most pristine left on Earth. And there are a lot of other pressures. Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with, as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral reefs. On the scale of decades, in our lifetimes, we're going to see a lot of damage to coral reefs. And I could spend the rest of my time, which is getting very limited, going through this litany of concerns about the ocean, but I want to end on a more positive note. And so the grand challenge then is to try and make sure that we preserve what's left, because there is still spectacular beauty. And the oceans are so productive, there's so much going on in there that's of relevance to humans that we really need to, even from a selfish perspective, try to do better than we have in the past. So we need to recognize those hot spots and do our best to protect them. When we look at pictures like this, they take our breath away, in addition to helping to give us breath by the oxygen that the oceans provide. Census scientists worked in the rain, they worked in the cold, they worked under water and they worked above water trying to illuminate the wondrous discovery, the still vast unknown, the spectacular adaptations that we see in ocean life. So whether you're a yak herder living in the mountains of Chile, whether you're a stockbroker in New York City or whether you're a TEDster living in Edinburgh, the oceans matter. And as the oceans go so shall we. Thanks for listening. (Applause)

Abundance is our future

{0: 'Peter Diamandis runs the X Prize Foundation, which offers large cash incentive prizes to inventors who can solve grand challenges like space flight, low-cost mobile medical diagnostics and oil spill cleanup. He is the chair of Singularity University, which teaches executives and grad students about exponentially growing technologies.'}

TED2012

(Applause) (Video) Announcer: Threats, in the wake of Bin Laden's death, have spiked. Announcer Two: Famine in Somalia. Announcer Three: Police pepper spray. Announcer Four: Vicious cartels. Announcer Five: Caustic cruise lines. Announcer Six: Societal decay. Announcer Seven: 65 dead. Announcer Eight: Tsunami warning. Announcer Nine: Cyberattacks. Multiple Announcers: Drug war. Mass destruction. Tornado. Recession. Default. Doomsday. Egypt. Syria. Crisis. Death. Disaster. Oh, my God. Peter Diamandis: So those are just a few of the clips I collected over the last six months — could have easily been the last six days or the last six years. The point is that the news media preferentially feeds us negative stories because that's what our minds pay attention to. And there's a very good reason for that. Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains. And because nothing is more important to us than survival, the first stop of all of that data is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala. Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news. And that old newspaper saying, "If it bleeds it leads," is very true. So given all of our digital devices that are bringing all the negative news to us seven days a week, 24 hours a day, it's no wonder that we're pessimistic. It's no wonder that people think that the world is getting worse. But perhaps that's not the case. Perhaps instead, it's the distortions brought to us of what's really going on. Perhaps the tremendous progress we've made over the last century by a series of forces are, in fact, accelerating to a point that we have the potential in the next three decades to create a world of abundance. Now I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems — climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage — we surely do. And as humans, we are far better at seeing the problems way in advance, but ultimately we knock them down. So let's look at what this last century has been to see where we're going. Over the last hundred years, the average human lifespan has more than doubled, average per capita income adjusted for inflation around the world has tripled. Childhood mortality has come down a factor of 10. Add to that the cost of food, electricity, transportation, communication have dropped 10 to 1,000-fold. Steve Pinker has showed us that, in fact, we're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history. And Charles Kenny that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent in the last 130 years. We truly are living in an extraordinary time. And many people forget this. And we keep setting our expectations higher and higher. In fact, we redefine what poverty means. Think of this, in America today, the majority of people under the poverty line still have electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators, television, mobile phones, air conditioning and cars. The wealthiest robber barons of the last century, the emperors on this planet, could have never dreamed of such luxuries. Underpinning much of this is technology, and of late, exponentially growing technologies. My good friend Ray Kurzweil showed that any tool that becomes an information technology jumps on this curve, on Moore's Law, and experiences price performance doubling every 12 to 24 months. That's why the cellphone in your pocket is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than a supercomputer of the '70s. Now look at this curve. This is Moore's Law over the last hundred years. I want you to notice two things from this curve. Number one, how smooth it is — through good time and bad time, war time and peace time, recession, depression and boom time. This is the result of faster computers being used to build faster computers. It doesn't slow for any of our grand challenges. And also, even though it's plotted on a log curve on the left, it's curving upwards. The rate at which the technology is getting faster is itself getting faster. And on this curve, riding on Moore's Law, are a set of extraordinarily powerful technologies available to all of us. Cloud computing, what my friends at Autodesk call infinite computing; sensors and networks; robotics; 3D printing, which is the ability to democratize and distribute personalized production around the planet; synthetic biology; fuels, vaccines and foods; digital medicine; nanomaterials; and A.I. I mean, how many of you saw the winning of Jeopardy by IBM's Watson? I mean, that was epic. In fact, I scoured the headlines looking for the best headline in a newspaper I could. And I love this: "Watson Vanquishes Human Opponents." Jeopardy's not an easy game. It's about the nuance of human language. And imagine if you would A.I.'s like this on the cloud available to every person with a cellphone. Four years ago here at TED, Ray Kurzweil and I started a new university called Singularity University. And we teach our students all of these technologies, and particularly how they can be used to solve humanity's grand challenges. And every year we ask them to start a company or a product or a service that can affect positively the lives of a billion people within a decade. Think about that, the fact that, literally, a group of students can touch the lives of a billion people today. 30 years ago that would have sounded ludicrous. Today we can point at dozens of companies that have done just that. When I think about creating abundance, it's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet; it's about creating a life of possibility. It is about taking that which was scarce and making it abundant. You see, scarcity is contextual, and technology is a resource-liberating force. Let me give you an example. So this is a story of Napoleon III in the mid-1800s. He's the dude on the left. He invited over to dinner the king of Siam. All of Napoleon's troops were fed with silver utensils, Napoleon himself with gold utensils. But the King of Siam, he was fed with aluminum utensils. You see, aluminum was the most valuable metal on the planet, worth more than gold and platinum. It's the reason that the tip of the Washington Monument is made of aluminum. You see, even though aluminum is 8.3 percent of the Earth by mass, it doesn't come as a pure metal. It's all bound by oxygen and silicates. But then the technology of electrolysis came along and literally made aluminum so cheap that we use it with throw-away mentality. So let's project this analogy going forward. We think about energy scarcity. Ladies and gentlemen, we are on a planet that is bathed with 5,000 times more energy than we use in a year. 16 terawatts of energy hits the Earth's surface every 88 minutes. It's not about being scarce, it's about accessibility. And there's good news here. For the first time, this year the cost of solar-generated electricity is 50 percent that of diesel-generated electricity in India — 8.8 rupees versus 17 rupees. The cost of solar dropped 50 percent last year. Last month, MIT put out a study showing that by the end of this decade, in the sunny parts of the United States, solar electricity will be six cents a kilowatt hour compared to 15 cents as a national average. And if we have abundant energy, we also have abundant water. Now we talk about water wars. Do you remember when Carl Sagan turned the Voyager spacecraft back towards the Earth, in 1990 after it just passed Saturn? He took a famous photo. What was it called? "A Pale Blue Dot." Because we live on a water planet. We live on a planet 70 percent covered by water. Yes, 97.5 percent is saltwater, two percent is ice, and we fight over a half a percent of the water on this planet, but here too there is hope. And there is technology coming online, not 10, 20 years from now, right now. There's nanotechnology coming on, nanomaterials. And the conversation I had with Dean Kamen this morning, one of the great DIY innovators, I'd like to share with you — he gave me permission to do so — his technology called Slingshot that many of you may have heard of, it is the size of a small dorm room refrigerator. It's able to generate a thousand liters of clean drinking water a day out of any source — saltwater, polluted water, latrine — at less than two cents a liter. The chairman of Coca-Cola has just agreed to do a major test of hundreds of units of this in the developing world. And if that pans out, which I have every confidence it will, Coca-Cola will deploy this globally to 206 countries around the planet. This is the kind of innovation, empowered by this technology, that exists today. And we've seen this in cellphones. My goodness, we're going to hit 70 percent penetration of cellphones in the developing world by the end of 2013. Think about it, that a Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile comm than President Reagan did 25 years ago. And if they're on a smartphone on Google, they've got access to more knowledge and information than President Clinton did 15 years ago. They're living in a world of information and communication abundance that no one could have ever predicted. Better than that, the things that you and I spent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for — GPS, HD video and still images, libraries of books and music, medical diagnostic technology — are now literally dematerializing and demonetizing into your cellphone. Probably the best part of it is what's coming down the pike in health. Last month, I had the pleasure of announcing with Qualcomm Foundation something called the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize. We're challenging teams around the world to basically combine these technologies into a mobile device that you can speak to, because it's got A.I., you can cough on it, you can do a finger blood prick. And to win, it needs to be able to diagnose you better than a team of board-certified doctors. So literally, imagine this device in the middle of the developing world where there are no doctors, 25 percent of the disease burden and 1.3 percent of the health care workers. When this device sequences an RNA or DNA virus that it doesn't recognize, it calls the CDC and prevents the pandemic from happening in the first place. But here, here is the biggest force for bringing about a world of abundance. I call it the rising billion. So the white lines here are population. We just passed the seven billion mark on Earth. And by the way, the biggest protection against a population explosion is making the world educated and healthy. In 2010, we had just short of two billion people online, connected. By 2020, that's going from two billion to five billion Internet users. Three billion new minds who have never been heard from before are connecting to the global conversation. What will these people want? What will they consume? What will they desire? And rather than having economic shutdown, we're about to have the biggest economic injection ever. These people represent tens of trillions of dollars injected into the global economy. And they will get healthier by using the Tricorder, and they'll become better educated by using the Khan Academy, and by literally being able to use 3D printing and infinite computing [become] more productive than ever before. So what could three billion rising, healthy, educated, productive members of humanity bring to us? How about a set of voices that have never been heard from before. What about giving the oppressed, wherever they might be, the voice to be heard and the voice to act for the first time ever? What will these three billion people bring? What about contributions we can't even predict? The one thing I've learned at the X Prize is that small teams driven by their passion with a clear focus can do extraordinary things, things that large corporations and governments could only do in the past. Let me share and close with a story that really got me excited. There is a program that some of you might have heard of. It's a game called Foldit. It came out of the University of Washington in Seattle. And this is a game where individuals can actually take a sequence of amino acids and figure out how the protein is going to fold. And how it folds dictates its structure and its functionality. And it's very important for research in medicine. And up until now, it's been a supercomputer problem. And this game has been played by university professors and so forth. And it's literally, hundreds of thousands of people came online and started playing it. And it showed that, in fact, today, the human pattern recognition machinery is better at folding proteins than the best computers. And when these individuals went and looked at who was the best protein folder in the world, it wasn't an MIT professor, it wasn't a CalTech student, it was a person from England, from Manchester, a woman who, during the day, was an executive assistant at a rehab clinic and, at night, was the world's best protein folder. Ladies and gentlemen, what gives me tremendous confidence in the future is the fact that we are now more empowered as individuals to take on the grand challenges of this planet. We have the tools with this exponential technology. We have the passion of the DIY innovator. We have the capital of the techno-philanthropist. And we have three billion new minds coming online to work with us to solve the grand challenges, to do that which we must do. We are living into extraordinary decades ahead. Thank you. (Applause)

The Earth is full

{0: 'Paul Gilding is an independent writer, activist and adviser on a sustainable economy. Click through to watch the onstage debate that followed this talk.'}

TED2012

Let me begin with four words that will provide the context for this week, four words that will come to define this century. Here they are: The Earth is full. It's full of us, it's full of our stuff, full of our waste, full of our demands. Yes, we are a brilliant and creative species, but we've created a little too much stuff — so much that our economy is now bigger than its host, our planet. This is not a philosophical statement, this is just science based in physics, chemistry and biology. There are many science-based analyses of this, but they all draw the same conclusion — that we're living beyond our means. The eminent scientists of the Global Footprint Network, for example, calculate that we need about 1.5 Earths to sustain this economy. In other words, to keep operating at our current level, we need 50 percent more Earth than we've got. In financial terms, this would be like always spending 50 percent more than you earn, going further into debt every year. But of course, you can't borrow natural resources, so we're burning through our capital, or stealing from the future. So when I say full, I mean really full — well past any margin for error, well past any dispute about methodology. What this means is our economy is unsustainable. I'm not saying it's not nice or pleasant or that it's bad for polar bears or forests, though it certainly is. What I'm saying is our approach is simply unsustainable. In other words, thanks to those pesky laws of physics, when things aren't sustainable, they stop. But that's not possible, you might think. We can't stop economic growth. Because that's what will stop: economic growth. It will stop because of the end of trade resources. It will stop because of the growing demand of us on all the resources, all the capacity, all the systems of the Earth, which is now having economic damage. When we think about economic growth stopping, we go, "That's not possible," because economic growth is so essential to our society that is is rarely questioned. Although growth has certainly delivered many benefits, it is an idea so essential that we tend not to understand the possibility of it not being around. Even though it has delivered many benefits, it is based on a crazy idea — the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. And I'm here to tell you the emperor has no clothes. That the crazy idea is just that, it is crazy, and with the Earth full, it's game over. Come on, you're thinking. That's not possible. Technology is amazing. People are innovative. There are so many ways we can improve the way we do things. We can surely sort this out. That's all true. Well, it's mostly true. We are certainly amazing, and we regularly solve complex problems with amazing creativity. So if our problem was to get the human economy down from 150 percent to 100 percent of the Earth's capacity, we could do that. The problem is we're just warming up this growth engine. We plan to take this highly-stressed economy and make it twice as big and then make it four times as big — not in some distant future, but in less than 40 years, in the life time of most of you. China plans to be there in just 20 years. The only problem with this plan is that it's not possible. In response, some people argue, but we need growth, we need it to solve poverty. We need it to develop technology. We need it to keep social stability. I find this argument fascinating, as though we can kind of bend the rules of physics to suit our needs. It's like the Earth doesn't care what we need. Mother nature doesn't negotiate; she just sets rules and describes consequences. And these are not esoteric limits. This is about food and water, soil and climate, the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives. So the idea that we can smoothly transition to a highly-efficient, solar-powered, knowledge-based economy transformed by science and technology so that nine billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads is a delusion. It's not that it's not possible to feed, clothe and house us all and have us live decent lives. It certainly is. But the idea that we can gently grow there with a few minor hiccups is just wrong, and it's dangerously wrong, because it means we're not getting ready for what's really going to happen. See what happens when you operate a system past its limits and then keep on going at an ever-accelerating rate is that the system stops working and breaks down. And that's what will happen to us. Many of you will be thinking, but surely we can still stop this. If it's that bad, we'll react. Let's just think through that idea. Now we've had 50 years of warnings. We've had science proving the urgency of change. We've had economic analysis pointing out that, not only can we afford it, it's cheaper to act early. And yet, the reality is we've done pretty much nothing to change course. We're not even slowing down. Last year on climate, for example, we had the highest global emissions ever. The story on food, on water, on soil, on climate is all much the same. I actually don't say this in despair. I've done my grieving about the loss. I accept where we are. It is sad, but it is what it is. But it is also time that we ended our denial and recognized that we're not acting, we're not close to acting and we're not going to act until this crisis hits the economy. And that's why the end of growth is the central issue and the event that we need to get ready for. So when does this transition begin? When does this breakdown begin? In my view, it is well underway. I know most people don't see it that way. We tend to look at the world, not as the integrated system that it is, but as a series of individual issues. We see the Occupy protests, we see spiraling debt crises, we see growing inequality, we see money's influence on politics, we see resource constraint, food and oil prices. But we see, mistakenly, each of these issues as individual problems to be solved. In fact, it's the system in the painful process of breaking down — our system, of debt-fueled economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet Earth, is eating itself alive. I could give you countless studies and evidence to prove this, but I won't because, if you want to see it, that evidence is all around you. I want to talk to you about fear. I want to do so because, in my view, the most important issue we face is how we respond to this question. The crisis is now inevitable. This issue is, how will we react? Of course, we can't know what will happen. The future is inherently uncertain. But let's just think through what the science is telling us is likely to happen. Imagine our economy when the carbon bubble bursts, when the financial markets recognize that, to have any hope of preventing the climate spiraling out of control, the oil and coal industries are finished. Imagine China, India and Pakistan going to war as climate impacts generate conflict over food and water. Imagine the Middle East without oil income, but with collapsing governments. Imagine our highly-tuned, just-in-time food industry and our highly-stressed agricultural system failing and supermarket shelves emptying. Imagine 30 percent unemployment in America as the global economy is gripped by fear and uncertainty. Now imagine what that means for you, your family, your friends, your personal financial security. Imagine what it means for your personal security as a heavily armed civilian population gets angrier and angrier about why this was allowed to happen. Imagine what you'll tell your children when they ask you, "So, in 2012, Mom and Dad, what was it like when you'd had the hottest decade on record for the third decade in a row, when every scientific body in the world was saying you've got a major problem, when the oceans were acidifying, when oil and food prices were spiking, when they were rioting in the streets of London and occupying Wall Street? When the system was so clearly breaking down, Mom and Dad, what did you do, what were you thinking?" So how do you feel when the lights go out on the global economy in your mind, when your assumptions about the future fade away and something very different emerges? Just take a moment and take a breath and think, what do you feel at this point? Perhaps denial. Perhaps anger. Maybe fear. Of course, we can't know what's going to happen and we have to live with uncertainty. But when we think about the kind of possibilities I paint, we should feel a bit of fear. We are in danger, all of us, and we've evolved to respond to danger with fear to motivate a powerful response, to help us bravely face a threat. But this time it's not a tiger at the cave mouth. You can't see the danger at your door. But if you look, you can see it at the door of your civilization. That's why we need to feel our response now while the lights are still on, because if we wait until the crisis takes hold, we may panic and hide. If we feel it now and think it through, we will realize we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Yes, things will get ugly, and it will happen soon — certainly in our lifetime — but we are more than capable of getting through everything that's coming. You see, those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem, that technology is limitless, that markets can be a force for good, are in fact right. The only thing they're missing is that it takes a good crisis to get us going. When we feel fear and we fear loss we are capable of quite extraordinary things. Think about war. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it just took four days for the government to ban the production of civilian cars and to redirect the auto industry, and from there to rationing of food and energy. Think about how a company responds to a bankruptcy threat and how a change that seemed impossible just gets done. Think about how an individual responds to a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and how lifestyle changes that previously were just too difficult suddenly become relatively easy. We are smart, in fact, we really are quite amazing, but we do love a good crisis. And the good news, this one's a monster. (Laughter) Sure, if we get it wrong, we could face the end of this civilization, but if we get it right, it could be the beginning of civilization instead. And how cool would it be to tell your grandchildren that you were part of that? There's certainly no technical or economic barrier in the way. Scientists like James Hansen tell us we may need to eliminate net CO2 emissions from the economy in just a few decades. I wanted to know what that would take, so I worked with professor Jorgen Randers from Norway to find the answer. We developed a plan called "The One Degree War Plan" — so named because of the level of mobilization and focus required. To my surprise, eliminating net CO2 emissions from the economy in just 20 years is actually pretty easy and pretty cheap, not very cheap, but certainly less than the cost of a collapsing civilization. We didn't calculate that precisely, but we understand that's very expensive. You can read the details, but in summary, we can transform our economy. We can do it with proven technology. We can do it at an affordable cost. We can do it with existing political structures. The only thing we need to change is how we think and how we feel. And this is where you come in. When we think about the future I paint, of course we should feel a bit of fear. But fear can be paralyzing or motivating. We need to accept the fear and then we need to act. We need to act like the future depends on it. We need to act like we only have one planet. We can do this. I know the free market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth, more stuff and nine billion people going shopping is the best we can do. They're wrong. We can be more, we can be much more. We have achieved remarkable things since working out how to grow food some 10,000 years ago. We've built a powerful foundation of science, knowledge and technology — more than enough to build a society where nine billion people can lead decent, meaningful and satisfying lives. The Earth can support that if we choose the right path. We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society's evolution — like, what do we want to be when we grow up, when we move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and suffer delusions of immortality? Well it's time to grow up, to be wiser, to be calmer, to be more considered. Like generations before us, we'll be growing up in war — not a war between civilizations, but a war for civilization, for the extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and plans on staying around into middle age. We can choose life over fear. We can do what we need to do, but it will take every entrepreneur, every artist, every scientist, every communicator, every mother, every father, every child, every one of us. This could be our finest hour. Thank you. (Applause)

Robots that fly ... and cooperate

{0: "As the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, Vijay Kumar studies the control and coordination of multi-robot formations."}

TED2012

Good morning. I'm here today to talk about autonomous flying beach balls. (Laughter) No, agile aerial robots like this one. I'd like to tell you a little bit about the challenges in building these, and some of the terrific opportunities for applying this technology. So these robots are related to unmanned aerial vehicles. However, the vehicles you see here are big. They weigh thousands of pounds, are not by any means agile. They're not even autonomous. In fact, many of these vehicles are operated by flight crews that can include multiple pilots, operators of sensors, and mission coordinators. What we're interested in is developing robots like this — and here are two other pictures — of robots that you can buy off the shelf. So these are helicopters with four rotors, and they're roughly a meter or so in scale, and weigh several pounds. And so we retrofit these with sensors and processors, and these robots can fly indoors. Without GPS. The robot I'm holding in my hand is this one, and it's been created by two students, Alex and Daniel. So this weighs a little more than a tenth of a pound. It consumes about 15 watts of power. And as you can see, it's about eight inches in diameter. So let me give you just a very quick tutorial on how these robots work. So it has four rotors. If you spin these rotors at the same speed, the robot hovers. If you increase the speed of each of these rotors, then the robot flies up, it accelerates up. Of course, if the robot were tilted, inclined to the horizontal, then it would accelerate in this direction. So to get it to tilt, there's one of two ways of doing it. So in this picture, you see that rotor four is spinning faster and rotor two is spinning slower. And when that happens, there's a moment that causes this robot to roll. And the other way around, if you increase the speed of rotor three and decrease the speed of rotor one, then the robot pitches forward. And then finally, if you spin opposite pairs of rotors faster than the other pair, then the robot yaws about the vertical axis. So an on-board processor essentially looks at what motions need to be executed and combines these motions, and figures out what commands to send to the motors — 600 times a second. That's basically how this thing operates. So one of the advantages of this design is when you scale things down, the robot naturally becomes agile. So here, R is the characteristic length of the robot. It's actually half the diameter. And there are lots of physical parameters that change as you reduce R. The one that's most important is the inertia, or the resistance to motion. So it turns out the inertia, which governs angular motion, scales as a fifth power of R. So the smaller you make R, the more dramatically the inertia reduces. So as a result, the angular acceleration, denoted by the Greek letter alpha here, goes as 1 over R. It's inversely proportional to R. The smaller you make it, the more quickly you can turn. So this should be clear in these videos. On the bottom right, you see a robot performing a 360-degree flip in less than half a second. Multiple flips, a little more time. So here the processes on board are getting feedback from accelerometers and gyros on board, and calculating, like I said before, commands at 600 times a second, to stabilize this robot. So on the left, you see Daniel throwing this robot up into the air, and it shows you how robust the control is. No matter how you throw it, the robot recovers and comes back to him. So why build robots like this? Well, robots like this have many applications. You can send them inside buildings like this, as first responders to look for intruders, maybe look for biochemical leaks, gaseous leaks. You can also use them for applications like construction. So here are robots carrying beams, columns and assembling cube-like structures. I'll tell you a little bit more about this. The robots can be used for transporting cargo. So one of the problems with these small robots is their payload-carrying capacity. So you might want to have multiple robots carry payloads. This is a picture of a recent experiment we did — actually not so recent anymore — in Sendai, shortly after the earthquake. So robots like this could be sent into collapsed buildings, to assess the damage after natural disasters, or sent into reactor buildings, to map radiation levels. So one fundamental problem that the robots have to solve if they are to be autonomous, is essentially figuring out how to get from point A to point B. So this gets a little challenging, because the dynamics of this robot are quite complicated. In fact, they live in a 12-dimensional space. So we use a little trick. We take this curved 12-dimensional space, and transform it into a flat, four-dimensional space. And that four-dimensional space consists of X, Y, Z, and then the yaw angle. And so what the robot does, is it plans what we call a minimum-snap trajectory. So to remind you of physics: You have position, derivative, velocity; then acceleration; and then comes jerk, and then comes snap. So this robot minimizes snap. So what that effectively does, is produce a smooth and graceful motion. And it does that avoiding obstacles. So these minimum-snap trajectories in this flat space are then transformed back into this complicated 12-dimensional space, which the robot must do for control and then execution. So let me show you some examples of what these minimum-snap trajectories look like. And in the first video, you'll see the robot going from point A to point B, through an intermediate point. (Whirring noise) So the robot is obviously capable of executing any curve trajectory. So these are circular trajectories, where the robot pulls about two G's. Here you have overhead motion capture cameras on the top that tell the robot where it is 100 times a second. It also tells the robot where these obstacles are. And the obstacles can be moving. And here, you'll see Daniel throw this hoop into the air, while the robot is calculating the position of the hoop, and trying to figure out how to best go through the hoop. So as an academic, we're always trained to be able to jump through hoops to raise funding for our labs, and we get our robots to do that. (Applause) So another thing the robot can do is it remembers pieces of trajectory that it learns or is pre-programmed. So here, you see the robot combining a motion that builds up momentum, and then changes its orientation and then recovers. So it has to do this because this gap in the window is only slightly larger than the width of the robot. So just like a diver stands on a springboard and then jumps off it to gain momentum, and then does this pirouette, this two and a half somersault through and then gracefully recovers, this robot is basically doing that. So it knows how to combine little bits and pieces of trajectories to do these fairly difficult tasks. So I want change gears. So one of the disadvantages of these small robots is its size. And I told you earlier that we may want to employ lots and lots of robots to overcome the limitations of size. So one difficulty is: How do you coordinate lots of these robots? And so here, we looked to nature. So I want to show you a clip of Aphaenogaster desert ants, in Professor Stephen Pratt's lab, carrying an object. So this is actually a piece of fig. Actually you take any object coated with fig juice, and the ants will carry it back to the nest. So these ants don't have any central coordinator. They sense their neighbors. There's no explicit communication. But because they sense the neighbors and because they sense the object, they have implicit coordination across the group. So this is the kind of coordination we want our robots to have. So when we have a robot which is surrounded by neighbors — and let's look at robot I and robot J — what we want the robots to do, is to monitor the separation between them, as they fly in formation. And then you want to make sure that this separation is within acceptable levels. So again, the robots monitor this error and calculate the control commands 100 times a second, which then translates into motor commands, 600 times a second. So this also has to be done in a decentralized way. Again, if you have lots and lots of robots, it's impossible to coordinate all this information centrally fast enough in order for the robots to accomplish the task. Plus, the robots have to base their actions only on local information — what they sense from their neighbors. And then finally, we insist that the robots be agnostic to who their neighbors are. So this is what we call anonymity. So what I want to show you next is a video of 20 of these little robots, flying in formation. They're monitoring their neighbors' positions. They're maintaining formation. The formations can change. They can be planar formations, they can be three-dimensional formations. As you can see here, they collapse from a three-dimensional formation into planar formation. And to fly through obstacles, they can adapt the formations on the fly. So again, these robots come really close together. As you can see in this figure-eight flight, they come within inches of each other. And despite the aerodynamic interactions with these propeller blades, they're able to maintain stable flight. (Applause) So once you know how to fly in formation, you can actually pick up objects cooperatively. So this just shows that we can double, triple, quadruple the robots' strength, by just getting them to team with neighbors, as you can see here. One of the disadvantages of doing that is, as you scale things up — so if you have lots of robots carrying the same thing, you're essentially increasing the inertia, and therefore you pay a price; they're not as agile. But you do gain in terms of payload-carrying capacity. Another application I want to show you — again, this is in our lab. This is work done by Quentin Lindsey, who's a graduate student. So his algorithm essentially tells these robots how to autonomously build cubic structures from truss-like elements. So his algorithm tells the robot what part to pick up, when, and where to place it. So in this video you see — and it's sped up 10, 14 times — you see three different structures being built by these robots. And again, everything is autonomous, and all Quentin has to do is to give them a blueprint of the design that he wants to build. So all these experiments you've seen thus far, all these demonstrations, have been done with the help of motion-capture systems. So what happens when you leave your lab, and you go outside into the real world? And what if there's no GPS? So this robot is actually equipped with a camera, and a laser rangefinder, laser scanner. And it uses these sensors to build a map of the environment. What that map consists of are features — like doorways, windows, people, furniture — and it then figures out where its position is, with respect to the features. So there is no global coordinate system. The coordinate system is defined based on the robot, where it is and what it's looking at. And it navigates with respect to those features. So I want to show you a clip of algorithms developed by Frank Shen and Professor Nathan Michael, that shows this robot entering a building for the very first time, and creating this map on the fly. So the robot then figures out what the features are, it builds the map, it figures out where it is with respect to the features, and then estimates its position 100 times a second, allowing us to use the control algorithms that I described to you earlier. So this robot is actually being commanded remotely by Frank, but the robot can also figure out where to go on its own. So suppose I were to send this into a building, and I had no idea what this building looked like. I can ask this robot to go in, create a map, and then come back and tell me what the building looks like. So here, the robot is not only solving the problem of how to go from point A to point B in this map, but it's figuring out what the best point B is at every time. So essentially it knows where to go to look for places that have the least information, and that's how it populates this map. So I want to leave you with one last application. And there are many applications of this technology. I'm a professor, and we're passionate about education. Robots like this can really change the way we do K-12 education. But we're in Southern California, close to Los Angeles, so I have to conclude with something focused on entertainment. I want to conclude with a music video. I want to introduce the creators, Alex and Daniel, who created this video. (Applause) So before I play this video, I want to tell you that they created it in the last three days, after getting a call from Chris. And the robots that play in the video are completely autonomous. You will see nine robots play six different instruments. And of course, it's made exclusively for TED 2012. Let's watch. (Sound of air escaping from valve) (Music) (Whirring sound) (Music) (Applause) (Cheers)

The power of introverts

{0: "Our world prizes extroverts, but Susan Cain makes a case for the contemplative. She's leading a social revolution that's showing people that looking inward is a virtue, not a problem."}

TED2012

When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns. (Laughter) Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." (Laughter) Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books. But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" — mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing. And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them. But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer. Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it — all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be — partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them. Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss. Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. A third to a half of the population are introverts — a third to a half. So that's one out of every two or three people you know. So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now — all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing. Now, to see the bias clearly, you need to understand what introversion is. It's different from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. Not all the time — these things aren't absolute — but a lot of the time. So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us. But now here's where the bias comes in. Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place. So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks — four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. And kids are working in countless group assignments. Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research. (Laughter) Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks — which is something we might all favor nowadays. And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface. Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. I'll give you some examples. Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi — all these people described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. And this turns out to have a special power all its own, because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; they were there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what they thought was right. Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts. I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other. And what I'm saying is that culturally, we need a much better balance. We need more of a yin and yang between these two types. This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them. And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations. Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California. And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubicle in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time. And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up. Now, of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating — and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer — but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers — Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad — seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness, where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. So, no wilderness, no revelations. This is no surprise, though, if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing. And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas — I mean zero. So — (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. And do you really want to leave it up to chance? Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there. Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? Why are we setting up our schools this way, and our workplaces? And why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? One answer lies deep in our cultural history. Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the "man" of contemplation. But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like "Character, the Grandest Thing in the World." And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln, who was praised for being modest and unassuming. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority." But then we hit the 20th century, and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "How to Win Friends and Influence People." And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. So that's the world we're living in today. That's our cultural inheritance. Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems. So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. Guess what? Books. I have a suitcase full of books. Here's Margaret Atwood, "Cat's Eye." Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. And here's "The Guide for the Perplexed" by Maimonides. But these are not exactly my books. I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors. My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read. But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. And people would come from all over to hear him speak. But here's the thing about my grandfather. Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted — so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way. So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion. (Laughter) And that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu. So I prepared for moments like these as best I could. I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get. And I call this my "year of speaking dangerously." (Laughter) And that actually helped a lot. But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. I mean, we are. And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision. Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. Just stop it. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions — you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. That is great. It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. School, same thing. We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. This is especially important for extroverted children too. They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part. Okay, number two: Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often. Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment. Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. And that's okay. But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

We need to talk about an injustice

{0: 'Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.'}

TED2012

Well this is a really extraordinary honor for me. I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row. I spend most of my time in very low-income communities in the projects and places where there's a great deal of hopelessness. And being here at TED and seeing the stimulation, hearing it, has been very, very energizing to me. And one of the things that's emerged in my short time here is that TED has an identity. And you can actually say things here that have impacts around the world. And sometimes when it comes through TED, it has meaning and power that it doesn't have when it doesn't. And I mention that because I think identity is really important. And we've had some fantastic presentations. And I think what we've learned is that, if you're a teacher your words can be meaningful, but if you're a compassionate teacher, they can be especially meaningful. If you're a doctor you can do some good things, but if you're a caring doctor you can do some other things. And so I want to talk about the power of identity. And I didn't learn about this actually practicing law and doing the work that I do. I actually learned about this from my grandmother. I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. She was tough, she was strong, she was powerful. She was the end of every argument in our family. She was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family. She was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved. Her parents were born in slavery in Virginia in the 1840's. She was born in the 1880's and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world. And my grandmother was tough, but she was also loving. When I would see her as a little boy, she'd come up to me and she'd give me these hugs. And she'd squeeze me so tight I could barely breathe and then she'd let me go. And an hour or two later, if I saw her, she'd come over to me and she'd say, "Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?" And if I said, "No," she'd assault me again, and if I said, "Yes," she'd leave me alone. And she just had this quality that you always wanted to be near her. And the only challenge was that she had 10 children. My mom was the youngest of her 10 kids. And sometimes when I would go and spend time with her, it would be difficult to get her time and attention. My cousins would be running around everywhere. And I remember, when I was about eight or nine years old, waking up one morning, going into the living room, and all of my cousins were running around. And my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me. And at first I thought we were playing a game. And I would look at her and I'd smile, but she was very serious. And after about 15 or 20 minutes of this, she got up and she came across the room and she took me by the hand and she said, "Come on, Bryan. You and I are going to have a talk." And I remember this just like it happened yesterday. I never will forget it. She took me out back and she said, "Bryan, I'm going to tell you something, but you don't tell anybody what I tell you." I said, "Okay, Mama." She said, "Now you make sure you don't do that." I said, "Sure." Then she sat me down and she looked at me and she said, "I want you to know I've been watching you." And she said, "I think you're special." She said, "I think you can do anything you want to do." I will never forget it. And then she said, "I just need you to promise me three things, Bryan." I said, "Okay, Mama." She said, "The first thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always love your mom." She said, "That's my baby girl, and you have to promise me now you'll always take care of her." Well I adored my mom, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." Then she said, "The second thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing." And I thought about it and I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." Then finally she said, "The third thing I want you to promise me is that you'll never drink alcohol." (Laughter) Well I was nine years old, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger. When I was about 14 or 15, one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer — I don't know where he got it — and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods. And we were kind of just out there doing the stuff we crazily did. And he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some, and they offered it to me. I said, "No, no, no. That's okay. You all go ahead. I'm not going to have any beer." My brother said, "Come on. We're doing this today; you always do what we do. I had some, your sister had some. Have some beer." I said, "No, I don't feel right about that. Y'all go ahead. Y'all go ahead." And then my brother started staring at me. He said, "What's wrong with you? Have some beer." Then he looked at me real hard and he said, "Oh, I hope you're not still hung up on that conversation Mama had with you." (Laughter) I said, "Well, what are you talking about?" He said, "Oh, Mama tells all the grandkids that they're special." (Laughter) I was devastated. (Laughter) And I'm going to admit something to you. I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't. I know this might be broadcast broadly. But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol. (Applause) I don't say that because I think that's virtuous; I say that because there is power in identity. When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us that they don't actually believe makes sense. We can get them to do things that they don't think they can do. When I thought about my grandmother, of course she would think all her grandkids were special. My grandfather was in prison during prohibition. My male uncles died of alcohol-related diseases. And these were the things she thought we needed to commit to. Well I've been trying to say something about our criminal justice system. This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago. In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons. Today, there are 2.3 million. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We have seven million people on probation and parole. And mass incarceration, in my judgment, has fundamentally changed our world. In poor communities, in communities of color there is this despair, there is this hopelessness, that is being shaped by these outcomes. One out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole. In urban communities across this country — Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington — 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole. Our system isn't just being shaped in these ways that seem to be distorting around race, they're also distorted by poverty. We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes. And yet, we seem to be very comfortable. The politics of fear and anger have made us believe that these are problems that are not our problems. We've been disconnected. It's interesting to me. We're looking at some very interesting developments in our work. My state of Alabama, like a number of states, actually permanently disenfranchises you if you have a criminal conviction. Right now in Alabama 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote. We're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it's been since prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And there is this stunning silence. I represent children. A lot of my clients are very young. The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison. We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country. And we're actually doing some litigation. The only country in the world. I represent people on death row. It's interesting, this question of the death penalty. In many ways, we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? And that's a very sensible question. But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill? I mean, it's fascinating. Death penalty in America is defined by error. For every nine people who have been executed, we've actually identified one innocent person who's been exonerated and released from death row. A kind of astonishing error rate — one out of nine people innocent. I mean, it's fascinating. In aviation, we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash. But somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem. It's not our problem. It's not our burden. It's not our struggle. I talk a lot about these issues. I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill. And it's interesting, when I teach my students about African-American history, I tell them about slavery. I tell them about terrorism, the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to World War II. We don't really know very much about it. But for African-Americans in this country, that was an era defined by terror. In many communities, people had to worry about being lynched. They had to worry about being bombed. It was the threat of terror that shaped their lives. And these older people come up to me now and they say, "Mr. Stevenson, you give talks, you make speeches, you tell people to stop saying we're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation's history after 9/11." They tell me to say, "No, tell them that we grew up with that." And that era of terrorism, of course, was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid. And yet, we have in this country this dynamic where we really don't like to talk about our problems. We don't like to talk about our history. And because of that, we really haven't understood what it's meant to do the things we've done historically. We're constantly running into each other. We're constantly creating tensions and conflicts. We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. In South Africa, people understood that we couldn't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, even after the genocide, there was this commitment, but in this country we haven't done that. I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty. It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said, "Well you know it's deeply troubling to hear what you're talking about." He said, "We don't have the death penalty in Germany. And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany." And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, "There's no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people." And I thought about that. What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? I couldn't bear it. It would be unconscionable. And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people — where you're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white — in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched. And yet, there is this disconnect. Well I believe that our identity is at risk. That when we actually don't care about these difficult things, the positive and wonderful things are nonetheless implicated. We love innovation. We love technology. We love creativity. We love entertainment. But ultimately, those realities are shadowed by suffering, abuse, degradation, marginalization. And for me, it becomes necessary to integrate the two. Because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful, more committed, more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world. And for me that means spending time thinking and talking about the poor, the disadvantaged, those who will never get to TED. But thinking about them in a way that is integrated in our own lives. You know ultimately, we all have to believe things we haven't seen. We do. As rational as we are, as committed to intellect as we are. Innovation, creativity, development comes not from the ideas in our mind alone. They come from the ideas in our mind that are also fueled by some conviction in our heart. And it's that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things, but also the dark and difficult things. Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader, talked about this. He said, "When we were in Eastern Europe and dealing with oppression, we wanted all kinds of things, but mostly what we needed was hope, an orientation of the spirit, a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness." Well that orientation of the spirit is very much at the core of what I believe even TED communities have to be engaged in. There is no disconnect around technology and design that will allow us to be fully human until we pay attention to suffering, to poverty, to exclusion, to unfairness, to injustice. Now I will warn you that this kind of identity is a much more challenging identity than ones that don't pay attention to this. It will get to you. I had the great privilege, when I was a young lawyer, of meeting Rosa Parks. And Ms. Parks used to come back to Montgomery every now and then, and she would get together with two of her dearest friends, these older women, Johnnie Carr who was the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott — amazing African-American woman — and Virginia Durr, a white woman, whose husband, Clifford Durr, represented Dr. King. And these women would get together and just talk. And every now and then Ms. Carr would call me, and she'd say, "Bryan, Ms. Parks is coming to town. We're going to get together and talk. Do you want to come over and listen?" And I'd say, "Yes, Ma'am, I do." And she'd say, "Well what are you going to do when you get here?" I said, "I'm going to listen." And I'd go over there and I would, I would just listen. It would be so energizing and so empowering. And one time I was over there listening to these women talk, and after a couple of hours Ms. Parks turned to me and she said, "Now Bryan, tell me what the Equal Justice Initiative is. Tell me what you're trying to do." And I began giving her my rap. I said, "Well we're trying to challenge injustice. We're trying to help people who have been wrongly convicted. We're trying to confront bias and discrimination in the administration of criminal justice. We're trying to end life without parole sentences for children. We're trying to do something about the death penalty. We're trying to reduce the prison population. We're trying to end mass incarceration." I gave her my whole rap, and when I finished she looked at me and she said, "Mmm mmm mmm." She said, "That's going to make you tired, tired, tired." (Laughter) And that's when Ms. Carr leaned forward, she put her finger in my face, she said, "That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave." And I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous. We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering. Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone's humanity. I've learned very simple things doing the work that I do. It's just taught me very simple things. I've come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I believe that for every person on the planet. I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar. I think if somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. And because of that there's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law. I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don't believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice. And finally, I believe that, despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology, we won't be judged by our design, we won't be judged by our intellect and reason. Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are. I sometimes get out of balance. I'll end with this story. I sometimes push too hard. I do get tired, as we all do. Sometimes those ideas get ahead of our thinking in ways that are important. And I've been representing these kids who have been sentenced to do these very harsh sentences. And I go to the jail and I see my client who's 13 and 14, and he's been certified to stand trial as an adult. I start thinking, well, how did that happen? How can a judge turn you into something that you're not? And the judge has certified him as an adult, but I see this kid. And I was up too late one night and I starting thinking, well gosh, if the judge can turn you into something that you're not, the judge must have magic power. Yeah, Bryan, the judge has some magic power. You should ask for some of that. And because I was up too late, wasn't thinking real straight, I started working on a motion. And I had a client who was 14 years old, a young, poor black kid. And I started working on this motion, and the head of the motion was: "Motion to try my poor, 14-year-old black male client like a privileged, white 75-year-old corporate executive." (Applause) And I put in my motion that there was prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct and judicial misconduct. There was a crazy line in there about how there's no conduct in this county, it's all misconduct. And the next morning, I woke up and I thought, now did I dream that crazy motion, or did I actually write it? And to my horror, not only had I written it, but I had sent it to court. (Applause) A couple months went by, and I had just forgotten all about it. And I finally decided, oh gosh, I've got to go to the court and do this crazy case. And I got into my car and I was feeling really overwhelmed — overwhelmed. And I got in my car and I went to this courthouse. And I was thinking, this is going to be so difficult, so painful. And I finally got out of the car and I started walking up to the courthouse. And as I was walking up the steps of this courthouse, there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse. When this man saw me, he came over to me and he said, "Who are you?" I said, "I'm a lawyer." He said, "You're a lawyer?" I said, "Yes, sir." And this man came over to me and he hugged me. And he whispered in my ear. He said, "I'm so proud of you." And I have to tell you, it was energizing. It connected deeply with something in me about identity, about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community, to a perspective that is hopeful. Well I went into the courtroom. And as soon as I walked inside, the judge saw me coming in. He said, "Mr. Stevenson, did you write this crazy motion?" I said, "Yes, sir. I did." And we started arguing. And people started coming in because they were just outraged. I had written these crazy things. And police officers were coming in and assistant prosecutors and clerk workers. And before I knew it, the courtroom was filled with people angry that we were talking about race, that we were talking about poverty, that we were talking about inequality. And out of the corner of my eye, I could see this janitor pacing back and forth. And he kept looking through the window, and he could hear all of this holler. He kept pacing back and forth. And finally, this older black man with this very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me, almost at counsel table. About 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break. And during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court. And this deputy jumped up and he ran over to this older black man. He said, "Jimmy, what are you doing in this courtroom?" And this older black man stood up and he looked at that deputy and he looked at me and he said, "I came into this courtroom to tell this young man, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on." I've come to TED because I believe that many of you understand that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity. That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice. And more than anything, for those of you who share that, I've simply come to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So you heard and saw an obvious desire by this audience, this community, to help you on your way and to do something on this issue. Other than writing a check, what could we do? BS: Well there are opportunities all around us. If you live in the state of California, for example, there's a referendum coming up this spring where actually there's going to be an effort to redirect some of the money we spend on the politics of punishment. For example, here in California we're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years — one billion dollars. And yet, 46 percent of all homicide cases don't result in arrest. 56 percent of all rape cases don't result. So there's an opportunity to change that. And this referendum would propose having those dollars go to law enforcement and safety. And I think that opportunity exists all around us. CA: There's been this huge decline in crime in America over the last three decades. And part of the narrative of that is sometimes that it's about increased incarceration rates. What would you say to someone who believed that? BS: Well actually the violent crime rate has remained relatively stable. The great increase in mass incarceration in this country wasn't really in violent crime categories. It was this misguided war on drugs. That's where the dramatic increases have come in our prison population. And we got carried away with the rhetoric of punishment. And so we have three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for stealing a bicycle, for low-level property crimes, rather than making them give those resources back to the people who they victimized. I believe we need to do more to help people who are victimized by crime, not do less. And I think our current punishment philosophy does nothing for no one. And I think that's the orientation that we have to change. (Applause) CA: Bryan, you've struck a massive chord here. You're an inspiring person. Thank you so much for coming to TED. Thank you. (Applause)

The clues to a great story

{0: 'Andrew Stanton has made you laugh and cry. The writer behind the three "Toy Story" movies and the writer/director of "WALL-E," he releases his new film, "John Carter," in March.'}

TED2012

A tourist is backpacking through the highlands of Scotland, and he stops at a pub to get a drink. And the only people in there is a bartender and an old man nursing a beer. And he orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while. And suddenly the old man turns to him and goes, "You see this bar? I built this bar with my bare hands from the finest wood in the county. Gave it more love and care than my own child. But do they call me MacGregor the bar builder? No." Points out the window. "You see that stone wall out there? I built that stone wall with my bare hands. Found every stone, placed them just so through the rain and the cold. But do they call me MacGregor the stone wall builder? No." Points out the window. "You see that pier on the lake out there? I built that pier with my bare hands. Drove the pilings against the tide of the sand, plank by plank. But do they call me MacGregor the pier builder? No. But you fuck one goat ... " (Laughter) Storytelling — (Laughter) is joke telling. It's knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. We all love stories. We're born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined. The children's television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, "Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story." And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, which is "Make me care" — please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care. We all know what it's like to not care. You've gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one. It's already halfway over, but something's caught you and you're drawn in and you care. That's not by chance, that's by design. So it got me thinking, what if I told you my history was story, how I was born for it, how I learned along the way this subject matter? And to make it more interesting, we'll start from the ending and we'll go to the beginning. And so if I were going to give you the ending of this story, it would go something like this: And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TED about story. And the most current story lesson that I've had was completing the film I've just done this year in 2012. The film is "John Carter." It's based on a book called "The Princess of Mars," which was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And Edgar Rice Burroughs actually put himself as a character inside this movie, and as the narrator. And he's summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter, to his mansion with a telegram saying, "See me at once." But once he gets there, he's found out that his uncle has mysteriously passed away and been entombed in a mausoleum on the property. (Video) Butler: You won't find a keyhole. Thing only opens from the inside. He insisted, no embalming, no open coffin, no funeral. You don't acquire the kind of wealth your uncle commanded by being like the rest of us, huh? Come, let's go inside. AS: What this scene is doing, and it did in the book, is it's fundamentally making a promise. It's making a promise to you that this story will lead somewhere that's worth your time. And that's what all good stories should do at the beginning, is they should give you a promise. You could do it an infinite amount of ways. Sometimes it's as simple as "Once upon a time ... " These Carter books always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as a narrator in it. And I always thought it was such a fantastic device. It's like a guy inviting you around the campfire, or somebody in a bar saying, "Here, let me tell you a story. It didn't happen to me, it happened to somebody else, but it's going to be worth your time." A well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot and propels you forward through the story to the end. In 2008, I pushed all the theories that I had on story at the time to the limits of my understanding on this project. (Video) (Mechanical Sounds) ♫ And that is all ♫ ♫ that love's about ♫ ♫ And we'll recall ♫ ♫ when time runs out ♫ ♫ That it only ♫ (Laughter) AS: Storytelling without dialogue. It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling. It's the most inclusive approach you can take. It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don't want to know that they're doing that. That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal. We're born problem solvers. We're compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that's what we do in real life. It's this well-organized absence of information that draws us in. There's a reason that we're all attracted to an infant or a puppy. It's not just that they're damn cute; it's because they can't completely express what they're thinking and what their intentions are. And it's like a magnet. We can't stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in. I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on "Finding Nemo." And we would call this the unifying theory of two plus two. Make the audience put things together. Don't give them four, give them two plus two. The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience. Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. It's the invisible application that holds our attention to story. I don't mean to make it sound like this is an actual exact science, it's not. That's what's so special about stories, they're not a widget, they aren't exact. Stories are inevitable, if they're good, but they're not predictable. I took a seminar in this year with an acting teacher named Judith Weston. And I learned a key insight to character. She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine. And the idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they're striving for, an itch that they can't scratch. She gave a wonderful example of Michael Corleone, Al Pacino's character in "The Godfather," and that probably his spine was to please his father. And it's something that always drove all his choices. Even after his father died, he was still trying to scratch that itch. I took to this like a duck to water. Wall-E's was to find the beauty. Marlin's, the father in "Finding Nemo," was to prevent harm. And Woody's was to do what was best for his child. And these spines don't always drive you to make the best choices. Sometimes you can make some horrible choices with them. I'm really blessed to be a parent, and watching my children grow, I really firmly believe that you're born with a temperament and you're wired a certain way, and you don't have any say about it, and there's no changing it. All you can do is learn to recognize it and own it. And some of us are born with temperaments that are positive, some are negative. But a major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you and to take the wheel and steer it. As parents, you're always learning who your children are. They're learning who they are. And you're still learning who you are. So we're all learning all the time. And that's why change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die, because life is never static. In 1998, I had finished writing "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting. So I wanted to become much better at it and learn anything I could. So I researched everything I possibly could. And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: "Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty." It's an incredibly insightful definition. When you're telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next? But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term? Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be? An example would be in "Finding Nemo," in the short tension, you were always worried, would Dory's short-term memory make her forget whatever she was being told by Marlin. But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge, vast ocean? In our earliest days at Pixar, before we truly understood the invisible workings of story, we were simply a group of guys just going on our gut, going on our instincts. And it's interesting to see how that led us places that were actually pretty good. You've got to remember that in this time of year, 1993, what was considered a successful animated picture was "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin," "Lion King." So when we pitched "Toy Story" to Tom Hanks for the first time, he walked in and he said, "You don't want me to sing, do you?" And I thought that epitomized perfectly what everybody thought animation had to be at the time. But we really wanted to prove that you could tell stories completely different in animation. We didn't have any influence then, so we had a little secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves. And they were: No songs, no "I want" moment, no happy village, no love story. And the irony is that, in the first year, our story was not working at all and Disney was panicking. So they privately got advice from a famous lyricist, who I won't name, and he faxed them some suggestions. And we got a hold of that fax. And the fax said, there should be songs, there should be an "I want" song, there should be a happy village song, there should be a love story and there should be a villain. And thank goodness we were just too young, rebellious and contrarian at the time. That just gave us more determination to prove that you could build a better story. And a year after that, we did conquer it. And it just went to prove that storytelling has guidelines, not hard, fast rules. Another fundamental thing we learned was about liking your main character. And we had naively thought, well Woody in "Toy Story" has to become selfless at the end, so you've got to start from someplace. So let's make him selfish. And this is what you get. (Voice Over) Woody: What do you think you're doing? Off the bed. Hey, off the bed! Mr. Potato Head: You going to make us, Woody? Woody: No, he is. Slinky? Slink ... Slinky! Get up here and do your job. Are you deaf? I said, take care of them. Slinky: I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them. I don't think what you did was right. Woody: What? Am I hearing correctly? You don't think I was right? Who said your job was to think, Spring Wiener? AS: So how do you make a selfish character likable? We realized, you can make him kind, generous, funny, considerate, as long as one condition is met for him, is that he stays the top toy. And that's what it really is, is that we all live life conditionally. We're all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met. After that, all bets are off. And before I'd even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about story. In 1986, I truly understood the notion of story having a theme. And that was the year that they restored and re-released "Lawrence of Arabia." And I saw that thing seven times in one month. I couldn't get enough of it. I could just tell there was a grand design under it — in every shot, every scene, every line. Yet, on the surface it just seemed to be depicting his historical lineage of what went on. Yet, there was something more being said. What exactly was it? And it wasn't until, on one of my later viewings, that the veil was lifted and it was in a scene where he's walked across the Sinai Desert and he's reached the Suez Canal, and I suddenly got it. (Video) Boy: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Cyclist: Who are you? Who are you? AS: That was the theme: Who are you? Here were all these seemingly disparate events and dialogues that just were chronologically telling the history of him, but underneath it was a constant, a guideline, a road map. Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world. A strong theme is always running through a well-told story. When I was five, I was introduced to possibly the most major ingredient that I feel a story should have, but is rarely invoked. And this is what my mother took me to when I was five. (Video) Thumper: Come on. It's all right. Look. The water's stiff. Bambi: Yippee! Thumper: Some fun, huh, Bambi? Come on. Get up. Like this. Ha ha. No, no, no. AS: I walked out of there wide-eyed with wonder. And that's what I think the magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder. Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent. It can't be artificially evoked. For me, there's no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling — to hold them still just for a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder. When it's tapped, the affirmation of being alive, it reaches you almost to a cellular level. And when an artist does that to another artist, it's like you're compelled to pass it on. It's like a dormant command that suddenly is activated in you, like a call to Devil's Tower. Do unto others what's been done to you. The best stories infuse wonder. When I was four years old, I have a vivid memory of finding two pinpoint scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. And he said I had a matching pair like that on my head, but I couldn't see them because of my hair. And he explained that when I was born, I was born premature, that I came out much too early, and I wasn't fully baked; I was very, very sick. And when the doctor took a look at this yellow kid with black teeth, he looked straight at my mom and said, "He's not going to live." And I was in the hospital for months. And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special. I don't know if I really believe that. I don't know if my parents really believe that, but I didn't want to prove them wrong. Whatever I ended up being good at, I would strive to be worthy of the second chance I was given. (Video) (Crying) Marlin: There, there, there. It's okay, daddy's here. Daddy's got you. I promise, I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo. AS: And that's the first story lesson I ever learned. Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesn't always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core. And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TEDTalk today. Thank you. (Applause)

Why I must speak out about climate change

{0: 'James Hansen has made key insights into our global climate -- and inspired a generation of activists and scientists.'}

TED2012

What do I know that would cause me, a reticent, Midwestern scientist, to get myself arrested in front of the White House protesting? And what would you do if you knew what I know? Let's start with how I got to this point. I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university. And I was really lucky to go to the University of Iowa where I could study under Professor James Van Allen who built instruments for the first U.S. satellites. Professor Van Allen told me about observations of Venus, that there was intense microwave radiation. Did it mean that Venus had an ionosphere? Or was Venus extremely hot? The right answer, confirmed by the Soviet Venera spacecraft, was that Venus was very hot — 900 degrees Fahrenheit. And it was kept hot by a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. I was fortunate to join NASA and successfully propose an experiment to fly to Venus. Our instrument took this image of the veil of Venus, which turned out to be a smog of sulfuric acid. But while our instrument was being built, I became involved in calculations of the greenhouse effect here on Earth, because we realized that our atmospheric composition was changing. Eventually, I resigned as principal investigator on our Venus experiment because a planet changing before our eyes is more interesting and important. Its changes will affect all of humanity. The greenhouse effect had been well understood for more than a century. British physicist John Tyndall, in the 1850's, made laboratory measurements of the infrared radiation, which is heat. And he showed that gasses such as CO2 absorb heat, thus acting like a blanket warming Earth's surface. I worked with other scientists to analyze Earth climate observations. In 1981, we published an article in Science magazine concluding that observed warming of 0.4 degrees Celsius in the prior century was consistent with the greenhouse effect of increasing CO2. That Earth would likely warm in the 1980's, and warming would exceed the noise level of random weather by the end of the century. We also said that the 21st century would see shifting climate zones, creation of drought-prone regions in North America and Asia, erosion of ice sheets, rising sea levels and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage. All of these impacts have since either happened or are now well under way. That paper was reported on the front page of the New York Times and led to me testifying to Congress in the 1980's, testimony in which I emphasized that global warming increases both extremes of the Earth's water cycle. Heatwaves and droughts on one hand, directly from the warming, but also, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor with its latent energy, rainfall will become in more extreme events. There will be stronger storms and greater flooding. Global warming hoopla became time-consuming and distracted me from doing science — partly because I had complained that the White House altered my testimony. So I decided to go back to strictly doing science and leave the communication to others. By 15 years later, evidence of global warming was much stronger. Most of the things mentioned in our 1981 paper were facts. I had the privilege to speak twice to the president's climate task force. But energy policies continued to focus on finding more fossil fuels. By then we had two grandchildren, Sophie and Connor. I decided that I did not want them in the future to say, "Opa understood what was happening, but he didn't make it clear." So I decided to give a public talk criticizing the lack of an appropriate energy policy. I gave the talk at the University of Iowa in 2004 and at the 2005 meeting of the American Geophysical Union. This led to calls from the White House to NASA headquarters and I was told that I could not give any talks or speak with the media without prior explicit approval by NASA headquarters. After I informed the New York Times about these restrictions, NASA was forced to end the censorship. But there were consequences. I had been using the first line of the NASA mission statement, "To understand and protect the home planet," to justify my talks. Soon the first line of the mission statement was deleted, never to appear again. Over the next few years I was drawn more and more into trying to communicate the urgency of a change in energy policies, while still researching the physics of climate change. Let me describe the most important conclusion from the physics — first, from Earth's energy balance and, second, from Earth's climate history. Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed. It reduces Earth's heat radiation to space, so there's a temporary energy imbalance. More energy is coming in than going out, until Earth warms up enough to again radiate to space as much energy as it absorbs from the Sun. So the key quantity is Earth's energy imbalance. Is there more energy coming in than going out? If so, more warming is in the pipeline. It will occur without adding any more greenhouse gasses. Now finally, we can measure Earth's energy imbalance precisely by measuring the heat content in Earth's heat reservoirs. The biggest reservoir, the ocean, was the least well measured, until more than 3,000 Argo floats were distributed around the world's ocean. These floats reveal that the upper half of the ocean is gaining heat at a substantial rate. The deep ocean is also gaining heat at a smaller rate, and energy is going into the net melting of ice all around the planet. And the land, to depths of tens of meters, is also warming. The total energy imbalance now is about six-tenths of a watt per square meter. That may not sound like much, but when added up over the whole world, it's enormous. It's about 20 times greater than the rate of energy use by all of humanity. It's equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year. That's how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day. This imbalance, if we want to stabilize climate, means that we must reduce CO2 from 391 ppm, parts per million, back to 350 ppm. That is the change needed to restore energy balance and prevent further warming. Climate change deniers argue that the Sun is the main cause of climate change. But the measured energy imbalance occurred during the deepest solar minimum in the record, when the Sun's energy reaching Earth was least. Yet, there was more energy coming in than going out. This shows that the effect of the Sun's variations on climate is overwhelmed by the increasing greenhouse gasses, mainly from burning fossil fuels. Now consider Earth's climate history. These curves for global temperature, atmospheric CO2 and sea level were derived from ocean cores and Antarctic ice cores, from ocean sediments and snowflakes that piled up year after year over 800,000 years forming a two-mile thick ice sheet. As you see, there's a high correlation between temperature, CO2 and sea level. Careful examination shows that the temperature changes slightly lead the CO2 changes by a few centuries. Climate change deniers like to use this fact to confuse and trick the public by saying, "Look, the temperature causes CO2 to change, not vice versa." But that lag is exactly what is expected. Small changes in Earth's orbit that occur over tens to hundreds of thousands of years alter the distribution of sunlight on Earth. When there is more sunlight at high latitudes in summer, ice sheets melt. Shrinking ice sheets make the planet darker, so it absorbs more sunlight and becomes warmer. A warmer ocean releases CO2, just as a warm Coca-Cola does. And more CO2 causes more warming. So CO2, methane, and ice sheets were feedbacks that amplified global temperature change causing these ancient climate oscillations to be huge, even though the climate change was initiated by a very weak forcing. The important point is that these same amplifying feedbacks will occur today. The physics does not change. As Earth warms, now because of extra CO2 we put in the atmosphere, ice will melt, and CO2 and methane will be released by warming ocean and melting permafrost. While we can't say exactly how fast these amplifying feedbacks will occur, it is certain they will occur, unless we stop the warming. There is evidence that feedbacks are already beginning. Precise measurements by GRACE, the gravity satellite, reveal that both Greenland and Antarctica are now losing mass, several hundred cubic kilometers per year. And the rate has accelerated since the measurements began nine years ago. Methane is also beginning to escape from the permafrost. What sea level rise can we look forward to? The last time CO2 was 390 ppm, today's value, sea level was higher by at least 15 meters, 50 feet. Where you are sitting now would be under water. Most estimates are that, this century, we will get at least one meter. I think it will be more if we keep burning fossil fuels, perhaps even five meters, which is 18 feet, this century or shortly thereafter. The important point is that we will have started a process that is out of humanity's control. Ice sheets would continue to disintegrate for centuries. There would be no stable shoreline. The economic consequences are almost unthinkable. Hundreds of New Orleans-like devastations around the world. What may be more reprehensible, if climate denial continues, is extermination of species. The monarch butterfly could be one of the 20 to 50 percent of all species that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates will be ticketed for extinction by the end of the century if we stay on business-as-usual fossil fuel use. Global warming is already affecting people. The Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico heatwave and drought last year, Moscow the year before and Europe in 2003, were all exceptional events, more than three standard deviations outside the norm. Fifty years ago, such anomalies covered only two- to three-tenths of one percent of the land area. In recent years, because of global warming, they now cover about 10 percent — an increase by a factor of 25 to 50. So we can say with a high degree of confidence that the severe Texas and Moscow heatwaves were not natural; they were caused by global warming. An important impact, if global warming continues, will be on the breadbasket of our nation and the world, the Midwest and Great Plains, which are expected to become prone to extreme droughts, worse than the Dust Bowl, within just a few decades, if we let global warming continue. How did I get dragged deeper and deeper into an attempt to communicate, giving talks in 10 countries, getting arrested, burning up the vacation time that I had accumulated over 30 years? More grandchildren helped me along. Jake is a super-positive, enthusiastic boy. Here at age two and a half years, he thinks he can protect his two and a half-day-old little sister. It would be immoral to leave these young people with a climate system spiraling out of control. Now the tragedy about climate change is that we can solve it with a simple, honest approach of a gradually rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and distributed 100 percent electronically every month to all legal residents on a per capita basis, with the government not keeping one dime. Most people would get more in the monthly dividend than they'd pay in increased prices. This fee and dividend would stimulate the economy and innovations, creating millions of jobs. It is the principal requirement for moving us rapidly to a clean energy future. Several top economists are coauthors on this proposition. Jim DiPeso of Republicans for Environmental Protection describes it thusly: "Transparent. Market-based. Does not enlarge government. Leaves energy decisions to individual choices. Sounds like a conservative climate plan." But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true cost to society, our governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels by 400 to 500 billion dollars per year worldwide, thus encouraging extraction of every fossil fuel — mountaintop removal, longwall mining, fracking, tar sands, tar shale, deep ocean Arctic drilling. This path, if continued, guarantees that we will pass tipping points leading to ice sheet disintegration that will accelerate out of control of future generations. A large fraction of species will be committed to extinction. And increasing intensity of droughts and floods will severely impact breadbaskets of the world, causing massive famines and economic decline. Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now. Yet, we dither, taking no action to divert the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes. If we had started in 2005, it would have required emission reductions of three percent per year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century. If we start next year, it is six percent per year. If we wait 10 years, it is 15 percent per year — extremely difficult and expensive, perhaps impossible. But we aren't even starting. So now you know what I know that is moving me to sound this alarm. Clearly, I haven't gotten this message across. The science is clear. I need your help to communicate the gravity and the urgency of this situation and its solutions more effectively. We owe it to our children and grandchildren. Thank you. (Applause)

Coding a better government

{0: 'Jennifer Pahlka is the founder of Code for America, which matches software geniuses with US cities to reboot local services.'}

TED2012

So a couple of years ago I started a program to try to get the rockstar tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they're supposed to hate; we have them work in government. The program is called Code for America, and it's a little bit like a Peace Corps for geeks. We select a few fellows every year and we have them work with city governments. Instead of sending them off into the Third World, we send them into the wilds of City Hall. And there they make great apps, they work with city staffers. But really what they're doing is they're showing what's possible with technology today. So meet Al. Al is a fire hydrant in the city of Boston. Here it kind of looks like he's looking for a date, but what he's really looking for is for someone to shovel him out when he gets snowed in, because he knows he's not very good at fighting fires when he's covered in four feet of snow. Now how did he come to be looking for help in this very unique manner? We had a team of fellows in Boston last year through the Code for America program. They were there in February, and it snowed a lot in February last year. And they noticed that the city never gets to digging out these fire hydrants. But one fellow in particular, a guy named Erik Michaels-Ober, noticed something else, and that's that citizens are shoveling out sidewalks right in front of these things. So he did what any good developer would do, he wrote an app. It's a cute little app where you can adopt a fire hydrant. So you agree to dig it out when it snows. If you do, you get to name it, and he called the first one Al. And if you don't, someone can steal it from you. So it's got cute little game dynamics on it. This is a modest little app. It's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the fellows wrote last year. But it's doing something that no other government technology does. It's spreading virally. There's a guy in the I.T. department of the City of Honolulu who saw this app and realized that he could use it, not for snow, but to get citizens to adopt tsunami sirens. It's very important that these tsunami sirens work, but people steal the batteries out of them. So he's getting citizens to check on them. And then Seattle decided to use it to get citizens to clear out clogged storm drains. And Chicago just rolled it out to get people to sign up to shovel sidewalks when it snows. So we now know of nine cities that are planning to use this. And this has spread just frictionlessly, organically, naturally. If you know anything about government technology, you know that this isn't how it normally goes. Procuring software usually takes a couple of years. We had a team that worked on a project in Boston last year that took three people about two and a half months. It was a way that parents could figure out which were the right public schools for their kids. We were told afterward that if that had gone through normal channels, it would have taken at least two years and it would have cost about two million dollars. And that's nothing. There is one project in the California court system right now that so far cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and it doesn't work. And there are projects like this at every level of government. So an app that takes a couple of days to write and then spreads virally, that's sort of a shot across the bow to the institution of government. It suggests how government could work better — not more like a private company, as many people think it should. And not even like a tech company, but more like the Internet itself. And that means permissionless, it means open, it means generative. And that's important. But what's more important about this app is that it represents how a new generation is tackling the problem of government — not as the problem of an ossified institution, but as a problem of collective action. And that's great news, because, it turns out, we're very good at collective action with digital technology. Now there's a very large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively. It's not just Code for America fellows, there are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing and writing civic apps every day in their own communities. They haven't given up on government. They are frustrated as hell with it, but they're not complaining about it, they're fixing it. And these folks know something that we've lost sight of. And that's that when you strip away all your feelings about politics and the line at the DMV and all those other things that we're really mad about, government is, at its core, in the words of Tim O'Reilly, "What we do together that we can't do alone." Now a lot of people have given up on government. And if you're one of those people, I would ask that you reconsider, because things are changing. Politics is not changing; government is changing. And because government ultimately derives its power from us — remember "We the people?" — how we think about it is going to effect how that change happens. Now I didn't know very much about government when I started this program. And like a lot of people, I thought government was basically about getting people elected to office. Well after two years, I've come to the conclusion that, especially local government, is about opossums. This is the call center for the services and information line. It's generally where you will get if you call 311 in your city. If you should ever have the chance to staff your city's call center, as our fellow Scott Silverman did as part of the program — in fact, they all do that — you will find that people call government with a very wide range of issues, including having an opossum stuck in your house. So Scott gets this call. He types "Opossum" into this official knowledge base. He doesn't really come up with anything. He starts with animal control. And finally, he says, "Look, can you just open all the doors to your house and play music really loud and see if the thing leaves?" So that worked. So booya for Scott. But that wasn't the end of the opossums. Boston doesn't just have a call center. It has an app, a Web and mobile app, called Citizens Connect. Now we didn't write this app. This is the work of the very smart people at the Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston. So one day — this is an actual report — this came in: "Opossum in my trashcan. Can't tell if it's dead. How do I get this removed?" But what happens with Citizens Connect is different. So Scott was speaking person-to-person. But on Citizens Connect everything is public, so everybody can see this. And in this case, a neighbor saw it. And the next report we got said, "I walked over to this location, found the trashcan behind the house. Opossum? Check. Living? Yep. Turned trashcan on its side. Walked home. Goodnight sweet opossum." (Laughter) Pretty simple. So this is great. This is the digital meeting the physical. And it's also a great example of government getting in on the crowd-sourcing game. But it's also a great example of government as a platform. And I don't mean necessarily a technological definition of platform here. I'm just talking about a platform for people to help themselves and to help others. So one citizen helped another citizen, but government played a key role here. It connected those two people. And it could have connected them with government services if they'd been needed, but a neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to government services. When one neighbor helps another, we strengthen our communities. We call animal control, it just costs a lot of money. Now one of the important things we need to think about government is that it's not the same thing as politics. And most people get that, but they think that one is the input to the other. That our input to the system of government is voting. Now how many times have we elected a political leader — and sometimes we spend a lot of energy getting a new political leader elected — and then we sit back and we expect government to reflect our values and meet our needs, and then not that much changes? That's because government is like a vast ocean and politics is the six-inch layer on top. And what's under that is what we call bureaucracy. And we say that word with such contempt. But it's that contempt that keeps this thing that we own and we pay for as something that's working against us, this other thing, and then we're disempowering ourselves. People seem to think politics is sexy. If we want this institution to work for us, we're going to have to make bureaucracy sexy. Because that's where the real work of government happens. We have to engage with the machinery of government. So that's OccupytheSEC movement has done. Have you seen these guys? It's a group of concerned citizens that have written a very detailed 325-page report that's a response to the SEC's request for comment on the Financial Reform Bill. That's not being politically active, that's being bureaucratically active. Now for those of us who've given up on government, it's time that we asked ourselves about the world that we want to leave for our children. You have to see the enormous challenges that they're going to face. Do we really think we're going to get where we need to go without fixing the one institution that can act on behalf of all of us? We can't do without government, but we do need it to be more effective. The good news is that technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society. And there's a generation out there that's grown up on the Internet, and they know that it's not that hard to do things together, you just have to architect the systems the right way. Now the average age of our fellows is 28, so I am, begrudgingly, almost a generation older than most of them. This is a generation that's grown up taking their voices pretty much for granted. They're not fighting that battle that we're all fighting about who gets to speak; they all get to speak. They can express their opinion on any channel at any time, and they do. So when they're faced with the problem of government, they don't care as much about using their voices. They're using their hands. They're using their hands to write applications that make government work better. And those applications let us use our hands to make our communities better. That could be shoveling out a hydrant, pulling a weed, turning over a garbage can with an opossum in it. And certainly, we could have been shoveling out those fire hydrants all along, and many people do. But these apps are like little digital reminders that we're not just consumers, and we're not just consumers of government, putting in our taxes and getting back services. We're more than that, we're citizens. And we're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship. So the question I have for all of you here: When it comes to the big, important things that we need to do together, all of us together, are we just going to be a crowd of voices, or are we also going to be a crowd of hands? Thank you. (Applause)

A TED speaker's worst nightmare

{0: 'Colin Robertson is apparently "attempting to make the world\'s first crowdsourced solar energy solution" Or is he?'}

TED2012

Today I'm going to talk about unexpected discoveries. Now I work in the solar technology industry. And my small startup is looking to force ourselves into the environment by paying attention to ... ... paying attention to crowd-sourcing. It's just a quick video of what we do. Huh. Hang on a moment. It might take a moment to load. (Laughter) We'll just — we can just skip — I'll just skip through the video instead ... (Laughter) No. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Music) This is not ... (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) Solar technology is ... Oh, that's all my time? Okay. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Design to challenge reality

{0: 'From wedding invitations to Utopian newspapers, Kelli Anderson re-designs commonplace objects to go beyond their ordinary functions and create surprising experiences.'}

TEDxPhoenix

I'm Kelli Anderson. I work as an artist and designer. And I like to try to find the hidden talents of everyday things. So before I get started, I want to show you a fast smattering of some examples of what I do. But this talk today is really less about what I make and is more about why I make these things. So, I get to tinker with everyday experiences. As we go through our everyday lives, visual and experiential things exert this invisible authority over our brains at all times. And they yield this power in subtle and sneaky ways. So visuals, for example, speak volumes through these teeny, tiny details, codified in things like type, shape, color and texture. So these small, picky things form the vocabulary that come together and make the sentences, enabling us to make tangible things like ... a solar-powered Popsicle truck. (Laughter) It educates the public about renewable energy. It's basically a physical infographic on wheels. And this unexpected pairing of sugar, bright colors and the threat of humanity's self-inflicted demise actually makes for a pretty convincing argument for solar. People arrive at experiences like these with expectations. And when we make things, we're actively choosing what to do with those expectations. In my work, I want to create disruptive wonder. I want to confound these expectations, because I think that every day, fundamental things and experiences frame reality in a way that we often take for granted. The small things we make can work to reinforce our assumptions about the world. Or small things can come out of left field and draw us into reassessing our complacent expectations about reality. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's awesome. Because then, these small things act as sort of a humble back door into understanding a reality that's infinitely surprising. So, as a little demonstration, back to the most basic and fundamental part of myself again: my name, kellianderson.com, spelled out in block letters. This is how people find me in the world. It means me. But in a more objective sense, it's really just this random jumble of letters that I've confined to the single possibility of making my name. So naturally, I wondered: What else can these letters spell? Turns out, all kinds of interesting phrases, like ... "Ken doll is near dot com." (Laughter) A little bit creepy. And "A colder melon skin." Period. (Laughter) Far better use of those kellianderson.com letters, I'm sure you'll agree. This is a dumb game, but it underscores a belief I have, that the world is full of order that doesn't necessarily deserve our respect. Sometimes, there's meaning, justice and logic present in the way things are. But sometimes there just isn't. I think that the moment we realize this is the moment we become creative people, because it prompts us to mess things up and do something better with the basic pieces of experience. What I'm after in my work, really, is this: the hidden talents of everyday things — all of those overlooked powers bestowed on the things that surround us by the wonders of physics, the complexities of cultural associations and a gazillion other only partially chartable things. So today, I want to show you three projects that reconsider the vast properties of commonplace experience and try to do something better by doing something more absurd. This first project is a holiday card I made for my friends. My goal in this was to get people to notice this going-through-the-motions holiday thing that I'm sure we've all felt before. And I did that through a holiday card, of course. From the outside, it looks pretty normal. But paper has this memory; paper never forgets how it was bent. I was able to use that material memory to guide the recipient through the experience of the card. So when you first pick it up, while floppy, it's clear it wants to bend in all of these certain ways. As people tinker with it, they discover that bending the card brings them through this simple story. And as you can see, it's a story about itself. (Laughter) This card is literally a four-frame documentary about receiving the card. (Laughter) So it's a recursive experience. (Applause) Oh, well, thank you. This excites me, because it's a recursive experience of a holiday card that gets the viewer to feel this repetitive ritual of all holiday cards. And it begins life as a humble piece of paper that came out of my inkjet printer. I think that's pretty cool. In a sense, that project was all about ritual becoming empty gesture. And it speaks to the fact that the more an experience repeats itself, the less it means — (Laughter) because we begin to take it for granted. And that's why cliches aren't interesting, and why people get in car wrecks near their homes. When we experience things over and over again, they just lose their gravity. So while paper does have all of these astonishing, overlooked capabilities, it takes a hell of a lot of intervention into getting us to see it as new again. This next project I want to show you is a wedding invitation, which is a format practically begging for reinvention. (Laughter) This is a card I made for my friends Mike and Karen, who happen to be really awesome people. Far more awesome, in fact, than the format of wedding invitations. So it was a really good excuse to push the boundaries of this format. And as far as how to push it, the facts of our shared history made it clear that this card should be about music. We're all total music nerds, and Karen and Mike have even recorded songs together. But you know, you also find inspiration in the darnedest of places. And we found some with this guy, Mr. Wizard — (Laughter) who had a much-beloved TV show, teaching kids about the science behind everyday things. And I remembered this episode that demonstrated sound is physical, with this simple experiment. He rolled up a cone of paper, he taped it shut, he taped a needle to the end of it, and — voilà! — it was a record player. I remember seeing this as a kid, and it totally blew my mind. If you can make a record player out of a piece of paper and a sewing needle, what isn't possible out of the world? So I explained this idea to Mike and Karen, and we all decided that it would be way better to make their guests paper record players, rather than traditional, boring invitations. We started getting really, really excited. And I started getting really nervous, because I'm the one who had to actually make it work. So I began spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about needles: Like, would we find needles with the right fidelity? I started calling paper suppliers, looking for the paper with the best audio properties. (Laughter) And they thought I was crazy. Meanwhile, Mike and Karen were recording a song, which they had mastered to a clear flexi disc. I had this black-and-white character printed on it, so that way, when the disc is turned, it completes the couple in all of these different guises. (Laughter) So we did it, we really did it! We made a paper record player — 200 recipient-operated paper record players. This is an actual recording of how it sounds. And then it segues into the real song for comparison. (Music and singing) (Music ends) We were so excited when we finally got that to work. (Laughter) And I was excited that we uncovered this hidden talent of paper in the process. I also love that project because it brings attention to the fact that we approach media with all these expectations that we do not necessarily need. We have assumptions about material experience, like that paper should be silent or that websites should be flat. But we also have these assumptions — (Laughter) that should be a lot scarier in a democracy, because they're like these little thought loopholes. We sleepwalk through our assumptions about the authority in media and assumptions put forth about political realities by media, like newspapers. But I, for one, have faith in these small, hacked experiences to inspire a sense of skepticism at this limited reality we've been handed. And this next project demonstrates just that. Imagine your normal, everyday commuter-newspaper-reading ritual. But what if you are handed a paper filled with stories from an alternate reality? (Laughter) Specifically: What if some crazy person had meticulously recreated a typical paper depicting an alternate reality? This is something we actually did do in the fall of 2008, in a project that was conceptualized by artist Steve Lambert, organized by The Yes Men and executed by many, many people, some of whom are me. We made a perfectly counterfeited "New York Times." We didn't ask anyone for permission, we just did it. (Laughter) We had it mass-produced, and we put it in the hands of hundreds of thousands of commuters on a Thursday morning in New York City. (Laughter) (Applause and cheers) Thanks! (Applause) "Why?," you might ask. "Why make a fake newspaper?" Well, quite frankly, because the real newspaper is depressing. We ostensibly live in a democracy where we should have some say in what happens in the world. But the truth is, we never see the stories we want to see in the newspaper. So we made a paper with only good news. (Laughter) We put in all the policy ideas we thought would actually help the world. Years before the withdrawal was even discussed, we ended the war in Iraq. Years before Occupy Wall Street, we put in a maximum wage law — (Laughter) to end the ginormous wage inequities between the lowest and highest income earners. We returned civics class to high school curriculum. (Laughter) See? These are good ideas! So then students would know how their government works again. There's a very important difference between these two papers. (Laughter) While the real "New York Times" has this slogan of, "All the News that's Fit to Print," we offered a more forward-thinking message of, "All the News We Hope to Print." (Laughter) And that's because our paper is postdated six months into the future, so when people are handed these on the street, they were literally getting an artifact from the utopian future, sort of a blueprint for an attainably utopian future brought about by this very important idea of popular pressure. And our hoax worked perfectly. We suspended people in this strange mental space, because while the stories in the paper couldn't be real, it just felt so perfectly, impeccably real. Here's a video showing — (Laughter) yes, we did that! — showing the first few seconds of conflicted belief, where people could feel for a moment what — (Laughter) Yes! (Laughter) This guy's good. (Laughter) But in order to get this type of reaction, our paper had to be radically believable. And Daniel Dunnam, my other half, and I formed the believability team. He made sure that the typography, the layout, the smell of the ink — everything — was just like a real "New York Times." And I supplied fake advertisements from the utopian future. (Laughter) We decided that the utopian future would be a perfect venue to help these companies who had done wrong in the past try making amends for that wrongdoing. (Laughter) And we do this through the vocabulary of their own advertising. So for Ikea, what if instead of cheap furniture, you could buy your own wind farm? It comes flat-packed, clearly easy to assemble — (Laughter) with that little zigzag tool and the wooden pegs. That would be awesome, right? More nefarious are companies like De Beers, who are making amends for their sale of blood diamonds by donating prosthetics to war-torn African countries. And this is our take on a used car dealership ad. They're now offering a "cash for polluters" program. So now you can trade in your car for a non-polluting type of transportation: a bicycle! (Laughter) And here's my favorite, Dr. Zizmor, who is giving you a beautiful, clear conscience. If you haven't taken a ride on the New York City subway, you may not know Dr. Z. But if you have, then you do, because his cheesy rainbow ads are everywhere. But now he is foregoing these superficial services. He's no longer cleaning up your face, now he's cleaning up our mess in Iraq. (Laughter) So the news of our fake paper made it onto the real news all around the world. These unexpected messages of hope were able to get out there through our sheer brazenness in ripping off the "New York Times," but also because we leveraged this pathway that no one had expected. We pushed our paper beyond its expected role in reporting the news, and we made a blueprint for a better world. With those three projects, I demonstrate that by rejecting normal order, by messing things up and by rearranging the pieces, we can expand our notion of what we demand from reality. So today, I want to put forth this idea that an avenue to better is through a million teeny, tiny disruptions to whatever is sitting in front of you. So go mess with the complacently rational. And you can see more of my work at: I'll snore naked dot com. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

Why you will fail to have a great career

{0: 'A professor of economics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, Larry Smith coaches his students to find the careers that they will truly love.'}

TEDxUW

I want to discuss with you this afternoon why you're going to fail to have a great career. (Laughter) I'm an economist. I do dismal. End of the day, it's ready for dismal remarks. I only want to talk to those of you who want a great career. I know some of you have already decided you want a good career. You're going to fail, too. (Laughter) Because — goodness, you're all cheery about failing. (Laughter) Canadian group, undoubtedly. (Laughter) Those trying to have good careers are going to fail, because, really, good jobs are now disappearing. There are great jobs and great careers, and then there are the high-workload, high-stress, bloodsucking, soul-destroying kinds of jobs, and practically nothing in-between. So people looking for good jobs are going to fail. I want to talk about those looking for great jobs, great careers, and why you're going to fail. First reason is that no matter how many times people tell you, "If you want a great career, you have to pursue your passion, you have to pursue your dreams, you have to pursue the greatest fascination in your life," you hear it again and again, and then you decide not to do it. It doesn't matter how many times you download Steven J.'s Stanford commencement address, you still look at it and decide not to do it. I'm not quite sure why you decide not to do it. You're too lazy to do it. It's too hard. You're afraid if you look for your passion and don't find it, you'll feel like you're an idiot, so then you make excuses about why you're not going to look for your passion. They are excuses, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to go through a whole long list — your creativity in thinking of excuses not to do what you really need to do if you want to have a great career. So, for example, one of your great excuses is: (Sigh) "Well, great careers are really and truly, for most people, just a matter of luck. So I'm going to stand around, I'm going to try to be lucky, and if I'm lucky, I'll have a great career. If not, I'll have a good career." But a good career is an impossibility, so that's not going to work. Then, your other excuse is, "Yes, there are special people who pursue their passions, but they are geniuses. They are Steven J. I'm not a genius. When I was five, I thought I was a genius, but my professors have beaten that idea out of my head long since." (Laughter) "And now I know I am completely competent." Now, you see, if this was 1950, being completely competent — that would have given you a great career. But guess what? This is almost 2012, and saying to the world, "I am totally, completely competent," is damning yourself with the faintest of praise. And then, of course, another excuse: "Well, I would do this, I would do this, but, but — well, after all, I'm not weird. Everybody knows that people who pursue their passions are somewhat obsessive. A little strange. Hmm? Hmm? Okay? You know, a fine line between madness and genius. "I'm not weird. I've read Steven J.'s biography. Oh my goodness — I'm not that person. I am nice. I am normal. I'm a nice, normal person, and nice, normal people — don't have passion." (Laughter) "Ah, but I still want a great career. I'm not prepared to pursue my passion, so I know what I'm going to do, because I have a solution. I have a strategy. It's the one Mommy and Daddy told me about. Mommy and Daddy told me that if I worked hard, I'd have a good career. So, if you work hard and have a good career, if you work really, really, really hard, you'll have a great career. Doesn't that, like, mathematically make sense?" Hmm. Not. But you've managed to talk yourself into that. You know what? Here's a little secret: You want to work? You want to work really, really, really hard? You know what? You'll succeed. The world will give you the opportunity to work really, really, really, really hard. But, are you so sure that that's going to give you a great career, when all the evidence is to the contrary? So let's deal with those of you who are trying to find your passion. You actually understand that you really had better do it, never mind the excuses. You're trying to find your passion — (Sigh) and you're so happy. You found something you're interested in. "I have an interest! I have an interest!" You tell me. You say, "I have an interest!" I say, "That's wonderful! And what are you trying to tell me?" "Well, I have an interest." I say, "Do you have passion?" "I have an interest," you say. "Your interest is compared to what?" "Well, I'm interested in this." "And what about the rest of humanity's activities?" "I'm not interested in them." "You've looked at them all, have you?" "No. Not exactly." Passion is your greatest love. Passion is the thing that will help you create the highest expression of your talent. Passion, interest — it's not the same thing. Are you really going to go to your sweetie and say, "Marry me! You're interesting." (Laughter) Won't happen. Won't happen, and you will die alone. (Laughter) What you want, what you want, what you want, is passion. It is beyond interest. You need 20 interests, and then one of them, one of them might grab you, one of them might engage you more than anything else, and then you may have found your greatest love, in comparison to all the other things that interest you, and that's what passion is. I have a friend, proposed to his sweetie. He was an economically rational person. He said to his sweetie, "Let us marry. Let us merge our interests." (Laughter) Yes, he did. "I love you truly," he said. "I love you deeply. I love you more than any other woman I've ever encountered. I love you more than Mary, Jane, Susie, Penelope, Ingrid, Gertrude, Gretel — I was on a German exchange program then. I love you more than —" All right. She left the room halfway through his enumeration of his love for her. After he got over his surprise at being, you know, turned down, he concluded he'd had a narrow escape from marrying an irrational person. Although, he did make a note to himself that the next time he proposed, it was perhaps not necessary to enumerate all of the women he had auditioned for the part. (Laughter) But the point stands. You must look for alternatives so that you find your destiny, or are you afraid of the word "destiny"? Does the word "destiny" scare you? That's what we're talking about. And if you don't find the highest expression of your talent, if you settle for "interesting," what the hell ever that means, do you know what will happen at the end of your long life? Your friends and family will be gathered in the cemetery, and there beside your gravesite will be a tombstone, and inscribed on that tombstone it will say, "Here lies a distinguished engineer, who invented Velcro." But what that tombstone should have said, in an alternative lifetime, what it should have said if it was your highest expression of talent, was, "Here lies the last Nobel Laureate in Physics, who formulated the Grand Unified Field Theory and demonstrated the practicality of warp drive." (Laughter) Velcro, indeed! (Laughter) One was a great career. One was a missed opportunity. But then, there are some of you who, in spite of all these excuses, you will find, you will find your passion. And you'll still fail. You're going to fail, because — because you're not going to do it, because you will have invented a new excuse, any excuse to fail to take action, and this excuse, I've heard so many times: "Yes, I would pursue a great career, but, I value human relationships — (Laughter) more than accomplishment. I want to be a great friend. I want to be a great spouse. I want to be a great parent, and I will not sacrifice them on the altar of great accomplishment." (Laughter) What do you want me to say? Now, do you really want me to say now, tell you, "Really, I swear I don't kick children." (Laughter) Look at the worldview you've given yourself. You're a hero no matter what. And I, by suggesting ever so delicately that you might want a great career, must hate children. I don't hate children. I don't kick them. Yes, there was a little kid wandering through this building when I came here, and no, I didn't kick him. (Laughter) Course, I had to tell him the building was for adults only, and to get out. He mumbled something about his mother, and I told him she'd probably find him outside anyway. Last time I saw him, he was on the stairs crying. (Laughter) What a wimp. (Laughter) But what do you mean? That's what you expect me to say. Do you really think it's appropriate that you should actually take children and use them as a shield? You know what will happen someday, you ideal parent, you? The kid will come to you someday and say, "I know what I want to be. I know what I'm going to do with my life." You are so happy. It's the conversation a parent wants to hear, because your kid's good in math, and you know you're going to like what comes next. Says your kid, "I have decided I want to be a magician. I want to perform magic tricks on the stage." (Laughter) And what do you say? You say, you say, "That's risky, kid. Might fail, kid. Don't make a lot of money at that, kid. I don't know, kid, you should think about that again, kid. You're so good at math, why don't you —" The kid interrupts you and says, "But it is my dream. It is my dream to do this." And what are you going to say? You know what you're going to say? "Look kid. I had a dream once, too, but — But —" So how are you going to finish the sentence with your "but"? "But. I had a dream too, once, kid, but I was afraid to pursue it." Or are you going to tell him this: "I had a dream once, kid. But then, you were born." (Laughter) (Applause) Do you really want to use your family, do you really ever want to look at your spouse and your kid, and see your jailers? There was something you could have said to your kid, when he or she said, "I have a dream." You could have said — looked the kid in the face and said, "Go for it, kid! Just like I did." But you won't be able to say that, because you didn't. So you can't. (Laughter) And so the sins of the parents are visited on the poor children. Why will you seek refuge in human relationships as your excuse not to find and pursue your passion? You know why. In your heart of hearts, you know why, and I'm being deadly serious. You know why you would get all warm and fuzzy and wrap yourself up in human relationships. It is because you are — you know what you are. You're afraid to pursue your passion. You're afraid to look ridiculous. You're afraid to try. You're afraid you may fail. Great friend, great spouse, great parent, great career. Is that not a package? Is that not who you are? How can you be one without the other? But you're afraid. And that's why you're not going to have a great career. Unless — "unless," that most evocative of all English words — "unless." But the "unless" word is also attached to that other, most terrifying phrase, "If only I had ..." "If only I had ..." If you ever have that thought ricocheting in your brain, it will hurt a lot. So, those are the many reasons why you are going to fail to have a great career. Unless — Unless. Thank you. (Applause)

The cockroach beatbox

{0: 'TED Fellow Greg Gage helps kids investigate the neuroscience in their own backyards.'}

TED-Ed

When you think about the brain, it's difficult to understand, because if I were to ask you right now, how does the heart work, you would instantly tell me it's a pump. It pumps blood. If I were to ask about your lungs, you would say it exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide. That's easy. If I were to ask you how the brain works, it's hard to understand because you can't just look at a brain and understand what it is. It's not a mechanical object, not a pump, not an airbag. It's just like, if you held it in your hand when it was dead, it's just a piece of fat. To understand how the brain works, you have to go inside a living brain. Because the brain's not mechanical, the brain is electrical and it's chemical. Your brain is made out of 100 billion cells, called neurons. And these neurons communicate with each other with electricity. And we're going to eavesdrop in on a conversation between two cells, and we're going to listen to something called a spike. But we're not going to record my brain or your brain or your teachers' brains, we're going to use our good friend the cockroach. Not just because I think they're cool, but because they have brains very similar to ours. So if you learn a little bit about how their brains work, we're going to learn a lot about how our brains work. I'm going to put them in some ice water here And then — Audience: Ew! Greg Gabe: Yeah ... Right now they're becoming anesthetized. Because they're cold blooded, they become the temperature of the water and they can't control it so they just basically "chillax," right? They're not going to feel anything, which may tell you a little about what we're going to do, a scientific experiment to understand the brain. So ... This is the leg of a cockroach. And a cockroach has all these beautiful hairs and pricklies all over it. Underneath each one of those is a cell, and this cell's a neuron that is going to send information about wind or vibration. If you ever try to catch a cockroach, it's hard because they can feel you coming before you're even there, they start running. These cells are zipping up this information up to the brain using those little axons with electronic messages in there. We're going to record by sticking a pin right in there. We need to take off the leg of a cockroach — don't worry, they'll grow back — then we're going to put two pins in there. These are metal pins. One will pick up this electronic message, this electric message is going by. So, we're now going to do the surgery, let's see if you guys can see this. Yeah, it's gross ... All right. So there we go. You guys can see his leg right there. Now I'm going to take this leg, I'm going to put it in this invention that we came up with called the Spikerbox — and this replaces lots of expensive equipment in a research lab, so you guys can do this in your own high schools, or in your own basements if it's me. (Audience: Laughter) So, there. Can you guys see that? Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and turn this on. I'm going to plug it in. (Tuning sound) To me, this is the most beautiful sound in the world. This is what your brain is doing right now. You have 100 billion cells making these raindrop-type noises. Let's take a look at what it looks like, let's pull it up on the iPad screen. I plugged my iPad into here as well. So remember we said the axon looks like a spike. So we're going to take a look at what one of them looks like in just a brief second. We're going to tap here, so we can sort of average this guy. So there we see it. That's an action potential. You've got 100 billion cells in your brain doing this right now, sending all this information back about what you're seeing, hearing. We also said this is a cell that's going to be taking up information about vibrations in the wind. So what if we do an experiment? We can actually blow on this and hear if we see a change. Are you guys going to be ready? If I blow on it you tell me if you hear anything. (Blowing) (Sound changes) Let me just touch this with a little pen here. (Noise) That was the neural firing rate. That actually took a while in neuroscience to understand this. This is called rate coding: the harder you press on something, the more spikes there are, and all that information is coming up to your brain. That's how you perceive things. So that's one way of doing an experiment with electricity. The other way is that your brain is not only taking in electrical impulses, you're also sending out. That's how you move your muscles around. Let's see what happens if I've plugged in something that's electric into the cockroach leg here. I'm going to take two pins, I'm going to plug them onto the cockroach. I'm going to take the other end, I'm going to plug in into my iPod. It's my iPhone actually. Do you guys know how your earbuds work in your ears? You have a battery in your phone, or iPod, right? It's sending electrical current into these magnets in your earbuds which shake back and forth and allow you to hear things. But that current's the same currency that our brain uses, so we can send that to our cockroach leg and hopefully if this works, we can actually see what happens when we play music into the cockroach. Let's take a look. (Music beat) Can we turn it up? There we go. (Audience reacts and gasps) GG: So what's happening? Audience: Wow! (Laughter) So you see what's moving. It's moving on the bass. All those audiophiles out there, if you have awesome, kicking car stereos, you know, the bass speakers are the biggest speakers. The biggest speakers have the longest waves, which have the most current, and the current is what's causing these things to move. So it's not just speakers that are causing electricity. Microphones also cause electricity. (Beat) So I'm going to go ahead and invite another person out on the stage here to help me out with this. So there we go. (Beatboxing) This is the first time this has ever happened in the history of mankind. Human beatbox to a cockroach leg. When you guys go back to your high school, think about neuroscience and how you guys can begin the neuro-revolution. Thank you very much. Bye bye. (Applause)

Questions no one knows the answers to

{0: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.'}

TED-Ed

On a typical day at school, endless hours are spent learning the answers to questions, but right now, we'll do the opposite. We're going to focus on questions where you can't learn the answers because they're unknown. I used to puzzle about a lot of things as a boy, for example: What would it feel like to be a dog? Do fish feel pain? How about insects? Was the Big Bang just an accident? And is there a God? And if so, how are we so sure that it's a He and not a She? Why do so many innocent people and animals suffer terrible things? Is there really a plan for my life? Is the future yet to be written, or is it already written and we just can't see it? But then, do I have free will? I mean, who am I anyway? Am I just a biological machine? But then, why am I conscious? What is consciousness? Will robots become conscious one day? I mean, I kind of assumed that some day I would be told the answers to all these questions. Someone must know, right? Guess what? No one knows. Most of those questions puzzle me more now than ever. But diving into them is exciting because it takes you to the edge of knowledge, and you never know what you'll find there. So, two questions that no one on Earth knows the answer to. (Music) [How many universes are there?] Sometimes when I'm on a long plane flight, I gaze out at all those mountains and deserts and try to get my head around how vast our Earth is. And then I remember that there's an object we see every day that would literally fit one million Earths inside it: the Sun. It seems impossibly big. But in the great scheme of things, it's a pinprick, one of about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which you can see on a clear night as a pale white mist stretched across the sky. And it gets worse. There are maybe 100 billion galaxies detectable by our telescopes. So if each star was the size of a single grain of sand, just the Milky Way has enough stars to fill a 30-foot by 30-foot stretch of beach three feet deep with sand. And the entire Earth doesn't have enough beaches to represent the stars in the overall universe. Such a beach would continue for literally hundreds of millions of miles. Holy Stephen Hawking, that is a lot of stars. But he and other physicists now believe in a reality that is unimaginably bigger still. I mean, first of all, the 100 billion galaxies within range of our telescopes are probably a minuscule fraction of the total. Space itself is expanding at an accelerating pace. The vast majority of the galaxies are separating from us so fast that light from them may never reach us. Still, our physical reality here on Earth is intimately connected to those distant, invisible galaxies. We can think of them as part of our universe. They make up a single, giant edifice obeying the same physical laws and all made from the same types of atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos, that make up you and me. However, recent theories in physics, including one called string theory, are now telling us there could be countless other universes built on different types of particles, with different properties, obeying different laws. Most of these universes could never support life, and might flash in and out of existence in a nanosecond. But nonetheless, combined, they make up a vast multiverse of possible universes in up to 11 dimensions, featuring wonders beyond our wildest imagination. The leading version of string theory predicts a multiverse made up of 10 to the 500 universes. That's a one followed by 500 zeros, a number so vast that if every atom in our observable universe had its own universe, and all of the atoms in all those universes each had their own universe, and you repeated that for two more cycles, you'd still be at a tiny fraction of the total, namely, one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth. (Laughter) But even that number is minuscule compared to another number: infinity. Some physicists think the space-time continuum is literally infinite and that it contains an infinite number of so-called pocket universes with varying properties. How's your brain doing? Quantum theory adds a whole new wrinkle. I mean, the theory's been proven true beyond all doubt, but interpreting it is baffling, and some physicists think you can only un-baffle it if you imagine that huge numbers of parallel universes are being spawned every moment, and many of these universes would actually be very like the world we're in, would include multiple copies of you. In one such universe, you'd graduate with honors and marry the person of your dreams, and in another, not so much. Well, there are still some scientists who would say, hogwash. The only meaningful answer to the question of how many universes there are is one. Only one universe. And a few philosophers and mystics might argue that even our own universe is an illusion. So, as you can see, right now there is no agreement on this question, not even close. All we know is the answer is somewhere between zero and infinity. Well, I guess we know one other thing. This is a pretty cool time to be studying physics. We just might be undergoing the biggest paradigm shift in knowledge that humanity has ever seen. (Music) [Why can't we see evidence of alien life?] Somewhere out there in that vast universe there must surely be countless other planets teeming with life. But why don't we see any evidence of it? Well, this is the famous question asked by Enrico Fermi in 1950: Where is everybody? Conspiracy theorists claim that UFOs are visiting all the time and the reports are just being covered up, but honestly, they aren't very convincing. But that leaves a real riddle. In the past year, the Kepler space observatory has found hundreds of planets just around nearby stars. And if you extrapolate that data, it looks like there could be half a trillion planets just in our own galaxy. If any one in 10,000 has conditions that might support a form of life, that's still 50 million possible life-harboring planets right here in the Milky Way. So here's the riddle: our Earth didn't form until about nine billion years after the Big Bang. Countless other planets in our galaxy should have formed earlier, and given life a chance to get underway billions, or certainly many millions of years earlier than happened on Earth. If just a few of them had spawned intelligent life and started creating technologies, those technologies would have had millions of years to grow in complexity and power. On Earth, we've seen how dramatically technology can accelerate in just 100 years. In millions of years, an intelligent alien civilization could easily have spread out across the galaxy, perhaps creating giant energy-harvesting artifacts or fleets of colonizing spaceships or glorious works of art that fill the night sky. At the very least, you'd think they'd be revealing their presence, deliberately or otherwise, through electromagnetic signals of one kind or another. And yet we see no convincing evidence of any of it. Why? Well, there are numerous possible answers, some of them quite dark. Maybe a single, superintelligent civilization has indeed taken over the galaxy and has imposed strict radio silence because it's paranoid of any potential competitors. It's just sitting there ready to obliterate anything that becomes a threat. Or maybe they're not that intelligent, or perhaps the evolution of an intelligence capable of creating sophisticated technology is far rarer than we've assumed. After all, it's only happened once on Earth in four billion years. Maybe even that was incredibly lucky. Maybe we are the first such civilization in our galaxy. Or, perhaps civilization carries with it the seeds of its own destruction through the inability to control the technologies it creates. But there are numerous more hopeful answers. For a start, we're not looking that hard, and we're spending a pitiful amount of money on it. Only a tiny fraction of the stars in our galaxy have really been looked at closely for signs of interesting signals. And perhaps we're not looking the right way. Maybe as civilizations develop, they quickly discover communication technologies far more sophisticated and useful than electromagnetic waves. Maybe all the action takes place inside the mysterious recently discovered dark matter, or dark energy, that appear to account for most of the universe's mass. Or, maybe we're looking at the wrong scale. Perhaps intelligent civilizations come to realize that life is ultimately just complex patterns of information interacting with each other in a beautiful way, and that that can happen more efficiently at a small scale. So, just as on Earth, clunky stereo systems have shrunk to beautiful, tiny iPods, maybe intelligent life itself, in order to reduce its footprint on the environment, has turned itself microscopic. So the Solar System might be teeming with aliens, and we're just not noticing them. Maybe the very ideas in our heads are a form of alien life. Well, okay, that's a crazy thought. The aliens made me say it. But it is cool that ideas do seem to have a life all of their own and that they outlive their creators. Maybe biological life is just a passing phase. Well, within the next 15 years, we could start seeing real spectroscopic information from promising nearby planets that will reveal just how life-friendly they might be. And meanwhile, SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is now releasing its data to the public so that millions of citizen scientists, maybe including you, can bring the power of the crowd to join the search. And here on Earth, amazing experiments are being done to try to create life from scratch, life that might be very different from the DNA forms we know. All of this will help us understand whether the universe is teeming with life or whether, indeed, it's just us. Either answer, in its own way, is awe-inspiring, because even if we are alone, the fact that we think and dream and ask these questions might yet turn out to be one of the most important facts about the universe. And I have one more piece of good news for you. The quest for knowledge and understanding never gets dull. It doesn't. It's actually the opposite. The more you know, the more amazing the world seems. And it's the crazy possibilities, the unanswered questions, that pull us forward. So stay curious.

Deep ocean mysteries and wonders

{0: 'A pioneer in ocean exploration, David Gallo is an enthusiastic ambassador between the sea and those of us on dry land.'}

TED-Ed

You know, I had a real rough time in school with ADD, and I have a PhD. I earned a PhD, but ... tough to pay attention — biology, geology, physics, chemistry — really tough for me. Only one thing grabbed my attention, and it's that planet called Earth. But in this picture here, you'll see that Earth is mostly water. That's the Pacific. Seventy percent of Earth is covered with water. You can say, "Hey, I know Earth. I live here." You don't know Earth. You don't know this planet, because most of it's covered with that — average depth, two miles. And when you go outside and look up at the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, the average depth of the ocean is 15 of those on top of one another. We've explored about five percent of what's in that water. "Explored," meaning, for the first time, go peek and see what's there. So what I want to do today is show you some things about this planet, about the oceans. I want to take you from shallow water down to the deep water, and hopefully, like me, you'll see some things that get you hooked on exploring planet Earth. You know things like corals; you've seen plenty of corals, those of you who've been to the beach, snorkeling, know corals are an amazing place to go — full of life, some big animals, small animals, some nice, some dangerous, sharks, whales, all that stuff. They need to be protected from humanity. They're great places. But what you probably don't know is in the very deep part of the ocean, we have volcanic eruptions. Most volcanoes on Earth are at the bottom of the sea — more than 80 percent. And we actually have fire, fire deep inside the ocean, going on right now. All over the world — in the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean. In this place, the ocean floor, the rocks actually turn to liquid. So you actually have waves on the ocean floor. You'd say nothing could live there, but when we look in detail, even there, in the deepest, darkest places on Earth, we find life, which tells us that life really wants to happen. So, pretty amazing stuff. Every time we go to the bottom of the sea, we explore with our submarines, with our robots, we see something that's usually surprising, sometimes it's startling and sometimes revolutionary. You see that puddle of water sitting there. And all around the water there's a little cliff, there's a little white sandy beach. We'll get closer, you'll see the beach a little bit better, some of the waves in that water, down there. The thing that's special about this water is that it's at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. So you're sitting inside a submarine, looking out the window at a little pond of water beneath the sea. We see ponds, we see lakes, we see rivers — in fact, right here is a river at the bottom of the ocean going from the lower left to the upper right. Water is actually flowing through there. This totally blew our minds. How can you have this at the bottom? You're in the ocean looking at more water. And there's animals that only live in that water. So, the bottom of the ocean — I love this map, because it shows in the middle of the ocean, there's a mountain range. It's the greatest mountain range on Earth, called the mid-ocean ridge — 50,000 miles long, and we've hardly had a peek at it. Hardly had a peek at it. We find valleys, many thousands of valleys, larger, wider, deeper than the Grand Canyon. We find, as I said, underwater lakes, rivers, waterfalls. The largest waterfall on the planet is actually under the ocean, up near Iceland. All that stuff is in that five percent that we've explored. So the deal about the ocean is that to explore it, you've got to have technology. Not only technology, but it's not just Dave Gallo or one person exploring, it's a team of people. You've got to have the talent, the team. You've got to have the technology. In this case, it's our ship, Atlantis, and the submarine, Alvin. Inside that submarine — this is an Alvin launch — there's three people. They're being wheeled out onto deck. There's 47 other people, the teamwork on that ship, making sure that these people are okay. Everybody in that submarine is thinking one thing right now: Should I have gone to the bathroom one more time? Because you're in there for 10 hours — 10 hours in that little sphere. Three of you together and nobody is going to be around you. You go into the water and once you hit the water, it's amazing. There's a lovely color blue that penetrates right inside you. You don't hear the surface ship anymore, you hear that pinging of a sonar. If you've got an iPhone you've got sonar on there — it's that same pinging that goes down to the bottom and comes back up. Divers check out the sub to make sure the outside is okay, and then they say "Go," and down you go to the bottom of the ocean and it's an amazing trip. So for two and a half hours, you sink down to the bottom. And two hours of it is totally pitch black. We thought that nothing could live inside that world at the bottom of the ocean. And when we look, we find some amazing things. All the way down — we call it the mid-water — from the top of the ocean down to the bottom, we find life. Whenever we stop and look, we find life. I'm going to show you some jellies. They're absolutely some of the coolest creatures on Earth. Look at that thing, just flailing his arms around. That's like a little lobster. That one is like all these animals with their mouths hooked together, the colonial animals. Some animals are tiny, some can be longer than this stage. Just amazing animals. And you can't collect them with a net — we have to go with our cameras and take a look at them. So every time we go, new species of life. The ocean is full of life. And yet the deepest part of the ocean — when we go to that mountain range, we find hot springs. Now we were sure — because this is poisonous water, because it's so deep it would crush the Titanic the same way you crush an empty cup in your hand — we were sure there would be no life there at all. Instead, we find more life and diversity and density than in the tropical rainforest. So, in one instance, in one peek out the window of the sub, we discover something that revolutionizes the way we think about life on Earth; and that is, you don't always have to have sunlight to get life going. There's big animals down there too, some that look familiar. That guy's called Dumbo. I love him. Dumbo's great. This guy — oh man, I wish I had more footage of this. We're trying to get an expedition together to go look at this and maybe in a year we'll have that. Go online and look. Vampyroteuthis infernalis. The vampire squid. Incredibly cool. In the darkness of the deep sea, he's got glowing tentacles, so if I'm coming at you like him, I put my arms out in the darkness so all you see are little glowing things over here. Meanwhile, I'm coming at you. When he wants to escape, he's got these glowing pods on his butt that look like eyes. Glowing eyes on his butt. How cool is that? Just an amazing animal. (Laughter) "Vampire" squid, because when it gets protective, it pulls this black cape over its whole body, and curls up into a ball. Outrageous animal. This ship, "The Ship of Dreams" — a hundred years ago this coming April, this ship was supposed to show up in New York. It's the Titanic. I co-led an expedition out there last year. We are learning so much about that ship. The Titanic is an interesting place for biology, because animals are moving in to live on the Titanic. Microbes are actually eating the hull of the Titanic. That's where Jack was king of the world there on the bow of the Titanic. So we're doing real good. And what's exciting to me is that we're making a virtual Titanic, so you can sit there at home with your joystick and your headset on, and you can actually explore the Titanic for yourself. That's what we want to do, make these virtual worlds, so it's not Dave Gallo or someone else exploring the world; it's you. You explore it for yourself. So here's the bottom line: The oceans are unexplored and I can't begin to tell you how important that is, because they're important to us. Seven billion people live on this planet and all of us are impacted by the sea, because the oceans control the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food you eat. All those are controlled in some way by the ocean, and this is a thing that we haven't even explored — five percent. The thing I want to leave you with is, in that five percent, I showed you some cool stuff. There's a lot more cool stuff — every dive we go on in the ocean, we find something new about the sea. So what's in that other 95 percent? Did we get the exciting stuff or is there more out there? And I'm here to tell you that the ocean is full of surprises. There's a quote I love by Marcel Proust: "The true voyage of exploration is not so much in seeking new landscapes," which we do, "but in having new eyes." And so I hope today, by showing you some of this, it's given you some new eyes about this planet, and for the first time, I want you to think about it differently. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)

How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries

{0: 'Adam Savage is an internationally renowned television producer, host and public speaker.'}

TED-Ed

One of the funny things about owning a brain is that you have no control over the things that it gathers and holds onto, the facts and the stories. And as you get older, it only gets worse. Things stick around for years sometimes before you understand why you're interested in them, before you understand their import to you. Here's three of mine. When Richard Feynman was a young boy in Queens, he went for a walk with his dad and his wagon and a ball. He noticed that when he pulled the wagon, the ball went to the back of the wagon. He asked his dad, "Why does the ball go to the back of the wagon?" And his dad said, "That's inertia." He said, "What's inertia?" And his dad said, "Ah. Inertia is the name that scientists give to the phenomenon of the ball going to the back of the wagon." (Laughter) "But in truth, nobody really knows." Feynman went on to earn degrees at MIT, Princeton, he solved the Challenger disaster, he ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his Feynman diagrams, describing the movement of subatomic particles. And he credits that conversation with his father as giving him a sense that the simplest questions could carry you out to the edge of human knowledge, and that that's where he wanted to play. And play he did. Eratosthenes was the third librarian at the great Library of Alexandria, and he made many contributions to science. But the one he is most remembered for began in a letter that he received as the librarian, from the town of Swenet, which was south of Alexandria. The letter included this fact that stuck in Eratosthenes' mind, and the fact was that the writer said, at noon on the solstice, when he looked down this deep well, he could see his reflection at the bottom, and he could also see that his head was blocking the sun. I should tell you — the idea that Christopher Columbus discovered that the world is spherical is total bull. It's not true at all. In fact, everyone who was educated understood that the world was spherical since Aristotle's time. Aristotle had proved it with a simple observation. He noticed that every time you saw the Earth's shadow on the Moon, it was circular, and the only shape that constantly creates a circular shadow is a sphere, Q.E.D. the Earth is round. But nobody knew how big it was until Eratosthenes got this letter with this fact. So he understood that the sun was directly above the city of Swenet, because looking down a well, it was a straight line all the way down the well, right past the guy's head up to the sun. Eratosthenes knew another fact. He knew that a stick stuck in the ground in Alexandria at the same time and the same day, at noon, the sun's zenith, on the solstice, the sun cast a shadow that showed that it was 7.2 degrees off-axis. If you know the circumference of a circle, and you have two points on it, all you need to know is the distance between those two points, and you can extrapolate the circumference. 360 degrees divided by 7.2 equals 50. I know it's a little bit of a round number, and it makes me suspicious of this story too, but it's a good story, so we'll continue with it. He needed to know the distance between Swenet and Alexandria, which is good because Eratosthenes was good at geography. In fact, he invented the word geography. (Laughter) The road between Swenet and Alexandria was a road of commerce, and commerce needed to know how long it took to get there. It needed to know the exact distance, so he knew very precisely that the distance between the two cities was 500 miles. Multiply that times 50, you get 25,000, which is within one percent of the actual diameter of the Earth. He did this 2,200 years ago. Now, we live in an age where multi-billion-dollar pieces of machinery are looking for the Higgs boson. We're discovering particles that may travel faster than the speed of light, and all of these discoveries are made possible by technology that's been developed in the last few decades. But for most of human history, we had to discover these things using our eyes and our ears and our minds. Armand Fizeau was an experimental physicist in Paris. His specialty was actually refining and confirming other people's results, and this might sound like a bit of an also-ran, but in fact, this is the soul of science, because there is no such thing as a fact that cannot be independently corroborated. And he was familiar with Galileo's experiments in trying to determine whether or not light had a speed. Galileo had worked out this really wonderful experiment where he and his assistant had a lamp, each one of them was holding a lamp. Galileo would open his lamp, and his assistant would open his. They got the timing down really good. They just knew their timing. And then they stood at two hilltops, two miles distant, and they did the same thing, on the assumption from Galileo that if light had a discernible speed, he'd notice a delay in the light coming back from his assistant's lamp. But light was too fast for Galileo. He was off by several orders of magnitude when he assumed that light was roughly ten times as fast as the speed of sound. Fizeau was aware of this experiment. He lived in Paris, and he set up two experimental stations, roughly 5.5 miles distant, in Paris. And he solved this problem of Galileo's, and he did it with a really relatively trivial piece of equipment. He did it with one of these. I'm going to put away the clicker for a second because I want to engage your brains in this. So this is a toothed wheel. It's got a bunch of notches and it's got a bunch of teeth. This was Fizeau's solution to sending discrete pulses of light. He put a beam behind one of these notches. If I point a beam through this notch at a mirror, five miles away, that beam is bouncing off the mirror and coming back to me through this notch. But something interesting happens as he spins the wheel faster. He notices that it seems like a door is starting to close on the light beam that's coming back to his eye. Why is that? It's because the pulse of light is not coming back through the same notch. It's actually hitting a tooth. And he spins the wheel fast enough and he fully occludes the light. And then, based on the distance between the two stations and the speed of his wheel and the number of notches in the wheel, he calculates the speed of light to within two percent of its actual value. And he does this in 1849. This is what really gets me going about science. Whenever I'm having trouble understanding a concept, I go back and I research the people that discovered that concept. I look at the story of how they came to understand it. What happens when you look at what the discoverers were thinking about when they made their discoveries, is you understand that they are not so different from us. We are all bags of meat and water. We all start with the same tools. I love the idea that different branches of science are called fields of study. Most people think of science as a closed, black box, when in fact it is an open field. And we are all explorers. The people that made these discoveries just thought a little bit harder about what they were looking at, and they were a little bit more curious. And their curiosity changed the way people thought about the world, and thus it changed the world. They changed the world, and so can you. Thank you. (Applause)

Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

{0: 'Jonathan Haidt studies how -- and why -- we evolved to be moral and political creatures.'}

TED2012

I have a question for you: Are you religious? Please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person. Let's see, I'd say about three or four percent. I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference. (Laughter) Okay, here's another question: Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way, shape or form? Raise your hand. Okay, that's the majority. My Talk today is about the main reason, or one of the main reasons, why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way, shape or form. My Talk today is about self-transcendence. It's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away. And when that happens, the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings. We talk about being uplifted or elevated. Now it's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor. So here's the metaphor I'm offering today. Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms, most of which we're very familiar with. But sometimes it's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase. We climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness. In 1902, the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience. He collected all kinds of case studies. He quoted the words of all kinds of people who'd had a variety of these experiences. One of the most exciting to me is this young man, Stephen Bradley, had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820. And here's what Bradley said about it. (Music) (Video) Stephen Bradley: I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, "Come." The next day I rejoiced with trembling. My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die. This world had no place in my affections. Previous to this time, I was very selfish and self-righteous. But now I desired the welfare of all mankind and could, with a feeling heart, forgive my worst enemies. JH: So note how Bradley's petty, moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase. And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving. The world's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase. Some shut down the self using meditation. Others use psychedelic drugs. This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god. Others use dancing, spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence. But you don't need a religion to get you through the staircase. Lots of people find self-transcendence in nature. Others overcome their self at raves. But here's the weirdest place of all: war. So many books about war say the same thing, that nothing brings people together like war. And that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences. I'm going to play for you an excerpt from this book by Glenn Gray. Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II. And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle. Here's a key passage where he basically describes the staircase. (Video) Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives. "I" passes insensibly into a "we," "my" becomes "our" and individual faith loses its central importance. I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life. JH: So what all of these cases have in common is that the self seems to thin out, or melt away, and it feels good, it feels really good, in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives. It feels somehow uplifting. This idea that we move up was central in the writing of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim even called us Homo duplex, or two-level man. The lower level he called the level of the profane. Now profane is the opposite of sacred. It just means ordinary or common. And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals. We want to satisfy our individual desires. We pursue our individual goals. But sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change. Individuals unite into a team, a movement or a nation, which is far more than the sum of its parts. Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group, into a moral community. Durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness. And once people circle around some sacred object or value, they'll then work as a team and fight to defend it. Durkheim wrote about a set of intense collective emotions that accomplish this miracle of E pluribus unum, of making a group out of individuals. Think of the collective joy in Britain on the day World War II ended. Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square, which brought down a dictator. And think of the collective grief in the United States that we all felt, that brought us all together, after 9/11. So let me summarize where we are. I'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human. I'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind. I'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred. When we climb that staircase, self-interest fades away, we become just much less self-interested, and we feel as though we are better, nobler and somehow uplifted. So here's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me: Is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design? Is it a product of natural selection, like our hands? Or is it a bug, a mistake in the system — this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain — Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience, it's just a mistake? Well many scientists who study religion take this view. The New Atheists, for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, sort of parasitic memes, that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff, like suicide bombing. And after all, how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves? How could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest? Well let me show you. In "The Descent of Man," Charles Darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality — where did it come from, why do we have it. Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves, but they're of great use to our groups. He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition. He said, "If the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other." He went on to say that "Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected." In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection. Now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years, but it's about to make a major comeback this year, especially after E.O. Wilson's book comes out in April, making a very strong case that we, and several other species, are products of group selection. But really the way to think about this is as multilevel selection. So look at it this way: You've got competition going on within groups and across groups. So here's a group of guys on a college crew team. Within this team there's competition. There are guys competing with each other. The slowest rowers, the weakest rowers, are going to get cut from the team. And only a few of these guys are going to go on in the sport. Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics. So within the team, their interests are actually pitted against each other. And sometimes it would be advantageous for one of these guys to try to sabotage the other guys. Maybe he'll badmouth his chief rival to the coach. But while that competition is going on within the boat, this competition is going on across boats. And once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat, now they've got no choice but to cooperate because they're all in the same boat. They can only win if they all pull together as a team. I mean, these things sound trite, but they are deep evolutionary truths. The main argument against group selection has always been that, well sure, it would be nice to have a group of cooperators, but as soon as you have a group of cooperators, they're just going to get taken over by free-riders, individuals that are going to exploit the hard work of the others. Let me illustrate this for you. Suppose we've got a group of little organisms — they can be bacteria, they can be hamsters; it doesn't matter what — and let's suppose that this little group here, they evolved to be cooperative. Well that's great. They graze, they defend each other, they work together, they generate wealth. And as you'll see in this simulation, as they interact they gain points, as it were, they grow, and when they've doubled in size, you'll see them split, and that's how they reproduce and the population grows. But suppose then that one of them mutates. There's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy. It takes advantage of the others. And so when a green interacts with a blue, you'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller. So here's how things play out. We start with just one green, and as it interacts it gains wealth or points or food. And in short order, the cooperators are done for. The free-riders have taken over. If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection cannot get started. But there are solutions to the free-rider problem. It's not that hard a problem. In fact, nature has solved it many, many times. And nature's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat. For example, why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own DNA, totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus? It's because they used to be separate free-living bacteria and they came together and became a superorganism. Somehow or other — maybe one swallowed another; we'll never know exactly why — but once they got a membrane around them, they were all in the same membrane, now all the wealth-created division of labor, all the greatness created by cooperation, stays locked inside the membrane and we've got a superorganism. And now let's rerun the simulation putting one of these superorganisms into a population of free-riders, of defectors, of cheaters and look what happens. A superorganism can basically take what it wants. It's so big and powerful and efficient that it can take resources from the greens, from the defectors, the cheaters. And pretty soon the whole population is actually composed of these new superorganisms. What I've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history. Darwin's laws don't change, but now there's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different. Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria. It happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple, primitive nests, or hives. Once several wasps were all together in the same hive, they had no choice but to cooperate, because pretty soon they were locked into competition with other hives. And the most cohesive hives won, just as Darwin said. These early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere. And it happened again, even more spectacularly, in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures, they came together around a hearth or a campfire, they divided labor, they began painting their bodies, they spoke their own dialects, and eventually they worshiped their own gods. Once they were all in the same tribe, they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside. And they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet, which is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction. Of course, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives. Human groups may look like hives for brief moments, but they tend to then break apart. We're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are. In fact, often, as we've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts, often those divisions are along religious lines. Nonetheless, when people do come together and put themselves all into the same movement, they can move mountains. Look at the people in these photos I've been showing you. Do you think they're there pursuing their self-interest? Or are they pursuing communal interest, which requires them to lose themselves and become simply a part of a whole? Okay, so that was my Talk delivered in the standard TED way. And now I'm going to give the whole Talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way. (Music) (Video) Jonathan Haidt: We humans have many varieties of religious experience, as William James explained. One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves. The staircase takes us from the experience of life as profane or ordinary upwards to the experience of life as sacred, or deeply interconnected. We are Homo duplex, as Durkheim explained. And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained. I can't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug, but if it is an adaptation, then the implications are profound. If it is an adaptation, then we evolved to be religious. I don't mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions. Those things came along too recently. I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects, people and ideas. This is why politics is so tribal. Politics is partly profane, it's partly about self-interest, but politics is also about sacredness. It's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas. It's about the eternal struggle between good and evil, and we all believe we're on the good team. And most importantly, if the staircase is real, it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life. Because human beings are, to some extent, hivish creatures like bees. We're bees. We busted out of the hive during the Enlightenment. We broke down the old institutions and brought liberty to the oppressed. We unleashed Earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort. Nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom. But sometimes we wonder: Is this all there is? What should I do with my life? What's missing? What's missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves. It's really comfortable down here on the lower level. Come, have a seat in my home entertainment center. One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top. I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia. They all want to find a cause or calling that they can throw themselves into. They're all searching for their staircase. And that gives me hope because people are not purely selfish. Most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger. And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago. "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." JH: Thank you. (Applause)

The $8 billion iPod

{0: 'Author and entrepreneur Rob Reid writes speculative fiction for Random House.'}

TED2012

The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional. And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. I'd therefore like to propose that we employ, we enlist, the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject. For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft. Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars ... (Laughter) ... if we use pennies. Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight. But it's also a morally important one. Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum — whatever sorghum is — losing sorghum. But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since Napster first came on the scene. So that's a chunk of what we're looking for. But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. So this small missing chunk here is puzzling. (Laughter) (Applause) Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms, it's not additional growth that piracy has prevented, but copyright math tells us it must therefore be foregone growth in a market that has no historic norms — one that didn't exist in the 90's. What we're looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy. (Laughter) 50 billion dollars of it a year, which is enough, at 30 seconds a ringtone, that could stretch from here to Neanderthal times. (Laughter) It's true. (Applause) I have Excel. (Laughter) The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that, back in '98, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people. Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people. And so the job losses that came with the Internet and all that content theft, have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries. And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day. And some people think that string theory is tough. (Laughter) Now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians' toolkit. It's the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyrighted song or movie gets pirated. Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law. Some people think this number's a little bit large, but copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it doesn't get compounded for inflation every year. Now when this law first passed, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs. And it was a big Christmas hit. Because what little hoodlum wouldn't want a million and a half bucks-worth of stolen goods in his pocket. (Laughter) (Applause) These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media. (Applause) Or about 75,000 jobs. (Laughter) (Applause) Now you might find copyright math strange, but that's because it's a field that's best left to experts. So that's it for now. I hope you'll join me next time when I will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to he American economy. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Listening to shame

{0: 'Brené Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity and shame.'}

TED2012

I'm going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk. I woke up the morning after I gave that talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life. And I actually didn't leave my house for about three days. The first time I left was to meet a friend for lunch. And when I walked in, she was already at the table. I sat down, and she said, "God, you look like hell." I said, "Thanks. I feel really — I'm not functioning." And she said, "What's going on?" And I said, "I just told 500 people that I became a researcher to avoid vulnerability. And that when being vulnerable emerged from my data, as absolutely essential to whole-hearted living, I told these 500 people that I had a breakdown. I had a slide that said 'Breakdown.' At what point did I think that was a good idea?" (Laughter) And she said, "I saw your talk live-streamed. It was not really you. It was a little different than what you usually do. But it was great." And I said, "This can't happen. YouTube, they're putting this thing on YouTube. And we're going to be talking about 600, 700 people." (Laughter) And she said, "Well, I think it's too late." And I said, "Let me ask you something." And she said, "Yeah." I said, "Do you remember when we were in college, really wild and kind of dumb?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "Remember when we'd leave a really bad message on our ex-boyfriend's answering machine? Then we'd have to break into his dorm room and then erase the tape?" (Laughter) And she goes, "Uh... no." (Laughter) Of course, the only thing I could say at that point was, "Yeah, me neither. Yeah — me neither." And I'm thinking to myself, "Brené, what are you doing? Why did you bring this up? Have you lost your mind? Your sisters would be perfect for this." (Laughter) So I looked back up and she said, "Are you really going to try to break in and steal the video before they put it on YouTube?" (Laughter) And I said, "I'm just thinking about it a little bit." (Laughter) She said, "You're like the worst vulnerability role model ever." (Laughter) Then I looked at her and I said something that at the time felt a little dramatic, but ended up being more prophetic than dramatic. "If 500 turns into 1,000 or 2,000, my life is over." (Laughter) I had no contingency plan for four million. (Laughter) And my life did end when that happened. And maybe the hardest part about my life ending is that I learned something hard about myself, and that was that, as much as I would be frustrated about not being able to get my work out to the world, there was a part of me that was working very hard to engineer staying small, staying right under the radar. But I want to talk about what I've learned. There's two things that I've learned in the last year. The first is: vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous. Let me ask you honestly — and I'll give you this warning, I'm trained as a therapist, so I can out-wait you uncomfortably — so if you could just raise your hand that would be awesome — how many of you honestly, when you're thinking about doing or saying something vulnerable think, "God, vulnerability is weakness." How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously? The majority of people. Now let me ask you this question: This past week at TED, how many of you, when you saw vulnerability up here, thought it was pure courage? Vulnerability is not weakness. I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives. And I've come to the belief — this is my 12th year doing this research — that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage — to be vulnerable, to let ourselves be seen, to be honest. One of the weird things that's happened is, after the TED explosion, I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country — everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, "Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk. We'd like you to come in and speak. We'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention vulnerability or shame." (Laughter) What would you like for me to talk about? There's three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change. (Laughter) So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. (Applause) To create is to make something that has never existed before. There's nothing more vulnerable than that. Adaptability to change is all about vulnerability. The second thing, in addition to really finally understanding the relationship between vulnerability and courage, the second thing I learned, is this: We have to talk about shame. And I'm going to be really honest with you. When I became a "vulnerability researcher" and that became the focus because of the TED talk — and I'm not kidding. I'll give you an example. About three months ago, I was in a sporting goods store buying goggles and shin guards and all the things that parents buy at the sporting goods store. About from a hundred feet away, this is what I hear: "Vulnerability TED! Vulnerability TED!" (Laughter) (Laughter ends) I'm a fifth-generation Texan. Our family motto is "Lock and load." I am not a natural vulnerability researcher. So I'm like, just keep walking, she's on my six. (Laughter) And then I hear, "Vulnerability TED!" I turn around, I go, "Hi." She's right here and she said, "You're the shame researcher who had the breakdown." (Laughter) At this point, parents are, like, pulling their children close. (Laughter) "Look away." And I'm so worn out at this point in my life, I look at her and I actually say, "It was a fricking spiritual awakening." (Laughter) (Applause) And she looks back and does this, "I know." (Laughter) And she said, "We watched your TED talk in my book club. Then we read your book and we renamed ourselves 'The Breakdown Babes.'" (Laughter) And she said, "Our tagline is: 'We're falling apart and it feels fantastic.'" (Laughter) You can only imagine what it's like for me in a faculty meeting. (Sighs) So when I became Vulnerability TED, like an action figure — Like Ninja Barbie, but I'm Vulnerability TED — I thought, I'm going to leave that shame stuff behind, because I spent six years studying shame before I started writing and talking about vulnerability. And I thought, thank God, because shame is this horrible topic, no one wants to talk about it. It's the best way to shut people down on an airplane. "What do you do?" "I study shame." "Oh." (Laughter) And I see you. (Laughter) But in surviving this last year, I was reminded of a cardinal rule — not a research rule, but a moral imperative from my upbringing — "you've got to dance with the one who brung ya". And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability. I learned about these things from studying shame. And so I want to walk you in to shame. Jungian analysts call shame the swampland of the soul. And we're going to walk in. And the purpose is not to walk in and construct a home and live there. It is to put on some galoshes — and walk through and find our way around. Here's why. We heard the most compelling call ever to have a conversation in this country, and I think globally, around race, right? Yes? We heard that. Yes? Cannot have that conversation without shame. Because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame. We heard a brilliant simple solution to not killing people in surgery, which is, have a checklist. You can't fix that problem without addressing shame, because when they teach those folks how to suture, they also teach them how to stitch their self-worth to being all-powerful. And all-powerful folks don't need checklists. And I had to write down the name of this TED Fellow so I didn't mess it up here. Myshkin Ingawale, I hope I did right by you. (Applause) I saw the TED Fellows my first day here. And he got up and he explained how he was driven to create some technology to help test for anemia, because people were dying unnecessarily. And he said, "I saw this need. So you know what I did? I made it." And everybody just burst into applause, and they were like "Yes!" And he said, "And it didn't work. (Laughter) And then I made it 32 more times, and then it worked." You know what the big secret about TED is? I can't wait to tell people this. I guess I'm doing it right now. (Laughter) This is like the failure conference. (Laughter) No, it is. (Applause) You know why this place is amazing? Because very few people here are afraid to fail. And no one who gets on the stage, so far that I've seen, has not failed. I've failed miserably, many times. I don't think the world understands that, because of shame. There's a great quote that saved me this past year by Theodore Roosevelt. A lot of people refer to it as the "Man in the Arena" quote. And it goes like this: "It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best, he wins, and at worst, he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly." And that's what this conference, to me, is about. Life is about daring greatly, about being in the arena. When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door, and you think, "I'm going in and I'm going to try this," shame is the gremlin who says, "Uh, uh. You're not good enough. You never finished that MBA. Your wife left you. I know your dad really wasn't in Luxembourg, he was in Sing Sing. I know those things that happened to you growing up. I know you don't think that you're pretty, smart, talented or powerful enough. I know your dad never paid attention, even when you made CFO." Shame is that thing. And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say, "I'm going to do this," we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing, 99 percent of the time is who? Us. Shame drives two big tapes — "never good enough" — and, if you can talk it out of that one, "who do you think you are?" The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is "I am bad." Guilt is "I did something bad." How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, "I'm sorry. I made a mistake?" How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake. There's a huge difference between shame and guilt. And here's what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. And here's what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive. The other thing you need to know about shame is it's absolutely organized by gender. If shame washes over me and washes over Chris, it's going to feel the same. Everyone sitting in here knows the warm wash of shame. We're pretty sure that the only people who don't experience shame are people who have no capacity for connection or empathy. Which means, yes, I have a little shame; no, I'm a sociopath. So I would opt for, yes, you have a little shame. Shame feels the same for men and women, but it's organized by gender. For women, the best example I can give you is Enjoli, the commercial. "I can put the wash on the line, pack the lunches, hand out the kisses and be at work at five to nine. I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never let you forget you're a man." For women, shame is, do it all, do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat. I don't know how much perfume that commercial sold, but I guarantee you, it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. (Laughter) Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be. And it's a straight-jacket. For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is one, do not be perceived as what? Weak. I did not interview men for the first four years of my study. It wasn't until a man looked at me after a book signing, and said, "I love what say about shame, I'm curious why you didn't mention men." And I said, "I don't study men." And he said, "That's convenient." (Laughter) And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because you say to reach out, tell our story, be vulnerable. But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters?" I said, "Yeah." "They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down. When we reach out and be vulnerable, we get the shit beat out of us. And don't tell me it's from the guys and the coaches and the dads. Because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else." So I started interviewing men and asking questions. And what I learned is this: You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear, I'll show you a woman who's done incredible work. You show me a man who can sit with a woman who's just had it, she can't do it all anymore, and his first response is not, "I unloaded the dishwasher!" (Laughter) But he really listens — because that's all we need — I'll show you a guy who's done a lot of work. Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it — to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we're parenting, the way we're working, the way we're looking at each other. Very quickly, some research by Mahalik at Boston College. He asked, what do women need to do to conform to female norms? The top answers in this country: nice, thin, modest and use all available resources for appearance. (Laughter) When he asked about men, what do men in this country need to do to conform with male norms, the answers were: always show emotional control, work is first, pursue status and violence. If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too. And so I'll leave you with this thought. If we're going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path. And I know it's seductive to stand outside the arena, because I think I did it my whole life, and think to myself, I'm going to go in there and kick some ass when I'm bulletproof and when I'm perfect. And that is seductive. But the truth is, that never happens. And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there, that's not what we want to see. We want you to go in. We want to be with you and across from you. And we just want, for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with, to dare greatly. So thank you all very much. I really appreciate it. (Applause)

Beautiful artificial limbs

{0: 'Scott Summit uses his 20 years of experience as an industrial designer to make artificial limbs that help people take personal control of these intimate objects.'}

TEDxCambridge

I'm an industrial designer, which means I create all these cool things from ideas that we surround ourselves with, or in this case, geeky people surround themselves with, for the most part. I have absolutely no background in biology, chemistry or engineering, so bear with me, because I'll be talking about biomedical engineering today. (Laughter) And please do stay here in the meantime. Industrial design is about making lots of things identical. The downside about that is, there's something impersonal about lots of identical things, because when you're trying to design one thing for one person to solve one issue, you can't really do that when you're making things aimed more to a demographic model or to a marketing requirements document, which is what we live by. So I got disheartened by the whole process in general, and went to rethink it and redesign designing altogether, went way back to my early, early design inspirations, and back to about eight years old, and that got me to this guy. Anyone here from MIT knows him or has a tattoo or poster of him somewhere. (Laughter) Anyone else in the room, just for a hint, he is the engineer of engineers or the designer of designers. He is the guy who made bionics a household word in the form of the polyester-clad Six Million Dollar Man that I grew up with. The thing that came from this pop culture show, the real takeaway, was two main things: if you're designing for the person, for a real person, you don't settle for the minimum functional requirements; you see how far beyond that you can go, where the rewards really are way out in the fringe of how far past that document you can go. And if you can nail that, you stand to improve the quality of life for somebody for every moment for the rest of their life. I kind of distilled that down into a design philosophy, and infuse that into the studio that I have now; I'm trying to get everyone to think along these lines. It's not a profound philosophy, but it works for us. We work with prosthetic limbs, and the first thing you see about prosthetic limbs is that they are engineering brilliance. They can do amazing things; they can return all kinds of functionality and performance back to somebody's life. But from the vantage of an industrial designer, they're not quite there. What we don't see is the sculpture or the beauty or the individual qualities or the uniqueness or the elegance to them. They are brilliant, mechanical, utilitarian devices. And that's great, except for a lot of people, that doesn't work. People come to our studio all the time, and they have bubble wrap and duct tape, trying to approximate their original form. Or they'll have a gym sock stuffed with other gym socks to try to recreate the shape that once was; and that, to us, is not thriving. The body, to us, is not a mechanical entity, where mechanical-only solutions can address them. It's our personal sculpture, our kinematic sculpture. It is our canvas; it represents not just our physicality, but also a lot of our personality as well. So when you're designing for the body, maybe the thing isn't to design for mass production, but to design with the body in mind, to really think about curves instead of hard geometry, or uniqueness instead of identical. The problem is, we're constrained by mass production, which makes a million identical things but can't make one unique, individualized thing. So we scrapped that in the new design process, and we start with the person. This is a three-dimensional scanner, and that's what happens when you scan somebody: you get three-dimensional data into your computer. You can take the sound-side limb there, the surviving limb, mirror it over, and from now on, anything in the process will recreate symmetry — something as personal and as hard to achieve as symmetry in the body. And you create a product that, no matter what, it's going to be as unique as their fingerprint. In fact, our process is incapable of creating two identical things. So we run it through computer modeling, 3D CAD. Here, we actually infuse a lot of the individual's taste and personality into it, everywhere we can, and we three-dimensionally print the results. We call the resulting parts "fairings," because they're named after the panels on a motorcycle that turn it from a mechanical thing into a sculptural thing. We tried this on Chad. Chad is a competitive soccer player, lost his leg eight years ago to cancer. You can imagine, it's really tricky to play soccer when you have titanium pipe where there used to be a leg. The resulting parts recreated his shape and deliberately had an aesthetic that look like sporting gear. We wanted it to make it look like he just pulled it out of the gym bag, so it's fairly utilitarian in that regard. Two things happened. One, we expected: his sense of his body came back to him. He was suddenly able to control the ball, to feel the ball, because his body remembered that original shape that he had had up until eight years ago. The other thing, though, is that the other members of the team stopped thinking of him as the amputee on the team. Not that they didn't know, but it stopped becoming a focal point for him. And there is a certain very quiet value in that, we like to believe. James lost his leg in a motorcycle crash. And the motorcycle is still a big part of James's personality and style. Check out the tattoo on his forearm. We three-dimensionally printed that into what would be his calf. He has his tattoo, he has his morphology and he has the materials of his motorcycle. And the result is interesting in that you can't really tell at first glance where the motorcycle stops and where James starts. It's kind of a chimera hybrid between the two, and James likes that. (Laughter) So, we don't ever try to make something look like it could be human. Our whole goal is to be unapologetically man-made, to take what's already there, morphology, and just make it really cool and beautiful, something that somebody can't wait to show the world, because that changes their look. You don't look at him and say, "He's an amputee with a prosthetic." You say, "He's a guy with something really cool going on. Deborah wanted her curves back, but she also just wanted what came out of it to be really sexy, which is great for us to hear. We created this lace pattern that lends itself well to 3D printing. We created the first leg, I think, where the lace defines the contour of the leg, instead of the leg giving form to the lace. We switched things over. What I like about this shot is you can see daylight through it. So we're not trying to hide anything; the load-bearing carbon component is totally visible. We're just giving it form and shape and contours that were hers to begin with. We made her another leg that matched her purse, just because we could. (Laughter) (Applause) We made another one where we laser-tattooed the leather, because how cool would it be to be able to change your tattoos out from one minute to the next? Love that. We try to capture as much of somebody's personality as we can. This is George. His will be finished next week. This is the raw computer data that we deal with. He's kind of a classic, timeless-type personality, so we did herringbone tweed, but in polished nickel. (Laughter) And Uve was all too proud to show his tattoos, so we are laser-tattooing those into the leather. Part of it is, yes, we're showing off, because we can do this, but the other part is this connects him to what will be a part of him. That is something really valuable; we believe in that. Tattoos are especially exciting for us. What happens if you take the tattoo, which is a combination of somebody's personal taste and choice, and their morphology, but now, let's say, you remove the person. You get a free-floating tattoo defining their body. So everything we do is about recreating and expressing something that means something to that person, and expressing that through what would be their body, whether it's speed or attitude or bling, whatever it is that captures and suggests them in the best way we can. Back to the 3D-printing thing and this whole process: we have a process that lends itself to making one thing per person; it's very individual, and it actually really lends itself well to complexity. So why not just print the entire leg? That's the concept that preceded the work we're doing now. This is a three-dimensionally printed leg. It's symmetric to the other leg. It is made in America, it is a trivially low-carbon footprint to create, curbside recyclable, costs about 4,000 dollars to create, and it is dishwasher-safe. (Laughter) There's a value to that, too. People don't think about that all the time, but yes, throw it in the dishwasher, it works just great. This was based on the original idea that I could go anywhere in the world with nothing more than a camera and a laptop computer, use the camera as a 3D scanner and create for somebody, in a matter of hours, a very high-quality, three-dimensionally printed leg for a very low cost. The proof of concept works great, we're finding it; we'll get there. Or, we upped the quality of the materials and created this for John. The fun thing with John's leg is that when his fiancee looked at this, she joked and said, "I like that leg better than that leg." (Laughter) And it's a joke — she knows full well what he goes through — but at the same time, there's something very valuable. He turned to us and said, "Nobody says that." He's never heard that in his life. That connected with him very deeply. So we like to think that this is a new type of design, where you're turning the original process on its head, where there is a dialogue that forms between the designer and the end user, where the designer relinquishes some of the control — designers hate doing that — and instead, is the curator of a process. And the end user relinquishes their body into the process, and their taste. I'd like to think that speaks to a greater change that's happening in the design world altogether; in this case, it's one where products will be evaluated on how well they address the individual. The individual will actually be part of the DNA of the end product itself. We will be evaluating products on how well they address a unique person, instead of a demographic model. This all really hit home for us in one of the first legs we did; when Chad here put on the leg, reached down and felt it and thought about it for a while. Then he turned to us and said, "That's the first time I've felt that shape in eight years." We thought about that. And for all the technology and all the nights and energy we put into it, that's all we really wanted to hear. Thanks. (Applause)

Victims of the city

{0: 'Mark Raymond’s work as an architect in Trinidad and Tobago is founded on the belief that thoughtfully designed cities can foster sustainability and inclusiveness throughout a society.'}

TEDxPortofSpain

We've been asked to address the theme of changing conversations. And I think certainly in the field that I'm in, that's a really important point to be at. From the discourses that are going on within architecture as well as throughout society, I think it is time to change the way that we look at things. As an architect, I've been involved with architectural projects, with urban planning projects, and more recently, projects that engage much more with the landscape. Now I can see so many opportunities and so many ways in which design can contribute and has the capacity to effect social change. And that's what I'm going to talk to you today about. Starting off, I think it might be useful to talk a little bit about architecture, because I think for many people, architecture is a slightly mystical activity. Not many people know what architects do. A lot of the time, I'm not sure the architects know what they're doing. But we try, and it's important to try and embrace that and try and understand what that means. When I talk about architecture today, I'm not talking about the profession. I'm not talking about an activity that's pursued by a select group of people with some specialized knowledge. I'm talking about architecture in the bigger sense: architecture in terms of the room that we're in, architecture as a pervasive activity, architecture as the activity that is the creation of shelter, the creation of space, the design and the creation of spaces between buildings, the landscape. It's man's interaction with the landscape. Our construction of the built environment — that's what I mean by architecture. It's not a specialized thing. And over the last, I suppose, 20 or 30 years, with the predominance of the internet and the wonderful and exciting advancements that are taking place in technology, one of the things that has happened is that our perception of the world has become commodified. It's become reduced in many ways to a perception that is two-dimensional. We spend a lot of our time, a lot of our lives, looking at the world through screens, whether it's our laptops or television screens or monitors at airports or in the workplace or even our telephones are now screens. And it has this effect of reducing our perception of the world. It expands it in many ways, but it can reduce it, it can turn into icons our idea or our notion of certain concepts or ideas that are, in fact, maybe a lot more pervasive than the two-dimensional image can convey. And I think that's true about architecture. I think we've grown accustomed to thinking about architecture in a really primarily two-dimensional way, in a flat way, that the building is about what it looks like, how it appears, it's visual commodity. But it's much more than that. It's much more than an aesthetic or just a sensory experience. That's very important, but it's much more than that. It's a complex operation. And a big part of architecture and a big part of design involves understanding the context in which that design exists or in which it's going to exist. It's having the imagination to try and predict or project where the building or where the urban space or where the landscape is going to be located, how it's going to be used, what are the operations, what are the activities that are going to take place in that space. And you might call those the programmatic aspects of architecture, the programmatic aspects of design. And I think that in recent times, we've tended to privilege or put at a higher level that visual sensory perception or desire about architecture ahead and in advance of those programmatic needs. We've tended to kind of create monuments, create icons that create a sensation or create effect, without really thinking through the value of the operation that those places or those spaces can affect. And it's in that zone or in that area that I think we need to start looking or trying to understand how architecture or how design can really impact on society, and how it can address some of the problems that we're facing. The big buzzword in design and in what I do and I think what everybody does is the idea of sustainability. Sustainability is an idea, a notion or a concept that's triangulated by three very important concepts or ideas: the environment, the economy and society. Well, the global economy seems to be currently in a kind of meltdown situation. A lot of work needs to be done there. The environment that we live in is challenged. We've got global warming, we've got rising tides, we've got all sorts of disasters taking place, all sorts of things happening that threaten the equilibrium of the world and the environment that we live in. And society itself is also challenged and threatened by some of the issues that we're faced with. I think we've heard about some of those issues today and the need to change the paradigm in which we perceive those things. It's really very crucial that we do that. So how does design impact that? How can how can I, as a designer, or anybody as a designer or any architect or how can society — in what way can design impact on that, in what way can it affect that? I'm going to talk today about ways in which I think design can impact on society, very specifically on society, and how that idea of design can infiltrate the idea of society and work with society in the operations of society in this programmatic way to effect social change. This is an image of Frederick Street in the early part of the last century. And I think it's a good image in lots of ways. It seems like that little triangulation of the environment, the economy and society seems to be in a kind of balance. So it seems that in cities we can see that balance that cities are symbols or ciphers or ways in which we can we can understand the confluence of those forces. And through time, there have been times when cities have done that very successfully. There are lots of examples of very good cities which have found themselves at a specific moment in time at a point of balance or equilibrium. If we look at Port of Spain as a city, and we consider the idea that, once upon a time, Port of Spain was just a little cluster, a little fishing village at the mouth of the St. Ann's River. And yet it's grown to be such a big, complex conglomeration, a big conurbation of lots and lots of complex ideas. The Italian architect Aldo Rossi, a 20th-century architect who died at the end of the last century, made a very profound statement. He said architecture is the making of the city over time. I think that's a great statement, because it talks, on one level, about the individual production and manufacture of an object — architecture — and it talks about architecture as being a form of cultural production, as something that speaks to an issue or speaks to ideas that are bigger than the sum of the parts of the building, and it relates it to the city. It also suggested that it's a constant, dynamic, changing process. And I think that's a very important thing to understand, that it's also part of the program. It's nothing to do with visual, it's to do with the program. It's how does this evolve, what are the dynamics, what are the components, what are the elements that contribute to the unraveling and the creation of the city? It also speaks to the fact that the city is something that can be imagined. In the same way as we can conceive and imagine of a space or a building, we can conceive and imagine of a city. And it speaks to the idea of the individual and the collective. And it's that link — the individual to the collective, the idea of the civitas, the idea of the society — that I think is a really important axiom for understanding how design can infiltrate and how design can effect change. These are some images of how Port of Spain evolved over a relatively short period of 200 years, from a colonial plan that was developed following some ordinances sent out by the king of Spain, called the Laws of the Indies. Many cities in the Caribbean and Latin America were predicated and formulated on this. It was a gesture, it was a single design that addressed the needs and the requirements of those establishing cities and new colonies. And it expanded, and over time, as trade began to develop in Trinidad, the city expanded, and it grew, and it started appropriating, more and more, the surrounding landscape, until it grew to pretty much what we have today, or what we understand to be the city of Port of Spain. But as we all know, that process grew also on a kind of macro scale as well. We have the evolution and the development of this big conurbation that stretches from Port of Spain to the west and over to Arouca in the east and seems to be continuing. So we've developed into this concept or idea that far exceeds the original Laws of the Indies plan. And it's turned into a complex arrangement and matrix of infrastructures and complex issues, issues that, in many ways, have led to a lot of problems. They've led to a lot of infrastructural problems. And we share this with many, many cities in the world. Cities all over the world are expanding, they're increasing, they're undergoing the same type of development that we've undergone to the point where the original Port of Spain and the downtown Port of Spain that used to comprise the city, used to constitute the city, has now turned into this sort of megalopolis, this sprawl, and it's difficult to comprehend. And when we think of the problems, we think of the infrastructural problems: the water, the power, the traffic congestion, the crime, the segregation, the polarization that exists, the situation that has led to what's happened in this country recently with the state of emergency ... Sometimes it seems completely insurmountable. It seems like we've got to a point where we can't really control it in the way that we can control that original plan. We can't really control this anymore. It's almost as if we're victims of the city, rather than people that have willingly or willfully designed the city or formulated the city. Another phenomenon that has happened commensurate with these issues of size and scale of infrastructure is the predomination of what I would call "typologies," different types of development. We're all familiar with the high-rise development. This is some buildings in Hong Kong, you know, the magnificent, tall structures that cost a fortune to build. But they predominate; it's almost as if you can't have a city unless you've got a high-rise building in it. They're symbolic, they seem emblematic with modernity and development. And then shopping malls is another predominant type, another prevalent type that all cities want to have, the idea that you can concentrate all these shops and all this retail activity in one place and create an environment for people to come and do specific retail functions and purchase things and be in a specific place at a specific time. And then the highway, the idea of cutting through landscapes to create how it's to increase the speed with which we can get from one point to another. And then we also have suburban development. These are all typologies that are emblematic of the type of development that has taken place in modern cities, in Port of Spain and cities all over the world. Now, there's nothing wrong with shopping malls, there's nothing wrong with highways, and there's nothing wrong with high-rise buildings or suburban development. What is kind of wrong is that what we seem to be doing is privileging types or ways of building or ideas about building above other really very important ways of how we can conceive or how we imagine space. What about schools? What about parks? What about making streets that are really comfortable to walk on and the people are not confronting traffic noise and congestion all the time? Where is that in the equation? It seems that with our focus on these types of structures and these typologies, which are motivated and driven primarily because they generate profit, they're part of an economic consumer system, they generate profit, that's why they're favored, that's why they are privileged above other types of development. But schools, parks, elements of cities that used to be really significant and really important are being diminished and marginalized as a consequence of the focus on this type of development. They're undermining the integrity of the city, they're undermining the capacity of the city to accommodate social interaction, to accommodate everybody, because the other thing is they're also exclusive. To work in a high-end office, you need to be qualified, you need to be educated, or you need to have access or the resources to get the qualifications or the training that allow you to get the job in there. If you don't have those, you work outside somewhere. We're not concerned about what those places are like, you just go and work somewhere else. Similarly, those people that used to live in the cities or used to live and contribute to the life of cities are being pushed out because buildings like high-rise buildings push them out. There's a premium on land price that pushes people out of cities. People can't go to shopping malls unless they've got cars, because those malls are generally located on the peripheries of cities. People can't go buy things in shopping malls, because they don't have enough disposable income; they're not going to spend money there. So those types of buildings, whilst they work for sectors of society, don't work for everybody. They're not equitable. Yet, an undue amount of attention is paid by government, by society on ensuring that those types of buildings proliferate, because they're seen as positive aspects of development — at the expense of types of building and types of program that could be beneficial to everybody, types of program that encourage interaction, that encourage education, that encourage people to be with each other and encourage a sense of community. These types of development dissipate society, they disaggregate society, they polarize society. They create isolated groups of activity to which access depends upon how much money you've got in your pocket. It's a polarizing and negative force. We see it in this city, and we're seeing it more and more other cities. And what ends up happening is that we end up with this sort of stack, that's like a time bomb. At some point the system must collapse, it's really not sustainable. It's like the economic system in the world today — it's really not a sustainable system, and we have to find ways of addressing it. Design can't provide the solution, but what it can address is some of the conditions that people live with. It can address some of the circumstances in which people find themselves, some of the areas of cities to which people have been shunted or pushed aside because they can no longer afford to live in the center, and they can't participate actively or fully in this consumerized, capitalized system. And we need to try and conceive of how we can transform these types of spaces, how we can integrate the activities that happen in these types of spaces within a bigger picture, how we can identify small moves or small gestures, whether through design or economic initiative or social initiative that effect change and that allow transformation of spaces that encourage and facilitate greater participation. And there are lots of ways of doing that. And whilst it might seem complex when we look at cities, when we look at the aggregate parts of cities, it may seem insurmountable. But if we try and isolate individual acts, individual ways of looking at things and formulate a program, a manner or way of understanding how we can do that, then we can get nearer to achieving or effecting some kind of social change. And there are examples in the world where that's been done. Barcelona is a really good example of a city where people sat down and collectively and actively tried to conceive of ways in which they could effect change, and they did it very successfully. And nearer to home, in Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá, when he took office, he decided, "I'm not going to spend billions of dollars on creating more highways. I'm going to appropriate the funds I have, and I'm going to create places — parks that everybody can use, public spaces that people can use." And as he created, more and more people came into those spaces. And those spaces were very effective in encouraging participation, encouraging senses of community amongst people, getting people to come together to forget what little trifling contests they had between each other, to start doing things together, to start moving around the city together and try to start acting together. So there are ways of doing it; there are models. And it comes back to this idea of program. What's our program? Well, I think we want to create equitable society. Then we want to create societies where there's active and equitable participation for everybody and where we can break down some of those inhibitions, those barriers. We can remove economic stigma, we can remove stigma around race, around where you live, around all those factors and try and bring people together in constructed and effective ways. In Trinidad, there are a number of examples. There are opportunities to do this all over the place. This is City Gate. It's the entrance to the city for tens of thousands of people. People come in and out of it every day. And yet, what they're confronted with is pretty bleak, horrid, grey, unwelcoming and sometimes unsafe because of all the traffic zooming around. And that space from City Gate that moves up to Independence Square could be a really wonderful experience, you know, with landscaping, with proper accommodation of the sort of facilities and amenities that people would need and would enjoy. It could become a really very important civic space. This is the Prado in Havana. It's just a notional idea of how that space could be treated so that movement in and out of the city every day becomes a really important and uplifting transition from the maxi taxi to the place where you work. In San Fernando we've got the waterfront, which is a really very beautiful part of this landscape in this country, but is in complete neglect. There are some really beautiful, fine examples of 19th-century architecture that form, in and of themselves, some really fine spaces. We need to we need to look at those spaces, we need to appropriate them, we need to determine uses for those spaces that would encourage all types of activity: spaces for performance, spaces for children to play in and learn that it's cool and it's OK and it's fun to be around other people, spaces for people to do all the kinds of activities that people like to do, that they enjoy doing collectively and that benefit society and encourage people to interact, regardless of their social or economic circumstance, or places for people to reflect, parks, places for people to sit and relax. And there are lots of ways we can do that, ways in which we can address and look at how we break down those barriers. We can do it with architectural language. We can look at the ways that spaces are formulated to break down divisions and barriers between inside and outside, between green and hard surfaces and try and generate spaces that really encourage interaction, encourage people to do things together and encourage a sense of community. We need to mandate government, we need to provide examples to developers, to people to generate that the benefit of these may not be measured in a financial return on investment, but the social benefit to us all is really immeasurable in the long run. And if we do that, I think we can demonstrate — and we've demonstrated in the past that designers had the capacity to do that — I think if we can do that, we can demonstrate to people that society is an inclusive community, and that if everybody is included, and if everybody feels part of the society, then we have a much better chance of ensuring a sustainable future. Thank you.

Let's transform energy -- with natural gas

{0: 'A legendary oil and gas entrepreneur, T. Boone Pickens is now on a mission to enhance U.S. energy policies to lessen the nation’s dependence on OPEC oil.'}

TED2012

I'm a believer. I'm a believer in global warming, and my record is good on the subject. But my subject is national security. We have to get off of oil purchased from the enemy. I'm talking about OPEC oil. And let me take you back 100 years to 1912. You're probably thinking that was my birth year. (Laughter) It wasn't. It was 1928. But go back to 1912, 100 years ago, and look at that point what we, our country, was faced with. It's the same energy question that you're looking at today, but it's different sources of fuel. A hundred years ago we were looking at coal, of course, and we were looking at whale oil and we were looking at crude oil. At that point, we were looking for a fuel that was cleaner, it was cheaper, and it wasn't ours though, it was theirs. So at that point, 1912, we selected crude oil over whale oil and some more coal. But as we moved on to the period now, 100 years later, we're back really at another decision point. What is the decision point? It's what we're going to use in the future. So from here, it's pretty clear to me, we would prefer to have cleaner, cheaper, domestic, ours — and we have that, we have that — which is natural gas. So here you are, that the cost of all this to the world is 89 million barrels of oil, give or take a few barrels, every day. And the cost annually is three trillion dollars. And one trillion of that goes to OPEC. That has got to be stopped. Now if you look at the cost of OPEC, it cost seven trillion dollars — on the Milken Institute study last year — seven trillion dollars since 1976, is what we paid for oil from OPEC. Now that includes the cost of military and the cost of the fuel both. But it's the greatest transfer of wealth, from one group to another in the history of mankind. And it continues. Now when you look at where is the transfer of wealth, you can see here that we have the arrows going into the Mid-East and away from us. And with that, we have found ourselves to be the world's policemen. We are policing the world, and how are we doing that? I know the response to this. I would bet there aren't 10 percent of you in the room that know how many aircraft carriers there are in the world. Raise your hand if you think you know. There are 12. One is under construction by the Chinese and the other 11 belong to us. Why do we have 11 aircraft carriers? Do we have a corner on the market? Are we smarter than anybody else? I'm not sure. If you look at where they're located — and on this slide it's the red blobs on there — there are five that are operating in the Mid-East, and the rest of them are in the United States. They just move back to the Mid-East and those come back. So actually most of the 11 we have are tied up in the Mid-East. Why? Why are they in the Mid-East? They're there to control, keep the shipping lanes open and make oil available. And the United States uses about 20 million barrels a day, which is about 25 percent of all the oil used everyday in the world. And we're doing it with four percent of the population. Somehow that doesn't seem right. That's not sustainable. So where do we go from here? Does that continue? Yes, it's going to continue. The slide you're looking at here is 1990 to 2040. Over that period you are going to double your demand. And when you look at what we're using the oil for, 70 percent of it is used for transportation fuel. So when somebody says, "Let's go more nuclear, let's go wind, let's go solar," fine; I'm for anything American, anything American. But if you're going to do anything about the dependency on foreign oil, you have to address transportation. So here we are using 20 million barrels a day — producing eight, importing 12, and from the 12, five comes from OPEC. When you look at the biggest user and the second largest user, we use 20 million barrels and the Chinese use 10. The Chinese have a little bit better plan — or they have a plan; we have no plan. In the history of America, we've never had an energy plan. We don't even realize the resources that we have available to us. If you take the last 10 years and bring forward, you've transferred to OPEC a trillion dollars. If you go forward the next 10 years and cap the price of oil at 100 dollars a barrel, you will pay 2.2 trillion. That's not sustainable either. But the days of cheap oil are over. They're over. They make it very clear to you, the Saudis do, they have to have 94 dollars a barrel to make their social commitments. Now I had people in Washington last week told me, he said, "The Saudis can produce the oil for five dollars a barrel. That has nothing to do with it. It's what they have to pay for is what we are going to pay for oil." There is no free market for oil. The oil is priced off the margin. And the OPEC nations are the ones that price the oil. So where are we headed from here? We're headed to natural gas. Natural gas will do everything we want it to do. It's 130 octane fuel. It's 25 percent cleaner than oil. It's ours, we have an abundance of it. And it does not require a refinery. It comes out of the ground at 130 octane. Run it through the separator and you're ready to use it. It's going to be very simple for us to use. It's going to be simple to accomplish this. You're going to find, and I'll tell you in just a minute, what you're looking for to make it happen. But here you can look at the list. Natural gas will fit all of those. It will replace or be able to be used for that. It's for power generation, transportation, it's peaking fuel, it's all those. Do we have enough natural gas? Look at the bar on the left. It's 24 trillion. It's what we use a year. Go forward and the estimates that you have from the EIA and onto the industry estimates — the industry knows what they're talking about — we've got 4,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that's available to us. How does that translate to barrels of oil equivalent? It would be three times what the Saudis claim they have. And they claim they have 250 billion barrels of oil, which I do not believe. I think it's probably 175 billion barrels. But anyway, whether they say they're right or whatever, we have plenty of natural gas. So I have tried to target on where we use the natural gas. And where I've targeted is on the heavy-duty trucks. There are eight million of them. You take eight million trucks — these are 18-wheelers — and take them to natural gas, reduce carbon by 30 percent, it is cheaper and it will cut our imports three million barrels. So you will cut 60 percent off of OPEC with eight million trucks. There are 250 million vehicles in America. So what you have is natural gas is the bridge fuel, is the way I see it. I don't have to worry about the bridge to where at my age. (Laughter) That's your concern. But when you look at the natural gas we have it could very well be the bridge to natural gas, because you have plenty of natural gas. But as I said, I'm for anything American. Now let me take you — I've been a realist — I went from theorist early to realist. I'm back to theorist again. If you look at the world, you have methane hydrates in the ocean around every continent. And here you can see methane, if that's the way you're going to go, that there's plenty of methane — natural gas is methane, methane and natural gas are interchangeable — but if you decide that you're going to use some methane — and I'm gone, so it's up to you — but we do have plenty of methane hydrates. So I think I've made my point that we have to get on our own resources in America. If we do — it's costing us a billion dollars a day for oil. And yet, we have no energy plan. So there's nothing going on that impresses me in Washington on that plan, other than I'm trying to focus on that eight million 18-wheelers. If we could do that, I think we would take our first step to an energy plan. If we did, we could see that our own resources are easier to use than anybody can imagine. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks for that. So from your point of view, you had this great Pickens Plan that was based on wind energy, and you abandoned it basically because the economics changed. What happened? TBP: I lost 150 million dollars. (Laughter) That'll make you abandon something. No, what happened to us, Chris, is that power, it's priced off the margin. And so the margin is natural gas. And at the time I went into the wind business, natural gas was nine dollars. Today it's two dollars and forty cents. You cannot do a wind deal under six dollars an MCF. CA: So what happened was that, through increased ability to use fracking technology, the calculated reserves of natural gas kind of exploded and the price plummeted, which made wind uncompetitive. In a nutshell that's what happened? TBP: That's what happened. We found out that we could go to the source rock, which were the carboniferous shales in the basins. The first one was Barnett Shale in Texas and then the Marcellus up in the Northeast across New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia; and Haynesville in Louisiana. This stuff is everywhere. We are overwhelmed with natural gas. CA: And now you're a big investor in that and bringing that to market? TBP: Well you say a big investor. It's my life. I'm a geologist, got out of school in '51, and I've been in the industry my entire life. Now I do own stocks. I'm not a big natural gas producer. Somebody the other day said I was the second largest natural gas producer in the United States. Don't I wish. But no, I'm not. I own stocks. But I also am in the fueling business. CA: But natural gas is a fossil fuel. You burn it, you release CO2. So you believe in the threat of climate change. Why doesn't that prospect concern you? TBP: Well you're going to have to use something. What do you have to replace it? (Laughter) CA: No, no. The argument that it's a bridge fuel makes sense, because the amount of CO2 per unit of energy is lower than oil and coal, correct? And so everyone can be at least happy to see a shift from coal or oil to natural gas. But if that's it and that becomes the reason that renewables don't get invested in, then, long-term, we're screwed anyway, right? TBP: Well I'm not ready to give up, but Jim and I talked there as he left, and I said, "How do you feel about natural gas?" And he said, "Well it's a bridge fuel, is what it is." And I said, "Bridge to what? Where are we headed?" See but again, I told you, I don't have to worry with that. You all do. CA: But I don't think that's right, Boone. I think you're a person who believes in your legacy. You've made the money you need. You're one of the few people in a position to really swing the debate. Do you support the idea of some kind of price on carbon? Does that make sense? TBP: I don't like that because it ends up the government is going to run the program. I can tell you it will be a failure. The government is not successful on these things. They just aren't, it's a bad deal. Look at Solyndra, or whatever it was. I mean, that was told to be a bad idea 10 times, they went ahead and did it anyway. But that only blew out 500 million. I think it's closer to a billion. But Chris, I think where we're headed, the long-term, I don't mind going back to nuclear. And I can tell you what the last page of the report that will take them five years to write will be. One, don't build a reformer on a fault. (Laughter) And number two, do not build a reformer on the ocean. And now I think reformers are safe. Move them inland and on very stable ground and build the reformers. There isn't anything wrong with nuke. You're going to have to have energy. There is no question. You can't — okay. CA: One of the questions from the audience is, with fracking and the natural gas process, what about the problem of methane leaking from that, methane being a worse global warming gas than CO2? Is that a concern? TBP: Fracking? What is fracking? CA: Fracking. TBP: I'm teasing. (Laughter) CA: We've got a little bit of accent incompatibility here, you know. TBP: No, let me tell you, I've told you what my age was. I got out of school in '51. I witnessed my first frack job at border Texas in 1953. Fracking came out in '47, and don't believe for a minute when our president gets up there and says the Department of Energy 30 years ago developed fracking. I don't know what in the hell he's talking about. I mean seriously, the Department of Energy did not have anything to do with fracking. The first frack job was in '47. I saw my first one in '53. I've fracked over 3,000 wells in my life. Never had a problem with messing up an aquifer or anything else. Now the largest aquifer in North America is from Midland, Texas to the South Dakota border, across eight states — big aquifer: Ogallala, Triassic age. There had to have been 800,000 wells fracked in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas in that aquifer. There's no problems. I don't understand why the media is focused on Eastern Pennsylvania. CA: All right, so you don't support a carbon tax of any kind or a price on carbon. Your picture then I guess of how the world eventually gets off fossil fuels is through innovation ultimately, that we'll someday make solar and nuclear cost competitive? TBP: Solar and wind, Jim and I agreed on that in 13 seconds. That is, it's going to be a small part, because you can't rely on it. CA: So how does the world get off fossil fuels? TBP: How do we get there? We have so much natural gas, a day will not come where you say, "Well let's don't use that anymore." You'll keep using it. It is the cleanest of all. And if you look at California, they use 2,500 buses. LAMTA have been on natural gas for 25 years. The Ft. Worth T has been on it for 25 years. Why? Air quality was the reason they used natural gas and got away from diesel. Why are all the trash trucks today in Southern California on natural gas? It's because of air quality. I know what you're telling me, and I'm not disagreeing with you. How in the hell can we get off the natural gas at some point? And I say, that is your problem. (Laughter) CA: All right, so it's the bridge fuel. What is at the other end of that bridge is for this audience to figure out. If someone comes to you with a plan that really looks like it might be part of this solution, are you ready to invest in those technologies, even if they aren't maximized for profits, they might be maximized for the future health of the planet? TBP: I lost 150 million on the wind, okay. Yeah, sure, I'm game for it. Because, again, I'm trying to get energy solved for America. And anything American will work for me. CA: Boone, I really, really appreciate you coming here, engaging in this conversation. I think there's a lot of people who will want to engage with you. And that was a real gift you gave this audience. Thank you so much. (TBP: You bet, Chris. Thank you.) (Applause)

The single biggest health threat women face

{0: "C. Noel Bairey Merz is director of the Women's Heart Center at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, where she is a professor of medicine."}

TEDxWomen 2011

One out of two of you women will be impacted by cardiovascular disease in your lifetime. So this is the leading killer of women. It's a closely held secret for reasons I don't know. In addition to making this personal — so we're going to talk about your relationship with your heart and all women's relationship with their heart — we're going to wax into the politics. Because the personal, as you know, is political. And not enough is being done about this. And as we have watched women conquer breast cancer through the breast cancer campaign, this is what we need to do now with heart. Since 1984, more women die in the U.S. than men. So where we used to think of heart disease as being a man's problem primarily — which that was never true, but that was kind of how everybody thought in the 1950s and '60s, and it was in all the textbooks. It's certainly what I learned when I was training. If we were to remain sexist, and that was not right, but if we were going to go forward and be sexist, it's actually a woman's disease. So it's a woman's disease now. And one of the things that you see is that male line, the mortality is going down, down, down, down, down. And you see the female line since 1984, the gap is widening. More and more women, two, three, four times more women, dying of heart disease than men. And that's too short of a time period for all the different risk factors that we know to change. So what this really suggested to us at the national level was that diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, which had been developed in men, by men, for men for the last 50 years — and they work pretty well in men, don't they? — weren't working so well for women. So that was a big wake-up call in the 1980's. Heart disease kills more women at all ages than breast cancer. And the breast cancer campaign — again, this is not a competition. We're trying to be as good as the breast cancer campaign. We need to be as good as the breast cancer campaign to address this crisis. Now sometimes when people see this, I hear this gasp. We can all think of someone, often a young woman, who has been impacted by breast cancer. We often can't think of a young woman who has heart disease. I'm going to tell you why. Heart disease kills people, often very quickly. So the first time heart disease strikes in women and men, half of the time it's sudden cardiac death — no opportunity to say good-bye, no opportunity to take her to the chemotherapy, no opportunity to help her pick out a wig. Breast cancer, mortality is down to four percent. And that is the 40 years that women have advocated. Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan stood up and said, "I'm a breast cancer survivor," and it was okay to talk about it. And then physicians have gone to bat. We've done the research. We have effective therapies now. Women are living longer than ever. That has to happen in heart disease, and it's time. It's not happening, and it's time. We owe an incredible debt of gratitude to these two women. As Barbara depicted in one of her amazing movies, "Yentl," she portrayed a young woman who wanted an education. And she wanted to study the Talmud. And so how did she get educated then? She had to impersonate a man. She had to look like a man. She had to make other people believe that she looked like a man and she could have the same rights that the men had. Bernadine Healy, Dr. Healy, was a cardiologist. And right around that time, in the 1980's, that we saw women and heart disease deaths going up, up, up, up, up, she wrote an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine and said, the Yentl syndrome. Women are dying of heart disease, two, three, four times more than men. Mortality is not going down, it's going up. And she questioned, she hypothesized, is this a Yentl syndrome? And here's what the story is. Is it because women don't look like men, they don't look like that male-pattern heart disease that we've spent the last 50 years understanding and getting really good diagnostics and really good therapeutics, and therefore, they're not recognized for their heart disease. And they're just passed. They don't get treated, they don't get detected, they don't get the benefit of all the modern medicines. Doctor Healy then subsequently became the first female director of our National Institutes of Health. And this is the biggest biomedical enterprise research in the world. And it funds a lot of my research. It funds research all over the place. It was a very big deal for her to become director. And she started, in the face of a lot of controversy, the Women's Health Initiative. And every woman in the room here has benefited from that Women's Health Initiative. It told us about hormone replacement therapy. It's informed us about osteoporosis. It informed us about breast cancer, colon cancer in women. So a tremendous fund of knowledge despite, again, that so many people told her not to do it, it was too expensive. And the under-reading was women aren't worth it. She was like, "Nope. Sorry. Women are worth it." Well there was a little piece of that Women's Health Initiative that went to National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which is the cardiology part of the NIH. And we got to do the WISE study — and the WISE stands for Women's Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation — and I have chaired this study for the last 15 years. It was a study to specifically ask, what's going on with women? Why are more and more women dying of ischemic heart disease? So in the WISE, 15 years ago, we started out and said, "Well wow, there's a couple of key observations and we should probably follow up on that." And our colleagues in Washington, D.C. had recently published that when women have heart attacks and die, compared to men who have heart attacks and die — and again, this is millions of people, happening every day — women, in their fatty plaque — and this is their coronary artery, so the main blood supply going into the heart muscle — women erode, men explode. You're going to find some interesting analogies in this physiology. (Laughter) So I'll describe the male-pattern heart attack first. Hollywood heart attack. Ughhhh. Horrible chest pain. EKG goes pbbrrhh, so the doctors can see this hugely abnormal EKG. There's a big clot in the middle of the artery. And they go up to the cath lab and boom, boom, boom get rid of the clot. That's a man heart attack. Some women have those heart attacks, but a whole bunch of women have this kind of heart attack, where it erodes, doesn't completely fill with clot, symptoms are subtle, EKG findings are different — female-pattern. So what do you think happens to these gals? They're often not recognized, sent home. I'm not sure what it was. Might have been gas. So we picked up on that and we said, "You know, we now have the ability to look inside human beings with these special catheters called IVUS: intravascular ultrasound." And we said, "We're going to hypothesize that the fatty plaque in women is actually probably different, and deposited differently, than men." And because of the common knowledge of how women and men get fat. When we watch people become obese, where do men get fat? Right here, it's just a focal — right there. Where do women get fat? All over. Cellulite here, cellulite here. So we said, "Look, women look like they're pretty good about putting kind of the garbage away, smoothly putting it away. Men just have to dump it in a single area." So we said, "Let's look at these." And so the yellow is the fatty plaque, and panel A is a man. And you can see, it's lumpy bumpy. He's got a beer belly in his coronary arteries. Panel B is the woman, very smooth. She's just laid it down nice and tidy. (Laughter) And if you did that angiogram, which is the red, you can see the man's disease. So 50 years of honing and crafting these angiograms, we easily recognize male-pattern disease. Kind of hard to see that female-pattern disease. So that was a discovery. Now what are the implications of that? Well once again, women get the angiogram and nobody can tell that they have a problem. So we are working now on a non-invasive — again, these are all invasive studies. Ideally you would love to do all this non-invasively. And again, 50 years of good non-invasive stress testing, we're pretty good at recognizing male-pattern disease with stress tests. So this is cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. We're doing this at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in the Women's Heart Center. We selected this for the research. This is not in your community hospital, but we would hope to translate this. And we're about two and a half years into a five-year study. This was the only modality that can see the inner lining of the heart. And if you look carefully, you can see that there's a black blush right there. And that is microvascular obstruction. The syndrome, the female-pattern now is called microvascular coronary dysfunction, or obstruction. The second reason we really liked MRI is that there's no radiation. So unlike the CAT scans, X-rays, thalliums, for women whose breast is in the way of looking at the heart, every time we order something that has even a small amount of radiation, we say, "Do we really need that test?" So we're very excited about M.R. You can't go and order it yet, but this is an area of active inquiry where actually studying women is going to advance the field for women and men. What are the downstream consequences then, when female-pattern heart disease is not recognized? This is a figure from an editorial that I published in the European Heart Journal this last summer. And it was just a pictogram to sort of show why more women are dying of heart disease, despite these good treatments that we know and we have work. And when the woman has male-pattern disease — so she looks like Barbara in the movie — they get treated. And when you have female-pattern and you look like a woman, as Barbara does here with her husband, they don't get the treatment. These are our life-saving treatments. And those little red boxes are deaths. So those are the consequences. And that is female-pattern and why we think the Yentl syndrome actually is explaining a lot of these gaps. There's been wonderful news also about studying women, finally, in heart disease. And one of the the cutting-edge areas that we're just incredibly excited about is stem cell therapy. If you ask, what is the big difference between women and men physiologically? Why are there women and men? Because women bring new life into the world. That's all stem cells. So we hypothesized that female stem cells might be better at identifying the injury, doing some cellular repair or even producing new organs, which is one of the things that we're trying to do with stem cell therapy. These are female and male stem cells. And if you had an injured organ, if you had a heart attack and we wanted to repair that injured area, do you want those robust, plentiful stem cells on the top? Or do you want these guys, that look like they're out to lunch? (Laughter) And some of our investigative teams have demonstrated that female stem cells — and this is in animals and increasingly we're showing this in humans — that female stem cells, when put even into a male body, do better than male stem cells going into a male body. One of the things that we say about all of this female physiology — because again, as much as we're talking about women and heart disease, women do, on average, have better longevity than men — is that unfolding the secrets of female physiology and understanding that is going to help men and women. So this is not a zero-sum game in anyway. Okay, so here's where we started. And remember, paths crossed in 1984, and more and more women were dying of cardiovascular disease. What has happened in the last 15 years with this work? We are bending the curve. We're bending the curve. So just like the breast cancer story, doing research, getting awareness going, it works, you just have to get it going. Now are we happy with this? We still have two to three more women dying for every man. And I would propose, with the better longevity that women have overall, that women probably should theoretically do better, if we could just get treated. So this is where we are, but we have a long row to hoe. We've worked on this for 15 years. And I've told you, we've been working on male-pattern heart disease for 50 years. So we're 35 years behind. And we'd like to think it's not going to take 35 years. And in fact, it probably won't. But we cannot stop now. Too many lives are at stake. So what do we need to do? You now, hopefully, have a more personal relationship with your heart. Women have heard the call for breast cancer and they have come out for awareness campaigns. The women are very good about getting mammograms now. And women do fundraising. Women participate. They have put their money where their mouth is and they have done advocacy and they have joined campaigns. This is what we need to do with heart disease now. And it's political. Women's health, from a federal funding standpoint, sometimes it's popular, sometimes it's not so popular. So we have these feast and famine cycles. So I implore you to join the Red Dress Campaign in this fundraising. Breast cancer, as we said, kills women, but heart disease kills a whole bunch more. So if we can be as good as breast cancer and give women this new charge, we have a lot of lives to save. So thank you for your attention. (Applause)

Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor

{0: 'At 14, Taylor Wilson became the youngest person to achieve fusion -- with a reactor born in his garage. Now he wants to save our seaports from nuclear terror.'}

TED2012

So my name is Taylor Wilson. I am 17 years old and I am a nuclear physicist, which may be a little hard to believe, but I am. And I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be that point, that the bridge that T. Boone Pickens talked about will get us to. So nuclear fusion is our energy future. And the second point, making the case that kids can really change the world. So you may ask — (Applause) You may ask me, well how do you know what our energy future is? Well I built a fusion reactor when I was 14 years old. That is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor. I started building this project when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I decided I wanted to make a star. Now most of you are probably saying, well there's no such thing as nuclear fusion. I don't see any nuclear power plants with fusion energy. Well it doesn't break even. It doesn't produce more energy out than I put in, but it still does some pretty cool stuff. And I assembled this in my garage, and it now lives in the physics department of the University of Nevada, Reno. And it slams together deuterium, which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it. So this is similar to the reaction of the proton chain that's going on inside the Sun. And I'm slamming it together so hard that that hydrogen fuses together, and in the process it has some byproducts, and I utilize those byproducts. So this previous year, I won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. I developed a detector that replaces the current detectors that Homeland Security has. For hundreds of dollars, I've developed a system that exceeds the sensitivity of detectors that are hundreds of thousands of dollars. I built this in my garage. (Applause) And I've developed a system to produce medical isotopes. Instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities I've developed a device that, on a very small scale, can produce these isotopes. So that's my fusion reactor in the background there. That is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor. Oh, by the way, I make yellowcake in my garage, so my nuclear program is as advanced as the Iranians. So maybe I don't want to admit to that. This is me at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world. And this is me with President Obama, showing him my Homeland Security research. (Applause) So in about seven years of doing nuclear research, I started out with a dream to make a "star in a jar," a star in my garage, and I ended up meeting the president and developing things that I think can change the world, and I think other kids can too. So thank you very much. (Applause)

Everyday moments, caught in time

{0: 'A two-term U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins captures readers with his understated wit, profound insight -- and a sense of being "hospitable."'}

TED2012

I'm here to give you your recommended dietary allowance of poetry. And the way I'm going to do that is present to you five animations of five of my poems. And let me just tell you a little bit of how that came about. Because the mixing of those two media is a sort of unnatural or unnecessary act. But when I was United States Poet Laureate — and I love saying that. (Laughter) It's a great way to start sentences. When I was him back then, I was approached by J. Walter Thompson, the ad company, and they were hired sort of by the Sundance Channel. And the idea was to have me record some of my poems and then they would find animators to animate them. And I was initially resistant, because I always think poetry can stand alone by itself. Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results, in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed. And surely, if you're reading a poem that mentions a cow, you don't need on the facing page a drawing of a cow. I mean, let's let the reader do a little work. But I relented because it seemed like an interesting possibility, and also I'm like a total cartoon junkie since childhood. I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Loony Tunes cartoons. Bugs Bunny is my muse. And this way poetry could find its way onto television of all places. And I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places — poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes. When I was Poet Laureate, there I go again — I can't help it, it's true — (Laughter) I created a poetry channel on Delta Airlines that lasted for a couple of years. So you could tune into poetry as you were flying. And my sense is, it's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life. Start a meeting with a poem. That would be an idea you might take with you. When you get a poem on a billboard or on the radio or on a cereal box or whatever, it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school. So let us start with the first one. It's a little poem called "Budapest," and in it I reveal, or pretend to reveal, the secrets of the creative process. (Video) Narration: "Budapest." My pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater. I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly, intent as any forager that has nothing on its mind but the grubs and insects that will allow it to live another day. It wants only to be here tomorrow, dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt, nose pressed against the page, writing a few more dutiful lines while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest or some other city where I have never been. BC: So that makes it seem a little easier. (Applause) Writing is not actually as easy as that for me. But I like to pretend that it comes with ease. One of my students came up after class, an introductory class, and she said, "You know, poetry is harder than writing," which I found both erroneous and profound. (Laughter) So I like to at least pretend it just flows out. A friend of mine has a slogan; he's another poet. He says that, "If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence you ever tried." (Laughter) The next poem is also rather short. Poetry just says a few things in different ways. And I think you could boil this poem down to saying, "Some days you eat the bear, other days the bear eats you." And it uses the imagery of dollhouse furniture. (Video) Narration: "Some Days." Some days I put the people in their places at the table, bend their legs at the knees, if they come with that feature, and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs. All afternoon they face one another, the man in the brown suit, the woman in the blue dress — perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved. But other days I am the one who is lifted up by the ribs then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse to sit with the others at the long table. Very funny. But how would you like it if you never knew from one day to the next if you were going to spend it striding around like a vivid god, your shoulders in the clouds, or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper staring straight ahead with your little plastic face? (Applause) BC: There's a horror movie in there somewhere. The next poem is called forgetfulness, and it's really just a kind of poetic essay on the subject of mental slippage. And the poem begins with a certain species of forgetfulness that someone called literary amnesia, in other words, forgetting the things that you have read. (Video) Narration: "Forgetfulness." The name of the author is the first to go, followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel, which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of. It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago, you kissed the names of the nine muses good-bye and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag. And even now, as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the Moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. (Applause) BC: The next poem is called "The Country" and it's based on, when I was in college I met a classmate who remains to be a friend of mine. He lived, and still does, in rural Vermont. I lived in New York City. And we would visit each other. And when I would go up to the country, he would teach me things like deer hunting, which meant getting lost with a gun basically — (Laughter) and trout fishing and stuff like that. And then he'd come down to New York City and I'd teach him what I knew, which was largely smoking and drinking. (Laughter) And in that way we traded lore with each other. The poem that's coming up is based on him trying to tell me a little something about a domestic point of etiquette in country living that I had a very hard time, at first, processing. It's called "The Country." (Video) Narration: "The Country." I wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden strike-anywhere matches just lying around the house, because the mice might get into them and start a fire. But your face was absolutely straight when you twisted the lid down on the round tin where the matches, you said, are always stowed. Who could sleep that night? Who could whisk away the thought of the one unlikely mouse padding along a cold water pipe behind the floral wallpaper, gripping a single wooden match between the needles of his teeth? Who could not see him rounding a corner, the blue tip scratching against rough-hewn beam, the sudden flare and the creature, for one bright, shining moment, suddenly thrust ahead of his time — now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid illuminating some ancient night? And who could fail to notice, lit up in the blazing insulation, the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces of his fellow mice — one-time inhabitants of what once was your house in the country? (Applause) BC: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. And the last poem is called "The Dead." I wrote this after a friend's funeral, but not so much about the friend as something the eulogist kept saying, as all eulogists tend to do, which is how happy the deceased would be to look down and see all of us assembled. And that to me was a bad start to the afterlife, having to witness your own funeral and feel gratified. So the little poem is called "The Dead." (Video) Narration: "The Dead." The dead are always looking down on us, they say. While we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity. They watch the tops of our heads moving below on Earth. And when we lie down in a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them, which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait like parents for us to close our eyes. (Applause) BC: I'm not sure if other poems will be animated. It took a long time — I mean, it's rather uncommon to have this marriage — a long time to put those two together. But then again, it took us a long time to put the wheel and the suitcase together. (Laughter) I mean, we had the wheel for some time. And schlepping is an ancient and honorable art. (Laughter) I just have time to read a more recent poem to you. If it has a subject, the subject is adolescence. And it's addressed to a certain person. It's called "To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl." "Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born, you would be all done in only one more year? Of course, you couldn't have done that all alone. So never mind; you're fine just being yourself. You're loved for just being you. But did you know that at your age Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture, Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room — no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator? Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life, after you come out of your room and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks. For some reason I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England when she was only 15. But then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model. (Laughter) A few centuries later, when he was your age, Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family, but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas and two complete masses as a youngster. (Laughter) But of course, that was in Austria at the height of Romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland. (Laughter) Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15 or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17? We think you're special just being you — playing with your food and staring into space. (Laughter) By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes, but that doesn't mean he never helped out around the house." (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause)

Make data more human

{0: 'Jer Thorp’s work focuses on adding meaning and narrative to huge amounts of data as a way to help people take control of the information that surrounds them.'}

TEDxVancouver

I want to talk to you about two of the most exciting possible things. You've probably guessed what they are — data and history. Right? So, I'm not a historian. I'm not going to give you a definition of history. But let's think instead of history within a framework. So, when we're making history, or when we're creating historical documents, we're taking things that have happened in the past, and we're stitching them together into a story. So let me start with a little bit of my own story. Like anybody my age who works creatively with computers, I was a popular, socially well-adjusted young man — (Laughter) And sporty! Sporty young man. And like a lot of people my age in the type of business that I'm in, I was influenced tremendously by Apple. But notice my choice of logo here, right? The Apple on the left, not the Apple on the right. I'm influenced as much by the Apple on the right as the next person, but the Apple on the left — I mean, look at that logo! It's a rainbow. It's not even in the right order! (Laughter) That's how crazy Apple was. (Laughter) But I don't want to talk too much about the company. I'll start talking about a machine, though. How amazing it is to think about this. I go back and I think about this. Wednesday — one Wednesday, when I was about 12 years old, I didn't have a computer. On Thursday, I had a computer. Can you imagine that change? It's so drastic. I can't even think about anything that could change our lives that way. But I'm actually not even going to talk about the computer. I'm going to talk about a program that came loaded on that computer. And it was build by, not the guy on the left, but the guy on the right. Does anybody know who the guy on the right is? Nobody ever knows the answer to this question. This is Bill Atkinson. And Bill Atkinson was responsible for tons of things that you see on your computer every day. But I want to talk about one program that Bill Atkinson wrote, called HyperCard. Someone's cheering over there. (Laughter) HyperCard was a program that shipped with the Mac, and it was designed for users of the computer to make programs on their computers. Crazy idea today. And these programs were not the apps that we think about today, with their large budgets and their big distribution. These were small things, people making applications to keep track of their local basketball team scores or to organize their research or to teach people about classical music or to calculate weird astronomical dates. And then, of course, there were some art projects. This is my favorite one. It's called "If Monks Had Macs," and it's a nonlinear kind of exploratory environment. I thank the stars for HyperCard all of the time. And I thank the stars for putting me in this era where I got to use HyperCard. HyperCard was the last program to ship on a public computer that was designed for the users of the computer to make programs with it. If you talked to the people who invented the computer and you told them there would be a day, a magical day, when everybody had a computer but none of them knew how to program, they would think you were crazy. So let's skip forward a few years. I'm starting my career as an artist, and I'm building things with my computer, small-scale things, investigating things like the growth systems of plants. Or, in this example, I'm building a simulated economy in which pixels are trading color with one another, trying to investigate how these types of systems work, and just kind of having fun. And then this project led me to start working with data. So I'm building graphics like this, which compare "communism" — the frequency of usage of the word "communism" in the New York Times — to "terrorism," at the top. You see "terrorism" kind of appears as "communism" is going away. And with these graphics, I was really interested in the aesthetic of the graphs. This is Iran and Iraq. It reads like a clock. It's called a "timepiece graph." This is another timepiece graph, overlaying "despair" over "hope." And there's only three times — actually, it's "crisis" over "hope" — there's only three times when "crisis" eclipses "hope." We're in the middle of one of them right now. But don't think about that too much. (Laughter) And finally, the culmination of this work with the New York Times data a few years ago was the attempt to combine an entire year's news cycle into a single graphic. So these graphics actually show us a full year of news, all the people, and how they're connected into a single graphic. And from there, I started to be interested again in more active systems. Here's a project called "Just Landed," where I'm looking at people tweeting on Twitter. "Hey! I just landed in Hawaii!" — you know, how people just casually try to sneak that into their Twitter conversation. "I'm not showing off. Really. But I did just land in Hawaii." And then I'm plotting those people's trips, in the hopes that maybe we can use social network and the data that it leaves behind to provide a model of how people move, which would be valuable to epidemiologists, among other people. And, more fun — this is a similar project, looking at people saying "Good morning" to each other all around the world. Which taught me, by the way, that it is true that people in Vancouver on the West Coast wake up much later and say "Good morning" much later than the people on the East Coast, who are more adventurous. Here's a more useful — maybe — project, where I took all the information from the Kepler Project and tried to put it into some visual form that made sense to me. And I should say that everything I've shown you up to now — these are all things that I just did for fun. It may seem weird, but this comes back from HyperCard. I'm building tools for myself. I may share them with a few other people, but they're for fun, they're for me. So, all these tools I show you kind of occupy this weird space somewhere between science, art and design. That's where my practice lies. And still today, from my experience with HyperCard, what I'm doing is building visual tools to help me understand systems. So today, I work at the New York Times. I'm the data artist in residence at the New York Times. And I've had an opportunity at the Times to work on a variety of really interesting projects, two of which I'm going to share with you today. The first one, I've been working on in conjunction with Mark Hansen. Mark Hansen is a professor of statistics at UCLA. He's also a media artist. And Mark came to the Times with a very interesting question to what may seem like an obvious problem: When people share content on the internet, how does that content get from person A to person B? Or maybe, person A to person B to person C to person D? We know that people share content in the internet, but what we don't know is what happens in that gap between one person to the other. So we decided to build the tool to explore that, and this tool is called Cascade. If we look at these systems that start with one event that leads to other events, we call that structure a cascade. And these cascades actually happen over time. So we can model these things over time. Now, the New York Times has a lot of people who share our content, so the cascades do not look like that one, they look more like this. Here's a typical cascade. At the bottom left, the very first event. And then as people are sharing the content from one person to another, we go up in the Y axis, degrees of separation, and over on the X axis, for time. So we're able to look at that conversation in a couple of different views: this one, which shows us the threads of conversation, and this one, which combines that stacked view with a view that lets us see the threads. Now, the Times publishes about 7,000 pieces of content every month. So it was important for us, when we were building this tool, to make it an exploratory one, so that people could dig through this vast terrain of data. I think of it as a vehicle that we're giving people to traverse this really big terrain of data. So here's what it really looks like, and here's the cascade playing in real time. I have to say, this was a tremendous moment. We had been working with canned data, fake data, for so long, that when we saw this for the first moment, it was like an archaeologist who had just dusted off these dinosaur bones. We discovered this thing, and we were seeing it for the first time, these sharing structures that underlie the internet. And maybe the dinosaur analogy is a good one, because we're actually making some probabilistic guesses about how these things link. We're looking at some of these pieces and making some guesses, but we try to make sure that those are as statistically rigorous as possible. Now tweets, in this case, they become parts of stories. They become parts of narratives. So we are building histories here, but they're very short-term histories. And sometimes these very large cascades are the most interesting ones, but sometimes the small ones are also interesting. This is one of my favorites. We call this the "Rabbi Cascade." It's a conversation amongst rabbis about this article in the New York Times, about the fact that religious workers don't get a lot of time off. I guess Saturdays and Sundays are bad days for them to take off. So, in this cascade, there's a group of rabbis having a conversation about a New York Times story. One of them has the best Twitter name ever — he's called "The Velveteen Rabbi." (Laughter) But we would have never found this if it weren't for this exploratory tool. This would just be sitting somewhere, and we would have never been able to see that. But this exercise of taking single pieces of information and building narrative structures, building histories out of them, I find tremendously interesting. You know, I moved to New York about two years ago. And in New York, everybody has a story that surrounds this tremendously impactful event that happened on September 11 of 2001. And my own story with September 11 has really become a more intricate one, because I spent a great deal of time working on a piece of the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. The central idea about the 9/11 Memorial is that the names in the memorial are not laid out in alphabetical order or chronological order, but instead, they're laid out in a way in which the relationships between the people who were killed are embodied in the memorial. Brothers are placed next to brothers, coworkers are placed together. So this memorial actually considers all of these myriad connections that were part of these people's lives. I worked with a company called Local Projects to work on an algorithm and a software tool to help the architects build the layout for the memorial: almost 3,000 names and almost 1,500 of these adjacency requests, these requests for connection — so a very dense story, a very dense narrative, that becomes an embodied part of this memorial. Working with Jake Barton, we produce the software tool, which allows the architects to, first of all, generate a layout that satisfied all of those adjacency requests, but then second, make little adjustments where they needed to to tell the stories that they wanted to tell. So this memorial, I think, has an incredibly timely concept in our era of social networks, because these networks — these real-life networks that make up people's lives — are actually embodied inside of the memorial. And one of the most tremendously moving experiences is to go to the memorial and see how these people are placed next to each other, so that this memorial is representing their own lives. How does this affect our lives? Well, I don't know if you remember, but in the spring, there was a controversy, because it was discovered that on the iPhone and, actually, on your computer, we were storing a tremendous amount of the location data. So Apple responded, saying, this was not location data about you, it was location data about wireless networks that were in the area where you are. So it's not about you, but it's about where you are. (Laughter) This is very valuable data. It's like gold to researchers, this human-mobility data. So we thought, "Man! How many people have iPhones?" How many of you have iPhones? So in this room, we have this tremendous database of location data that researchers would really, really like. So we built this system called Open Paths, which lets people upload their iPhone data and broker relationships with researchers to share that data, to donate that data to people that can actually put it to use. Open Paths was a great success as a prototype. We received thousands of data sets, and we built this interface which allows people to actually see their lives unfolding from these traces that are left behind on your devices. Now, what we didn't expect was how moving this experience would be. When I uploaded my data, I thought, "Big deal. I know where I live. I know where I work. What am I going to see here?" Well, it turns out, what I saw was that moment I got off the plane to start my new life in New York; the restaurant where I had Thai food that first night, thinking about this new experience of being in New York; the day that I met my girlfriend. This is LaGuardia airport. (Laughter) This is this Thai restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue. This is the moment I met my girlfriend. See how that changes the first time I told you about those stories and the second time I told you about those stories? Because what we do in the tool, inadvertently, is we put these pieces of data into a human context. And by placing data into a human context, it gains meaning. And I think this is tremendously, tremendously important, because these are our histories that are being stored on these devices. And by thinking about them that way, putting them in a human context — first of all, what we do with our own data is get a better understanding of the type of information that we're sharing. But if we can do this with other data, if we can put data into a human context, I think we can change a lot of things, because it builds, automatically, empathy for the people involved in these systems. And that, in turn, results in a fundamental respect, which, I believe, is missing in a large part of technology, when we start to deal with issues like privacy, by understanding that these numbers are not just numbers, but instead they're attached, tethered to, pieces of the real world. They carry weight. By understanding that, the dialog becomes a lot different. How many of you have ever clicked a button that enables a third party to access your location data on your phone? Lots of you. So the third party is the developer, the second party is Apple. The only party that never gets access to this information is the first party! And I think that's because we think about these pieces of data in this stranded, abstract way. We don't put them into a context which, I think, makes them a lot more important. So what I'm asking you to do is really simple: start to think about data in a human context. It doesn't really take anything. When you read stock prices, think about them in a human context. When you think about mortgage reports, think about them in a human context. There's no doubt that big data is big business. There's an industry being developed here. Think about how well we've done in previous industries that we've developed involving resources. Not very well at all. I think part of that problem is, we've had a lack of participation in these dialogues from multiple pieces of human society. So the other thing that I'm asking for is an inclusion in this dialogue from artists, from poets, from writers — from people who can bring a human element into this discussion. Because I believe that this world of data is going to be transformative for us. And unlike our attempts with the resource industry and our attempts with the financial industry, by bringing the human element into this story, I think we can take it to tremendous places. Thank you. (Applause)

Let's talk about dying

{0: 'Over the past 35 years Peter Saul has been intimately involved in the dying process for over 4,000 patients. He is passionate about improving the ways we die.'}

TEDxNewy

Look, I had second thoughts, really, about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys. Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem, which goes, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." (Laughter) So — (Laughter) So with that in mind, I'm going to set about trying to do those things here, and talk about dying in the 21st century. Now the first thing that will piss you off, undoubtedly, is that all of us are, in fact, going to die in the 21st century. There will be no exceptions to that. There are, apparently, about one in eight of you who think you're immortal, on surveys, but — (Laughter) Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen. While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece. Anyway, the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century, apart from it's going to happen to everybody, is it's shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us, unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that it's currently on. So there you go. That's the truth. No doubt that will piss you off, and now let's see whether we can set you free. I don't promise anything. Now, as you heard in the intro, I work in intensive care, and I think I've kind of lived through the heyday of intensive care. It's been a ride, man. This has been fantastic. We have machines that go ping. There's many of them up there. And we have some wizard technology which I think has worked really well, and over the course of the time I've worked in intensive care, the death rate for males in Australia has halved, and intensive care has had something to do with that. Certainly, a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that. So we have had tremendous success, and we kind of got caught up in our own success quite a bit, and we started using expressions like "lifesaving." I really apologize to everybody for doing that, because obviously, we don't. What we do is prolong people's lives, and delay death, and redirect death, but we can't, strictly speaking, save lives on any sort of permanent basis. And what's really happened over the period of time that I've been working in intensive care is that the people whose lives we started saving back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, are now coming to die in the 21st century of diseases that we no longer have the answers to in quite the way we did then. So what's happening now is there's been a big shift in the way that people die, and most of what they're dying of now isn't as amenable to what we can do as what it used to be like when I was doing this in the '80s and '90s. So we kind of got a bit caught up with this, and we haven't really squared with you guys about what's really happening now, and it's about time we did. I kind of woke up to this bit in the late '90s when I met this guy. This guy is called Jim, Jim Smith, and he looked like this. I was called down to the ward to see him. His is the little hand. I was called down to the ward to see him by a respiratory physician. He said, "Look, there's a guy down here. He's got pneumonia, and he looks like he needs intensive care. His daughter's here and she wants everything possible to be done." Which is a familiar phrase to us. So I go down to the ward and see Jim, and his skin his translucent like this. You can see his bones through the skin. He's very, very thin, and he is, indeed, very sick with pneumonia, and he's too sick to talk to me, so I talk to his daughter Kathleen, and I say to her, "Did you and Jim ever talk about what you would want done if he ended up in this kind of situation?" And she looked at me and said, "No, of course not!" I thought, "Okay. Take this steady." And I got talking to her, and after a while, she said to me, "You know, we always thought there'd be time." Jim was 94. (Laughter) And I realized that something wasn't happening here. There wasn't this dialogue going on that I imagined was happening. So a group of us started doing survey work, and we looked at four and a half thousand nursing home residents in Newcastle, in the Newcastle area, and discovered that only one in a hundred of them had a plan about what to do when their hearts stopped beating. One in a hundred. And only one in 500 of them had plan about what to do if they became seriously ill. And I realized, of course, this dialogue is definitely not occurring in the public at large. Now, I work in acute care. This is John Hunter Hospital. And I thought, surely, we do better than that. So a colleague of mine from nursing called Lisa Shaw and I went through hundreds and hundreds of sets of notes in the medical records department looking at whether there was any sign at all that anybody had had any conversation about what might happen to them if the treatment they were receiving was unsuccessful to the point that they would die. And we didn't find a single record of any preference about goals, treatments or outcomes from any of the sets of notes initiated by a doctor or by a patient. So we started to realize that we had a problem, and the problem is more serious because of this. What we know is that obviously we are all going to die, but how we die is actually really important, obviously not just to us, but also to how that features in the lives of all the people who live on afterwards. How we die lives on in the minds of everybody who survives us, and the stress created in families by dying is enormous, and in fact you get seven times as much stress by dying in intensive care as by dying just about anywhere else, so dying in intensive care is not your top option if you've got a choice. And, if that wasn't bad enough, of course, all of this is rapidly progressing towards the fact that many of you, in fact, about one in 10 of you at this point, will die in intensive care. In the U.S., it's one in five. In Miami, it's three out of five people die in intensive care. So this is the sort of momentum that we've got at the moment. The reason why this is all happening is due to this, and I do have to take you through what this is about. These are the four ways to go. So one of these will happen to all of us. The ones you may know most about are the ones that are becoming increasingly of historical interest: sudden death. It's quite likely in an audience this size this won't happen to anybody here. Sudden death has become very rare. The death of Little Nell and Cordelia and all that sort of stuff just doesn't happen anymore. The dying process of those with terminal illness that we've just seen occurs to younger people. By the time you've reached 80, this is unlikely to happen to you. Only one in 10 people who are over 80 will die of cancer. The big growth industry are these. What you die of is increasing organ failure, with your respiratory, cardiac, renal, whatever organs packing up. Each of these would be an admission to an acute care hospital, at the end of which, or at some point during which, somebody says, enough is enough, and we stop. And this one's the biggest growth industry of all, and at least six out of 10 of the people in this room will die in this form, which is the dwindling of capacity with increasing frailty, and frailty's an inevitable part of aging, and increasing frailty is in fact the main thing that people die of now, and the last few years, or the last year of your life is spent with a great deal of disability, unfortunately. Enjoying it so far? (Laughs) (Laughter) Sorry, I just feel such a, I feel such a Cassandra here. (Laughter) What can I say that's positive? What's positive is that this is happening at very great age, now. We are all, most of us, living to reach this point. You know, historically, we didn't do that. This is what happens to you when you live to be a great age, and unfortunately, increasing longevity does mean more old age, not more youth. I'm sorry to say that. (Laughter) What we did, anyway, look, what we did, we didn't just take this lying down at John Hunter Hospital and elsewhere. We've started a whole series of projects to try and look about whether we could, in fact, involve people much more in the way that things happen to them. But we realized, of course, that we are dealing with cultural issues, and this is, I love this Klimt painting, because the more you look at it, the more you kind of get the whole issue that's going on here, which is clearly the separation of death from the living, and the fear — Like, if you actually look, there's one woman there who has her eyes open. She's the one he's looking at, and [she's] the one he's coming for. Can you see that? She looks terrified. It's an amazing picture. Anyway, we had a major cultural issue. Clearly, people didn't want us to talk about death, or, we thought that. So with loads of funding from the Federal Government and the local Health Service, we introduced a thing at John Hunter called Respecting Patient Choices. We trained hundreds of people to go to the wards and talk to people about the fact that they would die, and what would they prefer under those circumstances. They loved it. The families and the patients, they loved it. Ninety-eight percent of people really thought this just should have been normal practice, and that this is how things should work. And when they expressed wishes, all of those wishes came true, as it were. We were able to make that happen for them. But then, when the funding ran out, we went back to look six months later, and everybody had stopped again, and nobody was having these conversations anymore. So that was really kind of heartbreaking for us, because we thought this was going to really take off. The cultural issue had reasserted itself. So here's the pitch: I think it's important that we don't just get on this freeway to ICU without thinking hard about whether or not that's where we all want to end up, particularly as we become older and increasingly frail and ICU has less and less and less to offer us. There has to be a little side road off there for people who don't want to go on that track. And I have one small idea, and one big idea about what could happen. And this is the small idea. The small idea is, let's all of us engage more with this in the way that Jason has illustrated. Why can't we have these kinds of conversations with our own elders and people who might be approaching this? There are a couple of things you can do. One of them is, you can, just ask this simple question. This question never fails. "In the event that you became too sick to speak for yourself, who would you like to speak for you?" That's a really important question to ask people, because giving people the control over who that is produces an amazing outcome. The second thing you can say is, "Have you spoken to that person about the things that are important to you so that we've got a better idea of what it is we can do?" So that's the little idea. The big idea, I think, is more political. I think we have to get onto this. I suggested we should have Occupy Death. (Laughter) My wife said, "Yeah, right, sit-ins in the mortuary. Yeah, yeah. Sure." (Laughter) So that one didn't really run, but I was very struck by this. Now, I'm an aging hippie. I don't know, I don't think I look like that anymore, but I had, two of my kids were born at home in the '80s when home birth was a big thing, and we baby boomers are used to taking charge of the situation, so if you just replace all these words of birth, I like "Peace, Love, Natural Death" as an option. I do think we have to get political and start to reclaim this process from the medicalized model in which it's going. Now, listen, that sounds like a pitch for euthanasia. I want to make it absolutely crystal clear to you all, I hate euthanasia. I think it's a sideshow. I don't think euthanasia matters. I actually think that, in places like Oregon, where you can have physician-assisted suicide, you take a poisonous dose of stuff, only half a percent of people ever do that. I'm more interested in what happens to the 99.5 percent of people who don't want to do that. I think most people don't want to be dead, but I do think most people want to have some control over how their dying process proceeds. So I'm an opponent of euthanasia, but I do think we have to give people back some control. It deprives euthanasia of its oxygen supply. I think we should be looking at stopping the want for euthanasia, not for making it illegal or legal or worrying about it at all. This is a quote from Dame Cicely Saunders, whom I met when I was a medical student. She founded the hospice movement. And she said, "You matter because you are, and you matter to the last moment of your life." And I firmly believe that that's the message that we have to carry forward. Thank you. (Applause)

The missing link to renewable energy

{0: 'Donald Sadoway is working on a battery miracle -- an inexpensive, incredibly efficient, three-layered battery using “liquid metal."'}

TED2012

The electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago. Because the way things stand today, electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply. If in the time that it took me to walk out here on this stage, some tens of megawatts of wind power stopped pouring into the grid, the difference would have to be made up from other generators immediately. But coal plants, nuclear plants can't respond fast enough. A giant battery could. With a giant battery, we'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal, gas and nuclear do today. You see, the battery is the key enabling device here. With it, we could draw electricity from the sun even when the sun doesn't shine. And that changes everything. Because then renewables such as wind and solar come out from the wings, here to center stage. Today I want to tell you about such a device. It's called the liquid metal battery. It's a new form of energy storage that I invented at MIT along with a team of my students and post-docs. Now the theme of this year's TED Conference is Full Spectrum. The OED defines spectrum as "The entire range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays of which the range of visible light is only a small part." So I'm not here today only to tell you how my team at MIT has drawn out of nature a solution to one of the world's great problems. I want to go full spectrum and tell you how, in the process of developing this new technology, we've uncovered some surprising heterodoxies that can serve as lessons for innovation, ideas worth spreading. And you know, if we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out; we can't just drill our way out; we can't bomb our way out. We're going to do it the old-fashioned American way, we're going to invent our way out, working together. (Applause) Now let's get started. The battery was invented about 200 years ago by a professor, Alessandro Volta, at the University of Padua in Italy. His invention gave birth to a new field of science, electrochemistry, and new technologies such as electroplating. Perhaps overlooked, Volta's invention of the battery for the first time also demonstrated the utility of a professor. (Laughter) Until Volta, nobody could imagine a professor could be of any use. Here's the first battery — a stack of coins, zinc and silver, separated by cardboard soaked in brine. This is the starting point for designing a battery — two electrodes, in this case metals of different composition, and an electrolyte, in this case salt dissolved in water. The science is that simple. Admittedly, I've left out a few details. Now I've taught you that battery science is straightforward and the need for grid-level storage is compelling, but the fact is that today there is simply no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid — namely uncommonly high power, long service lifetime and super-low cost. We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big, we need to think cheap. So let's abandon the paradigm of let's search for the coolest chemistry and then hopefully we'll chase down the cost curve by just making lots and lots of product. Instead, let's invent to the price point of the electricity market. So that means that certain parts of the periodic table are axiomatically off-limits. This battery needs to be made out of earth-abundant elements. I say, if you want to make something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt — (Laughter) preferably dirt that's locally sourced. And we need to be able to build this thing using simple manufacturing techniques and factories that don't cost us a fortune. So about six years ago, I started thinking about this problem. And in order to adopt a fresh perspective, I sought inspiration from beyond the field of electricity storage. In fact, I looked to a technology that neither stores nor generates electricity, but instead consumes electricity, huge amounts of it. I'm talking about the production of aluminum. The process was invented in 1886 by a couple of 22-year-olds — Hall in the United States and Heroult in France. And just a few short years following their discovery, aluminum changed from a precious metal costing as much as silver to a common structural material. You're looking at the cell house of a modern aluminum smelter. It's about 50 feet wide and recedes about half a mile — row after row of cells that, inside, resemble Volta's battery, with three important differences. Volta's battery works at room temperature. It's fitted with solid electrodes and an electrolyte that's a solution of salt and water. The Hall-Heroult cell operates at high temperature, a temperature high enough that the aluminum metal product is liquid. The electrolyte is not a solution of salt and water, but rather salt that's melted. It's this combination of liquid metal, molten salt and high temperature that allows us to send high current through this thing. Today, we can produce virgin metal from ore at a cost of less than 50 cents a pound. That's the economic miracle of modern electrometallurgy. It is this that caught and held my attention to the point that I became obsessed with inventing a battery that could capture this gigantic economy of scale. And I did. I made the battery all liquid — liquid metals for both electrodes and a molten salt for the electrolyte. I'll show you how. So I put low-density liquid metal at the top, put a high-density liquid metal at the bottom, and molten salt in between. So now, how to choose the metals? For me, the design exercise always begins here with the periodic table, enunciated by another professor, Dimitri Mendeleyev. Everything we know is made of some combination of what you see depicted here. And that includes our own bodies. I recall the very moment one day when I was searching for a pair of metals that would meet the constraints of earth abundance, different, opposite density and high mutual reactivity. I felt the thrill of realization when I knew I'd come upon the answer. Magnesium for the top layer. And antimony for the bottom layer. You know, I've got to tell you, one of the greatest benefits of being a professor: colored chalk. (Laughter) So to produce current, magnesium loses two electrons to become magnesium ion, which then migrates across the electrolyte, accepts two electrons from the antimony, and then mixes with it to form an alloy. The electrons go to work in the real world out here, powering our devices. Now to charge the battery, we connect a source of electricity. It could be something like a wind farm. And then we reverse the current. And this forces magnesium to de-alloy and return to the upper electrode, restoring the initial constitution of the battery. And the current passing between the electrodes generates enough heat to keep it at temperature. It's pretty cool, at least in theory. But does it really work? So what to do next? We go to the laboratory. Now do I hire seasoned professionals? No, I hire a student and mentor him, teach him how to think about the problem, to see it from my perspective and then turn him loose. This is that student, David Bradwell, who, in this image, appears to be wondering if this thing will ever work. What I didn't tell David at the time was I myself wasn't convinced it would work. But David's young and he's smart and he wants a Ph.D., and he proceeds to build — (Laughter) He proceeds to build the first ever liquid metal battery of this chemistry. And based on David's initial promising results, which were paid with seed funds at MIT, I was able to attract major research funding from the private sector and the federal government. And that allowed me to expand my group to 20 people, a mix of graduate students, post-docs and even some undergraduates. And I was able to attract really, really good people, people who share my passion for science and service to society, not science and service for career building. And if you ask these people why they work on liquid metal battery, their answer would hearken back to President Kennedy's remarks at Rice University in 1962 when he said — and I'm taking liberties here — "We choose to work on grid-level storage, not because it is easy, but because it is hard." (Applause) So this is the evolution of the liquid metal battery. We start here with our workhorse one watt-hour cell. I called it the shotglass. We've operated over 400 of these, perfecting their performance with a plurality of chemistries — not just magnesium and antimony. Along the way we scaled up to the 20 watt-hour cell. I call it the hockey puck. And we got the same remarkable results. And then it was onto the saucer. That's 200 watt-hours. The technology was proving itself to be robust and scalable. But the pace wasn't fast enough for us. So a year and a half ago, David and I, along with another research staff-member, formed a company to accelerate the rate of progress and the race to manufacture product. So today at LMBC, we're building cells 16 inches in diameter with a capacity of one kilowatt-hour — 1,000 times the capacity of that initial shotglass cell. We call that the pizza. And then we've got a four kilowatt-hour cell on the horizon. It's going to be 36 inches in diameter. We call that the bistro table, but it's not ready yet for prime-time viewing. And one variant of the technology has us stacking these bistro tabletops into modules, aggregating the modules into a giant battery that fits in a 40-foot shipping container for placement in the field. And this has a nameplate capacity of two megawatt-hours — two million watt-hours. That's enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 American households. So here you have it, grid-level storage: silent, emissions-free, no moving parts, remotely controlled, designed to the market price point without subsidy. So what have we learned from all this? (Applause) So what have we learned from all this? Let me share with you some of the surprises, the heterodoxies. They lie beyond the visible. Temperature: Conventional wisdom says set it low, at or near room temperature, and then install a control system to keep it there. Avoid thermal runaway. Liquid metal battery is designed to operate at elevated temperature with minimum regulation. Our battery can handle the very high temperature rises that come from current surges. Scaling: Conventional wisdom says reduce cost by producing many. Liquid metal battery is designed to reduce cost by producing fewer, but they'll be larger. And finally, human resources: Conventional wisdom says hire battery experts, seasoned professionals, who can draw upon their vast experience and knowledge. To develop liquid metal battery, I hired students and post-docs and mentored them. In a battery, I strive to maximize electrical potential; when mentoring, I strive to maximize human potential. So you see, the liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology, it's a blueprint for inventing inventors, full-spectrum. (Applause)

From mach-20 glider to hummingbird drone

{0: "As director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Regina Dugan oversaw the US armed forces' innovation engine. Now she deploys the same research tactics at Google."}

TED2012

You should be nice to nerds. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, if you don't already have a nerd in your life, you should get one. I'm just saying. Scientists and engineers change the world. I'd like to tell you about a magical place called DARPA where scientists and engineers defy the impossible and refuse to fear failure. Now these two ideas are connected more than you may realize, because when you remove the fear of failure, impossible things suddenly become possible. If you want to know how, ask yourself this question: What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? If you really ask yourself this question, you can't help but feel uncomfortable. I feel a little uncomfortable. Because when you ask it, you begin to understand how the fear of failure constrains you, how it keeps us from attempting great things, and life gets dull, amazing things stop happening. Sure, good things happen, but amazing things stop happening. Now I should be clear, I'm not encouraging failure, I'm discouraging fear of failure. Because it's not failure itself that constrains us. The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way. We're tested. And in part, that testing feels an appropriate part of achieving something great. Clemenceau said, "Life gets interesting when we fail, because it's a sign that we've surpassed ourselves." In 1895, Lord Kelvin declared that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible. In October of 1903, the prevailing opinion of expert aerodynamicists was that maybe in 10 million years we could build an aircraft that would fly. And two months later on December 17th, Orville Wright powered the first airplane across a beach in North Carolina. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. That was 1903. One year later, the next declarations of impossibilities began. Ferdinand Foch, a French army general credited with having one of the most original and subtle minds in the French army, said, "Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value." 40 years later, aero experts coined the term transonic. They debated, should it have one S or two? You see, they were having trouble in this flight regime, and it wasn't at all clear that we could fly faster than the speed of sound. In 1947, there was no wind tunnel data beyond Mach 0.85. And yet, on Tuesday, October 14th, 1947, Chuck Yeager climbed into the cockpit of his Bell X-1 and he flew towards an unknown possibility, and in so doing, he became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. Six of eight Atlas rockets blew up on the pad. After 11 complete mission failures, we got our first images from space. And on that first flight we got more data than in all U-2 missions combined. It took a lot of failures to get there. Since we took to the sky, we have wanted to fly faster and farther. And to do so, we've had to believe in impossible things. And we've had to refuse to fear failure. That's still true today. Today, we don't talk about flying transonically, or even supersonically, we talk about flying hypersonically — not Mach 2 or Mach 3, Mach 20. At Mach 20, we can fly from New York to Long Beach in 11 minutes and 20 seconds. At that speed, the surface of the airfoil is the temperature of molten steel — 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit — like a blast furnace. We are essentially burning the airfoil as we fly it. And we are flying it, or trying to. DARPA's hypersonic test vehicle is the fastest maneuvering aircraft ever built. It's boosted to near-space atop a Minotaur IV rocket. Now the Minotaur IV has too much impulse, so we have to bleed it off by flying the rocket at an 89 degree angle of attack for portions of the trajectory. That's an unnatural act for a rocket. The third stage has a camera. We call it rocketcam. And it's pointed at the hypersonic glider. This is the actual rocketcam footage from flight one. Now to conceal the shape, we changed the aspect ratio a little bit. But this is what it looks like from the third stage of the rocket looking at the unmanned glider as it heads into the atmosphere back towards Earth. We've flown twice. In the first flight, no aerodynamic control of the vehicle. But we collected more hypersonic flight data than in 30 years of ground-based testing combined. And in the second flight, three minutes of fully-controlled, aerodynamic flight at Mach 20. We must fly again, because amazing, never-been-done-before things require that you fly. You can't learn to fly at Mach 20 unless you fly. And while there's no substitute for speed, maneuverability is a very close second. If a Mach 20 glider takes 11 minutes and 20 seconds to get from New York to Long Beach, a hummingbird would take, well, days. You see, hummingbirds are not hypersonic, but they are maneuverable. In fact, the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards. It can fly up, down, forwards, backwards, even upside-down. And so if we wanted to fly in this room or places where humans can't go, we'd need an aircraft small enough and maneuverable enough to do so. This is a hummingbird drone. It can fly in all directions, even backwards. It can hover and rotate. This prototype aircraft is equipped with a video camera. It weighs less than one AA battery. It does not eat nectar. In 2008, it flew for a whopping 20 seconds, a year later, two minutes, then six, eventually 11. Many prototypes crashed — many. But there's no way to learn to fly like a hummingbird unless you fly. (Applause) It's beautiful, isn't it. Wow. It's great. Matt is the first ever hummingbird pilot. (Applause) Failure is part of creating new and amazing things. We cannot both fear failure and make amazing new things — like a robot with the stability of a dog on rough terrain, or maybe even ice; a robot that can run like a cheetah, or climb stairs like a human with the occasional clumsiness of a human. Or perhaps, Spider Man will one day be Gecko Man. A gecko can support its entire body weight with one toe. One square millimeter of a gecko's footpad has 14,000 hair-like structures called setae. They are used to help it grip to surfaces using intermolecular forces. Today we can manufacture structures that mimic the hairs of a gecko's foot. The result, a four-by-four-inch artificial nano-gecko adhesive. can support a static load of 660 pounds. That's enough to stick six 42-inch plasma TV's to your wall, no nails. So much for Velcro, right? And it's not just passive structures, it's entire machines. This is a spider mite. It's one millimeter long, but it looks like Godzilla next to these micromachines. In the world of Godzilla spider mites, we can make millions of mirrors, each one-fifth the diameter of a human hair, moving at hundreds of thousands of times per second to make large screen displays, so that we can watch movies like "Godzilla" in high-def. And if we can build machines at that scale, what about Eiffel Tower-like trusses at the microscale? Today we are making metals that are lighter than Styrofoam, so light they can sit atop a dandelion puff and be blown away with a wisp of air — so light that you can make a car that two people can lift, but so strong that it has the crash-worthiness of an SUV. From the smallest wisp of air to the powerful forces of nature's storms. There are 44 lightning strikes per second around the globe. Each lightning bolt heats the air to 44,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hotter than the surface of the Sun. What if we could use these electromagnetic pulses as beacons, beacons in a moving network of powerful transmitters? Experiments suggest that lightning could be the next GPS. Electrical pulses form the thoughts in our brains. Using a grid the size of your thumb, with 32 electrodes on the surface of his brain, Tim uses his thoughts to control an advanced prosthetic arm. And his thoughts made him reach for Katie. This is the first time a human has controlled a robot with thought alone. And it is the first time that Tim has held Katie's hand in seven years. That moment mattered to Tim and Katie, and this green goo may someday matter to you. This green goo is perhaps the vaccine that could save your life. It was made in tobacco plants. Tobacco plants can make millions of doses of vaccine in weeks instead of months, and it might just be the first healthy use of tobacco ever. And if it seems far-fetched that tobacco plants could make people healthy, what about gamers that could solve problems that experts can't solve? Last September, the gamers of Foldit solved the three-dimensional structure of the retroviral protease that contributes to AIDS in rhesus monkeys. Now understanding this structure is very important for developing treatments. For 15 years, it was unsolved in the scientific community. The gamers of Foldit solved it in 15 days. Now they were able to do so by working together. They were able to work together because they're connected by the Internet. And others, also connected to the Internet, used it as an instrument of democracy. And together they changed the fate of their nation. The Internet is home to two billion people, or 30 percent of the world's population. It allows us to contribute and to be heard as individuals. It allows us to amplify our voices and our power as a group. But it too had humble beginnings. In 1969, the internet was but a dream, a few sketches on a piece of paper. And then on October 29th, the first packet-switched message was sent from UCLA to SRI. The first two letters of the word "Login," that's all that made it through — an L and an O — and then a buffer overflow crashed the system. (Laughter) Two letters, an L and an O, now a worldwide force. So who are these scientists and engineers at a magical place called DARPA? They are nerds, and they are heroes among us. They challenge existing perspectives at the edges of science and under the most demanding of conditions. They remind us that we can change the world if we defy the impossible and we refuse to fear failure. They remind us that we all have nerd power. Sometimes we just forget. You see, there was a time when you weren't afraid of failure, when you were a great artist or a great dancer and you could sing, you were good at math, you could build things, you were an astronaut, an adventurer, Jacques Cousteau, you could jump higher, run faster, kick harder than anyone. You believed in impossible things and you were fearless. You were totally and completely in touch with your inner superhero. Scientists and engineers can indeed change the world. So can you. You were born to. So go ahead, ask yourself, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? Now I want to say, this is not easy. It's hard to hold onto this feeling, really hard. I guess in some way, I sort of believe it's supposed to be hard. Doubt and fear always creep in. We think someone else, someone smarter than us, someone more capable, someone with more resources will solve that problem. But there isn't anyone else; there's just you. And if we're lucky, in that moment, someone steps into that doubt and fear, takes a hand and says, "Let me help you believe." Jason Harley did that for me. Jason started at DARPA on March 18th, 2010. He was with our transportation team. I saw Jason nearly every day, sometimes twice a day. And more so than most, he saw the highs and the lows, the celebrations and the disappointments. And on one particularly dark day for me, Jason sat down and he wrote an email. He was encouraging, but firm. And when he hit send, he probably didn't realize what a difference it would make. It mattered to me. In that moment and still today when I doubt, when I feel afraid, when I need to reconnect with that feeling, I remember his words, they were so powerful. Text: "There is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you." ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ Voice: Because that's what being a superhero is all about. RD: "There is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you." And remember, be nice to nerds. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Regina, thank you. I have a couple of questions. So that glider of yours, the Mach 20 glider, the first one, no control, it ended up in the Pacific I think somewhere. RD: Yeah, yeah. It did. (CA: What happened on that second flight?) Yeah, it also went into the Pacific. (CA: But this time under control?) We didn't fly it into the Pacific. No, there are multiple portions of the trajectory that are demanding in terms of really flying at that speed. And so in the second flight, we were able to get three minutes of fully aerodynamic control of the vehicle before we lost it. CA: I imagine you're not planning to open up to passenger service from New York to Long Beach anytime soon. RD: It might be a little warm. CA: What do you picture that glider being used for? RD: Well our responsibility is to develop the technology for this. How it's ultimately used will be determined by the military. Now the purpose of the vehicle though, the purpose of the technology, is to be able to reach anywhere in the world in less than 60 minutes. CA: And to carry a payload of more than a few pounds? (RD: Yeah.) Like what's the payload it could carry? RD: Well I don't think we ultimately know what it will be, right. We've got to fly it first. CA: But not necessarily just a camera? RD: No, not necessarily just a camera. CA: It's amazing. The hummingbird? RD: Yeah? CA: I'm curious, you started your beautiful sequence on flight with a plane kind of trying to flap its wings and failing horribly, and there haven't been that many planes built since that flap wings. Why did we think that this was the time to go biomimicry and copy a hummingbird? Isn't that a very expensive solution for a small maneuverable flying object? RD: So I mean, in part, we wondered if it was possible to do it. And you have to revisit these questions over time. The folks at AeroVironment tried 300 or more different wing designs, 12 different forms of the avionics. It took them 10 full prototypes to get something that would actually fly. But there's something really interesting about a flying machine that looks like something you'd recognize. So we often talk about stealth as a means for avoiding any type of sensing, but when things looks just natural, you also don't see them. CA: Ah. So it's not necessarily just the performance. It's partly the look. (RD: Sure.) It's actually, "Look at that cute hummingbird flying into my headquarters." (Laughter) Because I think, as well as the awe of looking at that, I'm sure some people here are thinking, technology catches up so quick, how long is it before some crazed geek with a little remote control flies one through a window of the White House? I mean, do you worry about the Pandora's box issue here? RD: Well look, our singular mission is the creation and prevention of strategic surprise. That's what we do. It would be inconceivable for us to do that work if we didn't make people excited and uncomfortable with the things that we do at the same time. It's just the nature of what we do. Now our responsibility is to push that edge. And we have to be, of course, mindful and responsible of how the technology is developed and ultimately used, but we can't simply close our eyes and pretend that it isn't advancing; it's advancing. CA: I mean, you're clearly a really inspiring leader. And you persuade people to go to these great feats of invention, but at a personal level, in a way I can't imagine doing your job. Do you wake up in the night sometimes, just asking questions about the possibly unintended consequences of your team's brilliance? RD: Sure. I think you couldn't be human if you didn't ask those questions. CA: How do you answer them? RD: Well I don't always have answers for them, right. I think that we learn as time goes on. My job is one of the most exhilarating jobs you could have. I work with some of the most amazing people. And with that exhilaration, comes a really deep sense of responsibility. And so you have on the one hand this tremendous lift of what's possible and this tremendous seriousness of what it means. CA: Regina, that was jaw-dropping, as they say. Thank you so much for coming to TED. (RD: Thank you.) (Applause)

Unlock the intelligence, passion, greatness of girls

{0: "Leymah Gbowee is a peace activist in Liberia. She led a women's movement that was pivotal in ending the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003, and now speaks on behalf of women and girls around the world."}

TED2012

Many times I go around the world to speak, and people ask me questions about the challenges, my moments, some of my regrets. 1998: A single mother of four, three months after the birth of my fourth child, I went to do a job as a research assistant. I went to Northern Liberia. And as part of the work, the village would give you lodgings. And they gave me lodging with a single mother and her daughter. This girl happened to be the only girl in the entire village who had made it to the ninth grade. She was the laughing stock of the community. Her mother was often told by other women, "You and your child will die poor." After two weeks of working in that village, it was time to go back. The mother came to me, knelt down, and said, "Leymah, take my daughter. I wish for her to be a nurse." Dirt poor, living in the home with my parents, I couldn't afford to. With tears in my eyes, I said, "No." Two months later, I go to another village on the same assignment and they asked me to live with the village chief. The women's chief of the village has this little girl, fair color like me, totally dirty. And all day she walked around only in her underwear. When I asked, "Who is that?" She said, "That's Wei. The meaning of her name is pig. Her mother died while giving birth to her, and no one had any idea who her father was." For two weeks, she became my companion, slept with me. I bought her used clothes and bought her her first doll. The night before I left, she came to the room and said, "Leymah, don't leave me here. I wish to go with you. I wish to go to school." Dirt poor, no money, living with my parents, I again said, "No." Two months later, both of those villages fell into another war. Till today, I have no idea where those two girls are. Fast-forward, 2004: In the peak of our activism, the minister of Gender Liberia called me and said, "Leymah, I have a nine-year-old for you. I want you to bring her home because we don't have safe homes." The story of this little girl: She had been raped by her paternal grandfather every day for six months. She came to me bloated, very pale. Every night I'd come from work and lie on the cold floor. She'd lie beside me and say, "Auntie, I wish to be well. I wish to go to school." 2010: A young woman stands before President Sirleaf and gives her testimony of how she and her siblings live together, their father and mother died during the war. She's 19; her dream is to go to college to be able to support them. She's highly athletic. One of the things that happens is that she applies for a scholarship. Full scholarship. She gets it. Her dream of going to school, her wish of being educated, is finally here. She goes to school on the first day. The director of sports who's responsible for getting her into the program asks her to come out of class. And for the next three years, her fate will be having sex with him every day, as a favor for getting her in school. Globally, we have policies, international instruments, work leaders. Great people have made commitments — we will protect our children from want and from fear. The U.N. has the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Countries like America, we've heard things like No Child Left Behind. Other countries come with different things. There is a Millennium Development called Three that focuses on girls. All of these great works by great people aimed at getting young people to where we want to get them globally, I think, has failed. In Liberia, for example, the teenage pregnancy rate is three to every 10 girls. Teen prostitution is at its peak. In one community, we're told, you wake up in the morning and see used condoms like used chewing gum paper. Girls as young as 12 being prostituted for less than a dollar a night. It's disheartening, it's sad. And then someone asked me, just before my TEDTalk, a few days ago, "So where is the hope?" Several years ago, a few friends of mine decided we needed to bridge the disconnect between our generation and the generation of young women. It's not enough to say you have two Nobel laureates from the Republic of Liberia when your girls' kids are totally out there and no hope, or seemingly no hope. We created a space called the Young Girls Transformative Project. We go into rural communities and all we do, like has been done in this room, is create the space. When these girls sit, you unlock intelligence, you unlock passion, you unlock commitment, you unlock focus, you unlock great leaders. Today, we've worked with over 300. And some of those girls who walked in the room very shy have taken bold steps, as young mothers, to go out there and advocate for the rights of other young women. One young woman I met, teen mother of four, never thought about finishing high school, graduated successfully; never thought about going to college, enrolled in college. One day she said to me, "My wish is to finish college and be able to support my children." She's at a place where she can't find money to go to school. She sells water, sells soft drinks and sells recharge cards for cellphones. And you would think she would take that money and put it back into her education. Juanita is her name. She takes that money and finds single mothers in her community to send back to school. Says, "Leymah, my wish is to be educated. And if I can't be educated, when I see some of my sisters being educated, my wish has been fulfilled. I wish for a better life. I wish for food for my children. I wish that sexual abuse and exploitation in schools would stop." This is the dream of the African girl. Several years ago, there was one African girl. This girl had a son who wished for a piece of doughnut because he was extremely hungry. Angry, frustrated, really upset about the state of her society and the state of her children, this young girl started a movement, a movement of ordinary women banding together to build peace. I will fulfill the wish. This is another African girl's wish. I failed to fulfill the wish of those two girls. I failed to do this. These were the things that were going through the head of this other young woman — I failed, I failed, I failed. So I will do this. Women came out, protested a brutal dictator, fearlessly spoke. Not only did the wish of a piece of doughnut come true, the wish of peace came true. This young woman wished also to go to school. She went to school. This young woman wished for other things to happen, it happened for her. Today, this young woman is me, a Nobel laureate. I'm now on a journey to fulfill the wish, in my tiny capacity, of little African girls — the wish of being educated. We set up a foundation. We're giving full four-year scholarships to girls from villages that we see with potential. I don't have much to ask of you. I've also been to places in this U.S., and I know that girls in this country also have wishes, a wish for a better life somewhere in the Bronx, a wish for a better life somewhere in downtown L.A., a wish for a better life somewhere in Texas, a wish for a better life somewhere in New York, a wish for a better life somewhere in New Jersey. Will you journey with me to help that girl, be it an African girl or an American girl or a Japanese girl, fulfill her wish, fulfill her dream, achieve that dream? Because all of these great innovators and inventors that we've talked to and seen over the last few days are also sitting in tiny corners in different parts of the world, and all they're asking us to do is create that space to unlock the intelligence, unlock the passion, unlock all of the great things that they hold within themselves. Let's journey together. Let's journey together. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you so much. Right now in Liberia, what do you see as the main issue that troubles you? LG: I've been asked to lead the Liberian Reconciliation Initiative. As part of my work, I'm doing these tours in different villages and towns — 13, 15 hours on dirt roads — and there is no community that I've gone into that I haven't seen intelligent girls. But sadly, the vision of a great future, or the dream of a great future, is just a dream, because you have all of these vices. Teen pregnancy, like I said, is epidemic. So what troubles me is that I was at that place and somehow I'm at this place, and I just don't want to be the only one at this place. I'm looking for ways for other girls to be with me. I want to look back 20 years from now and see that there's another Liberian girl, Ghanaian girl, Nigerian girl, Ethiopian girl standing on this TED stage. And maybe, just maybe, saying, "Because of that Nobel laureate I'm here today." So I'm troubled when I see them like there's no hope. But I'm also not pessimistic, because I know it doesn't take a lot to get them charged up. CA: And in the last year, tell us one hopeful thing that you've seen happening. LG: I can tell you many hopeful things that I've seen happening. But in the last year, where President Sirleaf comes from, her village, we went there to work with these girls. And we could not find 25 girls in high school. All of these girls went to the gold mine, and they were predominantly prostitutes doing other things. We took 50 of those girls and we worked with them. And this was at the beginning of elections. This is one place where women were never — even the older ones barely sat in the circle with the men. These girls banded together and formed a group and launched a campaign for voter registration. This is a real rural village. And the theme they used was: "Even pretty girls vote." They were able to mobilize young women. But not only did they do that, they went to those who were running for seats to ask them, "What is it that you will give the girls of this community when you win?" And one of the guys who already had a seat was very — because Liberia has one of the strongest rape laws, and he was one of those really fighting in parliament to overturn that law because he called it barbaric. Rape is not barbaric, but the law, he said, was barbaric. And when the girls started engaging him, he was very hostile towards them. These little girls turned to him and said, "We will vote you out of office." He's out of office today. (Applause) CA: Leymah, thank you. Thank you so much for coming to TED. LG: You're welcome. (CA: Thank you.) (Applause)

Building blocks that blink, beep and teach

{0: 'Ayah Bdeir is an engineer and artist, and is the founder of littleBits and karaj, an experimental art, architecture and technology lab in Beirut.'}

TED2012

This may sound strange, but I'm a big fan of the concrete block. The first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea: modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together. Very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world. They enabled us to to build things that were larger than us, buildings, bridges, one brick at a time. Essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time. Almost a hundred years later in 1947, LEGO came up with this. It was called the Automatic Binding Brick. And in a few short years, LEGO bricks took place in every household. It's estimated that over 400 billion bricks have been produced — or 75 bricks for every person on the planet. You don't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses, beautiful bridges, beautiful buildings. LEGO made it accessible. LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it into the building block of our imagination. Meanwhile the exact same year, at Bell Labs the next revolution was about to be announced, the next building block. The transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive. Like the concrete block, the transistor allows you to build much larger, more complex circuits, one brick at a time. But there's a main difference: The transistor was only for experts. I personally don't accept this, that the building block of our time is reserved for experts, so I decided to change that. Eight years ago when I was at the Media Lab, I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers. A few years ago I started developing littleBits. Let me show you how they work. LittleBits are electronic modules with each one specific function. They're pre-engineered to be light, sound, motors and sensors. And the best part about it is they snap together with magnets. So you can't put them the wrong way. The bricks are color-coded. Green is output, blue is power, pink is input and orange is wire. So all you need to do is snap a blue to a green and very quickly you can start making larger circuits. You put a blue to a green, you can make light. You can put a knob in between and now you've made a little dimmer. Switch out the knob for a pulse module, which is here, and now you've made a little blinker. Add this buzzer for some extra punch and you've created a noise machine. I'm going to stop that. So beyond simple play, littleBits are actually pretty powerful. Instead of having to program, to wire, to solder, littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures. So to make this blink faster or slower, you would just turn this knob and basically make it pulse faster or slower. The idea behind littleBits is that it's a growing library. We want to make every single interaction in the world into a ready-to-use brick. Lights, sounds, solar panels, motors — everything should be accessible. We've been giving littleBits to kids and seeing them play with them. And it's been an incredible experience. The nicest thing is how they start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they don't learn at schools. For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch. We've also been taking littleBits to design schools. So for example, we've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littleBits as a material. Here you see, with felt and paper water bottles, we have Geordie making ... (Clanging) (Buzzing) A few weeks ago we took littleBits to RISD and gave them to some designers with no experience in engineering whatsoever — just cardboard, wood and paper — and told them "Make something." Here's an example of a project they made, a motion-activated confetti canon ball. (Laughter) But wait, this is actually my favorite project. It's a lobster made of playdough that's afraid of the dark. (Laughter) To these non-engineers, littleBits became another material, electronics became just another material. And we want to make this material accessible to everyone. So littleBits is open-source. You can go on the website, download all the design files, make them yourself. We want to encourage a world of creators, of inventors, of contributors, because this world that we live in, this interactive world, is ours. So go ahead and start inventing. Thank you. (Applause)

A magical tale (with augmented reality)

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

TED2012

Marco Tempest: What I'd like to show you today is something in the way of an experiment. Today's its debut. It's a demonstration of augmented reality. And the visuals you're about to see are not prerecorded. They are live and reacting to me in real time. I like to think of it as a kind of technological magic. So fingers crossed. And keep your eyes on the big screen. Augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery. It seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask, why, in a technological age, we continue to have this magical sense of wonder. Magic is deception, but it is a deception we enjoy. To enjoy being deceived, an audience must first suspend its disbelief. It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: I try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing to produce for these shadows of the imagination a willing suspension of disbelief that, for a moment, constitutes poetic faith. MT: This faith in the fictional is essential for any kind of theatrical experience. Without it, a script is just words. Augmented reality is just the latest technology. And sleight of hand is just an artful demonstration of dexterity. We are all very good at suspending our disbelief. We do it every day, while reading novels, watching television or going to the movies. We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had. Without this ability there is no magic. It was Jean Robert-Houdin, France's greatest illusionist, who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller. He said something that I've posted on the wall of my studio. Jean Robert-Houdin: A conjurer is not a juggler. He is an actor playing the part of a magician. MT: Which means magic is theater and every trick is a story. The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction. There are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome. Now many of them are intensely dramatic. Magicians play with fire and steel, defy the fury of the buzzsaw, dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape. But audiences don't come to see the magician die, they come to see him live. Because the best stories always have a happy ending. The tricks of magic have one special element. They are stories with a twist. Now Edward de Bono argued that our brains are pattern matching machines. He said that magicians deliberately exploit the way their audiences think. Edward de Bono: Stage magic relies almost wholly on the momentum error. The audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations that are perfectly reasonable, but do not, in fact, match what is being done in front of them. MT: In that respect, magic tricks are like jokes. Jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination. But when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips into something entirely unexpected, we laugh. The same thing happens when people watch magic tricks. The finale defies logic, gives new insight into the problem, and audiences express their amazement with laughter. It's fun to be fooled. One of the key qualities of all stories is that they're made to be shared. We feel compelled to tell them. When I do a trick at a party — (Laughter) that person will immediately pull their friend over and ask me to do it again. They want to share the experience. That makes my job more difficult, because, if I want to surprise them, I need to tell a story that starts the same, but ends differently — a trick with a twist on a twist. It keeps me busy. Now experts believe that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained. We think in narrative structures. We connect events and emotions and instinctively transform them into a sequence that can be easily understood. It's a uniquely human achievement. We all want to share our stories, whether it is the trick we saw at the party, the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation. Today, thanks to technology, we can share those stories as never before, by email, Facebook, blogs, tweets, on TED.com. The tools of social networking, these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story. We turn facts into similes and metaphors, and even fantasies. We polish the rough edges of our lives so that they feel whole. Our stories make us the people we are and, sometimes, the people we want to be. They give us our identity and a sense of community. And if the story is a good one, it might even make us smile. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Inventing is the easy part. Marketing takes work

{0: 'Daniel Schnitzer is the founder of EarthSpark International, a company dedicated to helping create clean energy supply chains in Haiti.\r\n'}

TEDxPittsburgh

So, without romanticizing this too much: imagine that you light your home with kerosene and candles every night, and that you do all of your cooking with charcoal. This is how the world's two billion poorest people cook and light their homes every day. This isn't just inconvenient, this is inefficient, it's expensive, it's harmful to human health, harmful to the environment, and it's unproductive. And that's energy poverty. So let me give you a couple of examples. I work in Haiti, where about 80% of the population lives in energy poverty. The average household spends 10% of its income on kerosene for lighting – that's an order of magnitude greater than what the average US household spends on electricity to light their homes. The 2008 hurricane season in Haiti caused about one billion dollars in damage. That was a sixth of their GDP. The damage was so severe because the primary energy fuel in Haiti is charcoal, which is made from trees, and has left the country almost completely deforested. Without trees, the country can't absorb heavy rains and massive flooding, as a result. So in the industrialized world, we built walls that protect us from the externalities of our energy use; we can afford to clean up acute environmental disasters; and we can also afford to adapt to chronic conditions like climate change. That's not the case for Haiti. They can't afford this. The only way they're going to lift themselves out of energy poverty is by adapting fuels that are more efficient, that are less expensive, that are better for human health, better for the environment and that are more productive. So it turns out that those fuels and technologies exist, and this is an example of that. This is a solar LED lightbulb that we sell for a retail price of about 10 dollars in rural Haiti. That's a payback period of less than three months for the average Haitian household. The prescriptions to solve energy poverty seems pretty straightforward: you develop these technologies that have a great return on investment, and people should be snatching them up. But that's not the case. The first time I ever went down to Haiti was in August of 2008, sort of on a whim, and I was fielding surveys in the rural south of the country to assess the extent of energy poverty. And at night, I would go around sometimes and I would speak with the street vendors and see if they were interested in buying these solar LED lamps. One woman who I encountered turned down my offer, and she said, “Mon chéri, c'est trop Cher,” which basically means, “My dear, it's too expensive.” But I tried to explain to her, “Look, this is going to save you a lot of money, and it's going to give you even better light than what you're using now with the kerosene.” So I didn't make the sale, but I did learn a really important lesson, which is that technology, products, were not going to end energy poverty. Instead, access was going to. Specifically, there are two types of access that are going to end energy poverty: there's physical access, and there's financial access. So, physical access — what does that mean? It's very expensive for low-income households in developing countries to reach major centers of commerce. And it's basically impossible for them to order something off Amazon.com. “The last mile” is a phrase that's normally associated with the telecommunications industry. It means that last bit of wire that's necessary to connect the customer to the provider. What we need for ending energy poverty are last-mile retailers that bring these clean energy products to the people. The kerosene and charcoal value chains already figured this out: those fuels are ubiquitous across the entire country. You can go to the most remote village in Haiti and you will find somebody selling kerosene and charcoal. So the other type of access: financial. We all know that clean energy products, technologies, tend to be characterized by higher upfront costs, but very low operating costs. And so in the industrialized world, we have very generous subsidies that are specifically designed to bring down those upfront costs. Those subsidies don't exist in Haiti. What they do have is microfinance. But you're going to severely diminish the value proposition of your clean energy product if you expect somebody in Haiti to go out, get a microloan, go back to the retailer, and then buy the clean energy product. So the prescription to end energy poverty is much more complicated than simply products. We need to integrate financial access directly into new, innovative distribution models. What does that mean? That means bundling consumer credit with the retailer. This is really easy for Bloomingdale’s to do, but it's not so easy for a rural sales agent in Haiti to do. We need to redirect cash flows that are going now from the diaspora in the United States through Western Union wire transfers in cash directly into clean energy products that can be delivered to or picked up by their friends or family in Haiti. So the next time you hear about a technology or product that's going to change the world, be a little bit skeptical. The inventor Dean Kamen, the guy who invented the Segway, a genius by any standards, once said that his job is easy, inventing things is easy, the hard part is the technology dissemination — it's getting those technologies and products to the people who need it most. Thank you. (Applause)

I am a pirate

{0: 'Rick Falkvinge, didn’t plan on becoming a politician, but his dedication to civil liberties and internet sovereignty led to him founding the Swedish Pirate Party in 2006.'}

TEDxOslo

Thank y'all! This is going to be a motivational speech. Because — imagine my motivation standing between this strong, healthy crowd ... and lunch. (Laughter) So ... I'm @Falkvinge on Twitter. Feel free to quote me if I say something memorable, stupid, funny, whatever. I love seeing my name on Twitter. So ... Hi! I'm Rick. I'm a politician. I'm sorry. How many in here have heard of the Swedish Pirate Party before? Let's see a show of hands. OK, that's practically everybody. Probably due to the fact that we are Sweden's neighbor. I frequently ask how many have heard of any other political party and there's always just scattered hands in the audience compared to this first question which is one-half to two-thirds. This is actually the first time ever that does not match. It was practically everybody. So, for those who haven't heard of us: well, the Pirate Party, we love the net. We love copying and sharing, and we love civil liberties. For that, some people call us pirates. Probably in an attempt to make us bow our heads and feel shame. That didn't work very well. We decided to stand tall about it instead. And so in 2006, I founded a new political party. I led it for its first five years. And the European elections, the last European elections, we became the largest party and the most coveted youth demographic, sub-30. And what's interesting is we did that on less than one percent of the competition's budget. We had a campaign budget total of 50,000 euros. They had six million between them — and we beat them. That gave us a cost efficiency advantage of over two orders of magnitude. And I'm gonna share the secret recipe of how we did that. We developed swarm methodologies. And they can be applied to any business or social cause. Well, almost any — there's a small asterisk by the end, and I'll get to that in just a minute. But applying these — and we've done this dozens of times, we know that this works. We've put two people in the European Parliament, we have 45 people in various German state parliaments, we're in the Icelandic parliament, the Czech senate, many, many, many more, local councils — and, as said, we've spread to 70 countries. And that's not bad for a political movement that hasn't even been around for a decade. So today we're going to talk a bit about — how people are motivated to be part of change, to be part of something bigger than themselves. And how you can channel this into an organization that harnesses this great power of wanting to make the world a better place. And in the end, come out a little on the better. When I speak to businesspeople, I frequently make them very upset when I contradict them and say that no, your employees are not your most valuable asset. Your most valuable asset is the thousands of people who want to work for you for free. And you don't let them. They get very upset about that. A swarm is a congregation of tens of thousands of volunteers that have chosen of their own will to converge on a common goal. There's this "Futurama" quote: "When push comes to shove, you gotta do what you love — even if it's not a good idea." (Laughter) I mean, seriously, what kind of idiot thinks they can change the world by starting a political party? (Laughter) This kind of idiot, apparently. But it works! What you need to do is to put a stake in the ground. You need to announce your goal. Just say, "I want to accomplish this." I'm going to do this. And it doesn't need to be very costly. My announcement was just two lines in a chat channel. "Hey, look, the Pirate Party has its website up now after New Year's." And the address. That was all the advertising I ever did. The next time I had several hundred activists wanting to work with us. When you provide such a focus point, a swarm intelligence emerges. When people can rally to a flag. And that's what gives you this two orders of magnitude of cost efficiency. It's a huge advantage — you're running circles around all the legacy organizations. And there are four goals that need to be fulfilled in your goal in order for this to work. These four criteria are that your goal must be: tangible, credible, inclusive and epic. Let's take a look at them: It needs to be tangible. A lot of people say, "Well, you know, we should make the world a better place," or, "Yeah, we should all feel good now." Not going to work. You need a binary. Are we there yet, or are we not there yet? It needs to be credible. Somebody seeing the project plan that you're posting needs to see that, yes, this project plan will take us from where we are to where we want to be. You need to break it down into subgoals that each by themselves are seen as doable, and when you add the subgoals together, we've gone to where we want. It needs to be — and this is where it gets exciting in terms of working swarmwise — it needs to be inclusive. Anybody who sees this project plan needs to immediately say, "I want to do this — and there's my spot!" And they will be able to jump right into the project and start working on it without asking anybody's permission. And that is exactly what'll happen. And, last but not least, it needs to be epic. It needs to energize people. It needs to electrify people. Shoot for the moon! On second thought, don't shoot for the moon, we've already been there — shoot for Mars! (Laughter) In contrast, you will never be able to get a volunteer swarm forming around making the most correct tax audit ever. Doesn't electrify people. Go to Mars. A lot of people kind of balk at the obstacles. We're going to climb a huge mountain. So how do you motivate people to do that? Well, it turns out that obstacles are not the problem. Not knowing the obstacles is the problem. If you know how high the mountain is, you know exactly what it takes to scale it. We know exactly how far away Mars is and what it takes to get there. If you can plan it like a project, you can plan what resources you need and you can execute it, exactly like a project. Let's see: we're going to Mars, we need two dozen volunteer rocket scientists, one dozen volunteer metallurgists, some crazy dude who will mix rocket fuel in his backyard and so on. When you can list the resources, you know what you need to get there. When you know what you need to get there, you can go there. And the next thing is to encourage this development of a swarm intelligence, which is where the cost efficiency comes in. There's a TED Talk on motivation that debunks that we work for money, and it presents science on how we're really motivated by three things, in terms of larger creative tasks, when we work for something bigger than ourselves. We work for autonomy, mastery and purpose. We've covered purpose already. As in, working for something bigger, tangible, credible, inclusive and epic. So, where that motivation talk ends, what it doesn't answer is, how do you build an organization that harnesses this motivational power. And this is where working swarmwise comes in, this is where swarm intelligence comes in. Turns out that there are three factors that you optimize for — and each of these are in complete opposite to what you learn at a business school. But it works. We know it works. We have people in many, many parliaments to prove it. Those three factors are: speed, trust and scalability. We optimize for speed by cutting bottlenecks out of the loop, cutting them out of the decision loop. That means cutting yourself out of the decision loop, which can be hard. But you've got to communicate your vision so passionately, so strongly, that everybody knows what the goal is and can find something, some step that takes the movement just a little closer to that goal. And when tens of thousands of people do that on a weekly basis, you become an unstoppable force. We had a three-person rule in our organization, saying that if three self-identified volunteers in the movement were in agreement that something was good for the movement, they had the green light from the highest office to go ahead and act in the name of the organization, including spending resources. When you talk about this kind of empowerment to traditional businesspeople, they think you belong in a zoo. But you know what? I led this organization for five years, there were 50,000 registered members and many, many more anonymous activists. It was not abused once. Everybody had the key to the treasure chest. It was not abused one single time. Turns out when you give people the keys to the castle, and look them in the eye and say, "I trust you," they step up to the plate. And that's a beautiful thing to see happen. Obviously, not everything went according to plan, but that's a different thing. We made mistakes. We should expect mistakes. If you're pioneering something, that means you must, by definition, venture into the unknown. When you're trying the unknown, some things won't go as planned. That's part of the definition of venturing into the unknown. To find the great, you must allow mistakes to happen. So you must communicate that we expect some things to go wrong to create a risk-positive environment. Therefore we optimize for iteration speed. Meaning that we try, we fail, we try again, we fail faster, we fail better, we try again, we fail better again. Maybe after we've tried 15 times, we've mastered some specific subject, so you want to minimize the time it takes to try those 15 times. We optimize on trust. We encourage diversity. You need to communicate your vision so strongly so that everybody can translate it into their own context because language is an incredibly strong inclusionary and exclusionary social marker. This one-brand-fits-all message — forget it! That's what they teach you at business school — it doesn't work. Or at least, it doesn't give you the cost-efficiency advantage of working swarmwise. This leads to a lot of different approaches tried in parallel in different social groups who try out different methods of working toward the goal. Some of them will work but in order to find the great ones, you need this diversity. And you need to communicate that we need that diversity. If somebody on this side does not understand what those guys are doing, that's OK because we all trust each other to work for the better of the movement. And it's OK that I don't understand their social context. I'm not expected to — I understand my social context. I contribute with something I know. Make people aware of this diversity. Finally, scalability. Get feet on the ground. Again, in business school, they teach you to use a lean organization. Forget that. Just scale up the organization from the get-go. Start with 10,000 empty boxes and an org chart covering down to every minor city. When you have lots and lots of small responsibilities in such a scaffolding that supports the swarm, supports the activists, you'll find that these boxes in the org charts are getting filled in quite rapidly, and they start to get filled in beyond your horizon with people you've never heard of. And so, this swarm keeps growing to tens of thousands of people, each taking on something small with very, very decentralized mandate to act on the organization. And this is when a swarm intelligence emerges. This is when you have this beehive logic where everybody knows what's to be done. Everybody is taking their own small steps towards it. So the swarm starts to act as a coherent organism. And it's amazing to watch. This is when you're awarded by the cost-efficiency advantage over your competitors by two orders of magnitude. Two orders of magnitude. This is not just a silver bullet. So we've been talking a lot about the big picture today. You can use these swarm methods for a lot of stuff. Do you want to change the world? Do you want to bring clean water to a billion people? Teach three billion people to read? Maybe you're into social change; you want to introduce unconditional basic income. Or maybe you want to take humanity to Mars. You can do this using these methods. You can do this. It's about leadership. It's about deciding what you want to do and telling it to the world. Because no matter whether you think you can or cannot change the world, no matter whether you think you can or cannot change the world, you are probably right. So one question I want everybody here to ask themselves today is the observation that change doesn't just happen, somebody makes it happen — do you want to be that person? Do you want to be that person? And then one last thing: There's one component more that's required to work swarmwise that I haven't mentioned yet. And that is fun. This goes beyond just enjoying your job, this goes beyond having a pinball machine in the office. Because this is actually required to succeed in a swarmwise scenario. This is required to succeed to get that cost-efficiency advantage of two orders of magnitude. For the reason that you need to attract volunteers. And people, in this aspect, are rather predictable. People will go to other people who are having fun. In contrast, they will walk an extra mile to avoid people who are not having fun. So, having fun is more than just having a pinball machine in the office. It's an absolute and unavoidable requirement for organizational and operational success when you're working swarmwise. So, in summary — a recipe for a swarm organization using these motivational methods to a huge competitive advantage. Your goal: it needs to be tangible, credible, inclusive and epic. Your organization needs to be optimized for speed, trust and scalability. You need to enjoy yourselves. And that will reward you with two orders of magnitude of cost-efficiency advantage. Thank you. (Applause)

The secret life of plankton

{0: 'Tierney Thys is a marine biologist and science educator. She studies the behavior of the Mola mola, or giant ocean sunfish -- and works with other scientists to make films that share the wonders they see.', 1: 'The Plankton Chronicles Project uses state-of-the-art optics to reveal the beauty and diversity of planktonic organisms. It was initiated by Christian Sardet, Noé Sardet and Sharif Mirshak.'}

TED-Ed

[Stories from the Sea] [Fish Tale My Secret Life as Plankton] How did I get here? Well, it's a stranger story than you might think. I came from a world of drifters, a place few humans have ever seen. The world of plankton. I came from a batch of a million eggs, and only a few of us survived. When I became a larva, I moved among other drifters. ["Plankton" comes from the Greek "planktos" for wandering] My fellow plankton came in all sizes, from tiny algae and bacteria to animals longer than a blue whale. I shared my nursery with other embryos and juveniles, from clams and crabs to sea urchins and anemones. (High pitch sound) We drifting animals are called zooplankton. The most common animals here are copepods and krill. (Buzzing) You could search the world over, but you'd never find a place more diverse than my childhood home. A teaspoon of seawater can contain more than a million living creatures. It can be a pretty tough existence, though. Trillions are born here, but only a few make it to adulthood. He may be no larger than a pin head, but this crab larva is an arrow worm's worst nightmare. (Bumping noises) (Buzzing) Epic battles between carnivores like these are just one way to get food. But the real powers of this place come from phytoplankton. Single-celled life that transforms sunlight and carbon dioxide into edible gold. Phytoplankton are the base for the largest food web in the world. During the night, many animals like me would rise up from the depths to feed on this sun-powered feast. (Maraca sound) I was part of the largest daily migration of life on Earth. During the day, I'd return to the darkness, where I'd join my bizarre companions. (High pitch buzz) (Flapping noises) Cannibals, like this sea butterfly mollusk, that eats its next of kin. And comb jellies, that beat cilia like rainbowed eyelashes. Some of these snare their prey with sticky tentacles, while others just take a bite out of their cousins. And siphonophores that catch prey with toxic fishing lures. But my favorite would have to be the crustacean Phronima. Its monstrous looks inspired the movie "Aliens." It can catch tiny bits in its bristles, but prefers larger prey like salps. With two sets of eyes, this female prowls the deeper water. Prey in hand, she performs one of the strangest behaviors in the entire animal kingdom. With body parts from her victims, she delicately assembles a barrel-like home feeding her young until they can drift off and survive on their own. Best of all, they make the perfect snack for a small fish like me. Here among the plankton, the food web is so tangled and complex, even scientists don't know who eats whom. But I do. At least now you know a bit of my story. There's so much more to me than just a tasty meal.

Connected, but alone?

{0: 'Sherry Turkle studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships: with others, with ourselves, with it.'}

TED2012

Just a moment ago, my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck. Her text said, "Mom, you will rock." I love this. Getting that text was like getting a hug. And so there you have it. I embody the central paradox. I'm a woman who loves getting texts who's going to tell you that too many of them can be a problem. Actually that reminder of my daughter brings me to the beginning of my story. 1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row. I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine. In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities. We were exploring different aspects of ourselves. And then we unplugged. I was excited. And, as a psychologist, what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world. Now fast-forward to 2012. I'm back here on the TED stage again. My daughter's 20. She's a college student. She sleeps with her cellphone, so do I. And I've just written a new book, but this time it's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine. So what happened? I'm still excited by technology, but I believe, and I'm here to make the case, that we're letting it take us places that we don't want to go. Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I've found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things. So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you're texting. (Laughter) People explain to me that it's hard, but that it can be done. Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents' full attention. But then these same children deny each other their full attention. This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together. And we even text at funerals. I study this. We remove ourselves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones. Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble — trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere — connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention. So you want to go to that board meeting, but you only want to pay attention to the bits that interest you. And some people think that's a good thing. But you can end up hiding from each other, even as we're all constantly connected to each other. A 50-year-old business man lamented to me that he feels he doesn't have colleagues anymore at work. When he goes to work, he doesn't stop by to talk to anybody, he doesn't call. And he says he doesn't want to interrupt his colleagues because, he says, "They're too busy on their email." But then he stops himself and he says, "You know, I'm not telling you the truth. I'm the one who doesn't want to be interrupted. I think I should want to, but actually I'd rather just do things on my Blackberry." Across the generations, I see that people can't get enough of each other, if and only if they can have each other at a distance, in amounts they can control. I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right. But what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships. An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, "Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation." When I ask people "What's wrong with having a conversation?" People say, "I'll tell you what's wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say." So that's the bottom line. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body — not too little, not too much, just right. Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring. I was caught off guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question, a profound question. He said, "Don't all those little tweets, don't all those little sips of online communication, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?" My answer was no, they don't add up. Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information, they may work for saying, "I'm thinking about you," or even for saying, "I love you," — I mean, look at how I felt when I got that text from my daughter — but they don't really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other. And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection. For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development. Over and over I hear, "I would rather text than talk." And what I'm seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they've become almost willing to dispense with people altogether. So for example, many people share with me this wish, that some day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital assistant on Apple's iPhone, will be more like a best friend, someone who will listen when others won't. I believe this wish reflects a painful truth that I've learned in the past 15 years. That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. That's why it's so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — so many automatic listeners. And the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us. We're developing robots, they call them sociable robots, that are specifically designed to be companions — to the elderly, to our children, to us. Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for each other? During my research I worked in nursing homes, and I brought in these sociable robots that were designed to give the elderly the feeling that they were understood. And one day I came in and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal. It seemed to be looking in her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. It comforted her. And many people found this amazing. But that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of a human life. That robot put on a great show. And we're vulnerable. People experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing. So during that moment when that woman was experiencing that pretend empathy, I was thinking, "That robot can't empathize. It doesn't face death. It doesn't know life." And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn't find it amazing; I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work. But when I stepped back, I felt myself at the cold, hard center of a perfect storm. We expect more from technology and less from each other. And I ask myself, "Why have things come to this?" And I believe it's because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable. We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control. But we're not so comfortable. We are not so much in control. These days, those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies. One, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; two, that we will always be heard; and three, that we will never have to be alone. And that third idea, that we will never have to be alone, is central to changing our psyches. Because the moment that people are alone, even for a few seconds, they become anxious, they panic, they fidget, they reach for a device. Just think of people at a checkout line or at a red light. Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved. And so people try to solve it by connecting. But here, connection is more like a symptom than a cure. It expresses, but it doesn't solve, an underlying problem. But more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves. It's shaping a new way of being. The best way to describe it is, I share therefore I am. We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we're having them. So before it was: I have a feeling, I want to make a call. Now it's: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. The problem with this new regime of "I share therefore I am" is that, if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves. We almost don't feel ourselves. So what do we do? We connect more and more. But in the process, we set ourselves up to be isolated. How do you get from connection to isolation? You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely. When I spoke at TED in 1996, reporting on my studies of the early virtual communities, I said, "Those who make the most of their lives on the screen come to it in a spirit of self-reflection." And that's what I'm calling for here, now: reflection and, more than that, a conversation about where our current use of technology may be taking us, what it might be costing us. We're smitten with technology. And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance. But it's time to talk. We grew up with digital technology and so we see it as all grown up. But it's not, it's early days. There's plenty of time for us to reconsider how we use it, how we build it. I'm not suggesting that we turn away from our devices, just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them, with each other and with ourselves. I see some first steps. Start thinking of solitude as a good thing. Make room for it. Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children. Create sacred spaces at home — the kitchen, the dining room — and reclaim them for conversation. Do the same thing at work. At work, we're so busy communicating that we often don't have time to think, we don't have time to talk, about the things that really matter. Change that. Most important, we all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits. Because it's when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other. Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection — how we care for each other, how we care for ourselves — but it's also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction. I'm optimistic. We have everything we need to start. We have each other. And we have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability. That we listen when technology says it will take something complicated and promises something simpler. So in my work, I hear that life is hard, relationships are filled with risk. And then there's technology — simpler, hopeful, optimistic, ever-young. It's like calling in the cavalry. An ad campaign promises that online and with avatars, you can "Finally, love your friends love your body, love your life, online and with avatars." We're drawn to virtual romance, to computer games that seem like worlds, to the idea that robots, robots, will someday be our true companions. We spend an evening on the social network instead of going to the pub with friends. But our fantasies of substitution have cost us. Now we all need to focus on the many, many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives, our own bodies, our own communities, our own politics, our own planet. They need us. Let's talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life the life we can love. Thank you. (Applause)

Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.

{0: "Chip Kidd's book jacket designs spawned a revolution in the art of American book packaging."}

TED2012

Hi. (Laughter) I did that for two reasons. First of all, I wanted to give you a good visual first impression. But the main reason I did it is that that's what happens to me when I'm forced to wear a Lady Gaga skanky mic. (Laughter) I'm used to a stationary mic. It's the sensible shoe of public address. (Laughter) But you clamp this thing on my head, and something happens. I just become skanky. (Laughter) So I'm sorry about that. And I'm already off-message. (Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, I have devoted the past 25 years of my life to designing books. ("Yes, BOOKS. You know, the bound volumes with ink on paper. You cannot turn them off with a switch. Tell your kids.") It all sort of started as a benign mistake, like penicillin. (Laughter) What I really wanted was to be a graphic designer at one of the big design firms in New York City. But upon arrival there, in the fall of 1986, and doing a lot of interviews, I found that the only thing I was offered was to be Assistant to the Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf, a book publisher. Now I was stupid, but not so stupid that I turned it down. I had absolutely no idea what I was about to become part of, and I was incredibly lucky. Soon, it had occurred to me what my job was. My job was to ask this question: "What do the stories look like?" Because that is what Knopf is. It is the story factory, one of the very best in the world. We bring stories to the public. The stories can be anything, and some of them are actually true. But they all have one thing in common: They all need to look like something. They all need a face. Why? To give you a first impression of what you are about to get into. A book designer gives form to content, but also manages a very careful balance between the two. Now, the first day of my graphic design training at Penn State University, the teacher, Lanny Sommese, came into the room and he drew a picture of an apple on the blackboard, and wrote the word "Apple" underneath, and he said, "OK. Lesson one. Listen up." And he covered up the picture and he said, "You either say this," and then he covered up the word, "or you show this. But you don't do this." Because this is treating your audience like a moron. (Laughter) And they deserve better. And lo and behold, soon enough, I was able to put this theory to the test on two books that I was working on for Knopf. The first was Katharine Hepburn's memoirs, and the second was a biography of Marlene Dietrich. Now the Hepburn book was written in a very conversational style, it was like she was sitting across a table telling it all to you. The Dietrich book was an observation by her daughter; it was a biography. So the Hepburn story is words and the Dietrich story is pictures, and so we did this. So there you are. Pure content and pure form, side by side. No fighting, ladies. ("What's a Jurassic Park?") Now, what is the story here? Someone is re-engineering dinosaurs by extracting their DNA from prehistoric amber. Genius! (Laughter) Now, luckily for me, I live and work in New York City, where there are plenty of dinosaurs. (Laughter) So, I went to the Museum of Natural History, and I checked out the bones, and I went to the gift shop, and I bought a book. And I was particularly taken with this page of the book, and more specifically the lower right-hand corner. Now I took this diagram, and I put it in a Photostat machine, (Laughter) and I took a piece of tracing paper, and I taped it over the Photostat with a piece of Scotch tape — stop me if I'm going too fast — (Laughter) — and then I took a Rapidograph pen — explain it to the youngsters — (Laughter) and I just started to reconstitute the dinosaur. I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea where I was going, but at some point, I stopped — when to keep going would seem like I was going too far. And what I ended up with was a graphic representation of us seeing this animal coming into being. We're in the middle of the process. And then I just threw some typography on it. Very basic stuff, slightly suggestive of public park signage. (Laughter) Everybody in house loved it, and so off it goes to the author. And even back then, Michael was on the cutting edge. ("Michael Crichton responds by fax:") ("Wow! Fucking Fantastic Jacket") (Laughter) (Applause) That was a relief to see that pour out of the machine. (Laughter) I miss Michael. And sure enough, somebody from MCA Universal calls our legal department to see if they can maybe look into buying the rights to the image, just in case they might want to use it. Well, they used it. (Laughter) (Applause) And I was thrilled. We all know it was an amazing movie, and it was so interesting to see it go out into the culture and become this phenomenon and to see all the different permutations of it. But not too long ago, I came upon this on the Web. No, that is not me. But whoever it is, I can't help but thinking they woke up one day like, "Oh my God, that wasn't there last night. Ooooohh! I was so wasted." (Laughter) But if you think about it, from my head to my hands to his leg. (Laughter) That's a responsibility. And it's a responsibility that I don't take lightly. The book designer's responsibility is threefold: to the reader, to the publisher and, most of all, to the author. I want you to look at the author's book and say, "Wow! I need to read that." David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, and the title essay in this collection is about his trip to a nudist colony. And the reason he went is because he had a fear of his body image, and he wanted to explore what was underlying that. For me, it was simply an excuse to design a book that you could literally take the pants off of. But when you do, you don't get what you expect. You get something that goes much deeper than that. And David especially loved this design because at book signings, which he does a lot of, he could take a magic marker and do this. (Laughter) Hello! (Laughter) Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir called ["Dry"], and it's about his time in rehab. In his 20s, he was a hotshot ad executive, and as Mad Men has told us, a raging alcoholic. He did not think so, however, but his coworkers did an intervention and they said, "You are going to rehab, or you will be fired and you will die." Now to me, this was always going to be a typographic solution, what I would call the opposite of Type 101. What does that mean? Usually on the first day of Introduction to Typography, you get the assignment of, select a word and make it look like what it says it is. So that's Type 101, right? Very simple stuff. This is going to be the opposite of that. I want this book to look like it's lying to you, desperately and hopelessly, the way an alcoholic would. The answer was the most low-tech thing you can imagine. I set up the type, I printed it out on an Epson printer with water-soluble ink, taped it to the wall and threw a bucket of water at it. Presto! Then when we went to press, the printer put a spot gloss on the ink and it really looked like it was running. Not long after it came out, Augusten was waylaid in an airport and he was hiding out in the bookstore spying on who was buying his books. And this woman came up to it, and she squinted, and she took it to the register, and she said to the man behind the counter, "This one's ruined." (Laughter) And the guy behind the counter said, "I know, lady. They all came in that way." (Laughter) Now, that's a good printing job. A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku, if you will, of the story. This particular story by Osama Tezuka is his epic life of the Buddha, and it's eight volumes in all. But the best thing is when it's on your shelf, you get a shelf life of the Buddha, moving from one age to the next. All of these solutions derive their origins from the text of the book, but once the book designer has read the text, then he has to be an interpreter and a translator. This story was a real puzzle. This is what it's about. ("Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters.") (Laughter) All right, so I got a collection of the paintings together and I looked at them and I deconstructed them and I put them back together. And so, here's the design, right? And so here's the front and the spine, and it's flat. But the real story starts when you wrap it around a book and put it on the shelf. Ahh! We come upon them, the clandestine lovers. Let's draw them out. Huhh! They've been discovered by the sultan. He will not be pleased. Huhh! And now the sultan is in danger. And now, we have to open it up to find out what's going to happen next. Try experiencing that on a Kindle. (Laughter) Don't get me started. Seriously. Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity. Do you know what John Updike used to do the first thing when he would get a copy of one of his new books from Alfred A. Knopf? He'd smell it. Then he'd run his hand over the rag paper, and the pungent ink and the deckled edges of the pages. All those years, all those books, he never got tired of it. Now, I am all for the iPad, but trust me — smelling it will get you nowhere. (Laughter) Now the Apple guys are texting, "Develop odor emission plug-in." (Laughter) And the last story I'm going to talk about is quite a story. A woman named Aomame in 1984 Japan finds herself negotiating down a spiral staircase off an elevated highway. When she gets to the bottom, she can't help but feel that, all of a sudden, she's entered a new reality that's just slightly different from the one that she left, but very similar, but different. And so, we're talking about parallel planes of existence, sort of like a book jacket and the book that it covers. So how do we show this? We go back to Hepburn and Dietrich, but now we merge them. So we're talking about different planes, different pieces of paper. So this is on a semi-transparent piece of velum. It's one part of the form and content. When it's on top of the paper board, which is the opposite, it forms this. So even if you don't know anything about this book, you are forced to consider a single person straddling two planes of existence. And the object itself invited exploration interaction, consideration and touch. This debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list. This is unheard of, both for us the publisher, and the author. We're talking a 900-page book that is as weird as it is compelling, and featuring a climactic scene in which a horde of tiny people emerge from the mouth of a sleeping girl and cause a German Shepherd to explode. (Laughter) Not exactly Jackie Collins. Fourteen weeks on the Best Seller list, eight printings, and still going strong. So even though we love publishing as an art, we very much know it's a business too, and that if we do our jobs right and get a little lucky, that great art can be great business. So that's my story. To be continued. What does it look like? Yes. It can, it does and it will, but for this book designer, page-turner, dog-eared place-holder, notes in the margins-taker, ink-sniffer, the story looks like this. Thank you. (Applause)

On the virtual dissection table

{0: 'Jack is the CEO of Anatomage, a company specializing on 3D medical technology.'}

TED2012

You know, cadaver dissection is the traditional way of learning human anatomy. For students, it's quite an experience, but for a school, it could be very difficult or expensive to maintain. So we learned the majority of anatomic classes taught, they do not have a cadaver dissection lab. Maybe those reasons, or depending on where you are, cadavers may not be easily available. So to address this, we developed with a Dr. Brown in Stanford: virtual dissection table. So we call this Anatomage Table. So with this Anatomage Table, students can experience the dissection without a human cadaver. And the table form is important, and since it's touch-interactive, just like the way they do dissections in the lab, or furthermore just the way a surgeon operates on a patient you can literally interact with your table. Our digital body is one-to-one life size, so this is exactly the way students will see the real anatomy. I'm going to do some demonstrations. As you can see, I use my finger to interact with my digital body. I'm going to do some cuts. I can cut any way I want to, so I cut right here. Then it's going to show inside. And I can change my cut to see different parts. Maybe I can cut there, see the brain, and I can change my cut. You can see some internal organs. So we call this the slicer mode. OK, I'm going to do another cut. Right there. This shows a lot of internal structures. So if I want to see the back side, I can flip and see from behind. Like this. So if these images are uncomfortable to you or disturbing to you, that means we did the right job. So our doctors said these are eye candies. So instead of just butchering the body, I'd like to do more clinically meaningful dissections. What I'm going to do is I'm going to peel off all the skin, muscles and bones, just to see a few internal organs. Right here. Let's say I'm going to cut the liver right here. OK. Let's say I'm interested in looking at the heart. I'm going to do some surgery here. I'm going to cut some veins, arteries. Oops! ... You don't want to hear "oops" in real surgery. (Laughter) But fortunately, our digital man has "undo." (Laughter) Okay. All right then. Let me zoom in. I'm going to make a cut right there. And then you can see the inside of the heart. You can see the atrium and the ventricles, how blood flows to our arteries and veins. Just like this, students can isolate anybody and dissect any way you want to. It doesn't have to be always dissection. Since it's digital, we can do reverse dissection. So let me show you, I'm going to start with the skeletal structure, and I can add a few internal organs. Yep. Maybe I can add quickly this way. And I can build muscles gradually, just like that. We can see tendons and muscles. Wish I could build my muscle this fast. (Laughter) And this is another way to learn anatomy. Another thing I can show you is, more often than not, doctors get to meet patients in X-ray form. So, Anatomage Table shows exactly how the anatomy will appear in X-ray. You can also interact with your X-ray, and also if you want, you can compare with how anatomy would appear in X-ray, too. So when you are done, just bring back the body and then it's ready for another session. It looks like our table also can transform gender, too. It's a female now. So this is Anatomage Table. Thank you. (Applause)

How can technology transform the human body?

{0: 'Trained as a classical ballerina and architect, Lucy McRae is fascinated by the human body, and how it can be shaped by technology. '}

TED2012

I call myself a body architect. I trained in classical ballet and have a background in architecture and fashion. As a body architect, I fascinate with the human body and explore how I can transform it. I worked at Philips Electronics in the far-future design research lab, looking 20 years into the future. I explored the human skin, and how technology can transform the body. I worked on concepts like an electronic tattoo, which is augmented by touch, or dresses that blushed and shivered with light. I started my own experiments. These were the low-tech approaches to the high-tech conversations I was having. These are Q-tips stuck to my roommate with wig glue. (Laughter) I started a collaboration with a friend of mine, Bart Hess — he doesn't normally look like this — and we used ourselves as models. We transformed our apartments into our laboratories, and worked in a very spontaneous and immediate way. We were creating visual imagery provoking human evolution. Whilst I was at Philips, we discussed this idea of a maybe technology, something that wasn't either switched on or off, but in between. A maybe that could take the form of a gas or a liquid. And I became obsessed with this idea of blurring the perimeter of the body, so you couldn't see where the skin ended and the near environment started. I set up my studio in the red-light district and obsessively wrapped myself in plumbing tubing, and found a way to redefine the skin and create this dynamic textile. I was introduced to Robyn, the Swedish pop star, and she was also exploring how technology coexists with raw human emotion. And she talked about how technology with these new feathers, this new face paint, this punk, the way that we identify with the world, and we made this music video. I'm fascinated with the idea of what happens when you merge biology with technology, and I remember reading about this idea of being able to reprogram biology, in the future, away from disease and aging. And I thought about this concept of, imagine if we could reprogram our own body odor, modify and biologically enhance it, and how would that change the way that we communicate with each other? Or the way that we attract sexual partners? And would we revert back to being more like animals, more primal modes of communication? I worked with a synthetic biologist, and I created a swallowable perfume, which is a cosmetic pill that you eat and the fragrance comes out through the skin's surface when you perspire. It completely blows apart the way that perfume is, and provides a whole new format. It's perfume coming from the inside out. It redefines the role of skin, and our bodies become an atomizer. I've learned that there's no boundaries, and if I look at the evolution of my work i can see threads and connections that make sense. But when I look towards the future, the next project is completely unknown and wide open. I feel like I have all these ideas existing embedded inside of me, and it's these conversations and these experiences that connect these ideas, and they kind of instinctively come out. As a body architect, I've created this limitless and boundless platform for me to discover whatever I want. And I feel like I've just got started. So here's to another day at the office. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you! Thank you!

"Put the financial aid in the bag"

{0: 'Carvens Lissaint is a Haitian American poet, actor, singer and playwright, currently starring in the Tony-winning musical HAMILTON as George Washington on Broadway.'}

TEDYouth 2011

(Music) I want everyone to put their hands on top of their head. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put your hands on top of your head. Just relax. Just stay calm. Everything will be nice and smooth if you just participate and just relax, okay? Yeah. All right, now put your hands down. Don't be no hero. Put your hands down. Okay? All right. Now. Cool. Good. I want you to run all that financial aid. Yeah, sucka, put the scholarships in the bag, yeah, yeah. Put the scholarships in the bag. Yeah, you too, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you. Yeah, yeah. You over there, go put the Pell Grants in the bag. Put the Pell Grants in there too. Yeah, you. Go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, go over to that booth and get me some of them subsidized, some of them subsidized loans. It ain't a game no more. I know you're hiding the money somewhere here. With all this tuition you got me and my homies payin' — Woo! — I'm about to get gangster-scholar up in here. Up in here. I'm about to go N.W.A. meets Beastie Boys if I don't see the cash, man. Cause we're not gonna take it. ♪ Oh ... Oh, you thought I was playing. Oh, you thought this was a game. Back up, back up. Mind your business, that's all. What do you, think this is a game? What? Huh? You don't even know me. I'll say something else. Don't call me crazy. Do not call me — Rives, tell 'em don't call me crazy before I go crazy. I'm telling you, now I'm about to go crazy. I'm about to go Tupac Thug Life in here. Like, "I ain't a killer but don't push me. Revenge is like the sweetest joy —" Woo! I'm about to go Biggie Smalls Brooklyn type, like, "Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis. When I was dead broke —" Woo! I'm about to go KRS-One cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs-type wild. Like, "Wa da da dang, wa da da da dang, listen to my nine millimeter go bang." You know what? You are dumb. You are really dumb. Hide your kids, hide your wife, 'cause we gettin' financial aid all up and in and around here. You think this is a game? You think I want to be out here doing this? Do you know how hard it was to find these guns? All right, I'm sorry. You understand? I'm just trying to get my education. You know what I mean? I'm just trying to fight for the opportunity that my great-great-great-grandfather died for, you know what I'm saying? You know how my ancestors did sit-ins, just so I can sit in a classroom. And all these years, all y'all been doing is strangling the life out of my bank statement, leaving my pockets as vacant as parking lots. Professor Willie Lynch taught you well, huh? Keep the body, take the money. Force feed my people deception and failure. Condition our brains to malfunction at the sight of success. Just keep the cycle going. Make us pay for an education that will end up failing us. Put us in debt so we're giving back the money we earned from our back-breaking work. This seems all too familiar. Sounds like the rust of shackles locking their way onto my degree. Sounds like the Thirteenth Amendment in reverse. Lecture halls shouldn't feel like cotton fields, shouldn't sound like muffled freedom songs trapped in the jaws of a generation's dreams. Oho! Oh, it all makes sense. Give us enough to get by but not enough to provide for ourselves. Keep us psychologically feeble so we lose our purpose in the process. Stop thieving our aspirations out of our sleep. Don't call it financial aid if you're not helping anyone with it. We have fought. We have fought way too hard to let green paper build a barricade in front of our futures. I will not let you potentially rob food out of my children's stomach. Best believe I'm going out blasting. I ain't no killer, but don't push me. I wish it didn't come to this, but I have to for my cousins in Haiti who don't even know what a college looks like, for my best friend Raymond sitting in cell block nine instead of a university, for the nooses hanging my GPA by its neck. There is no other option. There is no other way. Just, please, put the money in the bag. Put the money in the bag. I just want to go to school, man. I just want to get my education. I just want to learn. I just want to grow. Put the money in the bag, please. Just put the money in the bag.

The other inconvenient truth

{0: 'Jonathan Foley studies complex environmental systems and their affects on society. His computer models have shown the deep impact agriculture is having on our planet.'}

TEDxTC

Tonight, I want to have a conversation about this incredible global issue that's at the intersection of land use, food and environment, something we can all relate to, and what I've been calling the other inconvenient truth. But first, I want to take you on a little journey. Let's first visit our planet, but at night, and from space. This is what our planet looks like from outer space at nighttime, if you were to take a satellite and travel around the planet. And the thing you would notice first, of course, is how dominant the human presence on our planet is. We see cities, we see oil fields, you can even make out fishing fleets in the sea, that we are dominating much of our planet, and mostly through the use of energy that we see here at night. But let's go back and drop it a little deeper and look during the daytime. What we see during the day is our landscapes. This is part of the Amazon Basin, a place called Rondônia in the south-center part of the Brazilian Amazon. If you look really carefully in the upper right-hand corner, you're going to see a thin white line, which is a road that was built in the 1970s. If we come back to the same place in 2001, what we're going to find is that these roads spurt off more roads, and more roads after that, at the end of which is a small clearing in the rainforest where there are going to be a few cows. These cows are used for beef. We're going to eat these cows. And these cows are eaten basically in South America, in Brazil and Argentina. They're not being shipped up here. But this kind of fishbone pattern of deforestation is something we notice a lot of around the tropics, especially in this part of the world. If we go a little bit further south in our little tour of the world, we can go to the Bolivian edge of the Amazon, here also in 1975, and if you look really carefully, there's a thin white line through that kind of seam, and there's a lone farmer out there in the middle of the primeval jungle. Let's come back again a few years later, here in 2003, and we'll see that that landscape actually looks a lot more like Iowa than it does like a rainforest. In fact, what you're seeing here are soybean fields. These soybeans are being shipped to Europe and to China as animal feed, especially after the mad cow disease scare about a decade ago, where we don't want to feed animals animal protein anymore, because that can transmit disease. Instead, we want to feed them more vegetable proteins. So soybeans have really exploded, showing how trade and globalization are really responsible for the connections to rainforests and the Amazon — an incredibly strange and interconnected world that we have today. Well, again and again, what we find as we look around the world in our little tour of the world is that landscape after landscape after landscape have been cleared and altered for growing food and other crops. So one of the questions we've been asking is, how much of the world is used to grow food, and where is it exactly, and how can we change that into the future, and what does it mean? Well, our team has been looking at this on a global scale, using satellite data and ground-based data kind of to track farming on a global scale. And this is what we found, and it's startling. This map shows the presence of agriculture on planet Earth. The green areas are the areas we use to grow crops, like wheat or soybeans or corn or rice or whatever. That's 16 million square kilometers' worth of land. If you put it all together in one place, it'd be the size of South America. The second area, in brown, is the world's pastures and rangelands, where our animals live. That area's about 30 million square kilometers, or about an Africa's worth of land, a huge amount of land, and it's the best land, of course, is what you see. And what's left is, like, the middle of the Sahara Desert, or Siberia, or the middle of a rain forest. We're using a planet's worth of land already. If we look at this carefully, we find it's about 40 percent of the Earth's land surface is devoted to agriculture, and it's 60 times larger than all the areas we complain about, our suburban sprawl and our cities where we mostly live. Half of humanity lives in cities today, but a 60-times-larger area is used to grow food. So this is an amazing kind of result, and it really shocked us when we looked at that. So we're using an enormous amount of land for agriculture, but also we're using a lot of water. This is a photograph flying into Arizona, and when you look at it, you're like, "What are they growing here?" It turns out they're growing lettuce in the middle of the desert using water sprayed on top. Now, the irony is, it's probably sold in our supermarket shelves in the Twin Cities. But what's really interesting is, this water's got to come from some place, and it comes from here, the Colorado River in North America. Well, the Colorado on a typical day in the 1950s, this is just, you know, not a flood, not a drought, kind of an average day, it looks something like this. But if we come back today, during a normal condition to the exact same location, this is what's left. The difference is mainly irrigating the desert for food, or maybe golf courses in Scottsdale, you take your pick. Well, this is a lot of water, and again, we're mining water and using it to grow food, and today, if you travel down further down the Colorado, it dries up completely and no longer flows into the ocean. We've literally consumed an entire river in North America for irrigation. Well, that's not even the worst example in the world. This probably is: the Aral Sea. Now, a lot you will remember this from your geography classes. This is in the former Soviet Union in between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, one of the great inland seas of the world. But there's kind of a paradox here, because it looks like it's surrounded by desert. Why is this sea here? The reason it's here is because, on the right-hand side, you see two little rivers kind of coming down through the sand, feeding this basin with water. Those rivers are draining snowmelt from mountains far to the east, where snow melts, it travels down the river through the desert, and forms the great Aral Sea. Well, in the 1950s, the Soviets decided to divert that water to irrigate the desert to grow cotton, believe it or not, in Kazakhstan, to sell cotton to the international markets to bring foreign currency into the Soviet Union. They really needed the money. Well, you can imagine what happens. You turn off the water supply to the Aral Sea, what's going to happen? Here it is in 1973, 1986, 1999, 2004, and about 11 months ago. It's pretty extraordinary. Now a lot of us in the audience here live in the Midwest. Imagine that was Lake Superior. Imagine that was Lake Huron. It's an extraordinary change. This is not only a change in water and where the shoreline is, this is a change in the fundamentals of the environment of this region. Let's start with this. The Soviet Union didn't really have a Sierra Club. Let's put it that way. So what you find in the bottom of the Aral Sea ain't pretty. There's a lot of toxic waste, a lot of things that were dumped there that are now becoming airborne. One of those small islands that was remote and impossible to get to was a site of Soviet biological weapons testing. You can walk there today. Weather patterns have changed. Nineteen of the unique 20 fish species found only in the Aral Sea are now wiped off the face of the Earth. This is an environmental disaster writ large. But let's bring it home. This is a picture that Al Gore gave me a few years ago that he took when he was in the Soviet Union a long, long time ago, showing the fishing fleets of the Aral Sea. You see the canal they dug? They were so desperate to try to, kind of, float the boats into the remaining pools of water, but they finally had to give up because the piers and the moorings simply couldn't keep up with the retreating shoreline. I don't know about you, but I'm terrified that future archaeologists will dig this up and write stories about our time in history, and wonder, "What were you thinking?" Well, that's the future we have to look forward to. We already use about 50 percent of the Earth's fresh water that's sustainable, and agriculture alone is 70 percent of that. So we use a lot of water, a lot of land for agriculture. We also use a lot of the atmosphere for agriculture. Usually when we think about the atmosphere, we think about climate change and greenhouse gases, and mostly around energy, but it turns out agriculture is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases too. If you look at carbon dioxide from burning tropical rainforest, or methane coming from cows and rice, or nitrous oxide from too many fertilizers, it turns out agriculture is 30 percent of the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere from human activity. That's more than all our transportation. It's more than all our electricity. It's more than all other manufacturing, in fact. It's the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases of any human activity in the world. And yet, we don't talk about it very much. So we have this incredible presence today of agriculture dominating our planet, whether it's 40 percent of our land surface, 70 percent of the water we use, 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. We've doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus around the world simply by using fertilizers, causing huge problems of water quality from rivers, lakes, and even oceans, and it's also the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss. So without a doubt, agriculture is the single most powerful force unleashed on this planet since the end of the ice age. No question. And it rivals climate change in importance. And they're both happening at the same time. But what's really important here to remember is that it's not all bad. It's not that agriculture's a bad thing. In fact, we completely depend on it. It's not optional. It's not a luxury. It's an absolute necessity. We have to provide food and feed and, yeah, fiber and even biofuels to something like seven billion people in the world today, and if anything, we're going to have the demands on agriculture increase into the future. It's not going to go away. It's going to get a lot bigger, mainly because of growing population. We're seven billion people today heading towards at least nine, probably nine and a half before we're done. More importantly, changing diets. As the world becomes wealthier as well as more populous, we're seeing increases in dietary consumption of meat, which take a lot more resources than a vegetarian diet does. So more people, eating more stuff, and richer stuff, and of course having an energy crisis at the same time, where we have to replace oil with other energy sources that will ultimately have to include some kinds of biofuels and bio-energy sources. So you put these together. It's really hard to see how we're going to get to the rest of the century without at least doubling global agricultural production. Well, how are we going to do this? How are going to double global ag production around the world? Well, we could try to farm more land. This is an analysis we've done, where on the left is where the crops are today, on the right is where they could be based on soils and climate, assuming climate change doesn't disrupt too much of this, which is not a good assumption. We could farm more land, but the problem is the remaining lands are in sensitive areas. They have a lot of biodiversity, a lot of carbon, things we want to protect. So we could grow more food by expanding farmland, but we'd better not, because it's ecologically a very, very dangerous thing to do. Instead, we maybe want to freeze the footprint of agriculture and farm the lands we have better. This is work that we're doing to try to highlight places in the world where we could improve yields without harming the environment. The green areas here show where corn yields, just showing corn as an example, are already really high, probably the maximum you could find on Earth today for that climate and soil, but the brown areas and yellow areas are places where we're only getting maybe 20 or 30 percent of the yield you should be able to get. You see a lot of this in Africa, even Latin America, but interestingly, Eastern Europe, where Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries used to be, is still a mess agriculturally. Now, this would require nutrients and water. It's going to either be organic or conventional or some mix of the two to deliver that. Plants need water and nutrients. But we can do this, and there are opportunities to make this work. But we have to do it in a way that is sensitive to meeting the food security needs of the future and the environmental security needs of the future. We have to figure out how to make this tradeoff between growing food and having a healthy environment work better. Right now, it's kind of an all-or-nothing proposition. We can grow food in the background — that's a soybean field — and in this flower diagram, it shows we grow a lot of food, but we don't have a lot clean water, we're not storing a lot of carbon, we don't have a lot of biodiversity. In the foreground, we have this prairie that's wonderful from the environmental side, but you can't eat anything. What's there to eat? We need to figure out how to bring both of those together into a new kind of agriculture that brings them all together. Now, when I talk about this, people often tell me, "Well, isn't blank the answer?" — organic food, local food, GMOs, new trade subsidies, new farm bills — and yeah, we have a lot of good ideas here, but not any one of these is a silver bullet. In fact, what I think they are is more like silver buckshot. And I love silver buckshot. You put it together and you've got something really powerful, but we need to put them together. So what we have to do, I think, is invent a new kind of agriculture that blends the best ideas of commercial agriculture and the green revolution with the best ideas of organic farming and local food and the best ideas of environmental conservation, not to have them fighting each other but to have them collaborating together to form a new kind of agriculture, something I call "terraculture," or farming for a whole planet. Now, having this conversation has been really hard, and we've been trying very hard to bring these key points to people to reduce the controversy, to increase the collaboration. I want to show you a short video that does kind of show our efforts right now to bring these sides together into a single conversation. So let me show you that. (Music) ("Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota: Driven to Discover") (Music) ("The world population is growing by 75 million people each year. That's almost the size of Germany. Today, we're nearing 7 billion people. At this rate, we'll reach 9 billion people by 2040. And we all need food. But how? How do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet? We already know climate change is a big problem. But it's not the only problem. We need to face 'the other inconvenient truth.' A global crisis in agriculture. Population growth + meat consumption + dairy consumption + energy costs + bioenergy production = stress on natural resources. More than 40% of Earth's land has been cleared for agriculture. Global croplands cover 16 million km². That's almost the size of South America. Global pastures cover 30 million km². That's the size of Africa. Agriculture uses 60 times more land than urban and suburban areas combined. Irrigation is the biggest use of water on the planet. We use 2,800 cubic kilometers of water on crops every year. That's enough to fill 7,305 Empire State Buildings every day. Today, many large rivers have reduced flows. Some dry up altogether. Look at the Aral Sea, now turned to desert. Or the Colorado River, which no longer flows to the ocean. Fertilizers have more than doubled the phosphorus and nitrogen in the environment. The consequence? Widespread water pollution and massive degradation of lakes and rivers. Surprisingly, agriculture is the biggest contributor to climate change. It generates 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. That's more than the emissions from all electricity and industry, or from all the world's planes, trains and automobiles. Most agricultural emissions come from tropical deforestation, methane from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide from over-fertilizing. There is nothing we do that transforms the world more than agriculture. And there's nothing we do that is more crucial to our survival. Here's the dilemma... As the world grows by several billion more people, We'll need to double, maybe even triple, global food production. So where do we go from here? We need a bigger conversation, an international dialogue. We need to invest in real solutions: incentives for farmers, precision agriculture, new crop varieties, drip irrigation, gray water recycling, better tillage practices, smarter diets. We need everyone at the table. Advocates of commercial agriculture, environmental conservation, and organic farming... must work together. There is no single solution. We need collaboration, imagination, determination, because failure is not an option. How do we feed the world without destroying it? Yeah, so we face one of the greatest grand challenges in all of human history today: the need to feed nine billion people and do so sustainably and equitably and justly, at the same time protecting our planet for this and future generations. This is going to be one of the hardest things we ever have done in human history, and we absolutely have to get it right, and we have to get it right on our first and only try. So thanks very much. (Applause)

Half a million secrets

{0: 'Frank Warren is the creator of the PostSecret Project, a blog full of secrets anonymously shared via postcard.'}

TED2012

Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets. It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004. I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this. They were blank on one side, and on the other side I listed some simple instructions. I asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they'd never told anyone before. And I handed out these postcards randomly on the streets of Washington, D.C., not knowing what to expect. But soon the idea began spreading virally. People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards. I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox, not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C., but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq. Soon my crazy idea didn't seem so crazy. PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world. And this is my postcard collection today. You can see my wife struggling to stack a brick of postcards on a pyramid of over a half-million secrets. What I'd like to do now is share with you a very special handful of secrets from that collection, starting with this one. "I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. I never did have someone." Secrets can take many forms. They can be shocking or silly or soulful. They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet. (Laughter) Maybe one of you sent this one in. I don't know. This one does a great job of demonstrating the creativity that people have when they make and mail me a postcard. This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side. "Dear Birthmother, I have great parents. I've found love. I'm happy." Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now. "Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead." "I used to work with a bunch of uptight religious people, so sometimes I didn't wear panties, and just had a big smile and chuckled to myself." (Laughter) This next one takes a little explanation before I share it with you. I love to speak on college campuses and share secrets and the stories with students. And sometimes afterwards I'll stick around and sign books and take photos with students. And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos. And I should also mention that, just like today, at that PostSecret event, I was using a wireless microphone. "Your mic wasn't off during sound check. We all heard you pee." (Laughter) This was really embarrassing when it happened, until I realized it could have been worse. Right. You know what I'm saying. (Laughter) "Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use. I feel like the happiest person on Earth (now.)" "One of these men is the father of my son. He pays me a lot to keep it a secret." (Laughter) "That Saturday when you wondered where I was, well, I was getting your ring. It's in my pocket right now." I had this postcard posted on the PostSecret blog two years ago on Valentine's Day. It was the very bottom, the last secret in the long column. And it hadn't been up for more than a couple hours before I received this exuberant email from the guy who mailed me this postcard. And he said, "Frank, I've got to share with you this story that just played out in my life." He said, "My knees are still shaking." He said, "For three years, my girlfriend and I, we've made it this Sunday morning ritual to visit the PostSecret blog together and read the secrets out loud. I read some to her, she reads some to me." He says, "It's really brought us closer together through the years. And so when I discovered that you had posted my surprise proposal to my girlfriend at the very bottom, I was beside myself. And I tried to act calm, not to give anything away. And just like every Sunday, we started reading the secrets out loud to each other." He said, "But this time it seemed like it was taking her forever to get through each one." But she finally did. She got to that bottom secret, his proposal to her. And he said, "She read it once and then she read it again." And she turned to him and said, "Is that our cat?" (Laughter) And when she saw him, he was down on one knee, he had the ring out. He popped the question, she said yes. It was a very happy ending. So I emailed him back and I said, "Please share with me an image, something, that I can share with the whole PostSecret community and let everyone know your fairy tale ending." And he emailed me this picture. (Laughter) "I found your camera at Lollapalooza this summer. I finally got the pictures developed and I'd love to give them to you." This picture never got returned back to the people who lost it, but this secret has impacted many lives, starting with a student up in Canada named Matty. Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website, a website called IFoundYourCamera. Matty invites people to mail him digital cameras that they've found, memory sticks that have been lost with orphan photos. And Matty takes the pictures off these cameras and posts them on his website every week. And people come to visit to see if they can identify a picture they've lost or help somebody else get the photos back to them that they might be desperately searching for. This one's my favorite. (Laughter) Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers. And it might seem like a simple idea, and it is, but the impact it can have on people's lives can be huge. Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture. "That's me, my husband and son. The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother. Thank you for making your site. These pictures mean more to me than you know. My son's birth is on this camera. He turns four tomorrow." Every picture that you see there and thousands of others have been returned back to the person who lost it — sometimes crossing oceans, sometimes going through language barriers. This is the last postcard I have to share with you today. "When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again." When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died. They said that by preserving those voices and sharing them, it helped them keep the spirit of their loved ones alive. One young girl posted the last message she ever heard from her grandmother. Secrets can take many forms. They can be shocking or silly or soulful. They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet again. Voicemail recording: First saved voice message. Grandma: ♫ It's somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ Somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ The candles are lighted ♫ ♫ on somebody's cake ♫ ♫ And we're all invited ♫ ♫ for somebody's sake ♫ You're 21 years old today. Have a real happy birthday, and I love you. I'll say bye for now. FW: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: Frank, that was beautiful, so touching. Have you ever sent yourself a postcard? Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret? FW: I have one of my own secrets in every book. I think in some ways, the reason I started the project, even though I didn't know it at the time, was because I was struggling with my own secrets. And it was through crowd-sourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me, that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me. JC: And has anyone ever discovered which secret was yours in the book? Has anyone in your life been able to tell? FW: Sometimes I share that information, yeah. (Laughter) (Applause)

Moral behavior in animals

{0: 'Frans de Waal studies primate social behavior -- how they fight and reconcile, share and cooperate.'}

TEDxPeachtree

I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after. And I've always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century. And what is interesting about him in relation to morality is that he lived at a time where religion's influence was waning, and he was sort of wondering, I think, what would happen with society if there was no religion or if there was less religion. And so he painted this famous painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which some have interpreted as being humanity before the Fall, or being humanity without any Fall at all. And so it makes you wonder, what would happen if we hadn't tasted the fruit of knowledge, so to speak, and what kind of morality would we have. Much later, as a student, I went to a very different garden, a zoological garden in Arnhem where we keep chimpanzees. This is me at an early age with a baby chimpanzee. (Laughter) And I discovered there that the chimpanzees are very power-hungry and wrote a book about it. And at that time the focus in a lot of animal research was on aggression and competition. I painted a whole picture of the animal kingdom and humanity included, was that deep down we are competitors, we are aggressive, we are all out for our own profit, basically. This is the launch of my book. I'm not sure how well the chimpanzees read it, but they surely seemed interested in the book. (Laughter) Now in the process of doing all this work on power and dominance and aggression and so on, I discovered that chimpanzees reconcile after fights. And so what you see here is two males who have had a fight. They ended up in a tree, and one of them holds out a hand to the other. And about a second after I took the picture, they came together in the fork of the tree and kissed and embraced each other. And this is very interesting because at the time, everything was about competition and aggression, so it wouldn't make any sense. The only thing that matters is that you win or you lose. But why reconcile after a fight? That doesn't make any sense. This is the way bonobos do it. Bonobos do everything with sex. And so they also reconcile with sex. But the principle is exactly the same. The principle is that you have a valuable relationship that is damaged by conflict, so you need to do something about it. So my whole picture of the animal kingdom, and including humans also, started to change at that time. So we have this image in political science, economics, the humanities, the philosophy for that matter, that man is a wolf to man. And so deep down, our nature is actually nasty. I think it's a very unfair image for the wolf. The wolf is, after all, a very cooperative animal. And that's why many of you have a dog at home, which has all these characteristics also. And it's really unfair to humanity, because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for. So I started getting interested in those issues and studying that in other animals. So these are the pillars of morality. If you ask anyone, "What is morality based on?" these are the two factors that always come out. One is reciprocity, and associated with it is a sense of justice and a sense of fairness. And the other one is empathy and compassion. And human morality is more than this, but if you would remove these two pillars, there would be not much remaining, I think. So they're absolutely essential. So let me give you a few examples here. This is a very old video from the Yerkes Primate Center, where they trained chimpanzees to cooperate. So this is already about a hundred years ago that we were doing experiments on cooperation. What you have here is two young chimpanzees who have a box, and the box is too heavy for one chimp to pull in. And of course, there's food on the box. Otherwise they wouldn't be pulling so hard. And so they're bringing in the box. And you can see that they're synchronized. You can see that they work together, they pull at the same moment. It's already a big advance over many other animals who wouldn't be able to do that. Now you're going to get a more interesting picture, because now one of the two chimps has been fed. So one of the two is not really interested in the task anymore. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Laughter) [- and sometimes appears to convey its wishes and meanings by gestures.] Now look at what happens at the very end of this. (Laughter) He takes basically everything. (Laughter) There are two interesting parts about this. One is that the chimp on the right has a full understanding he needs the partner — so a full understanding of the need for cooperation. The second one is that the partner is willing to work even though he's not interested in the food. Why would that be? Well, that probably has to do with reciprocity. There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors. He will get a return favor at some point in the future. And so that's how this all operates. We do the same task with elephants. Now, it's very dangerous to work with elephants. Another problem with elephants is that you cannot make an apparatus that is too heavy for a single elephant. Now you can probably make it, but it's going to be a pretty clumsy apparatus, I think. And so what we did in that case — we do these studies in Thailand for Josh Plotnik — is we have an apparatus around which there is a rope, a single rope. And if you pull on this side of the rope, the rope disappears on the other side. So two elephants need to pick it up at exactly the same time, and pull. Otherwise nothing is going to happen and the rope disappears. The first tape you're going to see is two elephants who are released together arrive at the apparatus. The apparatus is on the left, with food on it. And so they come together, they arrive together, they pick it up together, and they pull together. So it's actually fairly simple for them. There they are. So that's how they bring it in. But now we're going to make it more difficult. Because the purpose of this experiment is to see how well they understand cooperation. Do they understand that as well as the chimps, for example? What we do in the next step is we release one elephant before the other and that elephant needs to be smart enough to stay there and wait and not pull at the rope — because if he pulls at the rope, it disappears and the whole test is over. Now this elephant does something illegal that we did not teach it. But it shows the understanding he has, because he puts his big foot on the rope, stands on the rope and waits there for the other, and then the other is going to do all the work for him. So it's what we call freeloading. (Laughter) But it shows the intelligence that the elephants have. They developed several of these alternative techniques that we did not approve of, necessarily. (Laughter) So the other elephant is now coming ... and is going to pull it in. Now look at the other; it doesn't forget to eat, of course. (Laughter) This was the cooperation and reciprocity part. Now something on empathy. Empathy is my main topic at the moment, of research. And empathy has two qualities: One is the understanding part of it. This is just a regular definition: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. And the emotional part. Empathy has basically two channels: One is the body channel, If you talk with a sad person, you're going to adopt a sad expression and a sad posture, and before you know it, you feel sad. And that's sort of the body channel of emotional empathy, which many animals have. Your average dog has that also. That's why people keep mammals in the home and not turtles or snakes or something like that, who don't have that kind of empathy. And then there's a cognitive channel, which is more that you can take the perspective of somebody else. And that's more limited. Very few animals, I think elephants and apes, can do that kind of thing. So synchronization, which is part of that whole empathy mechanism, is a very old one in the animal kingdom. In humans, of course, we can study that with yawn contagion. Humans yawn when others yawn. And it's related to empathy. It activates the same areas in the brain. Also, we know that people who have a lot of yawn contagion are highly empathic. People who have problems with empathy, such as autistic children, they don't have yawn contagion. So it is connected. And we study that in our chimpanzees by presenting them with an animated head. So that's what you see on the upper-left, an animated head that yawns. And there's a chimpanzee watching, an actual real chimpanzee watching a computer screen on which we play these animations. (Laughter) So yawn contagion that you're probably all familiar with — and maybe you're going to start yawning soon now — is something that we share with other animals. And that's related to that whole body channel of synchronization that underlies empathy, and that is universal in the mammals, basically. We also study more complex expressions — This is consolation. This is a male chimpanzee who has lost a fight and he's screaming, and a juvenile comes over and puts an arm around him and calms him down. That's consolation. It's very similar to human consolation. And consolation behavior — (Laughter) it's empathy driven. Actually, the way to study empathy in human children is to instruct a family member to act distressed, and then to see what young children do. And so it is related to empathy, and that's the kind of expressions we look at. We also recently published an experiment you may have heard about. It's on altruism and chimpanzees, where the question is: Do chimpanzees care about the welfare of somebody else? And for decades it had been assumed that only humans can do that, that only humans worry about the welfare of somebody else. Now we did a very simple experiment. We do that on chimpanzees that live in Lawrenceville, in the field station of Yerkes. And so that's how they live. And we call them into a room and do experiments with them. In this case, we put two chimpanzees side-by-side, and one has a bucket full of tokens, and the tokens have different meanings. One kind of token feeds only the partner who chooses, the other one feeds both of them. So this is a study we did with Vicki Horner. And here, you have the two color tokens. So they have a whole bucket full of them. And they have to pick one of the two colors. You will see how that goes. So if this chimp makes the selfish choice, which is the red token in this case, he needs to give it to us, we pick it up, we put it on a table where there's two food rewards, but in this case, only the one on the right gets food. The one on the left walks away because she knows already that this is not a good test for her. Then the next one is the pro-social token. So the one who makes the choices — that's the interesting part here — for the one who makes the choices, it doesn't really matter. So she gives us now a pro-social token and both chimps get fed. So the one who makes the choices always gets a reward. So it doesn't matter whatsoever. And she should actually be choosing blindly. But what we find is that they prefer the pro-social token. So this is the 50 percent line, that's the random expectation. And especially if the partner draws attention to itself, they choose more. And if the partner puts pressure on them — so if the partner starts spitting water and intimidating them — then the choices go down. (Laughter) It's as if they're saying, "If you're not behaving, I'm not going to be pro-social today." And this is what happens without a partner, when there's no partner sitting there. So we found that the chimpanzees do care about the well-being of somebody else — especially, these are other members of their own group. So the final experiment that I want to mention to you is our fairness study. And so this became a very famous study. And there are now many more, because after we did this about 10 years ago, it became very well-known. And we did that originally with Capuchin monkeys. And I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did. It has now been done with dogs and with birds and with chimpanzees. But with Sarah Brosnan, we started out with Capuchin monkeys. So what we did is we put two Capuchin monkeys side-by-side. Again, these animals, live in a group, they know each other. We take them out of the group, put them in a test chamber. And there's a very simple task that they need to do. And if you give both of them cucumber for the task, the two monkeys side-by-side, they're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row. So cucumber, even though it's only really water in my opinion, but cucumber is perfectly fine for them. Now if you give the partner grapes — the food preferences of my Capuchin monkeys correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket — and so if you give them grapes — it's a far better food — then you create inequity between them. So that's the experiment we did. Recently, we videotaped it with new monkeys who'd never done the task, thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction, and that turned out to be right. The one on the left is the monkey who gets cucumber. The one on the right is the one who gets grapes. The one who gets cucumber — note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine. The first piece she eats. Then she sees the other one getting grape, and you will see what happens. So she gives a rock to us. That's the task. And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it. The other one needs to give a rock to us. And that's what she does. And she gets a grape ... and eats it. The other one sees that. She gives a rock to us now, gets, again, cucumber. (Laughter) (Laughter ends) She tests a rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us. And she gets cucumber again. (Laughter) So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here. (Laughter) (Applause) I still have two minutes left — let me tell you a funny story about this. This study became very famous and we got a lot of comments, especially anthropologists, economists, philosophers. They didn't like this at all. Because they had decided in their minds, I believe, that fairness is a very complex issue, and that animals cannot have it. And so one philosopher even wrote us that it was impossible that monkeys had a sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution. (Laughter) And another one wrote a whole chapter saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness, if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes. Now the funny thing is that Sarah Brosnan, who's been doing this with chimpanzees, had a couple of combinations of chimpanzees where, indeed, the one who would get the grape would refuse the grape until the other guy also got a grape. So we're getting very close to the human sense of fairness. And I think philosophers need to rethink their philosophy for a while. So let me summarize. I believe there's an evolved morality. I think morality is much more than what I've been talking about, but it would be impossible without these ingredients that we find in other primates, which are empathy and consolation, pro-social tendencies and reciprocity and a sense of fairness. And so we work on these particular issues to see if we can create a morality from the bottom up, so to speak, without necessarily god and religion involved, and to see how we can get to an evolved morality. And I thank you for your attention. (Applause)

Let's put birth control back on the agenda

{0: 'Melinda French Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she puts into practice the idea that every life has equal value.'}

TEDxChange

Today, I'd like to talk with you about something that should be a totally uncontroversial topic. But, unfortunately, it's become incredibly controversial. This year, if you think about it, over a billion couples will have sex with one another. Couples like this one, and this one, and this one, and, yes, even this one. (Laughter) And my idea is this — all these men and women should be free to decide whether they do or do not want to conceive a child. And they should be able to use one of these birth control methods to act on their decision. Now, I think you'd have a hard time finding many people who disagree with this idea. Over one billion people use birth control without any hesitation at all. They want the power to plan their own lives and to raise healthier, better educated and more prosperous families. But, for an idea that is so broadly accepted in private, birth control certainly generates a lot of opposition in public. Some people think when we talk about contraception that it's code for abortion, which it's not. Some people — let's be honest — they're uncomfortable with the topic because it's about sex. Some people worry that the real goal of family planning is to control populations. These are all side issues that have attached themselves to this core idea that men and women should be able to decide when they want to have a child. And as a result, birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda. The victims of this paralysis are the people of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Here in Germany, the proportion of people that use contraception is about 66 percent. That's about what you'd expect. In El Salvador, very similar, 66 percent. Thailand, 64 percent. But let's compare that to other places, like Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest states in India. In fact, if Uttar Pradesh was its own country, it would be the fifth largest country in the world. Their contraception rate — 29 percent. Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, 10 percent. Chad, 2 percent. Let's just take one country in Africa, Senegal. Their rate is about 12 percent. But why is it so low? One reason is that the most popular contraceptives are rarely available. Women in Africa will tell you over and over again that what they prefer today is an injectable. They get it in their arm — and they go about four times a year, they have to get it every three months — to get their injection. The reason women like it so much in Africa is they can hide it from their husbands, who sometimes want a lot of children. The problem is every other time a woman goes into a clinic in Senegal, that injection is stocked out. It's stocked out 150 days out of the year. So can you imagine the situation — she walks all this way to go get her injection. She leaves her field, sometimes leaves her children, and it's not there. And she doesn't know when it's going to be available again. This is the same story across the continent of Africa today. And so what we've created as a world has become a life-and-death crisis. There are 100,000 women [per year] who say they don't want to be pregnant and they die in childbirth — 100,000 women a year. There are another 600,000 women [per year] who say they didn't want to be pregnant in the first place, and they give birth to a baby and her baby dies in that first month of life. I know everyone wants to save these mothers and these children. But somewhere along the way, we got confused by our own conversation. And we stopped trying to save these lives. So if we're going to make progress on this issue, we have to be really clear about what our agenda is. We're not talking about abortion. We're not talking about population control. What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives and to give their families the best possible future. Now, as a world, there are lots of things we have to do in the global health community if we want to make the world better in the future — things like fight diseases. So many children today die of diarrhea, as you heard earlier, and pneumonia. They kill literally millions of children a year. We also need to help small farmers — farmers who plow small plots of land in Africa — so that they can grow enough food to feed their children. And we have to make sure that children are educated around the world. But one of the simplest and most transformative things we can do is to give everybody access to birth control methods that almost all Germans have access to and all Americans, at some point, they use these tools during their life. And I think as long as we're really clear about what our agenda is, there's a global movement waiting to happen and ready to get behind this totally uncontroversial idea. When I grew up, I grew up in a Catholic home. I still consider myself a practicing Catholic. My mom's great-uncle was a Jesuit priest. My great-aunt was a Dominican nun. She was a schoolteacher and a principal her entire life. In fact, she's the one who taught me as a young girl how to read. I was very close to her. And I went to Catholic schools for my entire childhood until I left home to go to university. In my high school, Ursuline Academy, the nuns made service and social justice a high priority in the school. Today, in the [Gates] Foundation's work, I believe I'm applying the lessons that I learned in high school. So, in the tradition of Catholic scholars, the nuns also taught us to question received teachings. And one of the teachings that we girls and my peers questioned was is birth control really a sin? Because I think one of the reasons we have this huge discomfort talking about contraception is this lingering concern that if we separate sex from reproduction, we're going to promote promiscuity. And I think that's a reasonable question to be asked about contraception — what is its impact on sexual morality? But, like most women, my decision about birth control had nothing to do with promiscuity. I had a plan for my future. I wanted to go to college. I studied really hard in college, and I was proud to be one of the very few female computer science graduates at my university. I wanted to have a career, so I went on to business school and I became one of the youngest female executives at Microsoft. I still remember, though, when I left my parents' home to move across the country to start this new job at Microsoft. They had sacrificed a lot to give me five years of higher education. But they said, as I left home — and I literally went down the front steps, down the porch at home — and they said, "Even though you've had this great education, if you decide to get married and have kids right away, that's OK by us, too." They wanted me to do the thing that would make me the very happiest. I was free to decide what that would be. It was an amazing feeling. In fact, I did want to have kids — but I wanted to have them when I was ready. And so now, Bill and I have three. And when our eldest daughter was born, we weren't, I would say, exactly sure how to be great parents. Maybe some of you know that feeling. And so we waited a little while before we had our second child. And it's no accident that we have three children that are spaced three years apart. Now, as a mother, what do I want the very most for my children? I want them to feel the way I did — like they can do anything they want to do in life. And so, what has struck me as I've travelled the last decade for the foundation around the world is that all women want that same thing. Last year, I was in Nairobi, in the slums, in one called Korogocho — which literally means when translated, "standing shoulder to shoulder." And I spoke with this women's group that's pictured here. And the women talked very openly about their family life in the slums, what it was like. And they talked quite intimately about what they did for birth control. Marianne, in the center of the screen in the red sweater, she summed up that entire two-hour conversation in a phrase that I will never forget. She said, "I want to bring every good thing to this child before I have another." And I thought — that's it. That's universal. We all want to bring every good thing to our children. But what's not universal is our ability to provide every good thing. So many women suffer from domestic violence. And they can't even broach the subject of contraception, even inside their own marriage. There are many women who lack basic education. Even many of the women who do have knowledge and do have power don't have access to contraceptives. For 250 years, parents around the world have been deciding to have smaller families. This trend has been steady for a quarter of a millennium, across cultures and across geographies, with the glaring exception of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The French started bringing down their family size in the mid-1700s. And over the next 150 years, this trend spread all across Europe. The surprising thing to me, as I learned this history, was that it spread not along socioeconomic lines but around cultural lines. People who spoke the same language made that change as a group. They made the same choice for their family, whether they were rich or whether they were poor. The reason that trend toward smaller families spread was that this whole way was driven by an idea — the idea that couples can exercise conscious control over how many children they have. This is a very powerful idea. It means that parents have the ability to affect the future, not just accept it as it is. In France, the average family size went down every decade for 150 years in a row until it stabilized. It took so long back then because the contraceptives weren't that good. In Germany, this transition started in the 1880s, and it took just 50 years for family size to stabilize in this country. And in Asia and Latin America, the transition started in the 1960s, and it happened much faster because of modern contraception. I think, as we go through this history, it's important to pause for a moment and to remember why this has become such a contentious issue. It's because some family planning programs resorted to unfortunate incentives and coercive policies. For instance, in the 1960s, India adopted very specific numeric targets and they paid women to accept having an IUD placed in their bodies. Now, Indian women were really smart in this situation. When they went to get an IUD inserted, they got paid six rupees. And so what did they do? They waited a few hours or a few days, and they went to another service provider and had the IUD removed for one rupee. For decades in the United States, African-American women were sterilized without their consent. The procedure was so common it became known as the Mississippi appendectomy — a tragic chapter in my country's history. And as recently as the 1990s, in Peru, women from the Andes region were given anesthesia and they were sterilized without their knowledge. The most startling thing about this is that these coercive policies weren't even needed. They were carried out in places where parents already wanted to lower their family size. Because in region after region, again and again, parents have wanted to have smaller families. There's no reason to believe that African women have innately different desires. Given the option, they will have fewer children. The question is: will we invest in helping all women get what they want now? Or, are we going to condemn them to some century-long struggle, as if this was still revolutionary France and the best method was coitus interruptus? Empowering parents — it doesn't need justification. But here's the thing — our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It's what propels societies forward. In that same slum in Nairobi, I met a young businesswoman, and she was making backpacks out of her home. She and her young kids would go to the local jeans factory and collect scraps of denim. She'd create these backpacks and resell them. And when I talked with her, she had three children, and I asked her about her family. And she said she and her husband decided that they wanted to stop having children after their third one. And so when I asked her why, she simply said, "Well, because I couldn't run my business if I had another child." And she explained the income that she was getting out of her business afforded her to be able to give an education to all three of her children. She was incredibly optimistic about her family's future. This is the same mental calculus that hundreds of millions of men and women have gone through. And evidence proves that they have it exactly right. They are able to give their children more opportunities by exercising control over when they have them. In Bangladesh, there's a district called Matlab. It's where researchers have collected data on over 180,000 inhabitants since 1963. In the global health community, we like to say it's one of the longest pieces of research that's been running. We have so many great health statistics. In one of the studies, what did they do? Half the villagers were chosen to get contraceptives. They got education and access to contraception. Twenty years later, following those villages, what we learned is that they had a better quality of life than their neighbors. The families were healthier. The women were less likely to die in childbirth. Their children were less likely to die in the first thirty days of life. The children were better nourished. The families were also wealthier. The adult women's wages were higher. Households had more assets — things like livestock or land or savings. Finally, their sons and daughters had more schooling. So when you multiply these types of effects over millions of families, the product can be large-scale economic development. People talk about the Asian economic miracle of the 1980s — but it wasn't really a miracle. One of the leading causes of economic growth across that region was this cultural trend towards smaller families. Sweeping changes start at the individual family level — the family making a decision about what's best for their children. When they make that change and that decision, those become sweeping regional and national trends. When families in sub-Saharan Africa are given the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves, I think it will help spark a virtuous cycle of development in communities across the continent. We can help poor families build a better future. We can insist that all people have the opportunity to learn about contraceptives and have access to the full variety of methods. I think the goal here is really clear: universal access to birth control that women want. And for that to happen, it means that both rich and poor governments alike must make contraception a total priority. We can do our part, in this room and globally, by talking about the hundreds of millions of families that don't have access to contraception today and what it would do to change their lives if they did have access. I think if Marianne and the members of her women's group can talk about this openly and have this discussion out amongst themselves and in public, we can, too. And we need to start now. Because like Marianne, we all want to bring every good thing to our children. And where is the controversy in that? Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have some questions for Melinda. (Applause ends) Thank you for your courage and everything else. So, Melinda, in the last few years I've heard a lot of smart people say something to the effect of, "We don't need to worry about the population issue anymore. Family sizes are coming down naturally all over the world. We're going to peak at nine or 10 billion. And that's it." Are they wrong? Melinda Gates: If you look at the statistics across Africa, they are wrong. And I think we need to look at it, though, from a different lens. We need to look at it from the ground upwards. I think that's one of the reasons we got ourselves in so much trouble on this issue of contraception. We looked at it from top down and said we want to have different population numbers over time. Yes, we care about the planet. Yes, we need to make the right choices. But the choices have to be made at the family level. And it's only by giving people access and letting them choose what to do that you get those sweeping changes that we have seen globally — except for sub-Saharan Africa and those places in South Asia and Afghanistan. CA: Some people on the right in America and in many conservative cultures around the world might say something like this: "It's all very well to talk about saving lives and empowering women and so on. But, sex is sacred. What you're proposing is going to increase the likelihood that lots of sex happens outside marriage. And that is wrong." What would you say to them? MG: I would say that sex is absolutely sacred. And it's sacred in Germany, and it's sacred in the United States, and it's sacred in France and so many places around the world. And the fact that 98 percent of women in my country who are sexually experienced say they use birth control doesn't make sex any less sacred. It just means that they're getting to make choices about their lives. And I think in that choice, we're also honoring the sacredness of the family and the sacredness of the mother's life and the childrens' lives by saving their lives. To me, that's incredibly sacred, too. CA: So what is your foundation doing to promote this issue? And what could people here and people listening on the web — what would you like them to do? MG: I would say this — join the conversation. We've listed the website up here. Join the conversation. Tell your story about how contraception has either changed your life or somebody's life that you know. And say that you're for this. We need a groundswell of people saying, "This makes sense. We've got to give all women access — no matter where they live." And one of the things that we're going to do is do a large event July 11 in London, with a whole host of countries, a whole host of African nations, to all say we're putting this back on the global health agenda. We're going to commit resources to it, and we're going to do planning from the bottom up with governments to make sure that women are educated — so that if they want the tool, they have it, and that they have lots of options available either through their local healthcare worker or their local community rural clinic. CA: Melinda, I'm guessing that some of those nuns who taught you at school are going to see this TED Talk at some point. Are they going to be horrified, or are they cheering you on? MG: I know they're going to see the TED Talk because they know that I'm doing it and I plan to send it to them. And, you know, the nuns who taught me were incredibly progressive. I hope that they'll be very proud of me for living out what they taught us about social justice and service. I have come to feel incredibly passionate about this issue because of what I've seen in the developing world. And for me, this topic has become very close to heart because you meet these women and they are so often voiceless. And yet they shouldn't be — they should have a voice, they should have access. And so I hope they'll feel that I'm living out what I've learned from them and from the decades of work that I've already done at the foundation. CA: So, you and your team brought together today an amazing group of speakers to whom we're all grateful. Did you learn anything? (Laughter) MG: Oh my gosh, I learned so many things. I have so many follow-up questions. And I think a lot of this work is a journey. You heard the discussion about the journey through energy, or the journey through social design, or the journey in the coming and saying, "Why aren't there any women on this platform?" And I think for all of us who work on these development issues, you learn by talking to other people. You learn by doing. You learn by trying and making mistakes. And it's the questions you ask. Sometimes it's the questions you ask that helps lead to the answer the next person that can help you answer it. So I have lots of questions for the panelists from today. And I thought it was just an amazing day. CA: Melinda, thank you for inviting all of us on this journey with you. Thank you so much. MG: Great. Thanks, Chris.

How I repaired my own heart

{0: 'Tal Golesworthy is an engineer and entrepreneur, working in research and development of combustion and air pollution control -- until he decided to innovate in his own health.'}

TEDxKrakow

I'm a process engineer, I know all about boilers and incinerators and fabric filters, and cyclones, and things like that. But I also have Marfan syndrome. This is an inherited disorder. And in 1992, I participated in a genetic study, and found to my horror, as you can see from the slide, that my ascending aorta was not in the normal range, the green line at the bottom. Everyone in here will be between 3.2-3.6, and I was already up at 4.4. And as you can see, my aorta dilated progressively, and I got closer and closer to the point where surgery was going to be necessary. The surgery on offer was pretty gruesome. Anesthetize you, open your chest, put you on an artificial heart and lung machine, drop your body temperature to about 18 centigrade, stop your heart, cut the aorta out, replace it with a plastic valve and a plastic aorta. And most importantly, commit you to a lifetime of anticoagulation therapy. Normally, warfarin. The thought of the surgery was not attractive. The thought of the warfarin was really quite frightening. So I said to myself, "I'm an engineer, I'm in R&D, this is just a plumbing problem." "I can do this, I can change this." So I set out to change the entire treatment for aortic dilation. The project aim is really quite simple. The only real problem with the ascending aorta in people with Marfan syndrome is that it lacks some tensile strength. So, the possibility exists to simply externally wrap the pipe, and it would remain stable and operate quite happily. If your high-pressure hose pipe or hydraulic line bulges a little, you just wrap some tape around it, it really is that simple. In concept, though not in execution. The great advantage of an external support, for me, was that I could retain all of my own bits, all of my own endothelium and valves, and not need any anticoagulation therapy. So, where do we start? This is a sagittal slice through me. In the middle, you can see that little structure squeezing out, that's the left ventricle, pushing blood out through the aortic valve. You can see two of the leaflets of the aortic valve working there. Up into the ascending aorta. And it's that part, the ascending aorta, which dilates and ultimately bursts, which of course is fatal. We started by organizing image acquisition from magnetic resonance and CT imaging machines, from which to make a model of the patient's aorta. This is a model of my aorta. I've got a real one in my pocket, if anyone would like to look at it, and play with it. (Laughter) You can see it's quite a complex structure. It has a funny tri-lobal shape at the bottom, which contains the aortic valve. It then comes back into a round form, and then tapers and curves off. It's quite a difficult structure to produce. This is a sort of CAD model of me, and this is one of the later CAD models. We went through an iterative process of producing better and better models. When we produced that model, we turned it into a solid, plastic model, as you can see, using a rapid prototyping technique, another engineering technique. We then used that former to manufacture a perfectly bespoke porous textile mesh, which takes the shape of the former and perfectly fits the aorta. So this is absolutely personalized medicine at its best, really. Every patient we do has an absolutely bespoke implant. Once you've made it, the installation is quite easy. John Pepper, bless his heart, professor of cardiothoracic surgery. Never done it before in his life, he put the first one in, didn't like it, he put the second one in. Happy, away I went. Four and a half hours on the table, and everything was done. So the surgical implantation was actually the easiest part. If you compare our new treatment to the existing alternative, the composite aortic root graft, there are one or two startling comparisons which I'm sure will be clear to all of you. Two hours to install one of our devices, compared to 6 hours for the existing treatment. As I said, the existing treatment requires the heart-lung bypass machine, and it requires a total body cooling. We don't need any of that. We work on a beating heart. He opens you up, he accesses the aorta while your heart is beating, all at the right temperature. No breaking into your circulatory system. So it really is great. But for me, absolutely the best point is, there is no anticoagulation therapy required. I don't take any drugs at all, other than recreational ones that I would choose to take. (Laughter) And in fact, if you speak to people who are on long-term warfarin, it is a serious compromise to your quality of life, and even worse, it inevitably foreshortens your life. Likewise, if you have the artificial valve option, you're committed to antibiotic therapy whenever you have any intrusive medical treatment, even trips to the dentist require that you take antibiotics, in case you get an internal infection on the valve. Again, I don't have any of that, so I'm entirely free, my artery is fixed. I haven't got to worry about it, which is a rebirth for me. Back to the theme of the presentation, multidisciplinary research, how on earth does a process engineer used to working with boilers end up producing a medical device which transforms his own life? Well, the answer to that is, a multidisciplinary team. This is a list of the core team, and you can see there aren't only two principal technical disciplines there, medicine and engineering, but also, there are various specialists from within those two disciplines. John Pepper was the cardiac surgeon who did all the actual work on me. But everyone else had to contribute one way or another. Raad Mohiaddin, a medical radiologist. We had to get good-quality images from which to make the CAD model. Warren Thornton, who still does all our CAD models for us, had to write a bespoke piece of CAD code to produce this model from this really rather difficult input data set. There are some barriers to this, though, there are some problems. Jargon is a big one. I would think no one in this room understands the first four jargon points. The engineers amongst you will recognize "rapid prototyping" and "CAD." The medics amongst you, if there are any, will recognize the first two, but there will be nobody else here that understands all those four words. Taking the jargon out was very important to ensure that everyone in the team understood exactly what was meant when a particular phrase was used. Our disciplinary conventions were funny as well. We took a lot of horizontal slice images through me, produced those slices and used them to build a CAD model. And the very first CAD model we made, the surgeons were playing with it and couldn't quite figure it out. And then we realized that it was actually a mirror image of the real aorta. And it was a mirror image because in the real world, we always look down on plans, plans of houses, or streets, or maps. In the medical world, they look up at plans. So the horizontal images were all in inversion. So, one needs to be careful with disciplinary conventions. Everyone needs to understand what is assumed and what is not. Institutional barriers were another serious headache in the project. The Brompton Hospital was taken over by the Imperial College School of Medicine. And there are some seriously bad relationship problems between the two organizations. I was working with the Imperial and the Brompton, and this generated some serious problems for the project. Really, problems that shouldn't exist. Research & Ethics Committee. If you want to do anything new in surgery, you have to get a license from your local Research & Ethics. I'm sure it's the same in Poland. There will be some form of equivalent which licenses new types of surgery. We didn't only have the bureaucratic problems associated with that, we also had professional jealousies. There were people on the Research & Ethics committee who really didn't want to see John Pepper succeed again. Because he is so successful. And they made extra problems for us. Bureaucratic problems. Ultimately, when you have a new treatment, you have to have a guidance note for all the hospitals in the country. In the UK, we have the National Institute and Clinical Excellence. You have an equivalent in Poland, no doubt. And we had to get past the NICE problem. We now have a great clinical guidance, out on the net. So any other hospitals interested can come along, read the NICE report, get in touch with us, and then get doing it themselves. Funding barriers, another big area to be concerned with. A big problem with understanding one of those perspectives. When we first approached one of the big, charitable UK organizations that fund this kind of stuff, we essentially gave them an engineering proposal. They didn't understand it, they were doctors, next to God, it must be rubbish, they binned it. So in the end, I went after private investors, just gave up on it. Most R&D is going to be institutionally funded, by the Polish Academy of Sciences or the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, or whatever. And you need to get past those people. Jargon is a huge problem when you try to work across disciplines, because in an engineering world, we all understand CAD and RP. Not in the medical world. I suppose the funding bureaucrats ultimately have to get their act together. They've really got to start talking to each other, and exercise a bit of imagination, if that's not too much to ask. (Laughter) Which it probably is. (Laughter) I've coined the phrase "obstructive conservatism." So many people in the medical world don't want to change. Particularly when some jumped-up engineer has come along with the answer. They don't want to change. They simply want to do whatever they've done before. And in fact, many surgeons in the UK are still waiting for one of our patients to have some sort of an episode, so that they could say, "Told you that was no good." We've actually got 30 patients. At seven and a half years, we've got 90 post-op patient years between us, and we haven't had a single problem. And still, there are people in the UK saying, "That external aortic root, it will never work, you know." It really is a problem. I'm sure everyone in this room has come across arrogance amongst medics, doctors, surgeons, at some point. The middle point is simply the way that the doctors protect themselves. "Well, of course, I'm looking after my patient." I think it's not good, but that's my view. Egos, of course, again a huge problem. If you work in a multidisciplinary team, you've got to give your guys the benefit of the doubt, you've got to express support for them. Tom Treasure, professor of cardiothoracic surgery. Incredible guy. Dead easy to give him respect. Him giving me respect? Slightly different. (Laughter) That's all the bad news. The good news is, the benefits are stonkingly huge. Translate that one! I bet they can't. (Laughter) When you have a group of people with different professional training, a different professional experience, they not only have a different knowledge base, but also a different perspective on everything. And if you can bring them together, and get them talking and understanding each other, the results can be spectacular. You can find really novel solutions that have never been looked at before, very quickly and easily. You can short-cut huge amounts of work simply by using the extended knowledge base you have. And as a result, it's an entirely different use of the technology and the knowledge around you. The result of all this is that you can get incredibly quick progress on incredibly small budgets. I'm so embarrassed at how cheap it was to get from my idea to me being implanted that I'm not prepared to tell you what it cost, because I suspect there are absolutely standard surgical treatments, probably in the USA, which cost more for a one-off patient than the cost of us getting from my dream to my reality. That's all I want to say, and I've got three minutes left. So, Ewa's going to like me. If you have any questions, please come up and talk to me later on, it would be a pleasure to speak with you. Many thanks. (Applause)

Building US-China relations ... by banjo

{0: "Abigail Washburn pairs venerable folk elements with far-flung sounds, creating results that feel both strangely familiar and unlike anything anybody's ever heard before."}

TED2012

If you had caught me straight out of college in the halls of the Vermont State House where I was a lobbyist in training and asked me what I was going to do with my life, I would have told you that I'd just passed the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, the Chinese equivalency exam, and I was going to go study law in Beijing, and I was going to improve U.S.-China relations through top-down policy changes and judicial system reforms. (Laughter) (Applause) I had a plan, and I never ever thought it would have anything to do with the banjo. Little did I know what a huge impact it would have on me one night when I was at a party and I heard a sound coming out of a record player in the corner of a room. And it was Doc Watson singing and playing "Shady Grove." ♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my darlin' ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Going back to Harlan ♫ That sound was just so beautiful, the sound of Doc's voice and the rippling groove of the banjo. And after being totally and completely obsessed with the mammoth richness and history of Chinese culture, it was like this total relief to hear something so truly American and so truly awesome. I knew I had to take a banjo with me to China. So before going to law school in China I bought a banjo, I threw it in my little red truck and I traveled down through Appalachia and I learned a bunch of old American songs, and I ended up in Kentucky at the International Bluegrass Music Association Convention. And I was sitting in a hallway one night and a couple girls came up to me. And they said, "Hey, do you want to jam?" And I was like, "Sure." So I picked up my banjo and I nervously played four songs that I actually knew with them. And a record executive walked up to me and invited me to Nashville, Tennessee to make a record. (Laughter) It's been eight years, and I can tell you that I didn't go to China to become a lawyer. In fact, I went to Nashville. And after a few months I was writing songs. And the first song I wrote was in English, and the second one was in Chinese. (Music) [Chinese] Outside your door the world is waiting. Inside your heart a voice is calling. The four corners of the world are watching, so travel daughter, travel. Go get it, girl. (Applause) It's really been eight years since that fated night in Kentucky. And I've played thousands of shows. And I've collaborated with so many incredible, inspirational musicians around the world. And I see the power of music. I see the power of music to connect cultures. I see it when I stand on a stage in a bluegrass festival in east Virginia and I look out at the sea of lawn chairs and I bust out into a song in Chinese. [Chinese] And everybody's eyes just pop wide open like it's going to fall out of their heads. And they're like, "What's that girl doing?" And then they come up to me after the show and they all have a story. They all come up and they're like, "You know, my aunt's sister's babysitter's dog's chicken went to China and adopted a girl." And I tell you what, it like everybody's got a story. It's just incredible. And then I go to China and I stand on a stage at a university and I bust out into a song in Chinese and everybody sings along and they roar with delight at this girl with the hair and the instrument, and she's singing their music. And I see, even more importantly, the power of music to connect hearts. Like the time I was in Sichuan Province and I was singing for kids in relocation schools in the earthquake disaster zone. And this little girl comes up to me. [Chinese] "Big sister Wong," Washburn, Wong, same difference. "Big sister Wong, can I sing you a song that my mom sang for me before she was swallowed in the earthquake?" And I sat down, she sat on my lap. She started singing her song. And the warmth of her body and the tears rolling down her rosy cheeks, and I started to cry. And the light that shone off of her eyes was a place I could have stayed forever. And in that moment, we weren't our American selves, we weren't our Chinese selves, we were just mortals sitting together in that light that keeps us here. I want to dwell in that light with you and with everyone. And I know U.S.-China relations doesn't need another lawyer. Thank you. (Applause)

How do we heal medicine?

{0: 'Surgeon and public health professor by day, writer by night, Atul Gawande explores how doctors can dramatically improve their practice using approaches as simple as a checklist – or coaching.'}

TED2012

I got my start in writing and research as a surgical trainee, as someone who was a long ways away from becoming any kind of an expert at anything. So the natural question you ask then at that point is, how do I get good at what I'm trying to do? And it became a question of, how do we all get good at what we're trying to do? It's hard enough to learn to get the skills, try to learn all the material you have to absorb at any task you're taking on. I had to think about how I sew and how I cut, but then also how I pick the right person to come to an operating room. And then in the midst of all this came this new context for thinking about what it meant to be good. In the last few years we realized we were in the deepest crisis of medicine's existence due to something you don't normally think about when you're a doctor concerned with how you do good for people, which is the cost of health care. There's not a country in the world that now is not asking whether we can afford what doctors do. The political fight that we've developed has become one around whether it's the government that's the problem or is it insurance companies that are the problem. And the answer is yes and no; it's deeper than all of that. The cause of our troubles is actually the complexity that science has given us. And in order to understand this, I'm going to take you back a couple of generations. I want to take you back to a time when Lewis Thomas was writing in his book, "The Youngest Science." Lewis Thomas was a physician-writer, one of my favorite writers. And he wrote this book to explain, among other things, what it was like to be a medical intern at the Boston City Hospital in the pre-penicillin year of 1937. It was a time when medicine was cheap and very ineffective. If you were in a hospital, he said, it was going to do you good only because it offered you some warmth, some food, shelter, and maybe the caring attention of a nurse. Doctors and medicine made no difference at all. That didn't seem to prevent the doctors from being frantically busy in their days, as he explained. What they were trying to do was figure out whether you might have one of the diagnoses for which they could do something. And there were a few. You might have a lobar pneumonia, for example, and they could give you an antiserum, an injection of rabid antibodies to the bacterium streptococcus, if the intern sub-typed it correctly. If you had an acute congestive heart failure, they could bleed a pint of blood from you by opening up an arm vein, giving you a crude leaf preparation of digitalis and then giving you oxygen by tent. If you had early signs of paralysis and you were really good at asking personal questions, you might figure out that this paralysis someone has is from syphilis, in which case you could give this nice concoction of mercury and arsenic — as long as you didn't overdose them and kill them. Beyond these sorts of things, a medical doctor didn't have a lot that they could do. This was when the core structure of medicine was created — what it meant to be good at what we did and how we wanted to build medicine to be. It was at a time when what was known you could know, you could hold it all in your head, and you could do it all. If you had a prescription pad, if you had a nurse, if you had a hospital that would give you a place to convalesce, maybe some basic tools, you really could do it all. You set the fracture, you drew the blood, you spun the blood, looked at it under the microscope, you plated the culture, you injected the antiserum. This was a life as a craftsman. As a result, we built it around a culture and set of values that said what you were good at was being daring, at being courageous, at being independent and self-sufficient. Autonomy was our highest value. Go a couple generations forward to where we are, though, and it looks like a completely different world. We have now found treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousands of conditions that a human being can have. We can't cure it all. We can't guarantee that everybody will live a long and healthy life. But we can make it possible for most. But what does it take? Well, we've now discovered 4,000 medical and surgical procedures. We've discovered 6,000 drugs that I'm now licensed to prescribe. And we're trying to deploy this capability, town by town, to every person alive — in our own country, let alone around the world. And we've reached the point where we've realized, as doctors, we can't know it all. We can't do it all by ourselves. There was a study where they looked at how many clinicians it took to take care of you if you came into a hospital, as it changed over time. And in the year 1970, it took just over two full-time equivalents of clinicians. That is to say, it took basically the nursing time and then just a little bit of time for a doctor who more or less checked in on you once a day. By the end of the 20th century, it had become more than 15 clinicians for the same typical hospital patient — specialists, physical therapists, the nurses. We're all specialists now, even the primary care physicians. Everyone just has a piece of the care. But holding onto that structure we built around the daring, independence, self-sufficiency of each of those people has become a disaster. We have trained, hired and rewarded people to be cowboys. But it's pit crews that we need, pit crews for patients. There's evidence all around us: 40 percent of our coronary artery disease patients in our communities receive incomplete or inappropriate care. 60 percent of our asthma, stroke patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. Two million people come into hospitals and pick up an infection they didn't have because someone failed to follow the basic practices of hygiene. Our experience as people who get sick, need help from other people, is that we have amazing clinicians that we can turn to — hardworking, incredibly well-trained and very smart — that we have access to incredible technologies that give us great hope, but little sense that it consistently all comes together for you from start to finish in a successful way. There's another sign that we need pit crews, and that's the unmanageable cost of our care. Now we in medicine, I think, are baffled by this question of cost. We want to say, "This is just the way it is. This is just what medicine requires." When you go from a world where you treated arthritis with aspirin, that mostly didn't do the job, to one where, if it gets bad enough, we can do a hip replacement, a knee replacement that gives you years, maybe decades, without disability, a dramatic change, well is it any surprise that that $40,000 hip replacement replacing the 10-cent aspirin is more expensive? It's just the way it is. But I think we're ignoring certain facts that tell us something about what we can do. As we've looked at the data about the results that have come as the complexity has increased, we found that the most expensive care is not necessarily the best care. And vice versa, the best care often turns out to be the least expensive — has fewer complications, the people get more efficient at what they do. And what that means is there's hope. Because [if] to have the best results, you really needed the most expensive care in the country, or in the world, well then we really would be talking about rationing who we're going to cut off from Medicare. That would be really our only choice. But when we look at the positive deviants — the ones who are getting the best results at the lowest costs — we find the ones that look the most like systems are the most successful. That is to say, they found ways to get all of the different pieces, all of the different components, to come together into a whole. Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together. It's a terrible design strategy actually. There's a famous thought experiment that touches exactly on this that said, what if you built a car from the very best car parts? Well it would lead you to put in Porsche brakes, a Ferrari engine, a Volvo body, a BMW chassis. And you put it all together and what do you get? A very expensive pile of junk that does not go anywhere. And that is what medicine can feel like sometimes. It's not a system. Now a system, however, when things start to come together, you realize it has certain skills for acting and looking that way. Skill number one is the ability to recognize success and the ability to recognize failure. When you are a specialist, you can't see the end result very well. You have to become really interested in data, unsexy as that sounds. One of my colleagues is a surgeon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and he got interested in the question of, well how many CT scans did they do for their community in Cedar Rapids? He got interested in this because there had been government reports, newspaper reports, journal articles saying that there had been too many CT scans done. He didn't see it in his own patients. And so he asked the question, "How many did we do?" and he wanted to get the data. It took him three months. No one had asked this question in his community before. And what he found was that, for the 300,000 people in their community, in the previous year they had done 52,000 CT scans. They had found a problem. Which brings us to skill number two a system has. Skill one, find where your failures are. Skill two is devise solutions. I got interested in this when the World Health Organization came to my team asking if we could help with a project to reduce deaths in surgery. The volume of surgery had spread around the world, but the safety of surgery had not. Now our usual tactics for tackling problems like these are to do more training, give people more specialization or bring in more technology. Well in surgery, you couldn't have people who are more specialized and you couldn't have people who are better trained. And yet we see unconscionable levels of death, disability that could be avoided. And so we looked at what other high-risk industries do. We looked at skyscraper construction, we looked at the aviation world, and we found that they have technology, they have training, and then they have one other thing: They have checklists. I did not expect to be spending a significant part of my time as a Harvard surgeon worrying about checklists. And yet, what we found were that these were tools to help make experts better. We got the lead safety engineer for Boeing to help us. Could we design a checklist for surgery? Not for the lowest people on the totem pole, but for the folks who were all the way around the chain, the entire team including the surgeons. And what they taught us was that designing a checklist to help people handle complexity actually involves more difficulty than I had understood. You have to think about things like pause points. You need to identify the moments in a process when you can actually catch a problem before it's a danger and do something about it. You have to identify that this is a before-takeoff checklist. And then you need to focus on the killer items. An aviation checklist, like this one for a single-engine plane, isn't a recipe for how to fly a plane, it's a reminder of the key things that get forgotten or missed if they're not checked. So we did this. We created a 19-item two-minute checklist for surgical teams. We had the pause points immediately before anesthesia is given, immediately before the knife hits the skin, immediately before the patient leaves the room. And we had a mix of dumb stuff on there — making sure an antibiotic is given in the right time frame because that cuts the infection rate by half — and then interesting stuff, because you can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected. And we had items like making sure everyone in the room had introduced themselves by name at the start of the day, because you get half a dozen people or more who are sometimes coming together as a team for the very first time that day that you're coming in. We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world, deliberately in places from rural Tanzania to the University of Washington in Seattle. We found that after they adopted it the complication rates fell 35 percent. It fell in every hospital it went into. The death rates fell 47 percent. This was bigger than a drug. (Applause) And that brings us to skill number three, the ability to implement this, to get colleagues across the entire chain to actually do these things. And it's been slow to spread. This is not yet our norm in surgery — let alone making checklists to go onto childbirth and other areas. There's a deep resistance because using these tools forces us to confront that we're not a system, forces us to behave with a different set of values. Just using a checklist requires you to embrace different values from the ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork. This is the opposite of what we were built on: independence, self-sufficiency, autonomy. I met an actual cowboy, by the way. I asked him, what was it like to actually herd a thousand cattle across hundreds of miles? How did you do that? And he said, "We have the cowboys stationed at distinct places all around." They communicate electronically constantly, and they have protocols and checklists for how they handle everything — (Laughter) — from bad weather to emergencies or inoculations for the cattle. Even the cowboys are pit crews now. And it seemed like time that we become that way ourselves. Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work, whether in health care, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty, is the great task of our generation as a whole. In every field, knowledge has exploded, but it has brought complexity, it has brought specialization. And we've come to a place where we have no choice but to recognize, as individualistic as we want to be, complexity requires group success. We all need to be pit crews now. Thank you. (Applause)

How I beat a patent troll

{0: 'Drew Curtis is the founder and administrator of Fark.com.'}

TED2012

Last January, my company, Fark.com, was sued along with Yahoo, MSN, Reddit, AOL, TechCrunch and others by a company called Gooseberry Natural Resources. Gooseberry owned a patent for the creation and distribution of news releases via email. (Laughter) Now it may seem kind of strange that such a thing can actually be patented, but it does happen all the time. Take something already being done and patent it for an emerging technology — like phone calls on the internet or video listings for TV shows or radio but for cellphones, and so on. The problem with these patents is that the mechanisms are obscure and the patent system is dysfunctional, and as a result, most of these lawsuits end in settlements. And because these settlements are under a non-disclosure agreement, no one knows what the terms were. And as a result, the patent troll can claim that they won the case. In the case of Gooseberry Natural Resources, this patent on emailing news releases had sort of a fatal flaw as it pertained to myself, and that was that in the mainstream media world there is only one definition for news release, and it turns out that is press release — as in P.R. Now my company, Fark, deals with news, ostensibly, and as a result we were not in violation of this patent. So case closed, right? Wrong. One of the major problems with patent law is that, in the case that when you are sued by a patent troll, the burden of proof that you did not infringe on the patent is actually on the defendant, which means you have to prove that you do not infringe on the patent they're suing you on. And this can take quite a while. You need to know that the average patent troll defense costs two million dollars and takes 18 months when you win. That is your best case outcome when you get sued by a patent troll. Now I had hoped to team up with some of these larger companies in order to defend against this lawsuit, but one-by-one they settled out of the case, even though — and this is important — none of these companies infringed on this patent — not a one of them. And they started settling out. The reason they settled out is because it's cheaper to settle than to fight the lawsuit — clearly, two million dollars cheaper in some cases, and much worse if you actually lose. It would also constitute a massive distraction for management of a company, especially a small eight-man shop like my company. Six months into the lawsuit, we finally reached the discovery phase. And in discovery phase, we asked the patent troll to please provide screenshots of Fark where the infringement of their patent was actually occurring. Now perhaps it's because no such screenshots actually existed, but suddenly Gooseberry wanted to settle. Their attorney: "Ah, yes. My company's having a reorganization on our end." Never mind the fact that the address led to a strip mall somewhere in Northern L.A. with no employees. "And we'd like to go ahead and close this out. So would you mind giving us your best and final offer?" My response: "How about nothing?!" (Applause) We didn't have high hopes for that outcome. (Laughter) But they settled. No counter offer. Now, as mentioned before, one of the reasons I can talk to you about this is because there's no non-disclosure agreement on this case. Now how did that happen? Well during the settlement process, when we received our copy, I struck it. My attorney said, "Nah, no chance of that working." It came back signed. Now why? You can call them. They're not under NDA either. Now what did I learn from this case? Well, three things. First of all, if you can, don't fight the patent, fight the infringement. Patents are very difficult to overturn. Infringement is a lot easier to disprove. Secondly, make it clear from the beginning that either you have no money at all or that you would rather spend money with your attorney fighting the troll than actually giving them the money. Now the reason this works is because patent trolls are paid a percentage of what they're able to recover in settlements. If it becomes clear to them that they cannot recover any money, they become less interested in pursuing the case. Finally, make sure that you can tell them that you will make this process as annoying and as painful and as difficult as possible for them. Now this is a tactic that patent trolls are supposed to use on people to get their way. It turns out, because they're paid on contingency, it works really, really well in reverse. Don't forget that. So what does all this mean? Well to sum up, it boils down to one thing: Don't negotiate with terrorists. (Applause) Patent trolls have done more damage to the United States economy than any domestic or foreign terrorist organization in history every year. And what do they do with that money? They plow it right back into filing more troll lawsuits. Now this is the point in the Talk where I'm supposed to come up with some kind of a solution for the patent system. And the problem with that is that there are two very large industry groups that have different outcomes in mind for the patent system. The health care industry would like stronger protections for inventors. The hi-tech industry would like stronger protections for producers. And these goals aren't necessarily diametrically opposed, but they are at odds. And as a result, patent trolls can kind of live in the space in between. So unfortunately I'm not smart enough to have a solution for the patent troll problem. However, I did have this idea, and it was kind of good. And I thought, "I should patent this." (Laughter) Behold, patent infringement via mobile device — defined as a computer which is not stationary. My solution: award me this patent and I will troll them out of existence. Thank you. (Applause)

The stories behind the bloodlines

{0: 'With a large-format camera and a knack for talking her way into forbidden zones, Taryn Simon photographs portions of the American infrastructure inaccessible to its inhabitants.'}

TEDSalon London Fall 2011

This is Shivdutt Yadav, and he's from Uttar Pradesh, India. Now Shivdutt was visiting the local land registry office in Uttar Pradesh, and he discovered that official records were listing him as dead. His land was no longer registered in his name. His brothers, Chandrabhan and Phoolchand, were also listed as dead. Family members had bribed officials to interrupt the hereditary transfer of land by having the brothers declared dead, allowing them to inherit their father's share of the ancestral farmland. Because of this, all three brothers and their families had to vacate their home. According to the Yadav family, the local court has been scheduling a case review since 2001, but a judge has never appeared. There are several instances in Uttar Pradesh of people dying before their case is given a proper review. Shivdutt's father's death and a want for his property led to this corruption. He was laid to rest in the Ganges River, where the dead are cremated along the banks of the river or tied to heavy stones and sunk in the water. Photographing these brothers was a disorienting exchange because on paper they don't exist, and a photograph is so often used as an evidence of life. Yet, these men remain dead. This quandary led to the title of the project, which considers in many ways that we are all the living dead and that we in some ways represent ghosts of the past and the future. So this story is the first of 18 chapters in my new body of work titled "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters." And for this work, I traveled around the world over a four-year period researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. I was interested in ideas surrounding fate and whether our fate is determined by blood, chance or circumstance. The subjects I documented ranged from feuding families in Brazil to victims of genocide in Bosnia to the first woman to hijack an airplane and the living dead in India. In each chapter, you can see the external forces of governance, power and territory or religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. Each work that I make is comprised of three segments. On the left are one or more portrait panels in which I systematically order the members of a given bloodline. This is followed by a text panel, it's designed in scroll form, in which I construct the narrative at stake. And then on the right is what I refer to as a footnote panel. It's a space that's more intuitive in which I present fragments of the story, beginnings of other stories, photographic evidence. And it's meant to kind of reflect how we engage with histories or stories on the Internet, in a less linear form. So it's more disordered. And this disorder is in direct contrast to the unalterable order of a bloodline. In my past projects I've often worked in serial form, documenting things that have the appearance of being comprehensive through a determined title and a determined presentation, but in fact, are fairly abstract. In this project I wanted to work in the opposite direction and find an absolute catalog, something that I couldn't interrupt, curate or edit by choice. This led me to blood. A bloodline is determined and ordered. But the project centers on the collision of order and disorder — the order of blood butting up against the disorder represented in the often chaotic and violent stories that are the subjects of my chapters. In chapter two, I photograph the descendants of Arthur Ruppin. He was sent in 1907 to Palestine by the Zionist organization to look at areas for Jewish settlement and acquire land for Jewish settlement. He oversaw land acquisition on behalf of the Palestine Land Development Company whose work led to the establishment of a Jewish state. Through my research at the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, I wanted to look at the early paperwork of the establishment of the Jewish state. And I found these maps which you see here. And these are studies commissioned by the Zionist organization for alternative areas for Jewish settlement. In this, I was interested in the consequences of geography and imagining how the world would be different if Israel were in Uganda, which is what these maps demonstrate. These archives in Jerusalem, they maintain a card index file of the earliest immigrants and applicants for immigration to Palestine, and later Israel, from 1919 to 1965. Chapter three: Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo treated patients outside of Kisumu, Kenya for AIDS, tuberculosis, infertility, mental illness, evil spirits. He's most often paid for his services in cash, cows or goats. But sometimes when his female patients can't afford his services, their families give the women to Jura in exchange for medical treatment. As a result of these transactions, Jura has nine wives, 32 children and 63 grandchildren. In his bloodline you see the children and grandchildren here. Two of his wives were brought to him suffering from infertility and he cured them, three for evil spirits, one for an asthmatic condition and severe chest pain and two wives Ondijo claims he took for love, paying their families a total of 16 cows. One wife deserted him and another passed away during treatment for evil spirits. Polygamy is widely practiced in Kenya. It's common among a privileged class capable of paying numerous dowries and keeping multiple homes. Instances of prominent social and political figures in polygamous relationships has led to the perception of polygamy as a symbol of wealth, status and power. You may notice in several of the chapters that I photographed there are empty portraits. These empty portraits represent individuals, living individuals, who couldn't be present. And the reasons for their absence are given in my text panel. They include dengue fever, imprisonment, army service, women not allowed to be photographed for religious and cultural reasons. And in this particular chapter, it's children whose mothers wouldn't allow them to travel to the photographic shoot for fear that their fathers would kidnap them during it. Twenty-four European rabbits were brought to Australia in 1859 by a British settler for sporting purposes, for hunting. And within a hundred years, that population of 24 had exploded to half a billion. The European rabbit has no natural predators in Australia, and it competes with native wildlife and damages native plants and degrades the land. Since the 1950s, Australia has been introducing lethal diseases into the wild rabbit population to control growth. These rabbits were bred at a government facility, Biosecurity Queensland, where they bred three bloodlines of rabbits and have infected them with a lethal disease and are monitoring their progress to see if it will effectively kill them. So they're testing its virulence. During the course of this trial, all of the rabbits died, except for a few, which were euthanized. Haigh's Chocolate, in collaboration with the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia, stopped all production of the Easter Bunny in chocolate and has replaced it with the Easter Bilby. Now this was done to counter the annual celebration of rabbits and presumably make the public more comfortable with the killing of rabbits and promote an animal that's native to Australia, and actually an animal that is threatened by the European rabbit. In chapter seven, I focus on the effects of a genocidal act on one bloodline. So over a two-day period, six individuals from this bloodline were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. This is the only work in which I visually represent the dead. But I only represent those that were killed in the Srebrenica massacre, which is recorded as the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. And during this massacre, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically executed. So when you look at a detail of this work, you can see, the man on the upper-left is the father of the woman sitting next to him. Her name is Zumra. She is followed by her four children, all of whom were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. Following those four children is Zumra's younger sister who is then followed by her children who were killed as well. During the time I was in Bosnia, the mortal remains of Zumra's eldest son were exhumed from a mass grave. And I was therefore able to photograph the fully assembled remains. However, the other individuals are represented by these blue slides, which show tooth and bone samples that were matched to DNA evidence collected from family members to prove they were the identities of those individuals. They've all been given a proper burial, so what remains are these blue slides at the International Commission for Missing Persons. These are personal effects dug up from a mass grave that are awaiting identification from family members and graffiti at the Potochari battery factory, which was where the Dutch U.N. soldiers were staying, and also the Serbian soldiers later during the times of the executions. This is video footage used at the Milosevic trial, which from top to bottom shows a Serbian scorpion unit being blessed by an Orthodox priest before rounding up the boys and men and killing them. Chapter 15 is more of a performance piece. I solicited China's State Council Information Office in 2009 to select a multi-generational bloodline to represent China for this project. They chose a large family from Beijing for its size, and they declined to give me any further reasoning for their choice. This is one of the rare situations where I have no empty portraits. Everyone showed up. You can also see the evolution of the one-child-only policy as it travels through the bloodline. Previously known as the Department of Foreign Propaganda, the State Council Information Office is responsible for all of China's external publicity operations. It controls all foreign media and image production outside of China from foreign media working within China. It also monitors the Internet and instructs local media on how to handle any potentially controversial issues, including Tibet, ethnic minorities, Human Rights, religion, democracy movements and terrorism. For the footnote panel in this work, this office instructed me to photograph their central television tower in Beijing. And I also photographed the gift bag they gave me when I left. These are the descendants of Hans Frank who was Hitler's personal legal advisor and governor general of occupied Poland. Now this bloodline includes numerous empty portraits, highlighting a complex relationship to one's family history. The reasons for these absences include people who declined participation. There's also parents who participated who wouldn't let their children participate because they thought they were too young to decide for themselves. Another section of the family presented their clothing, as opposed to their physical presence, because they didn't want to be identified with the past that I was highlighting. And finally, another individual sat for me from behind and later rescinded his participation, so I had to pixelate him out so he's unrecognizable. In the footnote panel that accompanies this work I photographed an official Adolph Hitler postage stamp and an imitation of that stamp produced by British Intelligence with Hans Frank's image on it. It was released in Poland to create friction between Frank and Hitler, so that Hitler would imagine Frank was trying to usurp his power. Again, talking about fate, I was interested in the stories and fate of particular works of art. These paintings were taken by Hans Frank during the time of the Third Reich. And I'm interested in the impact of their absence and presence through time. They are Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady With an Ermine," Rembrandt's "Landscape With Good Samaritan" and Raphael's "Portrait of a Youth," which has never been found. Chapter 12 highlights people being born into a battle that is not of their making, but becomes their own. So this is the Ferraz family and the Novaes family. And they are in an active blood feud. This feud has been going on since 1991 in Northeast Brazil in Pernambuco, and it involved the deaths of 20 members of the families and 40 others associated with the feud, including hired hit men, innocent bystanders and friends. Tensions between these two families date back to 1913 when there was a dispute over local political power. But it got violent in the last two decades and includes decapitation and the death of two mayors. Installed into a protective wall surrounding the suburban home of Louis Novaes, who's the head of the Novaes family, are these turret holes, which were used for shooting and looking. Brazil's northeast state of Pernambuco is one of the nation's most violent regions. It's rooted in a principle of retributive justice, or an eye for an eye, so retaliatory killings have led to several deaths in the area. This story, like many of the stories in my chapters, reads almost as an archetypal episode, like something out of Shakespeare, that's happening now and will happen again in the future. I'm interested in these ideas of repetition. So after I returned home, I received word that one member of the family had been shot 30 times in the face. Chapter 17 is an exploration of the absence of a bloodline and the absence of a history. Children at this Ukrainian orphanage are between the ages of six and 16. This piece is ordered by age because it can't be ordered by blood. In a 12-month period when I was at the orphanage, only one child had been adopted. Children have to leave the orphanage at age 16, despite the fact that there's often nowhere for them to go. It's commonly reported in Ukraine that children, when leaving the orphanage are targeted for human trafficking, child pornography and prostitution. Many have to turn to criminal activity for their survival, and high rates of suicide are recorded. This is a boys' bedroom. There's an insufficient supply of beds at the orphanage and not enough warm clothing. Children bathe infrequently because the hot water isn't turned on until October. This is a girls' bedroom. And the director listed the orphanage's most urgent needs as an industrial size washing machine and dryer, four vacuum cleaners, two computers, a video projector, a copy machine, winter shoes and a dentist's drill. This photograph, which I took at the orphanage of one of the classrooms, shows a sign which I had translated when I got home. And it reads: "Those who do not know their past are not worthy of their future." There are many more chapters in this project. This is just an abridged rendering of over a thousand images. And this mass pile of images and stories forms an archive. And within this accumulation of images and texts, I'm struggling to find patterns and imagine that the narratives that surround the lives we lead are just as coded as blood itself. But archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information that's collected. And there's this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between. It's almost machine-like the way people are born and people die, and the stories keep coming and coming. And in this, I'm considering, is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution, or are we on repeat over and over again? Thank you. (Applause)

Older people are happier

{0: 'Laura Carstensen is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, and has extensively studied the effects on wellbeing of extended lifetimes.'}

TEDxWomen 2011

People are living longer and societies are getting grayer. You hear about it all the time. You read about it in your newspapers. You hear about it on your television sets. Sometimes, I'm concerned that we hear about it so much that we've come to accept longer lives with a kind of a complacency, even ease. But make no mistake, longer lives can — and, I believe, will improve quality of life at all ages. Now to put this in perspective, let me just zoom out for a minute. More years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined. In the blink of an eye, we nearly doubled the length of time that we're living. So if you ever feel like you don't have this aging thing quite pegged, don't kick yourself. It's brand new. And because fertility rates fell across that very same period that life expectancy was going up, that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of age in the population, with many young ones at the bottom winnowed to a tiny peak of older people who make it and survive to old age, is being reshaped into a rectangle. And now, if you're the kind of person who can get chills from population statistics, (Laughter) these are the ones that should do it. Because what that means is that for the first time in the history of the species, the majority of babies born in the developed world are having the opportunity to grow old. How did this happen? Well, we're no genetically hardier than our ancestors were 10,000 years ago. This increase in life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture — the crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well-being. Through cultural changes, our ancestors largely eliminated early death so that people can now live out their full lives. Now there are problems associated with aging — diseases, poverty, loss of social status. It's hardly time to rest on our laurels. But the more we learn about aging, the clearer it becomes that a sweeping downward course is grossly inaccurate. Aging brings some rather remarkable improvements — increased knowledge, expertise — and emotional aspects of life improve. That's right, older people are happy. They're happier than middle-aged people, and younger people, certainly. (Laughter) Study after study is coming to the same conclusion. The CDC recently conducted a survey where they asked respondents simply to tell them whether they experienced significant psychological distress in the previous week. And fewer older people answered affirmatively to that question than middle-aged people, and younger people as well. And a recent Gallup poll asked participants how much stress and worry and anger they had experienced the previous day. And stress, worry, anger all decrease with age. Now social scientists call this the paradox of aging. I mean, after all, aging is not a piece of cake. So we've asked all sorts of questions to see if we could undo this finding. We've asked whether it may be that the current generations of older people are and always have been the greatest generations. That is that younger people today may not typically experience these improvements as they grow older. We've asked, well, maybe older people are just trying to put a positive spin on an otherwise depressing existence. (Laughter) But the more we've tried to disavow this finding, the more evidence we find to support it. Years ago, my colleagues and I embarked on a study where we followed the same group of people over a 10-year period. Originally, the sample was aged 18 to 94. And we studied whether and how their emotional experiences changed as they grew older. Our participants would carry electronic pagers for a week at a time, and we'd page them throughout the day and evenings at random times. And every time we paged them, we'd ask them to answer several questions — "On a one to seven scale, how happy are you right now?" "How sad are you right now?" "How frustrated are you right now?" — so that we could get a sense of the kinds of emotions and feelings they were having in their day-to-day lives. And using this intense study of individuals, we find that it's not one particular generation that's doing better than the others, but the same individuals over time come to report relatively greater positive experience. Now you see this slight downturn at very advanced ages. And there is a slight downturn. But at no point does it return to the levels we see in early adulthood. Now it's really too simplistic to say that older people are "happy." In our study, they are more positive. But they're also more likely than younger people to experience mixed emotions — sadness at the same time you experience happiness; you know, that tear in the eye when you're smiling at a friend. And other research has shown that older people seem to engage with sadness more comfortably. They're more accepting of sadness than younger people are. And we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly charged emotional conflicts and debates. Older people can view injustice with compassion, but not despair. And all things being equal, older people direct their cognitive resources, like attention and memory, to positive information more than negative. If we show older, middle-aged, younger people images, like the ones you see on the screen, and we later ask them to recall all the images that they can, older people, but not younger people, remember more positive images than negative images. We've asked older and younger people to view faces in laboratory studies, some frowning, some smiling. Older people look toward the smiling faces and away from the frowning, angry faces. In day-to-day life, this translates into greater enjoyment and satisfaction. But as social scientists, we continue to ask about possible alternatives. We've said, well, maybe older people report more positive emotions because they're cognitively impaired. (Laughter) We've said, could it be that positive emotions are simply easier to process than negative emotions, and so you switch to the positive emotions? Maybe our neural centers in our brain are degraded such that we're unable to process negative emotions anymore. But that's not the case. The most mentally sharp older adults are the ones who show this positivity effect the most. And under conditions where it really matters, older people do process the negative information just as well as the positive information. So how can this be? Well, in our research, we've found that these changes are grounded fundamentally in the uniquely human ability to monitor time — not just clock time and calendar time, but lifetime. And if there's a paradox of aging, it's that recognizing that we won't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways. When time horizons are long and nebulous, as they typically are in youth, people are constantly preparing, trying to soak up all the information they possibly can, taking risks, exploring. We might spend time with people we don't even like because it's somehow interesting. We might learn something unexpected. (Laughter) We go on blind dates. (Laughter) You know, after all, if it doesn't work out, there's always tomorrow. People over 50 don't go on blind dates. (Laughter) As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change. When we recognize that we don't have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly. We take less notice of trivial matters. We savor life. We're more appreciative, more open to reconciliation. We invest in more emotionally important parts of life, and life gets better, so we're happier day-to-day. But that same shift in perspective leads us to have less tolerance than ever for injustice. By 2015, there will be more people in the United States over the age of 60 than under 15. What will happen to societies that are top-heavy with older people? The numbers won't determine the outcome. Culture will. If we invest in science and technology and find solutions for the real problems that older people face and we capitalize on the very real strengths of older people, then added years of life can dramatically improve quality of life at all ages. Societies with millions of talented, emotionally stable citizens who are healthier and better educated than any generations before them, armed with knowledge about the practical matters of life and motivated to solve the big issues can be better societies than we have ever known. My father, who is 92, likes to say, "Let's stop talking only about how to save the old folks and start talking about how to get them to save us all." Thank you. (Applause)

Tracking ancient diseases using ... plaque

{0: 'Christina Warinner is a researcher at the University of Zurich, where she studies how humans have co-evolved with environments, diets and disease.'}

TED2012

Have you ever wondered what is inside your dental plaque? Probably not, but people like me do. I'm an archeological geneticist at the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, and I study the origins and evolution of human health and disease by conducting genetic research on the skeletal and mummified remains of ancient humans. And through this work, I hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerabilities of our bodies, so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future. There are different ways to approach evolutionary medicine, and one way is to extract human DNA from ancient bones. And from these extracts, we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that might be related to adaptations, risk factors and inherited diseases. But this is only one half of the story. The most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites and our immune response. All of these diseases have a strong evolutionary component that directly relates to the fact that we live today in a very different environment than the ones in which our bodies evolved. And in order to understand these diseases, we need to move past studies of the human genome alone and towards a more holistic approach to human health in the past. But there are a lot of challenges for this. And first of all, what do we even study? Skeletons are ubiquitous; they're found all over the place. But of course, all of the soft tissue has decomposed, and the skeleton itself has limited health information. Mummies are a great source of information, except that they're really geographically limited and limited in time as well. Coprolites are fossilized human feces, and they're actually extremely interesting. You can learn a lot about ancient diet and intestinal disease, but they are very rare. (Laughter) So to address this problem, I put together a team of international researchers in Switzerland, Denmark and the U.K. to study a very poorly studied, little known material that's found on people everywhere. It's a type of fossilized dental plaque that is called officially dental calculus. Many of you may know it by the term tartar. It's what the dentist cleans off your teeth every time that you go in for a visit. And in a typical dentistry visit, you may have about 15 to 30 milligrams removed. But in ancient times before tooth brushing, up to 600 milligrams might have built up on the teeth over a lifetime. And what's really important about dental calculus is that it fossilizes just like the rest of the skeleton, it's abundant in quantity before the present day and it's ubiquitous worldwide. We find it in every population around the world at all time periods going back tens of thousands of years. And we even find it in neanderthals and animals. And so previous studies had only focused on microscopy. They'd looked at dental calculus under a microscope, and what they had found was things like pollen and plant starches, and they'd found muscle cells from animal meats and bacteria. And so what my team of researchers, what we wanted to do, is say, can we apply genetic and proteomic technology to go after DNA and proteins, and from this can we get better taxonomic resolution to really understand what's going on? And what we found is that we can find many commensal and pathogenic bacteria that inhabited the nasal passages and mouth. We also have found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and proteins and DNA related to diet. But what was surprising to us, and also quite exciting, is we also found bacteria that normally inhabit upper respiratory systems. So it gives us virtual access to the lungs, which is where many important diseases reside. And we also found bacteria that normally inhabit the gut. And so we can also now virtually gain access to this even more distant organ system that, from the skeleton alone, has long decomposed. And so by applying ancient DNA sequencing and protein mass spectrometry technologies to ancient dental calculus, we can generate immense quantities of data that then we can use to begin to reconstruct a detailed picture of the dynamic interplay between diet, infection and immunity thousands of years ago. So what started out as an idea, is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease, right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens. And from this information we can learn about how pathogens evolve and also why they continue to make us sick. And I hope I have convinced you of the value of dental calculus. And as a final parting thought, on behalf of future archeologists, I would like to ask you to please think twice before you go home and brush your teeth. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Is our universe the only universe?

{0: 'Brian Greene is perhaps the best-known proponent of superstring theory, the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in a higher dimensional space-time create every particle and force in the universe.'}

TED2012

A few months ago the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two teams of astronomers for a discovery that has been hailed as one of the most important astronomical observations ever. And today, after briefly describing what they found, I'm going to tell you about a highly controversial framework for explaining their discovery, namely the possibility that way beyond the Earth, the Milky Way and other distant galaxies, we may find that our universe is not the only universe, but is instead part of a vast complex of universes that we call the multiverse. Now the idea of a multiverse is a strange one. I mean, most of us were raised to believe that the word "universe" means everything. And I say most of us with forethought, as my four-year-old daughter has heard me speak of these ideas since she was born. And last year I was holding her and I said, "Sophia, I love you more than anything in the universe." And she turned to me and said, "Daddy, universe or multiverse?" (Laughter) But barring such an anomalous upbringing, it is strange to imagine other realms separate from ours, most with fundamentally different features, that would rightly be called universes of their own. And yet, speculative though the idea surely is, I aim to convince you that there's reason for taking it seriously, as it just might be right. I'm going to tell the story of the multiverse in three parts. In part one, I'm going to describe those Nobel Prize-winning results and to highlight a profound mystery which those results revealed. In part two, I'll offer a solution to that mystery. It's based on an approach called string theory, and that's where the idea of the multiverse will come into the story. Finally, in part three, I'm going to describe a cosmological theory called inflation, which will pull all the pieces of the story together. Okay, part one starts back in 1929 when the great astronomer Edwin Hubble realized that the distant galaxies were all rushing away from us, establishing that space itself is stretching, it's expanding. Now this was revolutionary. The prevailing wisdom was that on the largest of scales the universe was static. But even so, there was one thing that everyone was certain of: The expansion must be slowing down. That, much as the gravitational pull of the Earth slows the ascent of an apple tossed upward, the gravitational pull of each galaxy on every other must be slowing the expansion of space. Now let's fast-forward to the 1990s when those two teams of astronomers I mentioned at the outset were inspired by this reasoning to measure the rate at which the expansion has been slowing. And they did this by painstaking observations of numerous distant galaxies, allowing them to chart how the expansion rate has changed over time. Here's the surprise: They found that the expansion is not slowing down. Instead they found that it's speeding up, going faster and faster. That's like tossing an apple upward and it goes up faster and faster. Now if you saw an apple do that, you'd want to know why. What's pushing on it? Similarly, the astronomers' results are surely well-deserving of the Nobel Prize, but they raised an analogous question. What force is driving all galaxies to rush away from every other at an ever-quickening speed? Well the most promising answer comes from an old idea of Einstein's. You see, we are all used to gravity being a force that does one thing, pulls objects together. But in Einstein's theory of gravity, his general theory of relativity, gravity can also push things apart. How? Well according to Einstein's math, if space is uniformly filled with an invisible energy, sort of like a uniform, invisible mist, then the gravity generated by that mist would be repulsive, repulsive gravity, which is just what we need to explain the observations. Because the repulsive gravity of an invisible energy in space — we now call it dark energy, but I've made it smokey white here so you can see it — its repulsive gravity would cause each galaxy to push against every other, driving expansion to speed up, not slow down. And this explanation represents great progress. But I promised you a mystery here in part one. Here it is. When the astronomers worked out how much of this dark energy must be infusing space to account for the cosmic speed up, look at what they found. This number is small. Expressed in the relevant unit, it is spectacularly small. And the mystery is to explain this peculiar number. We want this number to emerge from the laws of physics, but so far no one has found a way to do that. Now you might wonder, should you care? Maybe explaining this number is just a technical issue, a technical detail of interest to experts, but of no relevance to anybody else. Well it surely is a technical detail, but some details really matter. Some details provide windows into uncharted realms of reality, and this peculiar number may be doing just that, as the only approach that's so far made headway to explain it invokes the possibility of other universes — an idea that naturally emerges from string theory, which takes me to part two: string theory. So hold the mystery of the dark energy in the back of your mind as I now go on to tell you three key things about string theory. First off, what is it? Well it's an approach to realize Einstein's dream of a unified theory of physics, a single overarching framework that would be able to describe all the forces at work in the universe. And the central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. It says that if you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules and then you'll find atoms and subatomic particles. But the theory says that if you could probe smaller, much smaller than we can with existing technology, you'd find something else inside these particles — a little tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string. And just like the strings on a violin, they can vibrate in different patterns producing different musical notes. These little fundamental strings, when they vibrate in different patterns, they produce different kinds of particles — so electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, all other particles would be united into a single framework, as they would all arise from vibrating strings. It's a compelling picture, a kind of cosmic symphony, where all the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the music that these little, tiny strings can play. But there's a cost to this elegant unification, because years of research have shown that the math of string theory doesn't quite work. It has internal inconsistencies, unless we allow for something wholly unfamiliar — extra dimensions of space. That is, we all know about the usual three dimensions of space. And you can think about those as height, width and depth. But string theory says that, on fantastically small scales, there are additional dimensions crumpled to a tiny size so small that we have not detected them. But even though the dimensions are hidden, they would have an impact on things that we can observe because the shape of the extra dimensions constrains how the strings can vibrate. And in string theory, vibration determines everything. So particle masses, the strengths of forces, and most importantly, the amount of dark energy would be determined by the shape of the extra dimensions. So if we knew the shape of the extra dimensions, we should be able to calculate these features, calculate the amount of dark energy. The challenge is we don't know the shape of the extra dimensions. All we have is a list of candidate shapes allowed by the math. Now when these ideas were first developed, there were only about five different candidate shapes, so you can imagine analyzing them one-by-one to determine if any yield the physical features we observe. But over time the list grew as researchers found other candidate shapes. From five, the number grew into the hundreds and then the thousands — A large, but still manageable, collection to analyze, since after all, graduate students need something to do. But then the list continued to grow into the millions and the billions, until today. The list of candidate shapes has soared to about 10 to the 500. So, what to do? Well some researchers lost heart, concluding that was so many candidate shapes for the extra dimensions, each giving rise to different physical features, string theory would never make definitive, testable predictions. But others turned this issue on its head, taking us to the possibility of a multiverse. Here's the idea. Maybe each of these shapes is on an equal footing with every other. Each is as real as every other, in the sense that there are many universes, each with a different shape, for the extra dimensions. And this radical proposal has a profound impact on this mystery: the amount of dark energy revealed by the Nobel Prize-winning results. Because you see, if there are other universes, and if those universes each have, say, a different shape for the extra dimensions, then the physical features of each universe will be different, and in particular, the amount of dark energy in each universe will be different. Which means that the mystery of explaining the amount of dark energy we've now measured would take on a wholly different character. In this context, the laws of physics can't explain one number for the dark energy because there isn't just one number, there are many numbers. Which means we have been asking the wrong question. It's that the right question to ask is, why do we humans find ourselves in a universe with a particular amount of dark energy we've measured instead of any of the other possibilities that are out there? And that's a question on which we can make headway. Because those universes that have much more dark energy than ours, whenever matter tries to clump into galaxies, the repulsive push of the dark energy is so strong that it blows the clump apart and galaxies don't form. And in those universes that have much less dark energy, well they collapse back on themselves so quickly that, again, galaxies don't form. And without galaxies, there are no stars, no planets and no chance for our form of life to exist in those other universes. So we find ourselves in a universe with the particular amount of dark energy we've measured simply because our universe has conditions hospitable to our form of life. And that would be that. Mystery solved, multiverse found. Now some find this explanation unsatisfying. We're used to physics giving us definitive explanations for the features we observe. But the point is, if the feature you're observing can and does take on a wide variety of different values across the wider landscape of reality, then thinking one explanation for a particular value is simply misguided. An early example comes from the great astronomer Johannes Kepler who was obsessed with understanding a different number — why the Sun is 93 million miles away from the Earth. And he worked for decades trying to explain this number, but he never succeeded, and we know why. Kepler was asking the wrong question. We now know that there are many planets at a wide variety of different distances from their host stars. So hoping that the laws of physics will explain one particular number, 93 million miles, well that is simply wrongheaded. Instead the right question to ask is, why do we humans find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance, instead of any of the other possibilities? And again, that's a question we can answer. Those planets which are much closer to a star like the Sun would be so hot that our form of life wouldn't exist. And those planets that are much farther away from the star, well they're so cold that, again, our form of life would not take hold. So we find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance simply because it yields conditions vital to our form of life. And when it comes to planets and their distances, this clearly is the right kind of reasoning. The point is, when it comes to universes and the dark energy that they contain, it may also be the right kind of reasoning. One key difference, of course, is we know that there are other planets out there, but so far I've only speculated on the possibility that there might be other universes. So to pull it all together, we need a mechanism that can actually generate other universes. And that takes me to my final part, part three. Because such a mechanism has been found by cosmologists trying to understand the Big Bang. You see, when we speak of the Big Bang, we often have an image of a kind of cosmic explosion that created our universe and set space rushing outward. But there's a little secret. The Big Bang leaves out something pretty important, the Bang. It tells us how the universe evolved after the Bang, but gives us no insight into what would have powered the Bang itself. And this gap was finally filled by an enhanced version of the Big Bang theory. It's called inflationary cosmology, which identified a particular kind of fuel that would naturally generate an outward rush of space. The fuel is based on something called a quantum field, but the only detail that matters for us is that this fuel proves to be so efficient that it's virtually impossible to use it all up, which means in the inflationary theory, the Big Bang giving rise to our universe is likely not a one-time event. Instead the fuel not only generated our Big Bang, but it would also generate countless other Big Bangs, each giving rise to its own separate universe with our universe becoming but one bubble in a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes. And now, when we meld this with string theory, here's the picture we're led to. Each of these universes has extra dimensions. The extra dimensions take on a wide variety of different shapes. The different shapes yield different physical features. And we find ourselves in one universe instead of another simply because it's only in our universe that the physical features, like the amount of dark energy, are right for our form of life to take hold. And this is the compelling but highly controversial picture of the wider cosmos that cutting-edge observation and theory have now led us to seriously consider. One big remaining question, of course, is, could we ever confirm the existence of other universes? Well let me describe one way that might one day happen. The inflationary theory already has strong observational support. Because the theory predicts that the Big Bang would have been so intense that as space rapidly expanded, tiny quantum jitters from the micro world would have been stretched out to the macro world, yielding a distinctive fingerprint, a pattern of slightly hotter spots and slightly colder spots, across space, which powerful telescopes have now observed. Going further, if there are other universes, the theory predicts that every so often those universes can collide. And if our universe got hit by another, that collision would generate an additional subtle pattern of temperature variations across space that we might one day be able to detect. And so exotic as this picture is, it may one day be grounded in observations, establishing the existence of other universes. I'll conclude with a striking implication of all these ideas for the very far future. You see, we learned that our universe is not static, that space is expanding, that that expansion is speeding up and that there might be other universes all by carefully examining faint pinpoints of starlight coming to us from distant galaxies. But because the expansion is speeding up, in the very far future, those galaxies will rush away so far and so fast that we won't be able to see them — not because of technological limitations, but because of the laws of physics. The light those galaxies emit, even traveling at the fastest speed, the speed of light, will not be able to overcome the ever-widening gulf between us. So astronomers in the far future looking out into deep space will see nothing but an endless stretch of static, inky, black stillness. And they will conclude that the universe is static and unchanging and populated by a single central oasis of matter that they inhabit — a picture of the cosmos that we definitively know to be wrong. Now maybe those future astronomers will have records handed down from an earlier era, like ours, attesting to an expanding cosmos teeming with galaxies. But would those future astronomers believe such ancient knowledge? Or would they believe in the black, static empty universe that their own state-of-the-art observations reveal? I suspect the latter. Which means that we are living through a remarkably privileged era when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration. It appears that it may not always be that way. Because today's astronomers, by turning powerful telescopes to the sky, have captured a handful of starkly informative photons — a kind of cosmic telegram billions of years in transit. and the message echoing across the ages is clear. Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Brian, thank you. The range of ideas you've just spoken about are dizzying, exhilarating, incredible. How do you think of where cosmology is now, in a sort of historical side? Are we in the middle of something unusual historically in your opinion? BG: Well it's hard to say. When we learn that astronomers of the far future may not have enough information to figure things out, the natural question is, maybe we're already in that position and certain deep, critical features of the universe already have escaped our ability to understand because of how cosmology evolves. So from that perspective, maybe we will always be asking questions and never be able to fully answer them. On the other hand, we now can understand how old the universe is. We can understand how to understand the data from the microwave background radiation that was set down 13.72 billion years ago — and yet, we can do calculations today to predict how it will look and it matches. Holy cow! That's just amazing. So on the one hand, it's just incredible where we've gotten, but who knows what sort of blocks we may find in the future. CA: You're going to be around for the next few days. Maybe some of these conversations can continue. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. (BG: My pleasure.) (Applause)

How to buy happiness

{0: 'Through clever studies, Michael Norton studies how we feel about what we buy and spend.'}

TEDxCambridge

So I want to talk today about money and happiness, which are two things a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking about, either trying to earn them or trying to increase them. And a lot of us resonate with this phrase, we see it in religions and self-help books: money can't buy happiness. And I want to suggest today that, in fact, that's wrong. (Laughter) I'm at a business school, so that's what we do. So that's wrong, and in fact, if you think that, you're just not spending it right. So instead of spending it the way you usually spend it, maybe if you spent it differently, that might work a little bit better. Before I tell you the ways you can spend it that will make you happier, let's think about the ways we usually spend it that don't, in fact, make us happier. We had a little natural experiment. So CNN, a little while ago, wrote this interesting article on what happens to people when they win the lottery. It turns out people think when they win the lottery their lives will be amazing. This article's about how their lives get ruined. What happens when people win the lottery is, one, they spend all the money and go into debt; and two, all of their friends and everyone they've ever met find them and bug them for money. It ruins their social relationships, in fact. So they have more debt and worse friendships than they had before they won the lottery. What was interesting about the article was, people started commenting on the article, readers of the thing. And instead of talking about how it made them realize that money doesn't lead to happiness, everyone started saying, "You know what I'd do if I won the lottery ...?" and fantasizing about what they'd do. Here's just two of the ones we saw that are interesting to think about. One person wrote, "When I win, I'm going to buy my own little mountain and have a little house on top." (Laughter) And another person wrote, "I would fill a big bathtub with money and get in the tub while smoking a big fat cigar and sipping a glass of champagne." This is even worse: "... then I'd have a picture taken and dozens of glossies made. Anyone begging for money or trying to extort from me would receive a copy of the picture and nothing else." (Laughter) And so many of the comments were exactly of this type, where people got money and, in fact, it made them antisocial. So I told you it ruins people's lives and their friends bug them. Also, money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourselves. We thought maybe the reason money doesn't make us happy is that we're spending it on the wrong things; in particular, we're always spending it on ourselves. And we wondered what would happen if we made people spend more of their money on others. So instead of being antisocial with your money, what if you were more pro-social with it? We thought, let's make people do it and see what happens. Let's have some people do what they usually do, spend money on themselves, and let's make some people give money away, and measure their happiness and see if, in fact, they get happier. The first way we did this was, one Vancouver morning, we went out on the campus at University of British Columbia, approached people and said, "Do you want to be in an experiment?" They said, "Yes." We asked them how happy they were, and then gave them an envelope. One of the envelopes had things in it that said, "By 5pm today, spend this money on yourself." We gave some examples of what you could spend it on. Other people got a slip of paper that said, "By 5pm today, spend this money on somebody else." Also inside the envelope was money. And we manipulated how much money we gave them; some people got this slip of paper and five dollars, some got this slip of paper and 20 dollars. We let them go about their day and do whatever they wanted. We found out they did spend it in the way we asked them to. We called them up and asked them, "What did you spend it on? How happy do you feel now?" What did they spend it on? These are college undergrads; a lot of what they spent it on for themselves were things like earrings and makeup. One woman said she bought a stuffed animal for her niece. People gave money to homeless people. Huge effect here of Starbucks. (Laughter) So if you give undergraduates five dollars, it looks like coffee to them, and they run over to Starbucks and spend it as fast as they can. Some people bought coffee for themselves, the way they usually would, but others bought coffee for somebody else. So the very same purchase, just targeted toward yourself or targeted toward somebody else. What did we find when we called at the end of the day? People who spent money on others got happier; people who spent it on themselves, nothing happened. It didn't make them less happy, it just didn't do much for them. The other thing we saw is the amount of money doesn't matter much. People thought 20 dollars would be way better than five. In fact, it doesn't matter how much money you spent. What really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself. We see this again and again when we give people money to spend on others instead of on themselves. Of course, these are undergraduates in Canada — not the world's most representative population. They're also fairly wealthy and affluent and other sorts of things. We wanted to see if this holds true everywhere in the world or just among wealthy countries. So we went to Uganda and ran a very similar experiment. Imagine, instead of just people in Canada, we say, "Name the last time you spent money on yourself or others. Describe it. How happy did it make you?" Or in Uganda, "Name the last time you spent money on yourself or others and describe that." Then we asked them how happy they are, again. And what we see is sort of amazing, because there's human universals on what you do with your money, and real cultural differences on what you do as well. So for example, one guy from Uganda says this: "I called a girl I wished to love." They basically went out on a date, and he says at the end that he didn't "achieve" her up till now. (Laughter) Here's a guy from Canada. Very similar thing. "I took my girlfriend out for dinner. We went to a movie, we left early, and then went back to her room for ... cake," just cake. (Laughter) Human universal: you spend money on others, you're being nice. Maybe you have something in mind, maybe not. But then we see extraordinary differences. So look at these two. This is a woman from Canada. We say, "Name a time you spent money on somebody else." She says, "I bought a present for my mom. I drove to the mall, bought a present, gave it to my mom." Perfectly nice thing to do. It's good to get gifts for people you know. Compare that to this woman from Uganda: "I was walking and met a longtime friend whose son was sick with malaria. They had no money, they went to a clinic and I gave her this money." This isn't $10,000, it's the local currency. So it's a very small amount of money, in fact. But enormously different motivations here. This is a real medical need, literally a lifesaving donation. Above, it's just kind of, I bought a gift for my mother. What we see again, though, is that the specific way you spend on other people isn't nearly as important as the fact that you spend on other people in order to make yourself happy, which is really quite important. So you don't have to do amazing things with your money to make yourself happy. You can do small, trivial things and still get the benefits from doing this. These are only two countries. We wanted to look at every country in the world if we could, to see what the relationship is between money and happiness. We got data from the Gallup Organization, which you know from all the political polls happening lately. They asked people, "Did you donate money to charity recently?" and, "How happy are you with life in general?" We can see what the relationship is between those two things. Are they positively correlated, giving money makes you happy? Or are they negatively correlated? On this map, green will mean they're positively correlated, red means they're negatively correlated. And you can see, the world is crazily green. So in almost every country in the world where we have this data, people who give money to charity are happier people than people who don't give money to charity. I know you're looking at the red country in the middle. I would be a jerk and not tell you what it is, but it's Central African Republic. You can make up stories. Maybe it's different there for some reason. Just below that to the right is Rwanda, though, which is amazingly green. So almost everywhere we look, we see that giving money away makes you happier than keeping it for yourself. What about work, which is where we spend the rest of our time, when we're not with the people we know. We decided to infiltrate some companies and do a very similar thing. These are sales teams in Belgium. They work in teams, go out and sell to doctors and try to get them to buy drugs. We can look and see how well they sell things as a function of being a member of a team. We give people on some teams some money "Spend it however you want on yourself," just like we did with the undergrads in Canada. To other teams we say, "Here's 15 euro. Spend it on one of your teammates. Buy them something as a gift and give it to them. Then we can see, we've got teams that spend on themselves and these pro-social teams who we give money to make the team better. The reason I have a ridiculous pinata there is one team pooled their money and bought a pinata, they smashed the pinata, the candy fell out and things like that. A silly, trivial thing to do, but think of the difference on a team that didn't do that at all, that got 15 euro, put it in their pocket, maybe bought themselves a coffee, or teams that had this pro-social experience where they bonded together to buy something and do a group activity. What we see is that the teams that are pro-social sell more stuff than the teams that only got money for themselves. One way to think of it is: for every 15 euro you give people for themselves, they put it in their pocket and don't do anything different than before. You don't get money from that; you lose money, since it doesn't motivate them to perform better. But when you give them 15 euro to spend on their teammates, they do so much better on their teams that you actually get a huge win on investing this kind of money. You're probably thinking to yourselves, this is all fine, but there's a context that's incredibly important for public policy, and I can't imagine it would work there. And if he doesn't show me that it works here, I don't believe anything he said. I know what you're all thinking about are dodgeball teams. (Laughter) This was a huge criticism that we got, that if you can't show it with dodgeball teams, this is all stupid. So we went and found these dodgeball teams and infiltrated them, and did the exact same thing as before. So we give people on some teams money to spend on themselves. Other teams, we give them money to spend on their dodgeball teammates. The teams that spend money on themselves have the same winning percentages as before. The teams we give the money to spend on each other become different teams; they dominate the league by the time they're done. Across all of these different contexts — your personal life, you work life, even things like intramural sports — we see spending on other people has a bigger return for you than spending on yourself. So if you think money can't buy happiness, you're not spending it right. The implication isn't you should buy this product instead of that product, and that's the way to make yourself happier. It's that you should stop thinking about which product to buy for yourself, and try giving some of it to other people instead. And we luckily have an opportunity for you. DonorsChoose.org is a nonprofit for mainly public school teachers in low-income schools. They post projects like, "I want to teach Huckleberry Finn and we don't have the books," or, "I want a microscope to teach my students science and we don't have a microscope." You and I can go on and buy it for them. The teacher and the kids write you thank-you notes, sometimes they send pictures of them using the microscope. It's an extraordinary thing. Go to the website and start yourself on the process of thinking less about "How can I spend money on myself?" and more about "If I've got five dollars or 15 dollars, what can I do to benefit other people?" Ultimately, when you do that, you'll find you benefit yourself much more. Thank you. (Applause)

Just how small is an atom?

{0: 'Jon Bergmann co-wrote the book on the "flipped classroom" -- using video to help students master new ideas outside the traditional class setting.'}

TED-Ed

You probably already know everything is made up of little tiny things called atoms or even that each atom is made up of even smaller particles called protons, neutrons and electrons. And you've probably heard that atoms are small. But I bet you haven't ever thought about how small atoms really are. Well, the answer is that they are really, really small. So you ask, just how small are atoms? To understand this, let's ask this question: How many atoms are in a grapefruit? Well, let's assume that the grapefruit is made up of only nitrogen atoms, which isn't at all true, but there are nitrogen atoms in a grapefruit. To help you visualize this, let's blow up each of the atoms to the size of a blueberry. And then how big would the grapefruit have to be? It would have to be the same size of — well, actually, the Earth. That's crazy! You mean to say that if I filled the Earth with blueberries, I would have the same number of nitrogen atoms as a grapefruit? That's right! So how big is the atom? Well, it's really, really small! And you know what? It gets even more crazy. Let's now look inside of each atom — and thus the blueberry, right? — What do you see there? In the center of the atom is something called the nucleus, which contains protons and neutrons, and on the outside, you'd see electrons. So how big is the nucleus? If atoms are like blueberries in the Earth, how big would the nucleus be? You might remember the old pictures of the atom from science class, where you saw this tiny dot on the page with an arrow pointing to the nucleus. Well, those pictures, they're not drawn to scale, so they're kind of wrong. So how big is the nucleus? So if you popped open the blueberry and were searching for the nucleus ... You know what? It would be invisible. It's too small to see! OK. Let's blow up the atom — the blueberry — to the size of a house. So imagine a ball that is as tall as a two-story house. Let's look for the nucleus in the center of the atom. And do you know what? It would just barely be visible. So to get our minds wrapped around how big the nucleus is, we need to blow up the blueberry, up to the size of a football stadium. So imagine a ball the size of a football stadium, and right smack dab in the center of the atom, you would find the nucleus, and you could see it! And it would be the size of a small marble. And there's more, if I haven't blown your mind by now. Let's consider the atom some more. It contains protons, neutrons and electrons. The protons and neutrons live inside of the nucleus, and contain almost all of the mass of the atom. Way on the edge are the electrons. So if an atom is like a ball the size of a football stadium, with the nucleus in the center, and the electrons on the edge, what is in between the nucleus and the electrons? Surprisingly, the answer is empty space. (Wind noise) That's right. Empty! Between the nucleus and the electrons, there are vast regions of empty space. Now, technically there are some electromagnetic fields, but in terms of stuff, matter, it is empty. Remember this vast region of empty space is inside the blueberry, which is inside the Earth, which really are the atoms in the grapefruit. OK, one more thing, if I can even get more bizarre. Since virtually all the mass of an atom is in the nucleus — now, there is some amount of mass in the electrons, but most of it is in the nucleus — how dense is the nucleus? Well, the answer is crazy. The density of a typical nucleus is four times 10 to the 17th kilograms per meter cubed. But that's hard to visualize. OK, I'll put it in English units. 2.5 times 10 to the 16th pounds per cubic feet. OK, that's still kind of hard to figure. OK, here's what I want you to do. Make a box that is one foot by one foot by one foot. Now let's go and grab all of the nuclei from a typical car. Now, cars on average weigh two tons. How many cars' nuclei would you have to put into the box to have your one-foot-box have the same density of the nucleus? Is it one car? Two? How about 100? Nope, nope and nope. The answer is much bigger. It is 6.2 billion. That is almost equal to the number of people in the Earth. So if everyone in the Earth owned their own car — and they don't — (Cars honking) and we put all of those cars into your box ... That would be about the density of a nucleus. So I'm saying that if you took every car in the world and put it into your one-foot box, you would have the density of one nucleus. OK, let's review. The atom is really, really, really small. Think atoms in a grapefruit like blueberries in the Earth. The nucleus is crazy small. Now look inside the blueberry, and blow it up to the size of a football stadium, and now the nucleus is a marble in the middle. The atom is made up of vast regions of empty space. That's weird. The nucleus has a crazy-high density. Think of putting all those cars in your one-foot box. I think I'm tired.

The 4 commandments of cities

{0: "Mayor Eduardo Paes is on a mission to ensure that Rio's renaissance creates a positive legacy for all its citizens."}

TED2012

It's a great honor to be here. It's a great honor to be here talking about cities, talking about the future of cities. It's great to be here as a mayor. I really do believe that mayors have the political position to really change people's lives. That's the place to be. And it's great to be here as the mayor of Rio. Rio's a beautiful city, a vibrant place, special place. Actually, you're looking at a guy who has the best job in the world. And I really wanted to share with you a very special moment of my life and the history of the city of Rio. (Video) Announcer: And now, ladies and gentlemen, the envelope containing the result. Jacques Rogge: I have the honor to announce that the games of the 31st Olympiad are awarded to the city of Rio de Janeiro. (Cheering) EP: Okay, that's very touching, very emotional, but it was not easy to get there. Actually it was a very hard challenge. We had to beat the European monarchy. This is Juan Carlos, king of Spain. We had to beat the powerful Japanese with all of their technology. We had to beat the most powerful man in the world defending his own city. So it was not easy at all. And actually this last guy here said a phrase a few years ago that I think fits perfectly to the situation of Rio winning the Olympic bid. We really showed that, yes, we can. And really, this is the reason I came here tonight. I came here tonight to tell you that things can be done, that you don't have always to be rich or powerful to get things on the way, that cities are a great challenge. It's a difficult task to deal with cities. But with some original ways of getting things done, with some basic commandments, you can really get cities to be a great, great place to live. I want you all to imagine Rio. You probably think about a city full of energy, a vibrant city full of green. And nobody showed that better than Carlos Saldanha in last year's "Rio." (Music) (Video) Bird: This is incredible. (Music) EP: Okay, some parts of Rio are pretty much like that, but it's not like that everywhere. We're like every big city in the world. We've got lots of people, pollution, cars, concrete, lots of concrete. These pictures I'm showing here, they are some pictures from Madureira. It's like the heart of the suburb in Rio. And I want to use an example of Rio that we're doing in Madureira, in this region, to see what we should think as our first commandment. So every time you see a concrete jungle like that, what you've got to do is find open spaces. If you don't have open spaces, you've got to go there and open spaces. So go inside these open spaces and make it that people can get inside and use those spaces. This is going to be the third largest park in Rio by June this year. It's going to be a place where people can meet, where you can put nature. The temperature's going to drop two, three degrees centigrade. So the first commandment I want to leave you tonight is, a city of the future has to be environmentally friendly. Every time you think of a city, you've got to think green. You've got to think green and green. So moving to our second commandment that I wanted to show you. Let's think that cities are made of people, lots of people together. cities are packed with people. So how do you move these people around? When you have 3.5 billion people living in cities — by 2050, it's going to be 6 billion people. So every time you think about moving these people around, you think about high-capacity transportation. But there is a problem. High-capacity transportation means spending lots and lots of money. So what I'm going to show here is something that was already presented in TED by the former mayor of Curitiba who created that, a city in Brazil, Jaime Lerner. And it's something that we're doing, again, lots in Rio. It's the BRT, the Bus Rapid Transit. So you get a bus. It's a simple bus that everybody knows. You transform it inside as a train car. You use separate lanes, dedicated lanes. The contractors, they don't like that. You don't have to dig deep down underground. You can build nice stations. This is actually a station that we're doing in Rio. Again, you don't have to dig deep down underground to make a station like that. This station has the same comfort, the same features as a subway station. A kilometer of this costs a tenth of a subway. So spending much less money and doing it much faster, you can really change the way people move. This is a map of Rio. All the lines, the colored lines you see there, it's our high-capacity transportation network. In this present time today, we only carry 18 percent of our population in high-capacity transportation. With the BRTs we're doing, again, the cheapest and fastest way, we're going to move to 63 percent of the population being carried by high-capacity transportation. So remember what I said: You don't always have to be rich or powerful to get things done. You can find original ways to get things done. So the second commandment I want to leave you tonight is, a city of the future has to deal with mobility and integration of its people. Moving to the third commandment. And this is the most controversial one. It has to do with the favelas, the slums — whatever you call it, there are different names all over the world. But the point we want to make here tonight is, favelas are not always a problem. I mean, favelas can sometimes really be a solution, if you deal with them, if you put public policy inside the favelas. Let me just show a map of Rio again. Rio has 6.3 million inhabitants — More than 20 percent, 1.4 million, live in the favelas. All these red parts are favelas. So you see, they are spread all over the city. This is a typical view of a favela in Rio. You see the contrast between the rich and poor. So I want to make two points here tonight about favelas. The first one is, you can change from what I call a [vicious] circle to a virtual circle. But what you've got to do to get that is you've got to go inside the favelas, bring in the basic services — mainly education and health — with high quality. I'm going to give a fast example here. This was an old building in a favela in Rio — [unclear favela name] — that we just transformed into a primary school, with high quality. This is primary assistance in health that we built inside a favela, again, with high quality. We call it a family clinic. So the first point is bring basic services inside the favelas with high quality. The second point I want to make about the favelas is, you've got to open spaces in the favela. Bring infrastructure to the favelas, to the slums, wherever you are. Rio has the aim, by 2020, to have all its favelas completely urbanized. Another example, this was completely packed with houses, and then we built this, what we call, a knowledge square. This is a place with high technology where the kids that live in a poor house next to this place can go inside and have access to all technology. We even built a theater there — 3D movie. And this is the kind of change you can get for that. And by the end of the day you get something better than a TED Prize, which is this great laugh from a kid that lives in the favela. So the third commandment I want to leave here tonight is, a city of the future has to be socially integrated. You cannot deal with a city if it's not socially integrated. But moving to our fourth commandment, I really wouldn't be here tonight. Between November and May, Rio's completely packed. We just had last week Carnivale. It was great. It was lots of fun. We have New Year's Eve. There's like two million people on Copacabana Beach. We have problems. We fight floods, tropical rains at this time of the year. You can imagine how people get happy with me watching these kinds of scenes. We have problems with the tropical rains. Almost every year we have these landslides, which are terrible. But the reason I could come here is because of that. This was something we did with IBM that's a little bit more than a year old. It's what we call the Operations Center of Rio. And I wanted to show that I can govern my city, using technology, from here, from Long Beach, so I got here last night and I know everything. We're going to speak now to the Operations Center. This is Osorio, he's our secretary of urban affairs. So Osorio, good to be there with you. I've already told the people that we have tropical rain this time of year. So how's the weather in Rio now? Osorio: The weather is fine. We have fair weather today. Let me get you our weather satellite radar. You see just a little bit of moisture around the city. Absolutely no problem in the city in terms of weather, today and in the next few days. EP: Okay, how's the traffic? We, at this time of year, get lots of traffic jams. People get mad at the mayor. So how's the traffic tonight? Osario: Well traffic tonight is fine. Let me get you one of our 8,000 buses. A live transmission in downtown Rio for you, Mr. Mayor. You see, the streets are clear. Now it's 11:00 pm in Rio. Nothing of concern in terms of traffic. I'll get to you now the incidents of the day. We had heavy traffic early in the morning and in the rush hour in the afternoon, but nothing of big concern. We are below average in terms of traffic incidents in the city. EP: Okay, so you're showing now some public services. These are the cars. Osorio: Absolutely, Mr. Mayor. Let me get you the fleet of our waste collection trucks. This is live transmission. We have GPS's in all of our trucks. And you can see them working in all parts of the city. Waste collection on time. Public services working well. EP: Okay, Osorio, thank you very much. It was great to have you here. We're going to move so that I can make a conclusion. (Applause) Okay, so no files, this place, no paperwork, no distance, 24/7 working. So the fourth commandment I want to share with you here tonight is, a city of the future has to use technology to be present. I don't need to be there anymore to know and to administrate the city. But everything that I said here tonight, or the commandments, are means, are ways, for us to govern cities — invest in infrastructure, invest in the green, open parks, open spaces, integrate socially, use technology. But at the end of the day, when we talk about cities, we talk about a gathering of people. And we cannot see that as a problem. That is fantastic. If there's 3.5 billion now, it's going to be six billion then it's going to be 10 billion. That is great, that means we're going to have 10 billion minds working together, 10 billion talents together. So a city of the future, I really do believe that it's a city that cares about its citizens, integrates socially its citizens. A city of the future is a city that can never let anyone out of this great party, which are cities. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Texting that saves lives

{0: 'Nancy Lublin, cofounder and CEO of Crisis Text Line, is using technology and data to save lives.'}

TED2012

To most of you, this is a device to buy, sell, play games, watch videos. I think it might be a lifeline. I think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin. Texting: I know I say texting and a lot of you think sexting, a lot of you think about the lewd photos that you see — hopefully not your kids sending to somebody else — or trying to translate the abbreviations LOL, LMAO, HMU. I can help you with those later. But the parents in the room know that texting is actually the best way to communicate with your kids. It might be the only way to communicate with your kids. (Laughter) The average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month, unless she's a girl, then it's closer to 4,000. And the secret is she opens every single one. Texting has a 100 percent open rate. Now the parents are really alarmed. It's a 100 percent open rate even if she doesn't respond to you when you ask her when she's coming home for dinner. I promise she read that text. And this isn't some suburban iPhone-using teen phenomenon. Texting actually overindexes for minority and urban youth. I know this because at DoSomething.org, which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in America, about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging. We're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that. We're finding it 11 times more powerful than email. We've also found an unintended consequence. We've been getting text messages back like these. "I don't want to go to school today. The boys call me faggot." "I was cutting, my parents found out, and so I stopped. But I just started again an hour ago." Or, "He won't stop raping me. He told me not to tell anyone. It's my dad. Are you there?" That last one's an actual text message that we received. And yeah, we're there. I will not forget the day we got that text message. And so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline. Because this isn't what we do. We do social change. Kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there's nowhere else to turn that they're sending them to us. So think about it, a text hotline; it's pretty powerful. It's fast, it's pretty private. No one hears you in a stall, you're just texting quietly. It's real time. We can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals. That's great. But the thing that really makes this awesome is the data. Because I'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals. I want to prevent this shit from happening. So think about a cop. There's something in New York City. The police did it. It used to be just guess work, police work. And then they started crime mapping. And so they started following and watching petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things — charting the future essentially. And they found things like, when you see crystal meth on the street, if you add police presence, you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen. In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60 percent. So think about the data from a crisis text line. There is no census on bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape — no census. Maybe there's some studies, some longitudinal studies, that cost lots of money and took lots of time. Or maybe there's some anecdotal evidence. Imagine having real time data on every one of those issues. You could inform legislation. You could inform school policy. You could say to a principal, "You're having a problem every Thursday at three o'clock. What's going on in your school?" You could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result. This is really, to me, the power of texting and the power of data. Because while people are talking about data, making it possible for Facebook to mine my friend from the third grade, or Target to know when it's time for me to buy more diapers, or some dude to build a better baseball team, I'm actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school, to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father's raping her. Thank you. (Applause)

How to use a paper towel

{0: 'Joe Smith is an active figure in the Oregon community and a powerful advocate for proper paper towel use.'}

TEDxConcordiaUPortland

Five hundred seventy-one million two hundred thirty thousand pounds of paper towels are used by Americans every year. If we could — correction, wrong figure — 13 billion used every year. If we could reduce the usage of paper towels, one paper towel per person per day, 571,230,000 pounds of paper not used. We can do that. Now there are all kinds of paper towel dispensers. There's the tri-fold. People typically take two or three. There's the one that cuts it, that you have to tear off. People go one, two, three, four, tear. This much, right? There's the one that cuts itself. People go, one, two, three, four. Or there's the same thing, but recycled paper, you have to get five of those because they're not as absorbent, of course. The fact is, you can do it all with one towel. The key, two words: This half of the room, your word is "shake." Let's hear it. Shake. Louder. Audience: Shake. Joe Smith: Your word is "fold." Audience: Fold. JS: Again. Audience: Fold. JS: Really loud. Audience: Shake. Fold. JS: OK. Wet hands. Shake — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. Why 12? Twelve apostles, twelve tribes, twelve zodiac signs, twelve months. The one I like the best: It's the biggest number with one syllable. (Laughter) Tri-fold. Fold ... Dry. (Applause) Audience: Shake. Fold. JS: Cuts itself. Fold. The fold is important because it allows interstitial suspension. You don't have to remember that part, but trust me. (Laughter) Audience: Shake. Fold. JS: Cuts itself. You know the funny thing is, I get my hands drier than people do with three or four, because they can't get in between the cracks. If you think this isn't as good... Audience: Shake. Fold. JS: Now, there's now a real fancy invention, it's the one where you wave your hand and it kicks it out. It's way too big a towel. Let me tell you a secret. If you're really quick, if you're really quick — and I can prove this — this is half a towel from the dispenser in this building. How? As soon as it starts, you just tear it off. It's smart enough to stop. And you get half a towel. Audience: Shake. Fold. JS: Now, let's all say it together. Shake. Fold. You will for the rest of your life remember those words every time you pick up a paper towel. And remember, one towel per person for one year — 571,230,000 pounds of paper. No small thing. And next year, toilet paper. (Laughter)

Gaming for understanding

{0: "Brenda Romero designs games that turn some of history's most tragic lessons into interactive, emotional experiences."}

TEDxPhoenix

When we think of games, there's all kinds of things. Maybe you're ticked off, or maybe, you're looking forward to a new game. You've been up too late playing a game. All these things happen to me. But when we think about games, a lot of times we think about stuff like this: first-person shooters, or the big, what we would call AAA games, or maybe you're a Facebook game player. This is one my partner and I worked on. Maybe you play Facebook games, and that's what we're making right now. This is a lighter form of game. Maybe you think about the tragically boring board games that hold us hostage in Thanksgiving situations. This would be one of the tragically boring board games that you can figure out. Or maybe you're in your living room, playing with the Wii with the kids, and there's this whole range of games, and that's very much what I think about. I make my living from games, I've been lucky enough to do this since I was 15, which also qualifies as I've never really had a real job. But we think about games as fun, and that's completely reasonable, but let's just think about this. So this one here, this is the 1980 Olympics. Now I don't know where you guys were, but I was in my living room. It was practically a religious event. And this is when the Americans beat the Russians, and this was — yes, it was technically a game. Hockey is a game. But really, was this a game? I mean, people cried. I've never seen my mother cry like that at the end of Monopoly. (Laughter) And so this was an amazing experience. Or, if anybody here is from Boston — So when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series after I believe, 351 years — (Laughter) when they won the World Series, it was amazing. I happened to be living in Springfield at the time, and the best part of it was, you would close the women's door in the bathroom, and I remember seeing "Go Sox," and I thought, really? Or the houses, you'd come out, because every game, well, I think almost every game, went into overtime, right? So we'd be outside, and all the other lights are on in the whole block. And kids — the attendance was down in school, kids weren't going to school, but it's OK, it's the Red Sox, right? I mean, there's education, and then there's the Red Sox, and we know where they're stacked. So this was an amazing experience, and again, yes, it was a game, but they didn't write newspaper articles, people didn't say, "You know, really, I can die now, because the Red Sox won." And many people did. So games, it means something more to us. It absolutely means something more. So now, this is an abrupt transition here. There was three years where I actually did have a real job, sort of. I was the head of a college department teaching games, so, again, it was sort of a real job, and now I got to talk about making them as opposed to making them. Part of the job of it, when you're a chair of a department, is to eat, and I did that very well — and so I'm out at a dinner with this guy called Zig Jackson. So this is Zig in this photograph, this is also one of Zig's photographs. He's a photographer. And he goes all around the country taking pictures of himself, and you can see here he's got Zig's Indian Reservation. And this particular shot — this is one of the more traditional shots. This is a rain dancer. And this is one of my favorite shots here. So you can look at this, and maybe you've even seen things like this. This is an expression of culture, right? And this is actually from his Degradation series. And what was most fascinating to me about this series is just, look at that little boy there, can you imagine? We can see that's a traditional Native American. Now I just want to change that guy's race. Just imagine if that's a black guy. So, "Honey, come here, let's get you a picture with the black guy." Right? Like, seriously, nobody would do this. It baffles the mind. And so Zig, being Indian, likewise it baffles his mind. His favorite photograph — my favorite photograph of his, which I don't have in here — is Indian taking picture of white people taking pictures of Indians. (Laughter) So I happen to be at dinner with this photographer, and he was talking with another photographer about a shooting that had occurred, and it was on an Indian Reservation. He'd taken his camera up there to photograph it, but when he got there, he discovered he couldn't do it. He just couldn't capture the picture. And so they were talking back and forth about this question. Do you take the picture or not? And that was fascinating to me as a game designer, because it never occurs to me, should I make the game about this difficult topic or not? Because we just make things that are fun or will make you feel fear, that visceral excitement. But every other medium does it. So this is my kid. This is Maezza, and when she was seven years old, she came home from school one day, and like I do every single day, I asked her, "What did you do today?" So she said, "We talked about the Middle Passage." Now, this was a big moment. Maezza's dad is black, and I knew this day was coming. I wasn't expecting it at seven, I don't know why, but I wasn't. Anyways, so I asked her, "How do you feel about that?" So she proceeded to tell me, and so any of you who are parents will recognize the bingo buzzwords here. "The ships start in England, they come down from England, they go to Africa, they go across the ocean — that's the Middle Passage part — they come to America, where the slaves are sold," she's telling me. But Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and then he passed the Emancipation Proclamation, and now they're free. Pause for about 10 seconds. "Can I play a game, Mommy?" And I thought, that's it? And so, you know, this is the Middle Passage, this is an incredibly significant event, and she's treating it like, basically some black people went on a cruise, this is more or less how it sounds to her. (Laughter) And so, to me, I wanted more value in this, so when she asked if she could play a game, I said, "Yes." (Laughter) And so I happened to have all of these little pieces. I'm a game designer, so I have this stuff sitting around my house. I said, "Yeah, you can play a game," and I give her a bunch of these, and I tell her to paint them in different families. These are pictures of Maezza when she was — God, it still chokes me up seeing these. So she's painting her little families. So then I grab a bunch of them and I put them on a boat. This was the boat, it was made quickly, obviously. And so the basic gist of it is, I grabbed a bunch of families, and she's like, "Mommy, but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things." And she says, "They want to go." And I said, "Honey, no, they don't want to go. This is the Middle Passage, Nobody wants to go on the Middle Passage." So she gave me a look that only a daughter of a game designer would give a mother, and as we're going across the ocean, following these rules, she realizes that she's rolling pretty high, and she says to me, "We're not going to make it." And she realizes, we don't have enough food, and so she asks what to do, and I say — remember, she's seven — "We can either put some people in the water or we can hope that they don't get sick and we make it to the other side." Just the look on her face came over — now mind you this is after a month of — this is Black History Month, right? After a month, she says to me, "Did this really happen?" And I said, "Yes." And so she said — this is her brother and sister — "If I came out of the woods, Avalon and Donovan might be gone." "Yes." "But I'd get to see them in America." "No." "But what if I saw them? Couldn't we stay together?" "So Daddy could be gone." "Yes." She was fascinated by this, and she started to cry, I started to cry, her father started to cry, and now we're all crying. He didn't expect to come home from work to the Middle Passage, but there it goes. And so, we made this game, and she got it. She got it because she spent time with these people. It wasn't abstract stuff in a brochure or in a movie. And so it was just an incredibly powerful experience. This is the game, which I've ended up calling "The New World," because I like the phrase. I don't think the New World felt too new worldly exciting to the people who were brought over on slave ships. But when this happened, I saw the whole planet; I was so excited. I'd been making games for 20-some years, and then I decided to do it again. My history is Irish. So this is a game called "Síochán Leat." It's "peace be with you." It's the entire history of my family in a single game. I made another game called "Train." I was making a series of six games that covered difficult topics, and if you're going to cover a difficult topic, this is one you need to cover, and I'll let you figure out what that's about on your own. And I also made a game about the Trail of Tears. This is a game with 50,000 individual pieces. I was crazy when I decided to start it, but I'm in the middle of it now. It's the same thing. I'm hoping that I'll teach culture through these games. And the one I'm working on right now, which is — because I'm right in the middle of it, and these for some reason choke me up like crazy — is a game called "Mexican Kitchen Workers." And originally, it was a math problem, more or less. Here's the economics of illegal immigration. And the more I learned about Mexican culture — my partner is Mexican — the more I learned that, you know, for all of us, food is a basic need, and it is obviously with Mexicans, too, but it's much more than that. It's an expression of love. It's an expression of — God, I'm totally choking up way more than I thought. I'll look away from the picture. It's an expression of beauty, it's how they say they love you. It's how they say they care, and you can't hear somebody talk about their Mexican grandmother without saying "food" in the first sentence. And so to me, this beautiful culture, this beautiful expression is something that I want to capture through games. And so games, for a change, it changes how we see topics, it changes our perceptions about those people in topics, and it changes ourselves. We change as people through games, because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so. Thank you.

A new museum wing ... in a giant bubble

{0: 'Liz Diller and her maverick firm DS+R bring a groundbreaking approach to big and small projects in architecture, urban design and art -- playing with new materials, tampering with space and spectacle in ways that make you look twice.'}

TED2012

We conventionally divide space into private and public realms, and we know these legal distinctions very well because we've become experts at protecting our private property and private space. But we're less attuned to the nuances of the public. What translates generic public space into qualitative space? I mean, this is something that our studio has been working on for the past decade. And we're doing this through some case studies. A large chunk of our work has been put into transforming this neglected industrial ruin into a viable post-industrial space that looks forward and backward at the same time. And another huge chunk of our work has gone into making relevant a site that's grown out of sync with its time. We've been working on democratizing Lincoln Center for a public that doesn't usually have $300 to spend on an opera ticket. So we've been eating, drinking, thinking, living public space for quite a long time. And it's taught us really one thing, and that is to truly make good public space, you have to erase the distinctions between architecture, urbanism, landscape, media design and so on. It really goes beyond distinction. Now we're moving onto Washington, D.C. and we're working on another transformation, and that is for the existing Hirshhorn Museum that's sited on the most revered public space in America, the National Mall. The Mall is a symbol of American democracy. And what's fantastic is that this symbol is not a thing, it's not an image, it's not an artifact, actually it's a space, and it's kind of just defined by a line of buildings on either side. It's a space where citizens can voice their discontent and show their power. It's a place where pivotal moments in American history have taken place. And they're inscribed in there forever — like the march on Washington for jobs and freedom and the great speech that Martin Luther King gave there. The Vietnam protests, the commemoration of all that died in the pandemic of AIDS, the march for women's reproductive rights, right up until almost the present. The Mall is the greatest civic stage in this country for dissent. And it's synonymous with free speech, even if you're not sure what it is that you have to say. It may just be a place for civic commiseration. There is a huge disconnect, we believe, between the communicative and discursive space of the Mall and the museums that line it to either side. And that is that those museums are usually passive, they have passive relationships between the museum as the presenter and the audience, as the receiver of information. And so you can see dinosaurs and insects and collections of locomotives and all of that, but you're really not involved; you're being talked to. When Richard Koshalek took over as director of the Hirshhorn in 2009, he was determined to take advantage of the fact that this museum was sited at the most unique place: at the seat of power in the U.S. And while art and politics are inherently and implicitly together always and all the time, there could be some very special relationship that could be forged here in its uniqueness. The question is, is it possible ultimately for art to insert itself into the dialogue of national and world affairs? And could the museum be an agent of cultural diplomacy? There are over 180 embassies in Washington D.C. There are over 500 think tanks. There should be a way of harnessing all of that intellectual and global energy into, and somehow through, the museum. There should be some kind of brain trust. So the Hirshhorn, as we began to think about it, and as we evolved the mission, with Richard and his team — it's really his life blood. But beyond exhibiting contemporary art, the Hirshhorn will become a public forum, a place of discourse for issues around arts, culture, politics and policy. It would have the global reach of the World Economic Forum. It would have the interdisciplinarity of the TED Conference. It would have the informality of the town square. And for this new initiative, the Hirshhorn would have to expand or appropriate a site for a contemporary, deployable structure. This is it. This is the Hirshhorn — so a 230-foot-diameter concrete doughnut designed in the early '70s by Gordon Bunshaft. It's hulking, it's silent, it's cloistered, it's arrogant, it's a design challenge. Architects love to hate it. One redeeming feature is it's lifted up off the ground and it's got this void, and it's got an empty core kind of in the spirit and that facade very much corporate and federal style. And around that space, the ring is actually galleries. Very, very difficult to mount shows in there. When the Hirshhorn opened, Ada Louise Huxstable, the New York Times critic, had some choice words: "Neo-penitentiary modern." "A maimed monument and a maimed Mall for a maimed collection." Almost four decades later, how will this building expand for a new progressive program? Where would it go? It can't go in the Mall. There is no space there. It can't go in the courtyard. It's already taken up by landscape and by sculptures. Well there's always the hole. But how could it take the space of that hole and not be buried in it invisibly? How could it become iconic? And what language would it take? The Hirshhorn sits among the Mall's monumental institutions. Most are neoclassical, heavy and opaque, made of stone or concrete. And the question is, if one inhabits that space, what is the material of the Mall? It has to be different from the buildings there. It has to be something entirely different. It has to be air. In our imagination, it has to be light. It has to be ephemeral. It has to be formless. And it has to be free. (Video) So this is the big idea. It's a giant airbag. The expansion takes the shape of its container and it oozes out wherever it can — the top and sides. But more poetically, we like to think of the structure as inhaling the democratic air of the Mall, bringing it into itself. The before and the after. It was dubbed "the bubble" by the press. That was the lounge. It's basically one big volume of air that just oozes out in every direction. The membrane is translucent. It's made of silcon-coated glass fiber. And it's inflated twice a year for one month at a time. This is the view from the inside. So you might have been wondering how in the world did we get this approved by the federal government. It had to be approved by actually two agencies. And one is there to preserve the dignity and sanctity of the Mall. I blush whenever I show this. It is yours to interpret. But one thing I can say is that it's a combination of iconoclasm and adoration. There was also some creative interpretation involved. The Congressional Buildings Act of 1910 limits the height of buildings in D.C. to 130 feet, except for spires, towers, domes and minarets. This pretty much exempts monuments of the church and state. And the bubble is 153 ft. That's the Pantheon next to it. It's about 1.2 million cubic feet of compressed air. And so we argued it on the merits of being a dome. So there it is, very stately, among all the stately buildings in the Mall. And while this Hirshhorn is not landmarked, it's very, very historically sensitive. And so we couldn't really touch its surfaces. We couldn't leave any traces behind. So we strained it from the edges, and we held it by cables. It's a study of some bondage techniques, which are actually very important because it's hit by wind all the time. There's one permanent steel ring at the top, but it can't be seen from any vantage point on the Mall. There are also some restrictions about how much it could be lit. It glows from within, it's translucent. But it can't be more lit than the Capitol or some of the monuments. So it's down the hierarchy on lighting. So it comes to the site twice a year. It's taken off the delivery truck. It's hoisted. And then it's inflated with this low-pressure air. And then it's restrained with the cables. And then it's ballasted with water at the very bottom. This is a very strange moment where we were asked by the bureaucracy at the Mall how much time would it take to install. And we said, well the first erection would take one week. And they really connected with that idea. And then it was really easy all the way through. So we didn't really have that many hurdles, I have to say, with the government and all the authorities. But some of the toughest hurdles have been the technical ones. This is the warp and weft. This is a point cloud. There are extreme pressures. This is a very, very unusual building in that there's no gravity load, but there's load in every direction. And I'm just going to zip through these slides. And this is the space in action. So flexible interior for discussions, just like this, but in the round — luminous and reconfigurable. Could be used for anything, for performances, films, for installations. And the very first program will be one of cultural dialogue and diplomacy organized in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations. Form and content are together here. The bubble is an anti-monument. The ideals of participatory democracy are represented through suppleness rather than rigidity. Art and politics occupy an ambiguous site outside the museum walls, but inside of the museum's core, blending its air with the democratic air of the Mall. And the bubble will inflate hopefully for the first time at the end of 2013. Thank you. (Applause)

A 40-year plan for energy

{0: 'In his new book, "Reinventing Fire," Amory Lovins shares ingenious ideas for the next era of energy.'}

TEDSalon NY2012

America's public energy conversation boils down to this question: Would you rather die of A) oil wars, or B) climate change, or C) nuclear holocaust, or D) all of the above? Oh, I missed one: or E) none of the above? That's the one we're not normally offered. What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing? Could we have fuel without fear? Could we reinvent fire? You see, fire made us human; fossil fuels made us modern. But now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable. Let's see how. Four-fifths of the world's energy still comes from burning each year four cubic miles of the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo. Those fossil fuels have built our civilization. They've created our wealth. They've enriched the lives of billions. But they also have rising costs to our security, economy, health and environment that are starting to erode, if not outweigh their benefits. So we need a new fire. And switching from the old fire to the new fire means changing two big stories about oil and electricity, each of which puts two-fifths of the fossil carbon in the air. But they're really quite distinct. Less than one percent of our electricity is made from oil — although almost half is made from coal. Their uses are quite concentrated. Three-fourths of our oil fuel is transportation. Three-fourths of our electricity powers buildings. And the rest of both runs factories. So very efficient vehicles, buildings and factories save oil and coal, and also natural gas that can displace both of them. But today's energy system is not just inefficient, it is also disconnected, aging, dirty and insecure. So it needs refurbishment. By 2050 though, it could become efficient, connected and distributed with elegantly frugal autos, factories and buildings all relying on a modern, secure and resilient electricity system. We can eliminate our addiction to oil and coal by 2050 and use one-third less natural gas while switching to efficient use and renewable supply. This could cost, by 2050, five trillion dollars less in net present value, that is expressed as a lump sum today, than business as usual — assuming that carbon emissions and all other hidden or external costs are worth zero — a conservatively low estimate. Yet this cheaper energy system could support 158 percent bigger U.S. economy all without needing oil or coal, or for that matter nuclear energy. Moreover, this transition needs no new inventions and no acts of Congress and no new federal taxes, mandate subsidies or laws and running Washington gridlock. Let me say that again. I'm going to tell you how to get the United States completely off oil and coal, five trillion dollars cheaper with no act of Congress led by business for profit. In other words, we're going to use our most effective institutions — private enterprise co-evolving with civil society and sped by military innovation to go around our least effective institutions. And whether you care most about profits and jobs and competitive advantage or national security, or environmental stewardship and climate protection and public health, reinventing fire makes sense and makes money. General Eisenhower reputedly said that enlarging the boundaries of a tough problem makes it soluble by encompassing more options and more synergies. So in reinventing fire, we integrated all four sectors that use energy — transportation, buildings, industry and electricity — and we integrated four kinds of innovation, not just technology and policy, but also design and business strategy. Those combinations yield very much more than the sum of the parts, especially in creating deeply disruptive business opportunities. Oil costs our economy two billion dollars a day, plus another four billion dollars a day in hidden economic and military costs, raising its total cost to over a sixth of GDP. Our mobility fuel goes three-fifths to automobiles. So let's start by making autos oil free. Two-thirds of the energy it takes to move a typical car is caused by its weight. And every unit of energy you save at the wheels, by taking out weight or drag, saves seven units in the tank, because you don't have to waste six units getting the energy to the wheels. Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, epidemic obesity has made our two-ton steel cars gain weight twice as fast as we have. But today, ultralight, ultrastrong materials, like carbon fiber composites, can make dramatic weight savings snowball and can make cars simpler and cheaper to build. Lighter and more slippery autos need less force to move them, so their engines get smaller. Indeed, that sort of vehicle fitness then makes electric propulsion affordable because the batteries or fuel cells also get smaller and lighter and cheaper. So sticker prices will ultimately fall to about the same as today, while the driving cost, even from the start, is very much lower. So these innovations together can transform automakers from wringing tiny savings out of Victorian engine and seal-stamping technologies to the steeply falling costs of three linked innovations that strongly reenforce each other — namely ultralight materials, making them into structures and electric propulsion. The sales can grow and the prices fall even faster with temporary feebates, that is rebates for efficient new autos paid for by fees on inefficient ones. And just in the first two years the biggest of Europe's five feebate programs has tripled the speed of improving automotive efficiency. The resulting shift to electric autos is going to be as game-changing as shifting from typewriters to the gains in computers. Of course, computers and electronics are now America's biggest industry, while typewriter makers have vanished. So vehicle fitness opens a new automotive competitive strategy that can double the oil savings over the next 40 years, but then also make electrification affordable, and that displaces the rest of the oil. America could lead this next automotive revolution. Currently the leader is Germany. Last year, Volkswagen announced that by next year they'll be producing this carbon fiber plugin hybrid getting 230 miles a gallon. Also last year, BMW announced this carbon fiber electric car, they said that its carbon fiber is paid for by needing fewer batteries. And they said, "We do not intend to be a typewriter maker." Audi claimed it's going to beat them both by a year. Seven years ago, an even faster and cheaper American manufacturing technology was used to make this little carbon fiber test part, which doubles as a carbon cap. (Laughter) In one minute — and you can tell from the sound how immensely stiff and strong it is. Don't worry about dropping it, it's tougher than titanium. Tom Friedman actually whacked it as hard as he could with a sledgehammer without even scuffing it. But such manufacturing techniques can scale to automotive speed and cost with aerospace performance. They can save four-fifths of the capital needed to make autos. They can save lives because this stuff can absorb up to 12 times as much crash energy per pound as steel. If we made all of our autos this way, it would save oil equivalent to finding one and a half Saudi Arabias, or half an OPEC, by drilling in the Detroit formation, a very prospective play. And all those mega-barrels under Detroit cost an average of 18 bucks a barrel. They are all-American, carbon-free and inexhaustible. The same physics and the same business logic also apply to big vehicles. In the five years ending with 2010, Walmart saved 60 percent of the fuel per ton-mile in its giant fleet of heavy trucks through better logistics and design. But just the technological savings in heavy trucks can get to two-thirds. And combined with triple to quintuple efficiency airplanes, now on the drawing board, can save close to a trillion dollars. Also today's military revolution in energy efficiency is going to speed up all of these civilian advances in much the same way that military R&D has given us the Internet, the Global Positioning System and the jet engine and microchip industries. As we design and build vehicles better, we can also use them smarter by harnessing four powerful techniques for eliminating needless driving. Instead of just seeing the travel grow, we can use innovative pricing, charging for road infrastructure by the mile, not by the gallon. We can use some smart IT to enhance transit and enable car sharing and ride sharing. We can allow smart and lucrative growth models that help people already be near where they want to be, so they don't need to go somewhere else. And we can use smart IT to make traffic free-flowing. Together, those things can give us the same or better access with 46 to 84 percent less driving, saving another 0.4 trillion dollars, plus 0.3 trillion dollars from using trucks more productively. So 40 years hence, when you add it all up, a far more mobile U.S. economy can use no oil. Saving or displacing barrels for 25 bucks rather than buying them for over a hundred, adds up to a $4 trillion net saving counting all the hidden costs at zero. So to get mobility without oil, to phase out the oil, we can get efficient and then switch fuels. Those 125 to 240 mile-per-gallon-equivalent autos can use any mixture of hydrogen fuel cells, electricity and advanced biofuels. The trucks and planes can realistically use hydrogen or advanced biofuels. The trucks could even use natural gas. But no vehicles will need oil. And the most biofuel we might need, just three million barrels a day, can be made two-thirds from waste without displacing any cropland and without harming soil or climate. Our team speeds up these kinds of oil savings by what we call "institutional acupuncture." We figure out where the business logic is congested and not flowing properly, we stick little needles in it to get it flowing, working with partners like Ford and Walmart and the Pentagon. And the long transition is already well under way. In fact, three years ago mainstream analysts were starting to see peak oil, not in supply, but in demand. And Deutsche Bank even said world oil use could peak around 2016. In other words, oil is getting uncompetitive even at low prices before it becomes unavailable even at high prices. But the electrified vehicles don't need to burden the electricity grid. Rather, when smart autos exchange electricity and information through smart buildings with smart grids, they're adding to the grid valuable flexibility and storage that help the grid integrate varying solar and wind power. So the electrified autos make the auto and electricity problems easier to solve together than separately. And they also converge the oil story with our second big story, saving electricity and then making it differently. And those twin revolutions in electricity will bring to that sector more numerous and profound and diverse disruptions than any other sector, because we've got 21st century technology and speed colliding head-on with 20th and 19th century institutions, rules and cultures. Changing how we make electricity gets easier if we need less of it. Most of it now is wasted and the technologies for saving it keep improving faster than we're installing them. So the unbought efficiency resource keeps getting ever bigger and cheaper. But as efficiency in buildings and industry starts to grow faster than the economy, America's electricity use could actually shrink, even with the little extra use required for those efficient electrified autos. And we can do this just by reasonably accelerating existing trends. Over the next 40 years, buildings, which use three-quarters of the electricity, can triple or quadruple their energy productivity, saving 1.4 trillion dollars, net present value, with a 33 percent internal rate of return or in English, the savings are worth four times what they cost. And industry can accelerate too, doubling its energy productivity with a 21 percent internal rate of return. The key is a disruptive innovation that we call integrative design that often makes very big energy savings cost less than small or no savings. That is, it can give you expanding returns, not diminishing returns. That is how our 2010 retrofit is saving over two-fifths of the energy in the Empire State Building — remanufacturing those six and a half thousand windows on site into super windows that pass light, but reflect heat. plus better lights and office equipment and such cut the maximum cooling load by a third. And then renovating smaller chillers instead of adding bigger ones saved 17 million dollars of capital cost, which helped pay for the other improvements and reduce the payback to just three years. Integrative design can also increase energy savings in industry. Dow's billion-dollar efficiency investment has already returned nine billion dollars. But industry as a whole has another half-trillion dollars of energy still to save. For example, three-fifths of the world's electricity runs motors. Half of that runs pumps and fans. And those can all be made more efficient, and the motors that turn them can have their system efficiency roughly doubled by integrating 35 improvements, paying back in about a year. But first we ought to be capturing bigger, cheaper savings that are normally ignored and are not in the textbooks. For example, pumps, the biggest use of motors, move liquid through pipes. But a standard industrial pumping loop was redesigned to use at least 86 percent less energy, not by getting better pumps, but just by replacing long, thin, crooked pipes with fat, short, straight pipes. This is not about new technology, it's just rearranging our metal furniture. Of course, it also shrinks the pumping equipment and its capital costs. So what do such savings mean for the electricity that is three-fifths used in motors? Well, from the coal burned at the power plant through all these compounding losses, only a tenth of the fuel energy actually ends up coming out the pipe as flow. But now let's turn those compounding losses around backwards, and every unit of flow or friction that we save in the pipe saves 10 units of fuel cost, pollution and what Hunter Lovins calls "global weirding" back at the power plant. And of course, as you go back upstream, the components get smaller and therefore cheaper. Our team has lately found such snowballing energy savings in more than 30 billion dollars worth of industrial redesigns — everything from data centers and chip fabs to mines and refineries. Typically our retrofit designs save about 30 to 60 percent of the energy and pay back in a few years, while the new facility designs save 40 to 90-odd percent with generally lower capital cost. Now needing less electricity would ease and speed the shift to new sources of electricity, chiefly renewables. China leads their explosive growth and their plummeting cost. In fact, these solar power module costs have just fallen off the bottom of the chart. And Germany now has more solar workers than America has steel workers. Already in about 20 states private installers will come put those cheap solar cells on your roof with no money down and beat your utility bill. Such unregulated products could ultimately add up to a virtual utility that bypasses your electric company just as your cellphone bypassed your wireline phone company. And this sort of thing gives utility executives the heebee-jeebees and it gives venture capitalists sweet dreams. Renewables are no longer a fringe activity. For each of the past four years half of the world's new generating capacity has been renewable, mainly lately in developing countries. In 2010, renewables other than big hydro, particularly wind and solar cells, got 151 billion dollars of private investment, and they actually surpassed the total installed capacity of nuclear power in the world by adding 60 billion watts in that one year. That happens to be the same amount of solar cell capacity that the world can now make every year — a number that goes up 60 or 70 percent a year. In contrast, the net additions of nuclear capacity and coal capacity and the orders behind those keep fading because they cost too much and they have too much financial risk. In fact in this country, no new nuclear power plant has been able to raise any private construction capital, despite seven years of 100-plus percent subsidies. So how else could we replace the coal-fired power plants? Well efficiency and gas can displace them all at just below their operating cost and, combined with renewables, can displace them more than 23 times at less than their replacement cost. But we only need to replace them once. We're often told though that only coal and nuclear plants can keep the lights on, because they're 24/7, whereas wind and solar power are variable, and hence supposedly unreliable. Actually no generator is 24/7. They all break. And when a big plant goes down, you lose a thousand megawatts in milliseconds, often for weeks or months, often without warning. That is exactly why we've designed the grid to back up failed plants with working plants. And in exactly the same way, the grid can handle wind and solar power's forecastable variations. Hourly simulations show that largely or wholly renewable grids can deliver highly reliable power when they're forecasted, integrated and diversified by both type and location. And that's true both for continental areas like the U.S. or Europe and for smaller areas embedded within a larger grid. That is how, for example, four German states in 2010 were 43 to 52 percent wind powered. Portugal was 45 percent renewable powered, Denmark 36. And it's how all of Europe can shift to renewable electricity. In America, our aging, dirty and insecure power system has to be replaced anyway by 2050. And whatever we replace it with is going to cost about the same, about six trillion dollars at present value — whether we buy more of what we've got or new nuclear and so-called clean coal, or renewables that are more or less centralized. But those four futures at the same cost differ profoundly in their risks, around national security, fuel, water, finance, technology, climate and health. For example, our over-centralized grid is very vulnerable to cascading and potentially economy-shattering blackouts caused by bad space weather or other natural disasters or a terrorist attack. But that blackout risk disappears, and all of the other risks are best managed, with distributed renewables organized into local micro-grids that normally interconnect, but can stand alone at need. That is, they can disconnect fractally and then reconnect seamlessly. That approach is exactly what the Pentagon is adopting for its own power supply. They think they need that; how about the rest of us that they're defending? We want our stuff to work too. At about the same cost as business as usual, this would maximize national security, customer choice, entrepreneurial opportunity and innovation. Together, efficient use and diverse dispersed renewable supply are starting to transform the whole electricity sector. Traditionally utilities build a lot of giant coal and nuclear plants and a bunch of big gas plants and maybe a little bit of efficiency renewables. And those utilities were rewarded, as they still are in 34 states, for selling you more electricity. However, especially where regulators are now instead rewarding cutting your bills, the investments are shifting radically toward efficiency, demand response, cogeneration, renewables and ways to knit them all together reliably with less transmission and little or no bulk electricity storage. So our energy future is not fate, but choice, and that choice is very flexible. In 1976, for example, government and industry insisted that the amount of energy needed to make a dollar of GDP could never go down. And I heretically suggested it could go down several-fold. Well that's what's actually happened so far. It's fallen by half. But with today's much better technologies, more mature delivery channels and integrative design, we can do far more and even cheaper. So to solve the energy problem, we just needed to enlarge it. And the results may at first seem incredible, but as Marshall McLuhan said, "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity." Now combine the electricity and oil revolutions, both driven by modern efficiency, and you get the really big story: reinventing fire, where business enabled and sped by smart policies in mindful markets can lead the United States completely off oil and coal by 2050, saving 5 trillion dollars, growing the economy 2.6-fold, strengthening out national security, oh, and by the way, by getting rid of the oil and coal, reducing the fossil carbon emissions by 82 to 86 percent. Now if you like any of those outcomes, you can support reinventing fire without needing to like all of them and without needing to agree about which of them is most important. So focusing on outcomes, not motives, can turn gridlock and conflict into a unifying solution to America's energy challenge. This also turns out to be the best way to cope with global challenges — climate change, nuclear proliferation, energy insecurity, energy poverty — all of which make us less safe. Now our team at RMI helps smart companies to get unstuck and speed this journey via six sectoral initiatives, with some more hatching. Of course there's still a lot of old thinking out there too. Former oil man Maurice Strong said, "Not all the fossils are in the fuel." But as Edgar Woolard, who used to chair Dupont, reminds us, "Companies hampered by old thinking won't be a problem because," he said," they simply won't be around long-term." I've described not just a once-in-a-civilization business opportunity, but one of the most profound transitions in the history of our species. We humans are inventing a new fire, not dug from below, but flowing from above; not scarce, but bountiful; not local, but everywhere; not transient, but permanent; not costly, but free. And but for a little transitional tail of natural gas and a bit of biofuel grown in ways that sustain and endure, this new fire is flameless. Efficiently used, it really can do our work without working our undoing. Each of you owns a piece of that $5 trillion prize. And our new book "Reinventing Fire" describes how you can capture it. So with the conversation just begun at ReinventingFire.com, let me invite you each to engage with us and with each other, with everyone around you, to help make the world richer, fairer, cooler and safer by together reinventing fire. Thank you. (Applause)

Sculpting waves in wood and time

{0: "Reuben Margolin's moving sculptures combine the logic of math with the sensuousness of nature."}

TED2012

Usually I like working in my shop, but when it's raining and the driveway outside turns into a river, then I just love it. And I'll cut some wood and drill some holes and watch the water, and maybe I'll have to walk around and look for washers. You have no idea how much time I spend. This is the "Double Raindrop." Of all my sculptures, it's the most talkative. It adds together the interference pattern from two raindrops that land near each other. Instead of expanding circles, they're expanding hexagons. All the sculptures move by mechanical means. Do you see how there's three peaks to the yellow sine wave? Right here I'm adding a sine wave with four peaks and turning it on. Eight hundred two-liter soda bottles — oh yea. (Laughter) Four hundred aluminum cans. Tule is a reed that's native to California, and the best thing about working with it is that it smells just delicious. A single drop of rain increasing amplitude. The spiral eddy that trails a paddle on a rafting trip. This adds together four different waves. And here I'm going to pull out the double wavelengths and increase the single. The mechanism that drives it has nine motors and about 3,000 pulleys. Four hundred and forty-five strings in a three-dimensional weave. Transferred to a larger scale — actually a lot larger, with a lot of help — 14,064 bicycle reflectors — a 20-day install. "Connected" is a collaboration with choreographer Gideon Obarzanek. Strings attached to dancers. This is very early rehearsal footage, but the finished work's on tour and is actually coming through L.A. in a couple weeks. A pair of helices and 40 wooden slats. Take your finger and draw this line. Summer, fall, winter, spring, noon, dusk, dark, dawn. Have you ever seen those stratus clouds that go in parallel stripes across the sky? Did you know that's a continuous sheet of cloud that's dipping in and out of the condensation layer? What if every seemingly isolated object was actually just where the continuous wave of that object poked through into our world? The Earth is neither flat nor round. It's wavy. It sounds good, but I'll bet you know in your gut that it's not the whole truth, and I'll tell you why. I have a two-year-old daughter who's the best thing ever. And I'm just going to come out and say it: My daughter is not a wave. And you might say, "Surely, Rueben, if you took even just the slightest step back, the cycles of hunger and eating, waking and sleeping, laughing and crying would emerge as pattern." But I would say, "If I did that, too much would be lost." This tension between the need to look deeper and the beauty and immediacy of the world, where if you even try to look deeper you've already missed what you're looking for, this tension is what makes the sculptures move. And for me, the path between these two extremes takes the shape of a wave. Let me show you one more. Thank you very much. Thanks. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) June Cohen: Looking at each of your sculptures, they evoke so many different images. Some of them are like the wind and some are like waves, and sometimes they look alive and sometimes they seem like math. Is there an actual inspiration behind each one? Are you thinking of something physical or somthing tangible as you design it? RM: Well some of them definitely have a direct observation — like literally two raindrops falling, and just watching that pattern is so stunning. And then just trying to figure out how to make that using stuff. I like working with my hands. There's nothing better than cutting a piece of wood and trying to make it move. JC: And does it ever change? Do you think you're designing one thing, and then when it's produced it looks like something else? RM: The "Double Raindrop" I worked on for nine months, and when I finally turned it on, I actually hated it. The very moment I turned it on, I hated it. It was like a really deep-down gut reaction, and I wanted to throw it out. And I happened to have a friend who was over, and he said, "Why don't you just wait." And I waited, and the next day I liked it a bit better, the next day I liked it a bit better, and now I really love it. And so I guess, one, the gut reactions a little bit wrong sometimes, and two, it does not look like as expected. JC: The relationship evolves over time. Well thank you so much. That was a gorgeous treat for us. RM: Thanks. (JC: Thank you, Reuben.) (Applause)

Tracking our online trackers

{0: 'Gary Kovacs is a technologist and the former CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, where he directed the development of Firefox.'}

TED2012

I don't know why, but I'm continually amazed to think that two and a half billion of us around the world are connected to each other through the Internet and that at any point in time more than 30 percent of the world's population can go online to learn, to create and to share. And the amount of time each of us is spending doing all of this is also continuing to go grow. A recent study showed that the young generation alone is spending over eight hours a day online. As the parent of a nine-year-old girl, that number seems awfully low. (Laughter) But just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us, it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world. And increasingly, the price we're being asked to pay for all of this connectedness is our privacy. Today, what many of us would love to believe is that the Internet is a private place; it's not. And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen, we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods. We are leaving our birthdays, our places of residence, our interests and preferences, our relationships, our financial histories, and on and on it goes. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not for one minute suggesting that sharing data is a bad thing. In fact, when I know the data that's being shared and I'm asked explicitly for my consent, I want some sites to understand my habits. It helps them suggest books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends for us to connect with. But when I don't know and when I haven't been asked, that's when the problem arises. It's a phenomenon on the Internet today called behavioral tracking, and it is very big business. In fact, there's an entire industry formed around following us through the digital woods and compiling a profile on each of us. And when all of that data is held, they can do almost whatever they want with it. This is an area today that has very few regulations and even fewer rules. Except for some of the recent announcements here in the United States and in Europe, it's an area of consumer protection that's almost entirely naked. So let me expose this lurking industry a little bit further. The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion and it's an experimental browser add-on that you can install in your Firefox browser that helps you see where your Web data is going and who's tracking you. The red dots you see up there are sites that are behavioral tracking that I have not navigated to, but are following me. The blue dots are the sites that I've actually navigated directly to. And the gray dots are sites that are also tracking me, but I have no idea who they are. All of them are connected, as you can see, to form a picture of me on the Web. And this is my profile. So let me go from an example to something very specific and personal. I installed Collusion in my own laptop two weeks ago and I let it follow me around for what was a pretty typical day. Now like most of you, I actually start my day going online and checking email. I then go to a news site, look for some headlines. And in this particular case I happened to like one of them on the merits of music literacy in schools and I shared it over a social network. Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table, and I asked her, "Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school?" And she, of course, naturally as a nine-year-old, looked at me and said quizzically, "What's literacy?" So I sent her online, of course, to look it up. Now let me stop here. We are not even two bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me. I have navigated to a total of four. So let me fast-forward through the rest of my day. I go to work, I check email, I log onto a few more social sites, I blog, I check more news reports, I share some of those news reports, I go look at some videos, pretty typical day — in this case, actually fairly pedantic — and at the end of the day, as my day winds down, look at my profile. The red dots have exploded. The gray dots have grown exponentially. All in all, there's over 150 sites that are now tracking my personal information, most all of them without my consent. I look at this picture and it freaks me out. This is nothing. I am being stalked across the Web. And why is this happening? Pretty simple — it's huge business. The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today. And as adults, we're certainly not alone. At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile, I installed one for my daughter. And on one single Saturday morning, over two hours on the Internet, here's her Collusion profile. This is a nine-year-old girl navigating to principally children's sites. I move from this, from freaked out to enraged. This is no longer me being a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate; this is me being a parent. Imagine in the physical world if somebody followed our children around with a camera and a notebook and recorded their every movement. I can tell you, there isn't a person in this room that would sit idly by. We'd take action. It may not be good action, but we would take action. (Laughter) We can't sit idly by here either. This is happening today. Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. Our voices matter and our actions matter even more. Today we've launched Collusion. You can download it, install it in Firefox, to see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods. Going forward, all of our voices need to be heard. Because what we don't know can actually hurt us. Because the memory of the Internet is forever. We are being watched. It's now time for us to watch the watchers. Thank you. (Applause)

Perspective is everything

{0: 'Rory Sutherland stands at the center of an advertising revolution in brand identities, designing cutting-edge, interactive campaigns that blur the line between ad and entertainment.'}

TEDxAthens

What you have here is an electronic cigarette. It's something that, since it was invented a year or two ago, has given me untold happiness. (Laughter) A little bit of it, I think, is the nicotine, but there's something much bigger than that; which is, ever since, in the UK, they banned smoking in public places, I've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again. (Laughter) And the reason, I only worked out just the other day, which is: when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people, you don't actually want to spend all the time talking. It's really, really tiring. Sometimes you just want to stand there silently, alone with your thoughts. Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. (Laughter) If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher. (Laughter) (Applause) So the power of reframing things cannot be overstated. What we have is exactly the same thing, the same activity, but one of them makes you feel great and the other one, with just a small change of posture, makes you feel terrible. And I think one of the problems with classical economics is, it's absolutely preoccupied with reality. And reality isn't a particularly good guide to human happiness. Why, for example, are pensioners much happier than the young unemployed? Both of them, after all, are in exactly the same stage of life. You both have too much time on your hands and not much money. But pensioners are reportedly very, very happy, whereas the unemployed are extraordinarily unhappy and depressed. The reason, I think, is that the pensioners believe they've chosen to be pensioners, whereas the young unemployed feel it's been thrust upon them. In England, the upper-middle classes have actually solved this problem perfectly, because they've re-branded unemployment. If you're an upper-middle-class English person, you call unemployment "a year off." (Laughter) And that's because having a son who's unemployed in Manchester is really quite embarrassing. But having a son who's unemployed in Thailand is really viewed as quite an accomplishment. (Laughter) But actually, the power to re-brand things — to understand that our experiences, costs, things don't actually much depend on what they really are, but on how we view them — I genuinely think can't be overstated. There's an experiment I think Daniel Pink refers to, where you put two dogs in a box and the box has an electric floor. Every now and then, an electric shock is applied to the floor, which pains the dogs. The only difference is one of the dogs has a small button in its half of the box. And when it nuzzles the button, the electric shock stops. The other dog doesn't have the button. It's exposed to exactly the same level of pain as the dog in the first box, but it has no control over the circumstances. Generally, the first dog can be relatively content. The second dog lapses into complete depression. The circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives. It's an interesting question. We ask the question — the whole debate in the Western world is about the level of taxation. But I think there's another debate to be asked, which is the level of control we have over our tax money, that what costs us 10 pounds in one context can be a curse; what costs us 10 pounds in a different context, we may actually welcome. You know, pay 20,000 pounds in tax toward health, and you're merely feeling a mug. Pay 20,000 pounds to endow a hospital ward, and you're called a philanthropist. I'm probably in the wrong country to talk about willingness to pay tax. (Laughter) So I'll give you one in return: how you frame things really matters. Do you call it "The bailout of Greece"? Or "The bailout of a load of stupid banks which lent to Greece"? (Laughter) Because they are actually the same thing. What you call them actually affects how you react to them, viscerally and morally. I think psychological value is great, to be absolutely honest. One of my great friends, a professor called Nick Chater, who's the Professor of Decision Sciences in London, believes we should spend far less time looking into humanity's hidden depths, and spend much more time exploring the hidden shallows. I think that's true, actually. I think impressions have an insane effect on what we think and what we do. But what we don't have is a really good model of human psychology — at least pre-Kahneman, perhaps, we didn't have a really good model of human psychology to put alongside models of engineering, of neoclassical economics. So people who believed in psychological solutions didn't have a model. We didn't have a framework. This is what Warren Buffett's business partner Charlie Munger calls "a latticework on which to hang your ideas." Engineers, economists, classical economists all had a very, very robust existing latticework on which practically every idea could be hung. We merely have a collection of random individual insights without an overall model. And what that means is that, in looking at solutions, we've probably given too much priority to what I call technical engineering solutions, Newtonian solutions, and not nearly enough to the psychological ones. You know my example of the Eurostar: six million pounds spent to reduce the journey time between Paris and London by about 40 minutes. For 0.01 percent of this money, you could have put wi-fi on the trains, which wouldn't have reduced the duration of the journey, but would have improved its enjoyment and its usefulness far more. For maybe 10 percent of the money, you could have paid all of the world's top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free Château Pétrus to all the passengers. (Laughter) You'd still have five million pounds in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down. (Laughter) Why were we not given the chance to solve that problem psychologically? I think it's because there's an imbalance, an asymmetry in the way we treat creative, emotionally driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational, numerical, spreadsheet-driven ideas. If you're a creative person, I think, quite rightly, you have to share all your ideas for approval with people much more rational than you. You have to go in and have a cost-benefit analysis, a feasibility study, an ROI study and so forth. And I think that's probably right. But this does not apply the other way around. People who have an existing framework — an economic framework, an engineering framework — feel that, actually, logic is its own answer. What they don't say is, "Well, the numbers all seem to add up, but before I present this idea, I'll show it to some really crazy people to see if they can come up with something better." And so we — artificially, I think — prioritize what I'd call mechanistic ideas over psychological ideas. An example of a great psychological idea: the single best improvement in passenger satisfaction on the London Underground, per pound spent, came when they didn't add any extra trains, nor change the frequency of the trains; they put dot matrix display boards on the platforms — because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality, its duration, but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait. Waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes, knuckle biting, going, "When's this train going to damn well arrive?" Here's a beautiful example of a psychological solution deployed in Korea. Red traffic lights have a countdown delay. It's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments. Why? Because road rage, impatience and general irritation are massively reduced when you can actually see the time you have to wait. In China, not really understanding the principle behind this, they applied the same principle to green traffic lights — (Laughter) which isn't a great idea. You're 200 yards away, you realize you've got five seconds to go, you floor it. (Laughter) The Koreans, very assiduously, did test both. The accident rate goes down when you apply this to red traffic lights; it goes up when you apply it to green traffic lights. This is all I'm asking for, really, in human decision making, is the consideration of these three things. I'm not asking for the complete primacy of one over the other. I'm merely saying that when you solve problems, you should look at all three of these equally, and you should seek as far as possible to find solutions which sit in the sweet spot in the middle. If you actually look at a great business, you'll nearly always see all of these three things coming into play. Really successful businesses — Google is a great, great technological success, but it's also based on a very good psychological insight: people believe something that only does one thing is better at that thing than something that does that thing and something else. It's an innate thing called "goal dilution." Ayelet Fishbach has written a paper about this. Everybody else at the time of Google, more or less, was trying to be a portal. Yes, there's a search function, but you also have weather, sports scores, bits of news. Google understood that if you're just a search engine, people assume you're a very, very good search engine. All of you know this, actually, from when you go in to buy a television, and in the shabbier end of the row of flat-screen TVs, you can see, are these rather despised things called "combined TV and DVD players." And we have no knowledge whatsoever of the quality of those things, but we look at a combined TV and DVD player and we go, "Uck. It's probably a bit of a crap telly and a bit rubbish as a DVD player." So we walk out of the shops with one of each. Google is as much a psychological success as it is a technological one. I propose that we can use psychology to solve problems that we didn't even realize were problems at all. This is my suggestion for getting people to finish their course of antibiotics. Don't give them 24 white pills; give them 18 white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first, and then take the blue ones. It's called "chunking." The likelihood that people will get to the end is much greater when there is a milestone somewhere in the middle. One of the great mistakes, I think, of economics is it fails to understand that what something is — whether it's retirement, unemployment, cost — is a function, not only of its amount, but also its meaning. This is a toll crossing in Britain. Quite often queues happen at the tolls. Sometimes you get very, very severe queues. You could apply the same principle, actually, to the security lanes in airports. What would happen if you could actually pay twice as much money to cross the bridge, but go through a lane that's an express lane? It's not an unreasonable thing to do; it's an economically efficient thing to do. Time means more to some people than others. If you're waiting trying to get to a job interview, you'd patently pay a couple of pounds more to go through the fast lane. If you're on the way to visit your mother-in-law, you'd probably prefer — (Laughter) you'd probably prefer to stay on the left. The only problem is if you introduce this economically efficient solution, people hate it ... because they think you're deliberately creating delays at the bridge in order to maximize your revenue, and, "Why on earth should I pay to subsidize your incompetence?" On the other hand, change the frame slightly and create charitable yield management, so the extra money you get goes not to the bridge company, it goes to charity ... and the mental willingness to pay completely changes. You have a relatively economically efficient solution, but one that actually meets with public approval and even a small degree of affection, rather than being seen as bastardy. So where economists make the fundamental mistake is they think that money is money. Actually, my pain experienced in paying five pounds is not just proportionate to the amount, but where I think that money is going. And I think understanding that could revolutionize tax policy. It could revolutionize the public services. It could actually change things quite significantly. [Ludwig Von Mises is my hero.] Here's a guy you all need to study. He's an Austrian School economist who was first active in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna. What was interesting about the Austrian School is they actually grew up alongside Freud. And so they're predominantly interested in psychology. They believed that there was a discipline called praxeology, which is a prior discipline to the study of economics. Praxeology is the study of human choice, action and decision-making. I think they're right. I think the danger we have in today's world is we have the study of economics considers itself to be a prior discipline to the study of human psychology. But as Charlie Munger says, "If economics isn't behavioral, I don't know what the hell is." Von Mises, interestingly, believes economics is just a subset of psychology. I think he just refers to economics as "the study of human praxeology under conditions of scarcity." But Von Mises, among many other things, I think uses an analogy which is probably the best justification and explanation for the value of marketing, the value of perceived value and the fact that we should treat it as being absolutely equivalent to any other kind of value. We tend to, all of us, even those of us who work in marketing, think of value in two ways: the real value, which is when you make something in a factory or provide a service, and then there's a dubious value, which you create by changing the way people look at things. Von Mises completely rejected this distinction. And he used this following analogy: he referred to strange economists called the French physiocrats, who believed that the only true value was what you extracted from the land. So if you're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer, you created true value. If however, you bought some wool from the shepherd and charged a premium for converting it into a hat, you weren't actually creating value, you were exploiting the shepherd. Now, Von Mises said that modern economists make exactly the same mistake with regard to advertising and marketing. He says if you run a restaurant, there is no healthy distinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food and the value you create by sweeping the floor. One of them creates, perhaps, the primary product — the thing we think we're paying for — the other one creates a context within which we can enjoy and appreciate that product. And the idea that one of them should have priority over the other is fundamentally wrong. Try this quick thought experiment: imagine a restaurant that serves Michelin-starred food, but where the restaurant smells of sewage and there's human feces on the floor. (Laughter) The best thing you can do there to create value is not actually to improve the food still further, it's to get rid of the smell and clean up the floor. And it's vital we understand this. If that seems like a sort of strange, abstruse thing — in the UK, the post office had a 98 percent success rate at delivering first-class mail the next day. They decided this wasn't good enough, and they wanted to get it up to 99. The effort to do that almost broke the organization. If, at the same time, you'd gone and asked people, "What percentage of first-class mail arrives the next day?" the average answer, or the modal answer, would have been "50 to 60 percent." Now, if your perception is much worse than your reality, what on earth are you doing trying to change the reality? That's like trying to improve the food in a restaurant that stinks. What you need to do is, first of all, tell people that 98 percent of first-class mail gets there the next day. That's pretty good. I would argue, in Britain, there's a much better frame of reference, which is to tell people that more first-class mail arrives the next day in the UK than in Germany, because generally, in Britain, if you want to make us happy about something, just tell us we do it better than the Germans. (Laughter) (Applause) Choose your frame of reference and the perceived value, and therefore, the actual value is completely transformed. It has to be said of the Germans that the Germans and the French are doing a brilliant job of creating a united Europe. The only thing they didn't expect is they're uniting Europe through a shared mild hatred of the French and Germans. But I'm British; that's the way we like it. (Laughter) What you'll also notice is that, in any case, our perception is leaky. We can't tell the difference between the quality of the food and the environment in which we consume it. All of you will have seen this phenomenon if you have your car washed or valeted. When you drive away, your car feels as if it drives better. (Laughter) And the reason for this — unless my car valet mysteriously is changing the oil and performing work which I'm not paying him for and I'm unaware of — is because perception is, in any case, leaky. Analgesics that are branded are more effective at reducing pain than analgesics that are not branded. I don't just mean through reported pain reduction — actual measured pain reduction. And so perception actually is leaky in any case. So if you do something that's perceptually bad in one respect, you can damage the other. Thank you very much. (Applause)

A teen just trying to figure it out

{0: 'Tavi Gevinson is a fashion blogger and a feminist who encourages everyone to embrace their complexity and look cool doing it.'}

TEDxTeen

Four years ago today, exactly, actually, I started a fashion blog called Style Rookie. Last September of 2011, I started an online magazine for teenage girls called Rookiemag.com. My name's Tavi Gevinson, and the title of my talk is "Still Figuring It Out," and the MS Paint quality of my slides was a total creative decision in keeping with today's theme, and has nothing to do with my inability to use PowerPoint. (Laughter) So I edit this site for teenage girls. I'm a feminist. I am kind of a pop culture nerd, and I think a lot about what makes a strong female character, and, you know, movies and TV shows, these things have influence. My own website. So I think the question of what makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted, and instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen who maybe have one quality that's played up a lot, like a Catwoman type, or she plays her sexuality up a lot, and it's seen as power. But they're not strong characters who happen to be female. They're completely flat, and they're basically cardboard characters. The problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple, when, in actuality, women are complicated, women are multifaceted — not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy, and women happen to be people. (Laughter) So the flaws are the key. I'm not the first person to say this. What makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses, who has flaws, who is maybe not immediately likable, but eventually relatable. I don't like to acknowledge a problem without also acknowledging those who work to fix it, so just wanted to acknowledge shows like "Mad Men," movies like "Bridesmaids," whose female characters or protagonists are complex, multifaceted. Lena Dunham, who's on here, her show on HBO that premiers next month, "Girls," she said she wanted to start it because she felt that every woman she knew was just a bundle of contradictions, and that feels accurate for all people, but you don't see women represented like that as much. Congrats, guys. (Laughs) But I don't feel that — I still feel that there are some types of women who are not represented that way, and one group that we'll focus on today are teens, because I think teenagers are especially contradictory and still figuring it out, and in the '90s there was "Freaks and Geeks" and "My So-Called Life," and their characters, Lindsay Weir and Angela Chase, I mean, the whole premise of the shows were just them trying to figure themselves out, basically, but those shows only lasted a season each, and I haven't really seen anything like that on TV since. So this is a scientific diagram of my brain — (Laughter) — around the time when I was, when I started watching those TV shows. I was ending middle school, starting high school — I'm a sophomore now — and I was trying to reconcile all of these differences that you're told you can't be when you're growing up as a girl. You can't be smart and pretty. You can't be a feminist who's also interested in fashion. You can't care about clothes if it's not for the sake of what other people, usually men, will think of you. So I was trying to figure all that out, and I felt a little confused, and I said so on my blog, and I said that I wanted to start a website for teenage girls that was not this kind of one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing because I think one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism is that girls then think that to be a feminist, they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in your beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all of the answers. And this is not true, and, actually, reconciling all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I understood that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process, and this is a spread from a zine that I made last year when I — I mean, I think I've let myself go a bit on the illustration front since. But, yeah. So I said on my blog that I wanted to start this publication for teenage girls and ask people to submit their writing, their photography, whatever, to be a member of our staff. I got about 3,000 emails. My editorial director and I went through them and put together a staff of people, and we launched last September. And this is an excerpt from my first editor's letter, where I say that Rookie, we don't have all the answers, we're still figuring it out too, but the point is not to give girls the answers, and not even give them permission to find the answers themselves, but hopefully inspire them to understand that they can give themselves that permission, they can ask their own questions, find their own answers, all of that, and Rookie, I think we've been trying to make it a nice place for all of that to be figured out. So I'm not saying, "Be like us," and "We're perfect role models," because we're not, but we just want to help represent girls in a way that shows those different dimensions. I mean, we have articles called "On Taking Yourself Seriously: How to Not Care What People Think of You," but we also have articles like, oops — I'm figuring it out! Ha ha. (Laughter) If you use that, you can get away with anything. We also have articles called "How to Look Like You Weren't Just Crying in Less than Five Minutes." So all of that being said, I still really appreciate those characters in movies and articles like that on our site, that aren't just about being totally powerful, maybe finding your acceptance with yourself and self-esteem and your flaws and how you accept those. So what I you to take away from my talk, the lesson of all of this, is to just be Stevie Nicks. Like, that's all you have to do. (Laughter) Because my favorite thing about her, other than, like, everything, is that she is very — has always been unapologetically present on stage, and unapologetic about her flaws and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings and she makes you listen to them and think about them, and yeah, so please be Stevie Nicks. Thank you. (Applause)

From stigma to supermodel

{0: 'Photographer Rick Guidotti sees a rich beauty in our genetic diversity and works to expose that vision to everyone.'}

TEDxPhoenix

I'll tell you a little bit about my story and who I am. I'm a fashion photographer based in New York City. I've worked for lots of different magazines in New York, I've worked for Elle and for Marie Claire, and for Interview and for GQ, and I got to work with some really beautiful people. My studio is in New York, but I also lived in Milan for about eight years, and in Paris as well, and worked for the house of Yves St. Laurent. I also did portraiture as well. I've worked for lots of different magazines, lots of great clients. But I was always told, every single day, who was beautiful. I was forced to work within certain parameters of the beauty standard. I was told, "This is the most amazing model of the moment, you've got to photograph her. She's incredible, you've got to." And then the next season, it would change again, and I'd have to shift my ideas of beauty, and so we'd go to the next model, and it was kind of really crazy, because I'm an artist. I saw beauty everywhere. I didn't see beauty just on a magazine cover. I did a shoot with, of course, Cindy, for Revlon, and really fantastic, beautiful people. But I thought, someone's always telling me who's beautiful. And I was kind of frustrated. I left my studio one afternoon in New York, and I was walking down Park Avenue, and I saw, waiting for a bus at the corner of Park and 20th, this gorgeous kid. She had long, white, beautiful hair, and pale, pale skin. She had a genetic condition called albinism. I didn't know much about it, but she was stunning, and I'd never met a model like this before. And I went to grab her and say, "I have to take your photograph, you're amazing!" And the bus came, she got on, and then she took off, and I was really glad because she was 12, and I'd be in prison at the moment. (Laughter) But really, it was extraordinary to see this kid. So I continued right down to Union Square, to the huge Barnes and Noble, and started pulling any books, or any information I could about this genetic condition, albinism. And I found really kind of sad images. I didn't find images of this kid. I found images of people sitting in hospital beds, looking sad, looking downtrodden, just images of despair. I found images of a bright red eye, the albino eye. I'm thinking, this kid had beautiful blue eyes, she didn't have red eyes. And then I started seeing images from Africa, where kids were surrounded by tribes pointing spears at them or in cancer wards and clinics, or they're just in beds, and images of illness, of sadness, of sickness. And then, I started, of course, going through those same medical textbooks, and started finding these typical images of kids and adults in their underwear, against walls in doctor's offices, with the black bar across their eyes saying "disease." This is a disease, defined by a disease. And I was like, this is crazy. And then I started going into it further, looking on the Internet, and all these different medical textbooks, and everything was so sad, and so negative. I then started finding images of the albino freak family in the circus, and then of course, all the movie references, from "Powder," who had albinism because his mother was struck by lightning, to "The Princess Bride" and to "The Matrix Reloaded," there were the ghost-like twins that came in and wreaked havoc, and destroyed things and then disappeared. Even most recently, "The Da Vinci Code," there was like the evil albino driving around Paris at night, killing people, shooting at people. Well, I found out, through my research, that people with albinism have a visual impairment. There's always vision, but they're considered legally blind. So they certainly wouldn't be driving around Paris at night shooting at anybody and expect to hit anything. So I'm thinking, this is crazy. So I contact NOAH. Now, NOAH is the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation. It's a support group for people living with this condition, and their families. And I'm like, "Hey, I'm a fashion photographer. Let's show the world the beauty of albinism!" And they said, "Get lost." And I'm pretty persistent. I'm like, "Won't you talk to me?" And they made it very clear to me about their fears of exploitation, that every time there was a magazine article that came out about a kid with albinism, it was a story about a victim. It was sad, or it was exploitative, or sensational — never positive, always negative. And I said, "Okay, well then, what do we do here?" So, let's form a nontraditional partnership — fashion photographer, genetic support group — and we'll work together. And you can keep an eye on me to make sure that we create something positive and powerful, showing the world the beauty of albinism. And they said okay. And I was like, fantastic, let's do this! So in walks the first person I'm about to photograph. Her name is Christine, and Christine is a knockout. Long white hair, really tall. She's stunning. She walks into my studio. The way that she walks in, though, instead of this gorgeous girl, she walks in like this, her head's down, shoulders hunched, one-word answers, she looks down, no eye contact. This kid has been teased her whole life because of her difference. And it was so apparent in the fact that it left her with zero self-esteem. And I'm thinking, oh, this kid is just so fragile. And just the day before, I was shooting Cindy on the same set, in my studio. I'm thinking well, I have to be so careful with her — no, out of respect for this gorgeous kid, I'm going to photograph her like I would anybody else. So the fan went on, the music went on, and I grabbed a mirror that was next to the set, and I held it up to her, and I said Christine, look at yourself. You're magnificent. And she looked in the mirror, and she got it. And she went from this to that. And that's our Christine, and she just exploded in front of the set. By the time she left the studio, she was kissing everybody on both cheeks, and saying, "Ciao!" and she was unbelievable. And I saw this transformation right in front of the lens, through photography, that she was now transformed, with a powerful and positive sense of who she is. The next day, she goes to school, she's going to change the way her community sees her difference. Instead of walking into that classroom like this, she's walking in like this. So it's all about ambassadors for change. It was extraordinary. And those first images, right after, we did a series of them, using several individuals with this condition, they were in Life magazine in 1998. So it was a while ago. It was a cover story, it was a five-page spread. It was really a fantastic editorial. It was great; I loved it. Then we used a lot of the images, though, from Life, and put them in other magazines, magazines worldwide. Magazines in the U.K., in France, in Italy and Canada, and other magazines in the States. It was amazing. So this is from the U.K., Christine again. Friends Jen and Ruthie are sisters, and Kristen. That's Lauren. We did a campaign for sunglasses. A lot of kids with this condition are photophobic, so they have a real strong light sensitivity. So we thought, perfect for a sunglass campaign. People magazine did a great story. So it was circulating, people were saying all this great stuff. It was fantastic. So I was getting calls, though. Getting calls from the U.K., saying, well we just saw this spread, can you come photograph our kids with this condition? We have a support group here, can you come meet our families? People in Africa were calling in the same. New Zealand, can you help us start a support group? I'm like, fantastic! This is great! Let's do it! So I would travel in all these places, as I was shooting and doing my commercial work, I was at a local chapter conference in Philadelphia. Small family conference, about 40 families, did my presentation of kids with albinism, this mom came up to me, and she said, "My son Randy, when he was a little boy, he'd come home from school, and I could see the kids were teasing him, and he'd be in tears. And I'd buy him an ice-cream cone, or a toy truck, and he'd forget about it." She said, "Now he's in high school. He comes home from school, I can see the pain, the anguish in his eyes. He walks in, he walks right past me, goes up to his room, slams the door, and I don't see him until the next day. He's not going to want to be photographed, he has zero self-esteem, this kid has such poor body image, and he's just so shy. But if you could just show him photographs of kids his own age, so that he knows he's not alone." I'm like, "Of course. Where is he? Show me!" She points over to Randy. Now Randy's sitting there — his pants are hanging down to here, his underwear's hanging out, he has this long, great big shirt, he has ten earrings, he has a tattoo. He's amazing, this kid. I crawl over to Randy. I'm like, "Randy, I speak to moms and dads every single day, terrified about the future of their kids with albinism. All they have to do is take one look at you, and they're going to be fine. Please let me take a photo of you. Your mother said, she told me, that you didn't want to be photographed." He said, "Rick, what do you mean? You have to understand, I'm 16 years old. I don't talk to my mother." And then he said, "I want to be photographed. I want to show the world that who I am, with my albinism, but also other things about me —" You see how shy he was. Very, very shy, Randy. But Randy created, early days in this idea, of this nonprofit group Positive Exposure, the idea of networking stories, sharing experiences and the images around the world. I'll kind of quickly go through the album. I was very interested, at that point, getting calls from everybody in the world, to find out more about this idea, a message, about albinism, or perceptions of people in communities about this syndrome, albinism. So I started hearing about stigmas, and discrimination, so what I looked at is really trying to explore cultural perceptions and attitudes towards this condition. This is my friend [unclear], who's a Kuna Indian in the San Blas region of the world, the San Blas region of Panama. She's extraordinary. So the incidence of albinism is about one in 20,000 worldwide. In the Kuna Indian, it's one in 125, the highest incidence in the world. We went to Fiji, actually, where we found out at the turn of the 19th century, a tribe could not hold their territory unless they had somebody with albinism in a powerful political position. My great friend Keke, I photographed in New Zealand, she's from India, from Delhi, but her family left Delhi because she was getting death threats. Now I'm thinking, this is horrible that they had to move, because she's eight years old. And we actually started a support group in Delhi, we found out that there are many kids that we worked with in their communities, after we started this group in India, that have had really positive experiences. So one of the things we want to make very clear is that we're not making generalizations about a community or a culture, and their reaction to people that are different. Keke's experiences were very different, but we've met many kids there that have been embraced by their communities throughout India. A great friend Sue Anna from Korea. Tom, who was just adopted by an American family, from China, This is my great friend Harry from Puerto Rico. And Natalia. She and I started the first albinism society in Russia. Maizan and her sister and mom in Malaysia. Ceara. All she ever wanted to do was be a dancer. She was told that because of her visual impairment, she'll never dance. She'll never be able to follow the choreography or the dance steps. She's like, they said, find another love, another passion. She's like, no. She's New Zealand's Celtic dance champion, and just started a school for dance for kids with visual impairment. I'm going to zip through this. Roz, from Australia. I spend a lot of time in Africa, where there's a high incidence of mortality associated with albinism, due to skin cancer. This is my friend Siri, who when she was born, the father's family put her out of the house, thinking she was cursed. and Mom, not knowing what to do, put Siri in the sun to get her dark like her brothers and sisters. So you can see, it's all sun damage. A lot of kids that I met throughout Africa were put in special schools, schools for the blind, not because the tools were better there for kids with visual impairment, but more importantly, because the teasing was so great, the discrimination is so great, these kids don't do well in mainstream schools. I started an albinism society in Kenya with my friend C.K., who actually went to a mainstream school. I'm like, C.K., how is it possible you went to a mainstream school? Nobody in Africa goes to mainstream schools. She said, "It's because of my twin sister, Delphine." Fantastic. She said Delphine would get all the work off the board, the things I couldn't see, she'd help me with it. If the type was too small, she'd blow it up for me, she said. But more importantly, when kids would tease me, Delphine would beat them up. (Laughter) But on a sadder note, I was spending a lot of time in Tanzania, where witch doctors are saying, bring me the bones of an albino, and I'll make a potion that will make you rich. So we're working very closely with the government there, I've been there six times in the last two years, to create public awareness programs to save these kids. This is the dancer. This is in the Shinyanga region. This is one of the visuals that we created in East Africa, trying to fight and educate the public. I received the Art of Reporting award, from an organization called the Chromosome 18 Registry. The larger organization was the Genetic Alliance, which was a coalition of all the genetic support groups, and it was the award for the Life magazine piece. The president at the time said, I'm also the founder and director of the Chromosome 18 Research Society and Registry. I'm like, fantastic! That's great. What's that? She's like, well, if you have an anomaly on your 18th chromosome, then you have all kinds of problems and difficulties and challenges, and then we look after you, through this support group, like NOAH is. So I'm like, that's great. She said, I see there's a universal message here, about all kids with differences, so it's not just about albinism. Would you come and speak to our families in San Antonio with these chromosome 18 anomalies? I'm like, sure! I went back to them thinking, what the hell is a chromosome 18 anomaly? I was an art major at the school of visual arts, I had no idea. But I looked it up, these are the images that I saw. I'm thinking, albinism was so easy, this is going to be rough. But I went to San Antonio, walked down to the auditorium where the kids and young adults were, opened the door, and I was instantly surrounded by kids screaming with laughter. There were kids with cleft palates, kids with mobility issues, feeding tubes, trachs, but they were kids, first and foremost. That's Rebecca and Pauline. My great friend, that's Ellington. He's awesome. Remy. That's Emory. Byron. Taylor. Elizabeth. And my great friend Sean. So we decided at that point to involve other organizations to be part of this larger exhibition that was going to be sent out from the People's Genome Celebration in 2001. The National Human Genome Research Institute and the Genetic Alliance invited me to create an exhibition at the Smithsonian, commemorating the mapping of the human genome. So we actually invited other genetic support groups to be part of this exhibition, not just on albinism, but all groups, again illustrating the universal applicability. I saw these images from the Marfan Foundation, these kids grow very, very tall, at risk of an aortic dissection, but they're amazing kids, and I thought, how gorgeous. And I understood the importance of this image, how important it was to show how beautiful, and to show how the image presents itself. But isn't there another way to show it? Because nobody, and I've photographed thousands of kids now, with Marfan Syndrome, and nobody stands like this, with a portable black bar. It's extraordinary. So we decided to put them in a pool, show Billy swimming — ["Bill with Marfan Syndrome"] — show how it presents itself, but keep going, and keep presenting how these kids look, but put the humanity back in these gorgeous images. I only have a few seconds here, so I'm going to go through. Cool girls at the Costello Conference. These are great friends Danielle and Maggie, who actually met at the last Costello Conference. For both, the first time they ever met anybody with the same syndrome. They go to the same conferences every year and I go and photograph them. And this year, they were there again in Florida, but this time it's a little different. They're gangsters now. (Laughter) But they're pretty amazing kids. I just want to talk very briefly about this really great kid, to talk very briefly about a project that we're taking these images, and bringing them into high schools. I can photograph a great kid in my studio, and she's having a brilliant time, and she feels 10,000 feet tall. By the time she leaves my studio and gets to Park Avenue, five people point at her, point at her birthmark, or at her white hair, or her wheelchair. So we have to make it relevant for all of us, for all these kids, to make people understand what the idea of celebrating diversity actually means. So we started a project called the PEARLS Project, where these photographs are going into high schools, and the kids that are in the images are blogging, and the students are following their blogs. And they all have these great video intros. I just want to give you this last one, and this is actually Byron, who is actually one of our bloggers. (Video) Byron: Hi, my name is Byron. I live in the D.C. area. I'm 14. When I was 10 months old, I had a left hemispherectomy. I had the left half of my brain removed, because I have something called Sturge-Weber Syndrome. I wear a brace on my right leg and right arm. I only see out of the right side of each eye, so sometimes it's harder for me to see things on the right side. So playing sports can be frustrating, because I might not see a ball coming. I didn't see that coming. Excuse me. Rick Guidotti: So we're using all the visual art to change public perceptions through these great kids. I feel as an artist, it's my responsibility. I know that when I was a kid, and I saw someone that was different walking down the street, If I stared, I got slapped by my mom. So the idea was if you don't stare, look away. And I think as an artist, it's my responsibility, and all of our responsibilities, to steady that gaze a little bit longer. Because you stand there, and you'll see a difference. You'll start seeing beauty in that difference. And you'll start seeing beautiful gorgeousness, and then this light just spreads, and once you're enlightened, it just changes your whole world. It's about seeing the beauty in all differences. Thank you so much, I'm sorry I ran over. Thank you guys, thank you.

Music and emotion through time

{0: 'Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas (call him MTT) is an all-around music educator -- connecting with global audiences, young musicians and concertgoers in San Francisco and London.'}

TED2012

Well when I was asked to do this TEDTalk, I was really chuckled, because, you see, my father's name was Ted, and much of my life, especially my musical life, is really a talk that I'm still having with him, or the part of me that he continues to be. Now Ted was a New Yorker, an all-around theater guy, and he was a self-taught illustrator and musician. He didn't read a note, and he was profoundly hearing impaired. Yet, he was my greatest teacher. Because even through the squeaks of his hearing aids, his understanding of music was profound. And for him, it wasn't so much the way the music goes as about what it witnesses and where it can take you. And he did a painting of this experience, which he called "In the Realm of Music." Now Ted entered this realm every day by improvising in a sort of Tin Pan Alley style like this. (Music) But he was tough when it came to music. He said, "There are only two things that matter in music: what and how. And the thing about classical music, that what and how, it's inexhaustible." That was his passion for the music. Both my parents really loved it. They didn't know all that much about it, but they gave me the opportunity to discover it together with them. And I think inspired by that memory, it's been my desire to try and bring it to as many other people as I can, sort of pass it on through whatever means. And how people get this music, how it comes into their lives, really fascinates me. One day in New York, I was on the street and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants. And a tough, slouchy kid got up to bat, and he took a swing and really connected. And he watched the ball fly for a second, and then he went, "Dah dadaratatatah. Brah dada dadadadah." And he ran around the bases. And I thought, go figure. How did this piece of 18th century Austrian aristocratic entertainment turn into the victory crow of this New York kid? How was that passed on? How did he get to hear Mozart? Well when it comes to classical music, there's an awful lot to pass on, much more than Mozart, Beethoven or Tchiakovsky. Because classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years. And every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive. Now the raw material of it, of course, is just the music of everyday life. It's all the anthems and dance crazes and ballads and marches. But what classical music does is to distill all of these musics down, to condense them to their absolute essence, and from that essence create a new language, a language that speaks very lovingly and unflinchingly about who we really are. It's a language that's still evolving. Now over the centuries it grew into the big pieces we always think of, like concertos and symphonies, but even the most ambitious masterpiece can have as its central mission to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment — like this one from the Beethoven Violin Concerto. (Music) It's so simple, so evocative. So many emotions seem to be inside of it. Yet, of course, like all music, it's essentially not about anything. It's just a design of pitches and silence and time. And the pitches, the notes, as you know, are just vibrations. They're locations in the spectrum of sound. And whether we call them 440 per second, A, or 3,729, B flat — trust me, that's right — they're just phenomena. But the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena is complex and emotional and not totally understood. And the way we react to them has changed radically over the centuries, as have our preferences for them. So for example, in the 11th century, people liked pieces that ended like this. (Music) And in the 17th century, it was more like this. (Music) And in the 21st century ... (Music) Now your 21st century ears are quite happy with this last chord, even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you or sent some of you running from the room. And the reason you like it is because you've inherited, whether you knew it or not, centuries-worth of changes in musical theory, practice and fashion. And in classical music we can follow these changes very, very accurately because of the music's powerful silent partner, the way it's been passed on: notation. Now the impulse to notate, or, more exactly I should say, encode music has been with us for a very long time. In 200 B.C., a man named Sekulos wrote this song for his departed wife and inscribed it on her gravestone in the notational system of the Greeks. (Music) And a thousand years later, this impulse to notate took an entirely different form. And you can see how this happened in these excerpts from the Christmas mass "Puer Natus est nobis," "For Us is Born." (Music) In the 10th century, little squiggles were used just to indicate the general shape of the tune. And in the 12th century, a line was drawn, like a musical horizon line, to better pinpoint the pitch's location. And then in the 13th century, more lines and new shapes of notes locked in the concept of the tune exactly, and that led to the kind of notation we have today. Well notation not only passed the music on, notating and encoding the music changed its priorities entirely, because it enabled the musicians to imagine music on a much vaster scale. Now inspired moves of improvisation could be recorded, saved, considered, prioritized, made into intricate designs. And from this moment, classical music became what it most essentially is, a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature: instinct and intelligence. And there began to be a real difference at this point between the art of improvisation and the art of composition. Now an improviser senses and plays the next cool move, but a composer is considering all possible moves, testing them out, prioritizing them out, until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design of ultimate and enduring coolness. Now some of the greatest composers, like Bach, were combinations of these two things. Bach was like a great improviser with a mind of a chess master. Mozart was the same way. But every musician strikes a different balance between faith and reason, instinct and intelligence. And every musical era had different priorities of these things, different things to pass on, different 'whats' and 'hows'. So in the first eight centuries or so of this tradition the big 'what' was to praise God. And by the 1400s, music was being written that tried to mirror God's mind as could be seen in the design of the night sky. The 'how' was a style called polyphony, music of many independently moving voices that suggested the way the planets seemed to move in Ptolemy's geocentric universe. This was truly the music of the spheres. (Music) This is the kind of music that Leonardo DaVinci would have known. And perhaps its tremendous intellectual perfection and serenity meant that something new had to happen — a radical new move, which in 1600 is what did happen. (Music) Singer: Ah, bitter blow! Ah, wicked, cruel fate! Ah, baleful stars! Ah, avaricious heaven! MTT: This, of course, was the birth of opera, and its development put music on a radical new course. The what now was not to mirror the mind of God, but to follow the emotion turbulence of man. And the how was harmony, stacking up the pitches to form chords. And the chords, it turned out, were capable of representing incredible varieties of emotions. And the basic chords were the ones we still have with us, the triads, either the major one, which we think is happy, or the minor one, which we perceive as sad. But what's the actual difference between these two chords? It's just these two notes in the middle. It's either E natural, and 659 vibrations per second, or E flat, at 622. So the big difference between human happiness and sadness? 37 freakin' vibrations. So you can see in a system like this there was enormous subtle potential of representing human emotions. And in fact, as man began to understand more his complex and ambivalent nature, harmony grew more complex to reflect it. Turns out it was capable of expressing emotions beyond the ability of words. Now with all this possibility, classical music really took off. It's the time in which the big forms began to arise. And the effects of technology began to be felt also, because printing put music, the scores, the codebooks of music, into the hands of performers everywhere. And new and improved instruments made the age of the virtuoso possible. This is when those big forms arose — the symphonies, the sonatas, the concertos. And in these big architectures of time, composers like Beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime. A piece like Beethoven's Fifth basically witnessing how it was possible for him to go from sorrow and anger, over the course of a half an hour, step by exacting step of his route, to the moment when he could make it across to joy. (Music) And it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues, like gripping ones of culture, such as nationalism or quest for freedom or the frontiers of sensuality. But whatever direction the music took, one thing until recently was always the same, and that was when the musicians stopped playing, the music stopped. Now this moment so fascinates me. I find it such a profound one. What happens when the music stops? Where does it go? What's left? What sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance? Is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude? And how might that change their lives? To me this is the intimate, personal side of music. It's the passing on part. It's the 'why' part of it. And to me that's the most essential of all. Mostly it's been a person-to-person thing, a teacher-student, performer-audience thing, and then around 1880 came this new technology that first mechanically then through analogs then digitally created a new and miraculous way of passing things on, albeit an impersonal one. People could now hear music all the time, even though it wasn't necessary for them to play an instrument, read music or even go to concerts. And technology democratized music by making everything available. It spearheaded a cultural revolution in which artists like Caruso and Bessie Smith were on the same footing. And technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes, using computers and synthesizers to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity beyond the means of performers and audiences. At the same time technology, by taking over the role that notation had always played, shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence way over to the instinctive side. The culture in which we live now is awash with music of improvisation that's been sliced, diced, layered and, God knows, distributed and sold. What's the long-term effect of this on us or on music? Nobody knows. The question remains: What happens when the music stops? What sticks with people? Now that we have unlimited access to music, what does stick with us? Well let me show you a story of what I mean by "really sticking with us." I was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home, and I spied a very shaky old man making his way across the room on a walker. He came over to a piano that was there, and he balanced himself and began playing something like this. (Music) And he said something like, "Me ... boy ... symphony ... Beethoven." And I suddenly got it, and I said, "Friend, by any chance are you trying to play this?" (Music) And he said, "Yes, yes. I was a little boy. The symphony: Isaac Stern, the concerto, I heard it." And I thought, my God, how much must this music mean to this man that he would get himself out of his bed, across the room to recover the memory of this music that, after everything else in his life is sloughing away, still means so much to him? Well, that's why I take every performance so seriously, why it matters to me so much. I never know who might be there, who might be absorbing it and what will happen to it in their life. But now I'm excited that there's more chance than ever before possible of sharing this music. That's what drives my interest in projects like the TV series "Keeping Score" with the San Francisco Symphony that looks at the backstories of music, and working with the young musicians at the New World Symphony on projects that explore the potential of the new performing arts centers for both entertainment and education. And of course, the New World Symphony led to the YouTube Symphony and projects on the internet that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world. And the exciting thing is all this is just a prototype. There's just a role here for so many people — teachers, parents, performers — to be explorers together. Sure, the big events attract a lot of attention, but what really matters is what goes on every single day. We need your perspectives, your curiosity, your voices. And it excites me now to meet people who are hikers, chefs, code writers, taxi drivers, people I never would have guessed who loved the music and who are passing it on. You don't need to worry about knowing anything. If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know. You can start anywhere. Ramble a bit. Follow traces. Get lost. Be surprised, amused inspired. All that 'what', all that 'how' is out there waiting for you to discover its 'why', to dive in and pass it on. Thank you. (Applause)

Information is food

{0: 'JP Rangaswami thinks deeply (and hilariously) about disruptive data.'}

TED@SXSWi

I love my food. And I love information. My children usually tell me that one of those passions is a little more apparent than the other. (Laughter) But what I want to do in the next eight minutes or so is to take you through how those passions developed, the point in my life when the two passions merged, the journey of learning that took place from that point. And one idea I want to leave you with today is what would would happen differently in your life if you saw information the way you saw food? I was born in Calcutta — a family where my father and his father before him were journalists, and they wrote magazines in the English language. That was the family business. And as a result of that, I grew up with books everywhere around the house. And I mean books everywhere around the house. And that's actually a shop in Calcutta, but it's a place where we like our books. In fact, I've got 38,000 of them now and no Kindle in sight. But growing up as a child with the books around everywhere, with people to talk to about those books, this wasn't a sort of slightly learned thing. By the time I was 18, I had a deep passion for books. It wasn't the only passion I had. I was a South Indian brought up in Bengal. And two of the things about Bengal: they like their savory dishes and they like their sweets. So by the time I grew up, again, I had a well-established passion for food. Now I was growing up in the late '60s and early '70s, and there were a number of other passions I was also interested in, but these two were the ones that differentiated me. (Laughter) And then life was fine, dandy. Everything was okay, until I got to about the age of 26, and I went to a movie called "Short Circuit." Oh, some of you have seen it. And apparently it's being remade right now and it's going to be coming out next year. It's the story of this experimental robot which got electrocuted and found a life. And as it ran, this thing was saying, "Give me input. Give me input." And I suddenly realized that for a robot both information as well as food were the same thing. Energy came to it in some form or shape, data came to it in some form or shape. And I began to think, I wonder what it would be like to start imagining myself as if energy and information were the two things I had as input — as if food and information were similar in some form or shape. I started doing some research then, and this was the 25-year journey, and started finding out that actually human beings as primates have far smaller stomachs than should be the size for our body weight and far larger brains. And as I went to research that even further, I got to a point where I discovered something called the expensive tissue hypothesis. That actually for a given body mass of a primate the metabolic rate was static. What changed was the balance of the tissues available. And two of the most expensive tissues in our human body are nervous tissue and digestive tissue. And what transpired was that people had put forward a hypothesis that was apparently coming up with some fabulous results by about 1995. It's a lady named Leslie Aiello. And the paper then suggested that you traded one for the other. If you wanted your brain for a particular body mass to be large, you had to live with a smaller gut. That then set me off completely to say, Okay, these two are connected. So I looked at the cultivation of information as if it were food and said, So we were hunter-gathers of information. We moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information. Does that really explain what we're seeing with the intellectual property battles nowadays? Because those people who were hunter-gatherers in origin wanted to be free and roam and pick up information as they wanted, and those that were in the business of farming information wanted to build fences around it, create ownership and wealth and structure and settlement. So there was always going to be a tension within that. And everything I saw in the cultivation said there were huge fights amongst the foodies between the cultivators and the hunter-gatherers. And this is happening here. When I moved to preparation, this same thing was true, expect that there were two schools. One group of people said you can distill your information, you can extract value, separate it and serve it up, while another group turned around and said no, no you can ferment it. You bring it all together and mash it up and the value emerges that way. The same is again true with information. But consumption was where it started getting really enjoyable. Because what I began to see then was there were so many different ways people would consume this. They'd buy it from the shop as raw ingredients. Do you cook it? Do you have it served to you? Do you go to a restaurant? The same is true every time as I started thinking about information. The analogies were getting crazy — that information had sell-by dates, that people had misused information that wasn't dated properly and could really make an effect on the stock market, on corporate values, etc. And by this time I was hooked. And this is about 23 years into this process. And I began to start thinking of myself as we start having mash-ups of fact and fiction, docu-dramas, mockumentaries, whatever you call it. Are we going to reach the stage where information has a percentage for fact associated with it? We start labeling information for the fact percentage? Are we going to start looking at what happens when your information source is turned off, as a famine? Which brings me to the final element of this. Clay Shirky once stated that there is no such animal as information overload, there is only filter failure. I put it to you that information, if viewed from the point of food, is never a production issue; you never speak of food overload. Fundamentally it's a consumption issue. And we have to start thinking about how we create diets within ourselves, exercise within ourselves, to have the faculties to be able to deal with information, to have the labeling to be able to do it responsibly. In fact, when I saw "Supersize Me," I starting thinking of saying, What would happen if an individual had 31 days nonstop Fox News? (Laughter) Would there be time to be able to work with it? So you start really understanding that you can have diseases, toxins, a need to balance your diet, and once you start looking, and from that point on, everything I have done in terms of the consumption of information, the production of information, the preparation of information, I've looked at from the viewpoint of food. It has probably not helped my waistline any because I like practicing on both sides. But I'd like to leave you with just that question: If you began to think of all the information that you consume the way you think of food, what would you do differently? Thank you very much for your time. (Applause)

Unseen footage, untamed nature

{0: 'Karen Bass has traveled the world to explore and capture footage from every environment across the Earth.'}

TED2012

I'm a very lucky person. I've been privileged to see so much of our beautiful Earth and the people and creatures that live on it. And my passion was inspired at the age of seven, when my parents first took me to Morocco, at the edge of the Sahara Desert. Now imagine a little Brit somewhere that wasn't cold and damp like home. What an amazing experience. And it made me want to explore more. So as a filmmaker, I've been from one end of the Earth to the other trying to get the perfect shot and to capture animal behavior never seen before. And what's more, I'm really lucky, because I get to share that with millions of people worldwide. Now the idea of having new perspectives of our planet and actually being able to get that message out gets me out of bed every day with a spring in my step. You might think that it's quite hard to find new stories and new subjects, but new technology is changing the way we can film. It's enabling us to get fresh, new images and tell brand new stories. In Nature's Great Events, a series for the BBC that I did with David Attenborough, we wanted to do just that. Images of grizzly bears are pretty familiar. You see them all the time, you think. But there's a whole side to their lives that we hardly ever see and had never been filmed. So what we did, we went to Alaska, which is where the grizzlies rely on really high, almost inaccessible, mountain slopes for their denning. And the only way to film that is a shoot from the air. (Video) David Attenborough: Throughout Alaska and British Columbia, thousands of bear families are emerging from their winter sleep. There is nothing to eat up here, but the conditions were ideal for hibernation. Lots of snow in which to dig a den. To find food, mothers must lead their cubs down to the coast, where the snow will already be melting. But getting down can be a challenge for small cubs. These mountains are dangerous places, but ultimately the fate of these bear families, and indeed that of all bears around the North Pacific, depends on the salmon. KB: I love that shot. I always get goosebumps every time I see it. That was filmed from a helicopter using a gyro-stabilized camera. And it's a wonderful bit of gear, because it's like having a flying tripod, crane and dolly all rolled into one. But technology alone isn't enough. To really get the money shots, it's down to being in the right place at the right time. And that sequence was especially difficult. The first year we got nothing. We had to go back the following year, all the way back to the remote parts of Alaska. And we hung around with a helicopter for two whole weeks. And eventually we got lucky. The cloud lifted, the wind was still, and even the bear showed up. And we managed to get that magic moment. For a filmmaker, new technology is an amazing tool, but the other thing that really, really excites me is when new species are discovered. Now, when I heard about one animal, I knew we had to get it for my next series, Untamed Americas, for National Geographic. In 2005, a new species of bat was discovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador. And what was amazing about that discovery is that it also solved the mystery of what pollinated a unique flower. It depends solely on the bat. Now, the series hasn't even aired yet, so you're the very first to see this. See what you think. (Video) Narrator: The tube-lipped nectar bat. A pool of delicious nectar lies at the bottom of each flower's long flute. But how to reach it? Necessity is the mother of evolution. (Music) This two-and-a-half-inch bat has a three-and-a-half-inch tongue, the longest relative to body length of any mammal in the world. If human, he'd have a nine-foot tongue. (Applause) KB: What a tongue. We filmed it by cutting a tiny little hole in the base of the flower and using a camera that could slow the action by 40 times. So imagine how quick that thing is in real life. Now people often ask me, "Where's your favorite place on the planet?" And the truth is I just don't have one. There are so many wonderful places. But some locations draw you back time and time again. And one remote location — I first went there as a backpacker; I've been back several times for filming, most recently for Untamed Americas — it's the Altiplano in the high Andes of South America, and it's the most otherworldly place I know. But at 15,000 feet, it's tough. It's freezing cold, and that thin air really gets you. Sometimes it's hard to breathe, especially carrying all the heavy filming equipment. And that pounding head just feels like a constant hangover. But the advantage of that wonderful thin atmosphere is that it enables you to see the stars in the heavens with amazing clarity. Have a look. (Video) Narrator: Some 1,500 miles south of the tropics, between Chile and Bolivia, the Andes completely change. It's called the Altiplano, or "high plains" — a place of extremes and extreme contrasts. Where deserts freeze and waters boil. More like Mars than Earth, it seems just as hostile to life. The stars themselves — at 12,000 feet, the dry, thin air makes for perfect stargazing. Some of the world's astronomers have telescopes nearby. But just looking up with the naked eye, you really don't need one. (Music) (Applause) KB: Thank you so much for letting me share some images of our magnificent, wonderful Earth. Thank you for letting me share that with you. (Applause)

Feats of memory anyone can do

{0: "Joshua Foer is a science writer who 'accidentally' won the U.S. Memory Championship."}

TED2012

I'd like to invite you to close your eyes. Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home. I'd like you to notice the color of the door, the material that it's made out of. Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles. (Laughter) They are competing in a naked bicycle race, and they are headed straight for your front door. I need you to actually see this. They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty, they're bouncing around a lot. And they crash straight into the front door of your home. Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you, spokes end up in awkward places. Step over the threshold of your door into your foyer, your hallway, whatever's on the other side, and appreciate the quality of the light. The light is shining down on Cookie Monster. Cookie Monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse. It's a talking horse. You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose. You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth. Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room. In your living room, in full imaginative broadband, picture Britney Spears. She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table, and she's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time." And then, follow me into your kitchen. In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road, and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz," hand-in-hand, skipping straight towards you. Okay. Open your eyes. I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest that is held every spring in New York City. It's called the United States Memory Championship. And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist, expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants. This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies, widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep. (Laughter) They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, looking at them just once. They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers. They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes. They were competing to see who could memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest. I was like, this is unbelievable. These people must be freaks of nature. And I started talking to a few of the competitors. This is a guy called Ed Cook, who had come over from England, where he had one of the best-trained memories. And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize that you were a savant?" And Ed was like, "I'm not a savant. In fact, I have just an average memory. Everybody who competes in this contest will tell you that they have just an average memory. We've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books." And I said, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?" And we were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy, says to me, "Josh, you're an American journalist. Do you know Britney Spears?" I'm like, "What? No. Why?" "Because I really want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on U.S. national television. It will prove to the world that anybody can do this." (Laughter) I was like, "Well, I'm not Britney Spears, but maybe you could teach me. I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?" And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me. I ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory, but also investigating it, trying to understand how it works, why it sometimes doesn't work, and what its potential might be. And I met a host of really interesting people. This is a guy called E.P. He's an amnesic who had, very possibly, the worst memory in the world. His memory was so bad, that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem, which is amazing. And he was this incredibly tragic figure, but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are. At the other end of the spectrum, I met this guy. This is Kim Peek, he was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie "Rain Man." We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was scintillating. (Laughter) And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin, in antiquity, and then later, in the Middle Ages. And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. One of the really interesting things that I learned is that once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today. Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds. Over the last few millenia, we've invented a series of technologies — from the alphabet, to the scroll, to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone — that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity. These technologies have made our modern world possible, but they've also changed us. They've changed us culturally, and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively. Having little need to remember anymore, it sometimes seems like we've forgotten how. One of the last places on Earth where you still find people passionate about this idea of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory, is at this totally singular memory contest. It's actually not that singular, there are contests held all over the world. And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it. A few years back a group of researchers at University College London brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab. They wanted to know: Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours? The answer was no. Are they smarter than the rest of us? They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, and the answer was: not really. There was, however, one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to. When they put these guys in an fMRI machine, scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes, they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain than everyone else. Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation. Why? And is there something that the rest of us can learn from this? The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where, every year, somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up. This is my friend Ben Pridmore, three-time world memory champion. On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in one hour, using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered. He used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an hour. (Laughter) Yeah. And while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these competitions, everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately come down to a concept that psychologists refer to as "elaborative encoding." And it's well-illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker/baker paradox, which goes like this: If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy named Baker." That's his name. And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker." Okay? And I come back to you at some point later on, and I say, "Do you remember that word that I told you a while back? Do you remember what it was?" The person who was told his name is Baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is a baker. Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird. What's going on here? Well, the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you. It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull. But the common noun "baker" — we know bakers. Bakers wear funny white hats. Bakers have flour on their hands. Bakers smell good when they come home from work. Maybe we even know a baker. And when we first hear that word, we start putting these associational hooks into it, that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date. The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests, and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life, is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lower-case B bakers — to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning, and transform it in some way, so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind. One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece. It came to be known as the memory palace. The story behind its creation goes like this: There was a poet called Simonides, who was attending a banquet. He was actually the hired entertainment, because back then, if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet. And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door, and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses. Kills everybody inside. It doesn't just kill everybody, it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition. Nobody can say who was inside, nobody can say where they were sitting. The bodies can't be properly buried. It's one tragedy compounding another. Simonides, standing outside, the sole survivor amid the wreckage, closes his eyes and has this realization, which is that in his mind's eye, he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting. And he takes the relatives by the hand, and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage. What Simonides figured out at that moment, is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers, and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories. If I asked you to recount the first 10 words of the story that I just told you about Simonides, chances are you would have a tough time with it. But, I would wager that if I asked you to recall who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse in your foyer right now, you would be able to see that. The idea behind the memory palace is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye, and populate it with images of the things that you want to remember — the crazier, weirder, more bizarre, funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is, the more unforgettable it's likely to be. This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years to the earliest Latin memory treatises. So how does this work? Let's say that you've been invited to TED center stage to give a speech, and you want to do it from memory, and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it, if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago. (Laughter) What you might do is picture yourself at the front door of your house. And you'd come up with some sort of crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image, to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about is this totally bizarre contest. (Laughter) And then you'd go inside your house, and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed. And that would remind you that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook. And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell. And you'd go into your kitchen, and the fourth topic you were going to talk about was this strange journey that you went on for a year, and you'd have some friends to help you remember that. This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches — not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up, but topic-for-topic. In fact, the phrase "topic sentence" — that comes from the Greek word "topos," which means "place." That's a vestige of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric in these sorts of spatial terms. The phrase "in the first place," that's like "in the first place of your memory palace." I thought this was just fascinating, and I got really into it. And I went to a few more of these memory contests, and I had this notion that I might write something longer about this subculture of competitive memorizers. But there was a problem. The problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event. (Laughter) Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs — I mean, the most dramatic it gets is when somebody starts massaging their temples. And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about. I know that there's incredible stuff happening in these people's minds, but I don't have access to it. And I realized, if I was going to tell this story, I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit. And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes every morning, before I sat down with my New York Times, just trying to remember something. Maybe it was a poem, maybe it was names from an old yearbook that I bought at a flea market. And I found that this was shockingly fun. I never would have expected that. It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory. What you're doing, is you're trying to get better and better at creating, at dreaming up, these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious, and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye. And I got pretty into it. This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit. (Laughter) It's a pair of earmuffs and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over except for two small pinholes, because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy. I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier, and I had this notion that I might enter it, sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism. It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research. Problem was, the experiment went haywire. I won the contest — (Laughter) which really wasn't supposed to happen. (Applause) Now, it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it's actually kind of beside the point. These are just tricks. They work because they're based on some pretty basic principles about how our brains work. And you don't have to be building memory palaces or memorizing packs of playing cards to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works. We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. Great memories are learned. At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged. We remember when we are able to take a piece of information and experience, and figure out why it is meaningful to us, why it is significant, why it's colorful, when we're able to transform it in some way that makes sense in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds, when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers. The memory palace, these memory techniques — they're just shortcuts. In fact, they're not even really shortcuts. They work because they make you work. They force a kind of depth of processing, a kind of mindfulness, that most of us don't normally walk around exercising. But there actually are no shortcuts. This is how stuff is made memorable. And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with, it's what E.P., the amnesic who couldn't even remember he had a memory problem, left me with, which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives, by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply? I learned firsthand that there are incredible memory capacities latent in all of us. But if you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember. Thank you. (Applause)

404, the story of a page not found

{0: 'Renny Gleeson helps navigate brands through fresh concepts, such as viral marketing and social media, to find the pulse of the modern consumer. '}

TED2012

So what I want to try to do is tell a quick story about a 404 page and a lesson that was learned as a result of it. But to start it probably helps to have an understanding of what a 404 page actually is. The 404 page is that. It's that broken experience on the Web. It's effectively the default page when you ask a website for something and it can't find it. And it serves you the 404 page. It's inherently a feeling of being broken when you go through it. And I just want you to think a little bit about, remember for yourself, it's annoying when you hit this thing. Because it's the feeling of a broken relationship. And that's where it's actually also interesting to think about, where does 404 come from? It's from a family of errors actually — a whole set of relationship errors, which, when I started digging into them, it looks almost like a checklist for a sex therapist or a couples counselor. You sort of get down there to the bottom and things get really dicey. (Laughter) Yes. But these things are everywhere. They're on sites big, they're on sites small. This is a global experience. What a 404 page tells you is that you fell through the cracks. And that's not a good experience when you're used to experiences like this. You can get on your Kinect and you can have unicorns dancing and rainbows spraying out of your mobile phone. A 404 page is not what you're looking for. You get that, and it's like a slap in the face. Trying to think about how a 404 felt, and it would be like if you went to Starbucks and there's the guy behind the counter and you're over there and there's no skim milk. And you say, "Hey, could you bring the skim milk?" And they walk out from behind the counter and they've got no pants on. And you're like, "Oh, I didn't want to see that." That's the 404 feeling. (Laughter) I mean, I've heard about that. So where this comes into play and why this is important is I head up a technology incubator, and we had eight startups sitting around there. And those startups are focused on what they are, not what they're not, until one day Athletepath, which is a website that focuses on services for extreme athletes, found this video. (Video) Guy: Joey! Crowd: Whoa! Renny Gleeson: You just ... no, he's not okay. They took that video and they embedded it in their 404 page and it was like a light bulb went off for everybody in the place. Because finally there was a page that actually felt like what it felt like to hit a 404. (Laughter) (Applause) So this turned into a contest. Dailypath that offers inspiration put inspiration on their 404 page. Stayhound, which helps you find pet sitters through your social network, commiserated with your pet. Each one of them found this. It turned into a 24-hour contest. At 4:04 the next day, we gave out $404 in cash. And what they learned was that those little things, done right, actually matter, and that well-designed moments can build brands. So you take a look out in the real world, and the fun thing is you can actually hack these yourself. You can type in an URL and put in a 404 and these will pop. This is one that commiserates with you. This is one that blames you. This is one that I loved. This is an error page, but what if this error page was also an opportunity? So it was a moment in time where all of these startups had to sit and think and got really excited about what they could be. Because back to the whole relationship issue, what they figured out through this exercise was that a simple mistake can tell me what you're not, or it can remind me of why I should love you. Thank you. (Applause)

Beethoven the businessman

{0: 'José Bowen is an accomplished musician and teacher who explores how technology has shaped the history of music.'}

TEDxSMU

This was the first title I thought of for this talk, "Beethoven as Bill Gates." Does that make sense? Maybe not. OK, so think about that. Being an educator, I am going to tell you the story, and then you'll figure it out for yourselves. So the second thought I had was that I would tell the story of the history of music delivery, literally from the beginning, from pounding rocks to pounding rock. The good news about this is the first 10,000 years just sailed by. So for 10,000 years, if you want to make music, you literally pick up rocks, later instruments, those sorts of things. And this goes on for a very long time. Gradually in the West, mostly we start to get a performing class, people who were experts, who were really good at pounding rocks. So, by the 18th century, we're still basically doing this. We have a class of experts, professionals, who play very expensive instruments, for the most part, things like the organ, complicated instruments, and if you wanted to hear music in the 18th century, it was live. You had to go to a concert. You had to go to church, you had to go to a civic event, you had to go hear somebody making music live. So, music always involved social interaction. There were no headphones you could put on, there was no iPhone, there was no record player. If you wanted to hear music, you had to get out of the house. There's really, basically, no music in your house. This goes on through the 18th century from the beginning, and then we have ... our first disruption. These two things actually happened together, these two disruptions. We get the piano, right? The piano was a new technology that really starts to happen in the 18th century, and then it becomes something that you could mass-produce cheaply. So you can now have an instrument that's not too expensive, that everyone can have one, that you can have at home. So this allows for a kind of disruption, but it wouldn't have happened if the second disruption hadn't happened at the same time, which is that somebody figured out how to do cheap music printing. Remember Gutenberg and the other kind of printing? Music is a little more complicated. It took a little longer to figure out: How do I create a cheap way to distribute sheet music? In London, at the time of the American Revolution, there are 12 music shops. By 1800, there are 30. By 1820, there are 150. So the internet wasn't the first time this happened, because think about what happens when, all of a sudden, you go from "If I want to hear music, I've got to go hear Bach, I've got to go hear Mozart." That meant you had to actually go hear Mozart. You didn't buy a CD of Mozart, you didn't download Mozart. You couldn't even buy Mozart sheet music, at least not easily or cheaply. But if you wanted to hear Mozart or Bach, you had to go to Germany and go hear them. But that's not true for Beethoven. And Beethoven figures out that, in fact, there's a new market. Beethoven is an entrepreneur, not unlike our other friend, Bill Gates. He's an entrepreneur that figures out, "Hey, I don't have to actually go to London. I can actually just sell sheet music. And it can be printed and mass-distributed, and I will be famous everywhere, and everybody else will play my music." So that changes the experience of music for everybody. It changes the variety, it changes the global pyramid, it changes all sorts of things. It creates a new class of musicians, of composers and performers — there's a division of labor. If you hire Bach to play for your wedding, guess who shows up? Bach! (Laughter) That's what he does for a living, right? He has no way to expand his business. But Beethoven does. Then this happens again. It happens 100 years later, so you're starting to see a theme. By the turn of the century, it's an interesting time for music delivery; 100 years later, we get the record player, the gramophone, the player piano. Now you could buy Rachmaninoff sheet music, but if you wanted to hear Rachmaninoff, you had to actually go to the concert hall. Not anymore. Now you can buy a record of Rachmaninoff, or you can buy a player piano and a roll that fits into another kind of recording device. And later, the radio. So think about this: you're a band in Texas; you're Doc Ross in Texas, and you've got the Texas big band market, you've got it nailed. And all of a sudden, there's this new thing called "radio." And now everybody can hear Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Man, the competition just sucks now. All of a sudden, the competition has gone global, just like it does a hundred years later, with the iPod, the internet and digital files and Garage Band, that do all of these things all over again. So now, maybe we can talk about these two guys. First of all, both of these guys are entrepreneurs. But second of all, both of these guys are software designers. That's what Beethoven does. He writes software that runs on that piece of hardware over there. (Laughter) That's a piece of hardware. That's a device that you can use if you have my piece of paper. If you have sheet music, does it sound good? No, it's a piece of paper. It's like those floppy disks; they weren't very useful. You can use them as coasters, I guess. But they're not very useful on their own. So both Beethoven and Bill Gates are software designers. What's interesting is that they also both live at a time where the hardware is changing very quickly. Those of you who are old enough to remember, go back to the '90s, go back to Windows whatever, and remember your joy and your love of Bill Gates, as every time a new software package came out, you had to get a new computer. So, guess what? When Beethoven started writing music, he had this instrument up on top, with five octaves. This one's bigger, it's got more pedals, it's louder, it can do more stuff. When Beethoven starts off, he doesn't have a piano that can do this. He actually just cannot do this. He can't go — (Musical chords) Can't do that. So in 1803, a French piano maker — alright, think about how smart this is: If you're a piano maker, into whose hands do you want to get that piano? Composers. Artists who will use the technology and make everybody else have to adopt your technology. It's like sending Bill Gates your fastest, latest computer, because you know he'll use up all the memory. (Laughter) So in 1803, Érard sends Beethoven a new piano. And it has more notes. And it can do that. So the first thing Beethoven does is, he writes a piece that can do that. If you've got a German or a Viennese piano or a British piano, it can't do that. So what do you do? You've gone to the music store. And you've bought the latest Beethoven piano sonata, and you take it home, and you've got a five-octave piano that was the brand-spanking-new, latest technology last year. You start playing that new Beethoven piano sonata, and what happens? Not enough notes! You run out of room. So, in fact, Beethoven has the same relationship with his audience that Bill Gates does. He's a software producer, and he has to deal with the hardware. And what's interesting about this is that Beethoven was actually smarter than Bill Gates. So when Beethoven gets his new Érard piano, he's writing his third piano concerto, he goes and he gives a concert, and he and uses all those extra notes. But what does he do when he goes and gives the concert? He has to take the piano with him, because it's the only piano he has in Vienna that has those extra notes. So he plays the concerto on the piano. It's great. But he realizes, "Oh, wait. Not everybody has one of these latest things. So he publishes piano sonatas — He waits; he delays: for the next 10 years, he still publishes piano sonatas that don't use the extra notes. He actually waits, because — This idea of Beethoven? Everything you know about Beethoven — basically wrong. Beethoven was a very clever entrepreneur. So the music he wrote for the popular market — not the pieces he was going to play himself, but the piano sonatas — he limits himself to the amount of keys that you have at home in some part of Southern Italy, where you have last year's piano. So what are the effects of these disruptions in music technology? How do composers, how do people respond? We've had three of these things, and they really all worked the same way. We started off with printing and the piano. The very first thing that happens is: it redefines the product. So the product becomes sheet music, becomes a piece of paper that you can then take home. In the 20th century, it becomes a record, something that you then take home. In the 21st century, it becomes a digital file. The nature of the product changes. Second, there's a division of labor. If you want to listen to Bach, you've got to go listen to Bach; there's no other way to do this. In the 19th century, we've got performers, and we've got composers, people who do different things. We have listeners who can now manipulate music like you just saw. It changes expectations of quality. Once everybody's heard Count Basie and Benny Goodman, maybe you're not quite so happy with your local band as much anymore. You've now heard ... — "I want to go listen to Benny Goodman some more." You have now a global market. You can hear things that you didn't use to hear. Every time this happens, we take away some social interaction. With Beethoven, you can now play Beethoven at home. You can't play Mozart at home. But with Beethoven, you can buy the sheet music, you can go home, you can close the door and play the piano. And only you are there. Now you have headphones that do the same thing. With each of these disruptions, it changes the amount of social interaction. It's a new personalized experience each time. I can play Beethoven the way I want to. I can play it faster, I can play it slower. I can actually personalize the experience now. There's more consumer choice, the marketplace gets bigger. The number of titles on sale in those music stores goes up. But there's also less choice, because in a global pyramid, you can't always tell what you want. There's so much choice out there. How do you pick? And so marketing starts to come in, and "Who is the flavor of the month?" There's one more thing that's not on the list: piracy. One of Haydn and Chopin's biggest worries is that people were going to write fake Chopin and put "Chopin" on it. Do you think Chopin would have been comforted by the thought, "Hey, 20 percent of the people who buy fake Chopin are more likely to go buy real Chopin"? I mean — I don't know. (Laughter) But Chopin, another clever entrepreneur — you know what he does? He publishes his music in Italy, France, Germany and England on the same day, because there's no international copyright, so he's got to have everything published on the same day. And he puts differences in every country. So if you're playing Chopin, the additions from different countries are different on purpose, because he wanted to be able to track who was a pirate. So, this wasn't something that Sony thought of. So, the question is ... This new technology, it makes more choice for more people, it makes it more global, but it also allows more piracy. It also allows for people to have a marketing filter. They have some way to interact that's not always direct. So the next time somebody says, you know, "Nothing like the internet ever happened." Well, it's true, but these kinds of disruptions in music technology have happened before. And the model for these disruptions is the same as we see in other kinds of businesses. It changes the nature of the product. So if you're in book publishing, you thought you were in book publishing because of these things called books. Well, you can still sell novels without books. You can still be in the music business even though you're not in the record business. You were selling records only because that was the technology that you inherited. Newspaper business: dead. But journalism isn't dead. And finally, schools. School is the next big horizon, because what were we in the business of? Schools used to be like buying gas or buying food; they had to have local entry points all over the place. But now, with the internet, we have a different distribution system. And so schools have got to think about what we're selling. But I think that the face-to-face interaction is not going to go away. There's still something of value here, as we've demonstrated today, because we're at this thing called TED, where we still want to get to know each other. Thank you very much. (Applause)

3 new ways to kill mosquitoes

{0: 'Bart Knols is a doctor committed to killing mosquitoes and ending malaria.'}

TEDxMaastricht

(Mosquito buzzing) (Swat) Gotcha. Mosquitoes. I hate them. Don't you? That awful buzzing sound at night around your ears that drives you absolutely crazy? Knowing that she wants to stick a needle in your skin and suck out your blood? That's awful, right? In fact, there's only one good thing I can think of when it gets to mosquitoes. When they fly into our bedroom at night, they prefer to bite my wife. (Laughter) But that's fascinating, right? Why does she receive more bites than I do? And the answer is smell, the smell of her body. And since we all smell different and produce chemicals on our skin that either attract or repel mosquitoes, some of us are just more attractive than others. So my wife smells nicer than I do, or I just stink more than she does. Either way, mosquitoes find us in the dark by sniffing us out. They smell us. And during my PhD, I wanted to know exactly what chemicals from our skin African malaria mosquitoes use to track us down at night. And there's a whole range of compounds that they do use. And this was not going to be an easy task. And therefore we set up various experiments. Why did we set up these experiments? Because half the world's population runs the risk of contracting a killer disease like malaria through a simple mosquito bite. Every 30 seconds, somewhere on this planet, a child dies of malaria, and Paul Levy this morning, he was talking about the metaphor of the 727 crashing into the United States. Well, in Africa, we have the equivalent of seven jumbo 747s crashing every day. But perhaps if we can attract these mosquitoes to traps, bait it with our smell, we may be able to stop transmission of disease. Now, solving this puzzle was not an easy thing, because we produce hundreds of different chemicals on the skin, but we undertook some remarkable experiments that managed us to resolve this puzzle very quickly indeed. First, we observed that not all mosquito species bite on the same part of the body. Strange. So we set up an experiment where we put a naked volunteer in a large cage, (Laughter) and in that cage, we released mosquitoes to see where they were biting on the body of that person. And we found some remarkable differences. On the left here you see the bites by the Dutch malaria mosquito on this person. They had a very strong preference for biting on the face. In contrast, the African malaria mosquito had a very strong preference for biting the ankles and feet of this person. And that, of course, we should have known all along, because they're called mosqui-toes, you see? (Laughter) That's right. (Applause) And so we started focusing on the smell of feet ... on the smell of human feet, until we came across a remarkable statement in the literature that said that cheese smells after feet rather than the reverse. Think of it. And this triggered us to do a remarkable experiment. We tried, with a tiny little piece of Limburger cheese, which smells badly after feet, to attract African malaria mosquitoes. And you know what? It worked. In fact, it worked so well that now we have a synthetic mixture of the aroma of Limburger cheese that we're using in Tanzania and has been shown there to be two to three times more attractive to mosquitoes than humans. Limburg, be proud of your cheese, as it is now used in the fight against malaria. (Applause) That's the cheese, just to show you. My second story is remarkable as well. It's about man's best friend. It's about dogs. And I will show you how we can use dogs in the fight against malaria. One of the best ways of killing mosquitoes is not to wait until they fly around like adults and bite people and transmit disease. It's to kill them when they're still in the water as larvae. Why? Because they are just like the CIA. In that pool of water, these larvae are concentrated. They're all together there. They are immobile. They can't escape from that water. They can't fly. And they're accessible. You can actually walk up to that pool and you can kill them there, right? So the problem that we face with this is that, throughout the landscape, all these pools of water with the larvae, they are scattered all over the place, which makes it very hard for an inspector like this to actually find all these breeding sites and treat them with insecticides. And last year we thought very, very hard, how can we resolve this problem? Until we realized that just like us — we have a unique smell — mosquito larvae also have a very unique smell. And so we set up another crazy experiment, because we collected the smell of these larvae, put it on pieces of cloth, and then did something very remarkable. Here we have a bar with four holes and we put the smell of these larvae in the left hole. Oh, that was very quick. And then you see the dog. It's called Tweed. It's a border collie. He's examining these holes and now he's got it already. He's going back to check the control holes again, but he's coming back to the first one, and now he's locking into that smell, which means that now, we can use dogs with these inspectors to much better find the breeding sites of mosquitoes in the field, and therefore have a much bigger impact on malaria. This lady is Ellen van der Zweep. She's one of the best dog trainers in the world, and she believes that we can do a lot more. Since we also know that people that carry malaria parasites smell different compared to people that are uninfected, she's convinced that we can train dogs to find people that carry the parasite. That means that in a population where malaria has gone down all the way and there's few people remaining with parasites, that the dogs can find these people, we can treat them with antimalarial drugs and give the final blow to malaria. Man's best friend in the fight against malaria. My third story is perhaps even more remarkable ... and, I should say, has never been shown to the public until today. (Audience cheers) Yeah. It's a crazy story, but I believe it's perhaps the best and ultimate revenge against mosquitoes ever. In fact, people have told me that now they will enjoy being bitten by mosquitoes. And the question of course is, what would make someone enjoy being bitten by mosquitoes? And the answer I have right here ... in my pocket — (Laughter) if I get it. It's a tablet. A simple tablet, and when I take it with water ... it does miracles. Thank you. Now, let me show you how this works. Here in this box, I have a cage with several hundred hungry female mosquitoes ... (Laughter) that I'm just about to release. (Laughter) Just kidding, just kidding. (Laughter) What I'm going to show you is, I'm gonna stick my arm into it and I will show you how quickly they will bite. There we go. Don't worry, I do this all the time in the lab. There we go. OK. Now, on the video — on the video here, I'm going to show you exactly the same thing, except that what I'm showing you on the video happened one hour after I took the tablet. Have a look. That doesn't work. OK. Sorry about that. I'm sticking in my arm, I'm giving them a big juicy blood meal, I'm shaking them off, and we follow them through time to see these mosquitoes get very, very sick indeed, here shown in fast motion. And three hours later, what we see at the bottom of the cage is dead mosquitoes ... very dead mosquitoes. And I'm going to say, ladies and gentlemen, we have swapped the cards with mosquitoes. They don't kill us. We kill them. (Applause) Now — (Laughter) Maastricht, be prepared. Now, think of what we can do with this. We can actually use this to contain outbreaks of mosquito-born diseases, of epidemics, right? And better still, imagine what would happen if, in a very large area, everyone would take these drugs, for just three weeks. That would give us an opportunity to actually eliminate malaria as a disease. So cheese, dogs and a pill to kill mosquitoes. That's the kind of out-of-the-box science that I love doing ... for the betterment of mankind, but especially for her, so that she can grow up in a world without malaria. Thank you. (Applause)

The optimism bias

{0: 'Tali Sharot studies why our brains are biased toward optimism.'}

TED2012

I'm going to talk to you about optimism — or more precisely, the optimism bias. It's a cognitive illusion that we've been studying in my lab for the past few years, and 80 percent of us have it. It's our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing good events in our lives and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events. So we underestimate our likelihood of suffering from cancer, being in a car accident. We overestimate our longevity, our career prospects. In short, we're more optimistic than realistic, but we are oblivious to the fact. Take marriage for example. In the Western world, divorce rates are about 40 percent. That means that out of five married couples, two will end up splitting their assets. But when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce, they estimate it at zero percent. And even divorce lawyers, who should really know better, hugely underestimate their own likelihood of divorce. So it turns out that optimists are not less likely to divorce, but they are more likely to remarry. In the words of Samuel Johnson, "Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience." (Laughter) So if we're married, we're more likely to have kids. And we all think our kids will be especially talented. This, by the way, is my two-year-old nephew, Guy. And I just want to make it absolutely clear that he's a really bad example of the optimism bias, because he is in fact uniquely talented. (Laughter) And I'm not alone. Out of four British people, three said that they were optimistic about the future of their own families. That's 75 percent. But only 30 percent said that they thought families in general are doing better than a few generations ago. And this is a really important point, because we're optimistic about ourselves, we're optimistic about our kids, we're optimistic about our families, but we're not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us, and we're somewhat pessimistic about the fate of our fellow citizens and the fate of our country. But private optimism about our own personal future remains persistent. And it doesn't mean that we think things will magically turn out okay, but rather that we have the unique ability to make it so. Now I'm a scientist, I do experiments. So to show you what I mean, I'm going to do an experiment here with you. So I'm going to give you a list of abilities and characteristics, and I want you to think for each of these abilities where you stand relative to the rest of the population. The first one is getting along well with others. Who here believes they're at the bottom 25 percent? Okay, that's about 10 people out of 1,500. Who believes they're at the top 25 percent? That's most of us here. Okay, now do the same for your driving ability. How interesting are you? How attractive are you? How honest are you? And finally, how modest are you? So most of us put ourselves above average on most of these abilities. Now this is statistically impossible. We can't all be better than everyone else. (Laughter) But if we believe we're better than the other guy, well that means that we're more likely to get that promotion, to remain married, because we're more social, more interesting. And it's a global phenomenon. The optimism bias has been observed in many different countries — in Western cultures, in non-Western cultures, in females and males, in kids, in the elderly. It's quite widespread. But the question is, is it good for us? So some people say no. Some people say the secret to happiness is low expectations. I think the logic goes something like this: If we don't expect greatness, if we don't expect to find love and be healthy and successful, well we're not going to be disappointed when these things don't happen. And if we're not disappointed when good things don't happen, and we're pleasantly surprised when they do, we will be happy. So it's a very good theory, but it turns out to be wrong for three reasons. Number one: Whatever happens, whether you succeed or you fail, people with high expectations always feel better. Because how we feel when we get dumped or win employee of the month depends on how we interpret that event. The psychologists Margaret Marshall and John Brown studied students with high and low expectations. And they found that when people with high expectations succeed, they attribute that success to their own traits. "I'm a genius, therefore I got an A, therefore I'll get an A again and again in the future." When they failed, it wasn't because they were dumb, but because the exam just happened to be unfair. Next time they will do better. People with low expectations do the opposite. So when they failed it was because they were dumb, and when they succeeded it was because the exam just happened to be really easy. Next time reality would catch up with them. So they felt worse. Number two: Regardless of the outcome, the pure act of anticipation makes us happy. The behavioral economist George Lowenstein asked students in his university to imagine getting a passionate kiss from a celebrity, any celebrity. Then he said, "How much are you willing to pay to get a kiss from a celebrity if the kiss was delivered immediately, in three hours, in 24 hours, in three days, in one year, in 10 years? He found that the students were willing to pay the most not to get a kiss immediately, but to get a kiss in three days. They were willing to pay extra in order to wait. Now they weren't willing to wait a year or 10 years; no one wants an aging celebrity. But three days seemed to be the optimum amount. So why is that? Well if you get the kiss now, it's over and done with. But if you get the kiss in three days, well that's three days of jittery anticipation, the thrill of the wait. The students wanted that time to imagine where is it going to happen, how is it going to happen. Anticipation made them happy. This is, by the way, why people prefer Friday to Sunday. It's a really curious fact, because Friday is a day of work and Sunday is a day of pleasure, so you'd assume that people will prefer Sunday, but they don't. It's not because they really, really like being in the office and they can't stand strolling in the park or having a lazy brunch. We know that, because when you ask people about their ultimate favorite day of the week, surprise, surprise, Saturday comes in at first, then Friday, then Sunday. People prefer Friday because Friday brings with it the anticipation of the weekend ahead, all the plans that you have. On Sunday, the only thing you can look forward to is the work week. So optimists are people who expect more kisses in their future, more strolls in the park. And that anticipation enhances their wellbeing. In fact, without the optimism bias, we would all be slightly depressed. People with mild depression, they don't have a bias when they look into the future. They're actually more realistic than healthy individuals. But individuals with severe depression, they have a pessimistic bias. So they tend to expect the future to be worse than it ends up being. So optimism changes subjective reality. The way we expect the world to be changes the way we see it. But it also changes objective reality. It acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that is the third reason why lowering your expectations will not make you happy. Controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success, it leads to success. Optimism leads to success in academia and sports and politics. And maybe the most surprising benefit of optimism is health. If we expect the future to be bright, stress and anxiety are reduced. So all in all, optimism has lots of benefits. But the question that was really confusing to me was, how do we maintain optimism in the face of reality? As an neuroscientist, this was especially confusing, because according to all the theories out there, when your expectations are not met, you should alter them. But this is not what we find. We asked people to come into our lab in order to try and figure out what was going on. We asked them to estimate their likelihood of experiencing different terrible events in their lives. So, for example, what is your likelihood of suffering from cancer? And then we told them the average likelihood of someone like them to suffer these misfortunes. So cancer, for example, is about 30 percent. And then we asked them again, "How likely are you to suffer from cancer?" What we wanted to know was whether people will take the information that we gave them to change their beliefs. And indeed they did — but mostly when the information we gave them was better than what they expected. So for example, if someone said, "My likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 50 percent," and we said, "Hey, good news. The average likelihood is only 30 percent," the next time around they would say, "Well maybe my likelihood is about 35 percent." So they learned quickly and efficiently. But if someone started off saying, "My average likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 10 percent," and we said, "Hey, bad news. The average likelihood is about 30 percent," the next time around they would say, "Yep. Still think it's about 11 percent." (Laughter) So it's not that they didn't learn at all — they did — but much, much less than when we gave them positive information about the future. And it's not that they didn't remember the numbers that we gave them; everyone remembers that the average likelihood of cancer is about 30 percent and the average likelihood of divorce is about 40 percent. But they didn't think that those numbers were related to them. What this means is that warning signs such as these may only have limited impact. Yes, smoking kills, but mostly it kills the other guy. What I wanted to know was what was going on inside the human brain that prevented us from taking these warning signs personally. But at the same time, when we hear that the housing market is hopeful, we think, "Oh, my house is definitely going to double in price." To try and figure that out, I asked the participants in the experiment to lie in a brain imaging scanner. It looks like this. And using a method called functional MRI, we were able to identify regions in the brain that were responding to positive information. One of these regions is called the left inferior frontal gyrus. So if someone said, "My likelihood of suffering from cancer is 50 percent," and we said, "Hey, good news. Average likelihood is 30 percent," the left inferior frontal gyrus would respond fiercely. And it didn't matter if you're an extreme optimist, a mild optimist or slightly pessimistic, everyone's left inferior frontal gyrus was functioning perfectly well, whether you're Barack Obama or Woody Allen. On the other side of the brain, the right inferior frontal gyrus was responding to bad news. And here's the thing: it wasn't doing a very good job. The more optimistic you were, the less likely this region was to respond to unexpected negative information. And if your brain is failing at integrating bad news about the future, you will constantly leave your rose-tinted spectacles on. So we wanted to know, could we change this? Could we alter people's optimism bias by interfering with the brain activity in these regions? And there's a way for us to do that. This is my collaborator Ryota Kanai. And what he's doing is he's passing a small magnetic pulse through the skull of the participant in our study into their inferior frontal gyrus. And by doing that, he's interfering with the activity of this brain region for about half an hour. After that everything goes back to normal, I assure you. (Laughter) So let's see what happens. First of all, I'm going to show you the average amount of bias that we see. So if I was to test all of you now, this is the amount that you would learn more from good news relative to bad news. Now we interfere with the region that we found to integrate negative information in this task, and the optimism bias grew even larger. We made people more biased in the way that they process information. Then we interfered with the brain region that we found to integrate good news in this task, and the optimism bias disappeared. We were quite amazed by these results because we were able to eliminate a deep-rooted bias in humans. And at this point we stopped and we asked ourselves, would we want to shatter the optimism illusion into tiny little bits? If we could do that, would we want to take people's optimism bias away? Well I've already told you about all of the benefits of the optimism bias, which probably makes you want to hold onto it for dear life. But there are, of course, pitfalls, and it would be really foolish of us to ignore them. Take for example this email I recieved from a firefighter here in California. He says, "Fatality investigations for firefighters often include 'We didn't think the fire was going to do that,' even when all of the available information was there to make safe decisions." This captain is going to use our findings on the optimism bias to try to explain to the firefighters why they think the way they do, to make them acutely aware of this very optimistic bias in humans. So unrealistic optimism can lead to risky behavior, to financial collapse, to faulty planning. The British government, for example, has acknowledged that the optimism bias can make individuals more likely to underestimate the costs and durations of projects. So they have adjusted the 2012 Olympic budget for the optimism bias. My friend who's getting married in a few weeks has done the same for his wedding budget. And by the way, when I asked him about his own likelihood of divorce, he said he was quite sure it was zero percent. So what we would really like to do, is we would like to protect ourselves from the dangers of optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful, benefiting from the many fruits of optimism. And I believe there's a way for us to do that. The key here really is knowledge. We're not born with an innate understanding of our biases. These have to be identified by scientific investigation. But the good news is that becoming aware of the optimism bias does not shatter the illusion. It's like visual illusions, in which understanding them does not make them go away. And this is good because it means we should be able to strike a balance, to come up with plans and rules to protect ourselves from unrealistic optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful. I think this cartoon portrays it nicely. Because if you're one of these pessimistic penguins up there who just does not believe they can fly, you certainly never will. Because to make any kind of progress, we need to be able to imagine a different reality, and then we need to believe that that reality is possible. But if you are an extreme optimistic penguin who just jumps down blindly hoping for the best, you might find yourself in a bit of a mess when you hit the ground. But if you're an optimistic penguin who believes they can fly, but then adjusts a parachute to your back just in case things don't work out exactly as you had planned, you will soar like an eagle, even if you're just a penguin. Thank you. (Applause)

The mathematics of history

{0: 'Jean-Baptiste Michel looks at how we can use large volumes of data to better understand our world.'}

TED2012

So it turns out that mathematics is a very powerful language. It has generated considerable insight in physics, in biology and economics, but not that much in the humanities and in history. I think there's a belief that it's just impossible, that you cannot quantify the doings of mankind, that you cannot measure history. But I don't think that's right. I want to show you a couple of examples why. So my collaborator Erez and I were considering the following fact: that two kings separated by centuries will speak a very different language. That's a powerful historical force. So the king of England, Alfred the Great, will use a vocabulary and grammar that is quite different from the king of hip hop, Jay-Z. (Laughter) Now it's just the way it is. Language changes over time, and it's a powerful force. So Erez and I wanted to know more about that. So we paid attention to a particular grammatical rule, past-tense conjugation. So you just add "ed" to a verb at the end to signify the past. "Today I walk. Yesterday I walked." But some verbs are irregular. "Yesterday I thought." Now what's interesting about that is irregular verbs between Alfred and Jay-Z have become more regular. Like the verb "to wed" that you see here has become regular. So Erez and I followed the fate of over 100 irregular verbs through 12 centuries of English language, and we saw that there's actually a very simple mathematical pattern that captures this complex historical change, namely, if a verb is 100 times more frequent than another, it regularizes 10 times slower. That's a piece of history, but it comes in a mathematical wrapping. Now in some cases math can even help explain, or propose explanations for, historical forces. So here Steve Pinker and I were considering the magnitude of wars during the last two centuries. There's actually a well-known regularity to them where the number of wars that are 100 times deadlier is 10 times smaller. So there are 30 wars that are about as deadly as the Six Days War, but there's only four wars that are 100 times deadlier — like World War I. So what kind of historical mechanism can produce that? What's the origin of this? So Steve and I, through mathematical analysis, propose that there's actually a very simple phenomenon at the root of this, which lies in our brains. This is a very well-known feature in which we perceive quantities in relative ways — quantities like the intensity of light or the loudness of a sound. For instance, committing 10,000 soldiers to the next battle sounds like a lot. It's relatively enormous if you've already committed 1,000 soldiers previously. But it doesn't sound so much, it's not relatively enough, it won't make a difference if you've already committed 100,000 soldiers previously. So you see that because of the way we perceive quantities, as the war drags on, the number of soldiers committed to it and the casualties will increase not linearly — like 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 — but exponentially — 10,000, later 20,000, later 40,000. And so that explains this pattern that we've seen before. So here mathematics is able to link a well-known feature of the individual mind with a long-term historical pattern that unfolds over centuries and across continents. So these types of examples, today there are just a few of them, but I think in the next decade they will become commonplace. The reason for that is that the historical record is becoming digitized at a very fast pace. So there's about 130 million books that have been written since the dawn of time. Companies like Google have digitized many of them — above 20 million actually. And when the stuff of history is available in digital form, it makes it possible for a mathematical analysis to very quickly and very conveniently review trends in our history and our culture. So I think in the next decade, the sciences and the humanities will come closer together to be able to answer deep questions about mankind. And I think that mathematics will be a very powerful language to do that. It will be able to reveal new trends in our history, sometimes to explain them, and maybe even in the future to predict what's going to happen. Thank you very much. (Applause)

How to build your creative confidence

{0: 'David Kelley’s company IDEO helped create many icons of the digital generation -- but what matters even more to him is unlocking the creative potential of people and organizations to innovate routinely.'}

TED2012

I wanted to talk to you today about creative confidence. I'm going to start way back in the third grade at Oakdale School in Barberton, Ohio. I remember one day my best friend Brian was working on a project. He was making a horse out of the clay our teacher kept under the sink. And at one point, one of the girls that was sitting at his table, seeing what he was doing, leaned over and said to him, "That's terrible. That doesn't look anything like a horse." And Brian's shoulders sank. And he wadded up the clay horse and he threw it back in the bin. I never saw Brian do a project like that ever again. And I wonder how often that happens, you know? It seems like when I tell that story of Brian to my class, a lot of them want to come up after class and tell me about their similar experience, how a teacher shut them down, or how a student was particularly cruel to them. And then some kind of opt out of thinking of themselves as creative at that point. And I see that opting out that happens in childhood, and it moves in and becomes more ingrained, even, by the time you get to adult life. So we see a lot of this. When we have a workshop or when we have clients in to work with us side by side, eventually we get to the point in the process that's kind of fuzzy or unconventional. And eventually, these big-shot executives whip out their BlackBerrys and they say they have to make really important phone calls, and they head for the exits. And they're just so uncomfortable. When we track them down and ask them what's going on, they say something like, "I'm just not the creative type." But we know that's not true. If they stick with the process, if they stick with it, they end up doing amazing things. And they surprise themselves at just how innovative they and their teams really are. So I've been looking at this fear of judgment that we have, that you don't do things, you're afraid you're going to be judged; if you don't say the right creative thing, you're going to be judged. And I had a major breakthrough, when I met the psychologist Albert Bandura. I don't know if you know Albert Bandura, but if you go to Wikipedia, it says that he's the fourth most important psychologist in history — you know, like Freud, Skinner, somebody and Bandura. (Laughter) Bandura is 86 and he still works at Stanford. And he's just a lovely guy. So I went to see him, because he's just worked on phobias for a long time, which I'm very interested in. He had developed this way, this, kind of, methodology, that ended up curing people in a very short amount of time, like, in four hours. He had a huge cure rate of people who had phobias. And we talked about snakes — I don't know why — we talked about snakes and fear of snakes as a phobia. And it was really enjoyable, really interesting. He told me that he'd invite the test subject in, and he'd say, "You know, there's a snake in the next room and we're going to go in there." To which, he reported, most of them replied, "Hell no! I'm not going in there, certainly if there's a snake in there." But Bandura has a step-by-step process that was super successful. So he'd take people to this two-way mirror looking into the room where the snake was. And he'd get them comfortable with that. Then through a series of steps, he'd move them and they'd be standing in the doorway with the door open, and they'd be looking in there. And he'd get them comfortable with that. And then many more steps later, baby steps, they'd be in the room, they'd have a leather glove like a welder's glove on, and they'd eventually touch the snake. And when they touched the snake, everything was fine. They were cured. In fact, everything was better than fine. These people who had lifelong fears of snakes were saying things like, "Look how beautiful that snake is." And they were holding it in their laps. Bandura calls this process "guided mastery." I love that term: guided mastery. And something else happened. These people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives. They tried harder, they persevered longer, and they were more resilient in the face of failure. They just gained a new confidence. And Bandura calls that confidence "self-efficacy," the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do. Well, meeting Bandura was really cathartic for me, because I realized that this famous scientist had documented and scientifically validated something that we've seen happen for the last 30 years: that we could take people who had the fear that they weren't creative, and we could take them through a series of steps, kind of like a series of small successes, and they turn fear into familiarity. And they surprise themselves. That transformation is amazing. We see it at the d.school all the time. People from all different kinds of disciplines, they think of themselves as only analytical. And they come in and they go through the process, our process, they build confidence and now they think of themselves differently. And they're totally emotionally excited about the fact that they walk around thinking of themselves as a creative person. So I thought one of the things I'd do today is take you through and show you what this journey looks like. To me, that journey looks like Doug Dietz. Doug Dietz is a technical person. He designs large medical imaging equipment. He's worked for GE, and he's had a fantastic career. But at one point, he had a moment of crisis. He was in the hospital looking at one of his MRI machines in use, when he saw a young family, and this little girl. And that little girl was crying and was terrified. And Doug was really disappointed to learn that nearly 80 percent of the pediatric patients in this hospital had to be sedated in order to deal with his MRI machine. And this was really disappointing to Doug, because before this time, he was proud of what he did. He was saving lives with this machine. But it really hurt him to see the fear that this machine caused in kids. About that time, he was at the d.school at Stanford taking classes. He was learning about our process, about design thinking, about empathy, about iterative prototyping. And he would take this new knowledge and do something quite extraordinary. He would redesign the entire experience of being scanned. And this is what he came up with. (Laughter) He turned it into an adventure for the kids. He painted the walls and he painted the machine, and he got the operators retrained by people who know kids, like children's museum people. And now when the kid comes, it's an experience. And they talk to them about the noise and the movement of the ship. And when they come, they say, "OK, you're going to go into the pirate ship, but be very still, because we don't want the pirates to find you." And the results were super dramatic: from something like 80 percent of the kids needing to be sedated, to something like 10 percent of the kids needing to be sedated. And the hospital and GE were happy, too, because you didn't have to call the anesthesiologist all the time, and they could put more kids through the machine in a day. So the quantitative results were great. But Doug's results that he cared about were much more qualitative. He was with one of the mothers waiting for her child to come out of the scan. And when the little girl came out of her scan, she ran up to her mother and said, "Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?" (Laughter) And so, I've heard Doug tell the story many times of his personal transformation and the breakthrough design that happened from it, but I've never really seen him tell the story of the little girl without a tear in his eye. Doug's story takes place in a hospital. I know a thing or two about hospitals. A few years ago, I felt a lump on the side of my neck. It was my turn in the MRI machine. It was cancer, it was the bad kind. I was told I had a 40 percent chance of survival. So while you're sitting around with the other patients, in your pajamas, and everybody's pale and thin — (Laughter) you know? — and you're waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays, you think of a lot of things. Mostly, you think about: Am I going to survive? And I thought a lot about: What was my daughter's life going to be like without me? But you think about other things. I thought a lot about: What was I put on Earth to do? What was my calling? What should I do? I was lucky because I had lots of options. We'd been working in health and wellness, and K-12, and the developing world. so there were lots of projects that I could work on. But then I decided and committed at this point, to the thing I most wanted to do, which was to help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along their way. And if I was going to survive, that's what I wanted to do. I survived, just so you know. (Laughter) (Applause) I really believe that when people gain this confidence — and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO — that they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives. We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions. We see them come up with more interesting — and just more — ideas, so they can choose from better ideas. And they just make better decisions. I know at TED, you're supposed to have a change-the-world kind of thing, isn't that — everybody has a change-the-world thing? If there is one for me, this is it, to help this happen. So I hope you'll join me on my quest, you as, kind of, thought leaders. It would be really great if you didn't let people divide the world into the creatives and the non-creatives, like it's some God-given thing, and to have people realize that they're naturally creative, and that those natural people should let their ideas fly; that they should achieve what Bandura calls self-efficacy, that you can do what you set out to do, and that you can reach a place of creative confidence and touch the snake. Thank you. (Applause)

How to look inside the brain

{0: 'Carl Schoonover is a neuroscientist and one of the founders of NeuWrite, a collaboration between writers and neuroscientist.'}

TED2012

This is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain. It's a diagram of the visual system. And some things look very familiar today. Two eyes at the bottom, optic nerve flowing out from the back. There's a very large nose that doesn't seem to be connected to anything in particular. And if we compare this to more recent representations of the visual system, you'll see that things have gotten substantially more complicated over the intervening thousand years. And that's because today we can see what's inside of the brain, rather than just looking at its overall shape. Imagine you wanted to understand how a computer works and all you could see was a keyboard, a mouse, a screen. You really would be kind of out of luck. You want to be able to open it up, crack it open, look at the wiring inside. And up until a little more than a century ago, nobody was able to do that with the brain. Nobody had had a glimpse of the brain's wiring. And that's because if you take a brain out of the skull and you cut a thin slice of it, put it under even a very powerful microscope, there's nothing there. It's gray, formless. There's no structure. It won't tell you anything. And this all changed in the late 19th century. Suddenly, new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring. The computer was cracked open. So what really launched modern neuroscience was a stain called the Golgi stain. And it works in a very particular way. Instead of staining all of the cells inside of a tissue, it somehow only stains about one percent of them. It clears the forest, reveals the trees inside. If everything had been labeled, nothing would have been visible. So somehow it shows what's there. Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience, applied this Golgi stain, which yields data which looks like this, and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell, the neuron. And if you're thinking of the brain as a computer, this is the transistor. And very quickly Cajal realized that neurons don't operate alone, but rather make connections with others that form circuits just like in a computer. Today, a century later, when researchers want to visualize neurons, they light them up from the inside rather than darkening them. And there's several ways of doing this. But one of the most popular ones involves green fluorescent protein. Now green fluorescent protein, which oddly enough comes from a bioluminescent jellyfish, is very useful. Because if you can get the gene for green fluorescent protein and deliver it to a cell, that cell will glow green — or any of the many variants now of green fluorescent protein, you get a cell to glow many different colors. And so coming back to the brain, this is from a genetically engineered mouse called "Brainbow." And it's so called, of course, because all of these neurons are glowing different colors. Now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify individual molecular components of neurons, molecules, rather than the entire cell. And there's several ways of doing this, but one of the most popular ones involves using antibodies. And you're familiar, of course, with antibodies as the henchmen of the immune system. But it turns out that they're so useful to the immune system because they can recognize specific molecules, like, for example, the coat protein of a virus that's invading the body. And researchers have used this fact in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain, recognize specific substructures of the cell and identify them individually. And a lot of the images I've been showing you here are very beautiful, but they're also very powerful. They have great explanatory power. This, for example, is an antibody staining against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain. And you've heard of serotonin, of course, in the context of diseases like depression and anxiety. You've heard of SSRIs, which are drugs that are used to treat these diseases. And in order to understand how serotonin works, it's critical to understand where the serontonin machinery is. And antibody stainings like this one can be used to understand that sort of question. I'd like to leave you with the following thought: Green fluorescent protein and antibodies are both totally natural products at the get-go. They were evolved by nature in order to get a jellyfish to glow green for whatever reason, or in order to detect the coat protein of an invading virus, for example. And only much later did scientists come onto the scene and say, "Hey, these are tools, these are functions that we could use in our own research tool palette." And instead of applying feeble human minds to designing these tools from scratch, there were these ready-made solutions right out there in nature developed and refined steadily for millions of years by the greatest engineer of all. Thank you. (Applause)

One year of turning the world inside out

{0: 'With a camera, a dedicated wheatpasting crew and the help of whole villages and favelas, 2011 TED Prize winner JR shows the world its true face.'}

TED2012

Twelve years ago, I was in the street writing my name to say, "I exist." Then I went to taking photos of people to paste them on the street to say, "They exist." From the suburbs of Paris to the wall of Israel and Palestine, the rooftops of Kenya to the favelas of Rio, paper and glue — as easy as that. I asked a question last year: Can art change the world? Well let me tell you, in terms of changing the world there has been a lot of competition this year, because the Arab Spring is still spreading, the Eurozone has collapsed ... what else? The Occupy movement found a voice, and I still have to speak English constantly. So there has been a lot of change. So when I had my TED wish last year, I said, look, I'm going to switch my concept. You are going to take the photos. You're going to send them to me. I'm going to print them and send them back to you. Then you're going to paste them where it makes sense for you to place your own statement. This is Inside Out. One hundred thousand posters have been printed this year. Those are the kind of posters, let me show you. And we keep sending more every day. This is the size. Just a regular piece of paper with a little bit of ink on it. This one was from Haiti. When I launched my wish last year, hundreds of people stood up and said they wanted to help us. But I say it has to be under the conditions I've always worked: no credit, no logos, no sponsoring. A week later, a handful of people were there ready to rock and empower the people on the ground who wanted to change the world. These are the people I want to talk about to you today. Two weeks after my speech, in Tunisia, hundreds of portraits were made. And they pasted [over] every single portrait of the dictator [with] their own photos. Boom! This is what happened. Slim and his friends went through the country and pasted hundreds of photos everywhere to show the diversity in the country. They really make Inside Out their own project. Actually, that photo was pasted in a police station, and what you see on the ground are ID cards of all the photos of people being tracked by the police. Russia. Chad wanted to fight against homophobia in Russia. He went with his friends in front of every Russian embassy in Europe and stood there with the photos to say, "We have rights." They used Inside Out as a platform for protest. Karachi, Pakistan. Sharmeen is actually here. She organized a TEDx action out there and made all the unseen faces of the city on the walls in her town. And I want to thank her today. North Dakota. Standing Rock Nation, in this Turtle Island, [unclear name] from the Dakota Lakota tribe wanted to show that the Native Americans are still here. The seventh generation are still fighting for their rights. He pasted up portraits all over his reservation. And he's here also today. Each time I get a wall in New York, I use his photos to continue spreading the project. Juarez: You've heard of the border — one of the most dangerous borders in the world. Monica has taken thousands of portraits with a group of photographers and covered the entire border. Do you know what it takes to do this? People, energy, make the glue, organize the team. It was amazing. While in Iran at the same time Abololo — of course a nickname — has pasted one single face of a woman to show his resistance against the government. I don't have to explain to you what kind of risk he took for that action. There are tons of school projects. Twenty percent of the posters we are receiving comes from schools. Education is so essential. Kids just make photos in a class, the teacher receives them, they paste them on the school. Here they even got the help of the firemen. There should be even more schools doing this kind of project. Of course we wanted to go back to Israel and Palestine. So we went there with a truck. This is a photobooth truck. You go on the back of that truck, it takes your photo, 30 seconds later take it from the side, you're ready to rock. Thousands of people use them and each of them signs up for a two-state peace solution and then walk in the street. This is march, the 450,000 march — beginning of September. They were all holding their photo as a statement. On the other side, people were wrapping up streets, buildings. It's everywhere. Come on, don't tell me that people aren't ready for peace out there. These projects took thousands of actions in one year, making hundreds of thousands of people participating, creating millions of views. This is the biggest global art participatory project that's going on. So back to the question, "Can art change the world?" Maybe not in one year. That's the beginning. But maybe we should change the question. Can art change people's lives? From what I've seen this year, yes. And you know what? It's just the beginning. Let's turn the world inside out together. Thank you. (Applause)

Cheap, effective shelter for disaster relief

{0: 'Michael McDaniel is a graphic designer using his skills to help people in meaningful ways. '}

TEDxAustin

So, I'm going to start off with kind of the buzzkill a little bit. Forty-two million people were displaced by natural disasters in 2010. Now, there was nothing particularly special about 2010, because, on average, 31 and a half million people are displaced by natural disasters every single year. Now, usually when people hear statistics or stats like that, you start thinking about places like Haiti or other kind of exotic or maybe even impoverished areas, but it happens right here in the United States every single year. Last year alone, 99 federally declared disasters were on file with FEMA, from Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to the Central Texas wildfires that just happened recently. Now, how does the most powerful country in the world handle these displaced people? They cram them onto cots, put all your personal belongings in a plastic garbage bag, stick it underneath, and put you on the floor of an entire sports arena, or a gymnasium. So obviously there's a massive housing gap, and this really upset me, because academia tells you after a major disaster, there's typically about an 18-month time frame to — we kinda recover, start the recovery process, but what most people don't realize is that on average it takes 45 to 60 days or more for the infamous FEMA trailers to even begin to show up. Before that time, people are left to their own devices. So I became obsessed with trying to figure out a way to actually fill this gap. This actually became my creative obsession. I put aside all my freelance work after hours and started just focusing particularly on this problem. So I started sketching. Two days after Katrina, I started sketching and sketching and trying to brainstorm up ideas or solutions for this, and as things started to congeal or ideas started to form, I started sketching digitally on the computer, but it was an obsession, so I couldn't just stop there. I started experimenting, making models, talking to experts in the field, taking their feedback, and refining, and I kept on refining and refining for nights and weekends for over five years. Now, my obsession ended up driving me to create full-size prototypes in my own backyard — (Laughter) — and actually spending my own personal savings on everything from tooling to patents and a variety of other costs, but in the end I ended up with this modular housing system that can react to any situation or disaster. It can be put up in any environment, from an asphalt parking lot to pastures or fields, because it doesn't require any special setup or specialty tools. Now, at the foundation and kind of the core of this whole system is the Exo Housing Unit, which is just the individual shelter module. And though it's light, light enough that you can actually lift it by hand and move it around, and it actually sleeps four people. And you can arrange these things as kind of more for encampments and more of a city grid type layout, or you can circle the wagons, essentially, and form these circular pods out of them, which give you this semi-private communal area for people to actually spill out into so they're not actually trapped inside these units. Now this fundamentally changes the way we respond to disasters, because gone are the horrid conditions inside a sports arena or a gymnasium, where people are crammed on these cots inside. Now we have instant neighborhoods outside. So the Exo is designed to be simply, basically like a coffee cup. They can actually stack together so we get extremely efficient transportation and storage out of them. In fact, 15 Exos can fit on a single semi truck by itself. This means the Exo can actually be transported and set up faster than any other housing option available today. But I'm obsessive, so I couldn't just stop there, so I actually started modifying the bunks where you could actually slide out the bunks and slide in desks or shelving, so the same unit can now be used for an office or storage location. The doors can actually swap out, so you can actually put on a rigid panel with a window unit in it for climate control, or a connector module that would allow you to actually connect multiple units together, which gives you larger and kind of compartmentalized living spaces, so now this same kit of parts, this same unit can actually serve as a living room, bedroom or bathroom, or an office, a living space and secure storage. Sounds like a great idea, but how do you make it real? So the first idea I had, initially, was just to go the federal and state governments and go, "Here, take it, for free." But I was quickly told that, "Boy, our government doesn't really work like that." (Laughter) Okay. Okay. So maybe I would start a nonprofit to kind of help consult and get this idea going along with the government, but then I was told, "Son, our government looks to private sector for things like this." Okay. So maybe I would take this whole idea and go to private corporations that would have this mutually shared benefit to it, but I was quickly told by some corporations that my personal passion project was not a brand fit because they didn't want their logos stamped across the ghettos of Haiti. Now, I wasn't just obsessed. I was outraged. (Laughter.) So I decided, kind of told myself, "Oh yeah? Watch this. I'll do it myself." (Laughter) Now, this quickly, my day job sent me to work out of our Milan office for a few months, so I was like, what will I do? So I actually scheduled sleep on my calendar, and spent the 8-hour time difference on conference calls with material suppliers, manufacturers and potential customers. And we found through this whole process, we found this great little manufacturer in Virginia, and if his body language is any indication, that's the owner — (Laughter) — of what it's like for a manufacturer to work directly with a designer, you've got to see what happens here. (Laughter) But G.S. Industries was fantastic. They actually built three prototypes for us by hand. So now we have prototypes that can show that four people can actually sleep securely and much more comfortably than a tent could ever provide. And they actually shipped them here to Texas for us. Now, a funny thing started happening. Other people started to believe in what we were doing, and actually offered us hangar space, donated hangar space to us. And then the Georgetown Airport Authority was bent over backwards to help us with anything we needed. So now we had a hangar space to work in, and prototypes to demo with. So in one year, we've negotiated manufacturing agreements, been awarded one patent, filed our second patent, talked to multiple people, demoed this to FEMA and its consultants to rave reviews, and then started talking to some other people who requested information, this little group called the United Nations. And on top of that, now we have a whole plethora of other individuals that have come up and started to talk to us from doing it for mining camps, mobile youth hostels, right down to the World Cup and the Olympics. So, in closing, on this whole thing here is hopefully very soon we will not have to respond to these painful phone calls that we get after disasters where we don't really have anything to sell or give you yet. Hopefully very soon we will be there, because we are destined, obsessed with making it real. Thank you. (Applause)

The sea we've hardly seen

{0: "Melissa Garren is a molecular and marine biologist with a passion for unlocking the mysteries of our ocean's ecosystems and finding new avenues for conservation."}

TEDxMonterey

In the next ten minutes, we will immerse ourselves in an amazing and beautiful marine world that's very often overlooked. I'd like to take you on a journey into the sea, looking at it from the perspective of its smallest inhabitants: the microbes. My goal is that after this short journey, you'll share my amazement at how deeply connected our lives are to these microscopic creatures and also perhaps my concern that these relationships are often neglected when it comes to making decisions and policies about our oceans. When you look out on a clear blue ocean, you're actually gazing at a microbial soup full of vibrant life. What you see here are marine bacteria buzzing about and exploring other members of the marine food web. To emphasize how small this world really is, I've added a white line to most of my slides that shows you the thickness of a single strand of human hair — very tiny. An average teaspoon of clean seawater has five million bacteria and 50 million viruses in it. If I were to scoop up two gallons of seawater, there would be more bacteria in those two gallons than there are people on this planet. Take just a moment and think about how many gallons might make up an ocean. Or maybe I've already made your stomach turn, as you think of all of the seawater we've each accidentally swallowed over the years. But luckily, we rarely get sick from that seawater, because most marine microbes are working for us, not against us. One of my favorite examples is that they provide half of the oxygen we breathe. In middle school, we all learn to thank the trees. And admittedly, they may be more huggable than the microbes. But it turns out that land plants only create a quarter of the oxygen we breathe. Another quarter comes from macroalgae like kelp and a full 50% from the microbes. Take a deep breath in. Thank the trees. Take another deep breath in. Thank the macroalgae. Your next two breaths — tip your hats to the microbes. This picture is of a bacterium that happens to be the single most abundant photosynthesizer on our planet. It's called, "Prochlorococcus," and this is oceans' oxygen-producing powerhouse and, I might argue, one of the most amazing discoveries of recent marine microbiology. We didn't know it existed until 1988. All of human history has depended on this little microbe for the oxygen they breathe every day, no matter where or when they lived. And we've only been aware of that relationship for a mere 24 years. I find that astounding. How many more critical relationships are out there that we have yet to discover? I see our relationship with marine microbes as parallel in many ways to the relationship we have with microbes in our gut. We've all experienced the wrath of unhappy gut microbes at one point or another, perhaps food poisoning or tainted water. But we may be less aware of the connection we have with marine microbes and the physical discomforts we can feel when those communities change. As an extreme example: the disease cholera is caused by a bacterium that thrives in the ocean. So while most marine microbes are indeed helping us, there do remain plenty that are not. Our relationship with the ocean, much like our gut, is dependent on the right balance of microbes. The old phrase, "You are what you eat" applies to our ocean microbes as well. To give you a sense of what an overfed ocean may look like, here are two examples of me sampling seawater. On your left, it's a clean coral reef, and on your right is a nearly dead coral reef that has a very intense fish farming operation in the waters there. You'll notice I'm only smiling in one of these two pictures, and in the other one my dive buddy had to be a whole lot closer to capture that image. So if we were to take a drop of seawater from each of these samples and put it under the microscope, this is what the bacteria and viral communities would look like. So again, clean reef on your left, fish farm reef on your right. As we all have had a feeling of discomfort from imbalanced gut microbes, a fish swimming through a part of the ocean that has been overfed in this way — in this case, by intense aquaculture, but it could be a sewage spill or fertilizer runoff or any number of other sources — that fish will feel the physical discomforts of the ocean microbes being out of whack. There may be less oxygen present, there may be more pathogens there, and there may be toxins produced by some of these microbes. The bottom line is that from their tiny-scale existence, these tiny microbes have a very large-scale power to control how our ocean smells, how it tastes, how it feels and how it looks. If you take one idea away from my talk today, let it be this: we have an incredibly important relationship with these marine microbes that have very large-scale consequences, and we're just barely beginning to understand what that relationship looks like and how it may be changing. Just as a physician will have trouble curing a disease of unknown cause, we will have similar trouble restoring ocean health without understanding the microbes better. They are the invisible engineers that control the chemistry of the ocean and therefore, what creatures can live there, whether or not it's safe for us to swim there and all of the other characteristics we sense with our eyes, noses and taste buds. And the more we pay attention to these small but very numerous members of the ocean, the more we're learning they do indeed respond to human actions, such as in this fish farm example. Now, as the past few slides about coral reefs may have suggested, I do indeed spend much of my time as a researcher thinking about human-microbe interactions, specifically on coral reefs. It turns out, we're not alone in having our own protective community of microbes. Corals, along with most other organisms on this planet, have their own protective communities as well. However, rather than keeping theirs on the inside as we do in our gut, they keep theirs on the outside, to protect them from their surroundings So what you're seeing here is a three-dimensional image of a live spot on a living coral with all of its living bacteria, that I took with some exciting technology — a high-speed laser-scanning confocal microscope. All of the red circles are the symbiotic algae that live inside the coral tissue, turning sunlight and into sugars they both can use, and all of the little blue dots are the protective bacteria. So when I use image analysis software to highlight the outer layer of the coral in white, you can see that there are still some tiny little blue dots above that layer. And those bacteria are sitting in a mucus layer, which is also part of the coral's protective layer. From the bigger perspective, I spend my time thinking about these relationships, because too many reefs are going from looking like the picture on your left to the picture on your right. Believe it or not, the picture on your right remains a very popular tourist snorkeling spot on the island of Maui, even though it's lost most of its coral cover over the past decade or so. Corals are getting sick all around the globe at alarming rates, and we really don't know how or why. I see the microbes on the coral reefs, both the good ones and the bad ones, trying to link their micro-scale behaviors to this big picture of: How do we help the reef that looks like the right back towards something that looks more like the left? Or: How do we stop coral disease from spreading? Just over a year ago, no one had ever seen a view like this. This video is a prime example of making the invisible visible. We're looking at a side view of the same coral as before, where the protective layer meets the seawater; so, seawater on your right, coral on your left. It's incredibly exciting to me that we can finally see these bacteria in real life, in real time, at their micro scale, and learn how they interact with the world around them. Ecologists all over the world are used to being able to grab a pair of binoculars and go out and observe what their study creatures do each day. But microbial ecologists have desperately needed breakthroughs in technology, such as with this fast confocal, to make similar observations. I work to find ways that cutting-edge technologies like this can help make the unseen seeable, to see marine bacteria in action and learn how they behave. In doing so, we can learn how they respond to our actions and our behaviors and the environment around them in ways that will help us better manage our oceans. Another example of how I'm doing this is by using microfluidics to study specifically how pathogens behave in the ocean. The basic idea behind microfluidics is that you can use nanofabrication techniques to recreate or mimic the conditions bacteria experience at their own tiny scale in the ocean. What you see here is a microfluidic chamber on a microscope slide with a microscope lens underneath it. We use high-speed video microscopy to record bacteria behavior. The colored tubing is where bacteria and seawater flow in and out of the device. And it's using a device like this that I recently discovered that a known coral pathogen actually has the ability to sniff around the seawater and hunt for corals. Here's the video of in action. You'll see all of the pathogens which are the tiny green dots on the left start detecting the coral mucus I put on the right side of the channel, and they swim quickly over in that direction and stay there. Up until now, it was thought that a pathogen would need some good luck to find its host in the ocean. But simply by watching and observing, we can learn that these bacteria are very well adapted to seeking out their victims. These micro-channels are bringing us closer than ever before to understanding how bacteria navigate that big blue ocean. It turns out that this pathogen can even detect the coral mucus when I dilute it 20,000 fold. So these bacteria are very well adapted to hunting down these corals. I'm currently testing different environmental conditions to see what scenarios make this pathogen more or less capable of hunting corals. By learning more about what triggers the hunt, we should be able to find ways to help slow down or prevent this disease. There's also some evidence that the healthy microbes on the coral can fight off the pathogen if the conditions are right. So, one final image of a coral and its healthy bacteria. I hope you've enjoyed this short journey into our microbial oceans and that the next time you look out at the sea, you'll take in a deep breath of fresh ocean air and wonder: What else are all of the unseen microbes doing to keep us and our oceans healthy? Thank you.

What's left to explore?

{0: "Armed with blood samples, high-tech tools and a small army of fieldworkers, Nathan Wolfe hopes to re-invent pandemic control -- and reveal hidden secrets of the planet's dominant lifeform: the virus."}

TED2012

Recently I visited Beloit, Wisconsin. And I was there to honor a great 20th century explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews. During his time at the American Museum of Natural History, Andrews led a range of expeditions to uncharted regions, like here in the Gobi Desert. He was quite a figure. He was later, it's said, the basis of the Indiana Jones character. And when I was in Beloit, Wisconsin, I gave a public lecture to a group of middle school students. And I'm here to tell you, if there's anything more intimidating than talking here at TED, it'll be trying to hold the attention of a group of a thousand 12-year-olds for a 45-minute lecture. Don't try that one. At the end of the lecture they asked a number of questions, but there was one that's really stuck with me since then. There was a young girl who stood up, and she asked the question: "Where should we explore?" I think there's a sense that many of us have that the great age of exploration on Earth is over, that for the next generation they're going to have to go to outer space or the deepest oceans in order to find something significant to explore. But is that really the case? Is there really nowhere significant for us to explore left here on Earth? It sort of made me think back to one of my favorite explorers in the history of biology. This is an explorer of the unseen world, Martinus Beijerinck. So Beijerinck set out to discover the cause of tobacco mosaic disease. What he did is he took the infected juice from tobacco plants and he would filter it through smaller and smaller filters. And he reached the point where he felt that there must be something out there that was smaller than the smallest forms of life that were ever known — bacteria, at the time. He came up with a name for his mystery agent. He called it the virus — Latin for "poison." And in uncovering viruses, Beijerinck really opened this entirely new world for us. We now know that viruses make up the majority of the genetic information on our planet, more than the genetic information of all other forms of life combined. And obviously there's been tremendous practical applications associated with this world — things like the eradication of smallpox, the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer, which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus. And Beijerinck's discovery, this was not something that occurred 500 years ago. It was a little over 100 years ago that Beijerinck discovered viruses. So basically we had automobiles, but we were unaware of the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet. We now have these amazing tools to allow us to explore the unseen world — things like deep sequencing, which allow us to do much more than just skim the surface and look at individual genomes from a particular species, but to look at entire metagenomes, the communities of teeming microorganisms in, on and around us and to document all of the genetic information in these species. We can apply these techniques to things from soil to skin and everything in between. In my organization we now do this on a regular basis to identify the causes of outbreaks that are unclear exactly what causes them. And just to give you a sense of how this works, imagine that we took a nasal swab from every single one of you. And this is something we commonly do to look for respiratory viruses like influenza. The first thing we would see is a tremendous amount of genetic information. And if we started looking into that genetic information, we'd see a number of usual suspects out there — of course, a lot of human genetic information, but also bacterial and viral information, mostly from things that are completely harmless within your nose. But we'd also see something very, very surprising. As we started to look at this information, we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before — no plant, animal, fungus, virus or bacteria. Basically we have no clue what this is. And for the small group of us who actually study this kind of data, a few of us have actually begun to call this information biological dark matter. We know it's not anything that we've seen before; it's sort of the equivalent of an uncharted continent right within our own genetic information. And there's a lot of it. If you think 20 percent of genetic information in your nose is a lot of biological dark matter, if we looked at your gut, up to 40 or 50 percent of that information is biological dark matter. And even in the relatively sterile blood, around one to two percent of this information is dark matter — can't be classified, can't be typed or matched with anything we've seen before. At first we thought that perhaps this was artifact. These deep sequencing tools are relatively new. But as they become more and more accurate, we've determined that this information is a form of life, or at least some of it is a form of life. And while the hypotheses for explaining the existence of biological dark matter are really only in their infancy, there's a very, very exciting possibility that exists: that buried in this life, in this genetic information, are signatures of as of yet unidentified life. That as we explore these strings of A's, T's, C's and G's, we may uncover a completely new class of life that, like Beijerinck, will fundamentally change the way that we think about the nature of biology. That perhaps will allow us to identify the cause of a cancer that afflicts us or identify the source of an outbreak that we aren't familiar with or perhaps create a new tool in molecular biology. I'm pleased to announce that, along with colleagues at Stanford and Caltech and UCSF, we're currently starting an initiative to explore biological dark matter for the existence of new forms of life. A little over a hundred years ago, people were unaware of viruses, the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet. A hundred years from now, people may marvel that we were perhaps completely unaware of a new class of life that literally was right under our noses. It's true, we may have charted all the continents on the planet and we may have discovered all the mammals that are out there, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to explore on Earth. Beijerinck and his kind provide an important lesson for the next generation of explorers — people like that young girl from Beloit, Wisconsin. And I think if we phrase that lesson, it's something like this: Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. Go after the dark matter in whatever field you choose to explore. There are unknowns all around us and they're just waiting to be discovered. Thank you. (Applause)

Religions and babies

{0: 'In Hans Rosling’s hands, data sings. Global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development -- with some surprisingly good news -- snaps into sharp focus.'}

TEDxSummit

I'm going to talk about religion. But it's a broad and very delicate subject, so I have to limit myself. And therefore I will limit myself to only talk about the links between religion and sexuality. (Laughter) This is a very serious talk. So I will talk of what I remember as the most wonderful. It's when the young couple whisper, "Tonight we are going to make a baby." My talk will be about the impact of religions on the number of babies per woman. This is indeed important, because everyone understands that there is some sort of limit on how many people we can be on this planet. And there are some people who say that the world population is growing like this — three billion in 1960, seven billion just last year — and it will continue to grow because there are religions that stop women from having few babies, and it may continue like this. To what extent are these people right? When I was born there was less than one billion children in the world, and today, 2000, there's almost two billion. What has happened since, and what do the experts predict will happen with the number of children during this century? This is a quiz. What do you think? Do you think it will decrease to one billion? Will it remain the same and be two billion by the end of the century? Will the number of children increase each year up to 15 years, or will it continue in the same fast rate and be four billion children up there? I will tell you by the end of my speech. But now, what does religion have to do with it? When you want to classify religion, it's more difficult than you think. You go to Wikipedia and the first map you find is this. It divides the world into Abrahamic religions and Eastern religion, but that's not detailed enough. So we went on and we looked in Wikipedia, we found this map. But that subdivides Christianity, Islam and Buddhism into many subgroups, which was too detailed. Therefore at Gapminder we made our own map, and it looks like this. Each country's a bubble. The size is the population — big China, big India here. And the color now is the majority religion. It's the religion where more than 50 percent of the people say that they belong. It's Eastern religion in India and China and neighboring Asian countries. Islam is the majority religion all the way from the Atlantic Ocean across the Middle East, Southern Europe and through Asia all the way to Indonesia. That's where we find Islamic majority. And Christian majority religions, we see in these countries. They are blue. And that is most countries in America and Europe, many countries in Africa and a few in Asia. The white here are countries which cannot be classified, because one religion does not reach 50 percent or there is doubt about the data or there's some other reason. So we were careful with that. So bear with our simplicity now when I take you over to this shot. This is in 1960. And now I show the number of babies per woman here: two, four or six — many babies, few babies. And here the income per person in comparable dollars. The reason for that is that many people say you have to get rich first before you get few babies. So low income here, high income there. And indeed in 1960, you had to be a rich Christian to have few babies. The exception was Japan. Japan here was regarded as an exception. Otherwise it was only Christian countries. But there was also many Christian countries that had six to seven babies per woman. But they were in Latin America or they were in Africa. And countries with Islam as the majority religion, all of them almost had six to seven children per woman, irregardless of the income level. And all the Eastern religions except Japan had the same level. Now let's see what has happened in the world. I start the world, and here we go. Now 1962 — can you see they're getting a little richer, but the number of babies per woman is falling? Look at China. They're falling fairly fast. And all of the Muslim majority countries across the income are coming down, as do the Christian majority countries in the middle income range. And when we enter into this century, you'll find more than half of mankind down here. And by 2010, we are actually 80 percent of humans who live in countries with about two children per woman. (Applause) It's a quite amazing development which has happened. (Applause) And these are countries from United States here, with $40,000 per capita, France, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, Algeria, Indonesia, India and all the way to Bangladesh and Vietnam, which has less than five percent of the income per person of the United States and the same amount of babies per woman. I can tell you that the data on the number of children per woman is surprisingly good in all countries. We get that from the census data. It's not one of these statistics which is very doubtful. So what we can conclude is you don't have to get rich to have few children. It has happened across the world. And then when we look at religions, we can see that the Eastern religions, indeed there's not one single country with a majority of that religion that has more than three children. Whereas with Islam as a majority religion and Christianity, you see countries all the way. But there's no major difference. There's no major difference between these religions. There is a difference with income. The countries which have many babies per woman here, they have quite low income. Most of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. But there are also countries here like Guatemala, like Papua New Guinea, like Yemen and Afghanistan. Many think that Afghanistan here and Congo, which have suffered severe conflicts, that they don't have fast population growth. It's the other way around. In the world today, it's the countries that have the highest mortality rates that have the fastest population growth. Because the death of a child is compensated by one more child. These countries have six children per woman. They have a sad death rate of one to two children per woman. But 30 years from now, Afghanistan will go from 30 million to 60 million. Congo will go from 60 to 120. That's where we have the fast population growth. And many think that these countries are stagnant, but they are not. Let me compare Senegal, a Muslim dominated country, with a Christian dominated country, Ghana. I take them backwards here to their independence, when they were up here in the beginning of the 1960s. Just look what they have done. It's an amazing improvement, from seven children per woman, they've gone all the way down to between four and five. It's a tremendous improvement. So what does it take? Well we know quite well what is needed in these countries. You need to have children to survive. You need to get out of the deepest poverty so children are not of importance for work in the family. You need to have access to some family planning. And you need the fourth factor, which perhaps is the most important factor. But let me illustrate that fourth factor by looking at Qatar. Here we have Qatar today, and there we have Bangladesh today. If I take these countries back to the years of their independence, which is almost the same year — '71, '72 — it's a quite amazing development which had happened. Look at Bangladesh and Qatar. With so different incomes, it's almost the same drop in number of babies per woman. And what is the reason in Qatar? Well I do as I always do. I went to the statistical authority of Qatar, to their webpage — It's a very good webpage. I recommend it — and I looked up — oh yeah, you can have lots of fun here — and provided free of charge, I found Qatar's social trends. Very interesting. Lots to read. I found fertility at birth, and I looked at total fertility rate per woman. These are the scholars and experts in the government agency in Qatar, and they say the most important factors are: "Increased age at first marriage, increased educational level of Qatari woman and more women integrated in the labor force." I couldn't agree more. Science couldn't agree more. This is a country that indeed has gone through a very, very interesting modernization. So what it is, is these four: Children should survive, children shouldn't be needed for work, women should get education and join the labor force and family planning should be accessible. Now look again at this. The average number of children in the world is like in Colombia — it's 2.4 today. There are countries up here which are very poor. And that's where family planning, better child survival is needed. I strongly recommend Melinda Gates' last TEDTalk. And here, down, there are many countries which are less than two children per woman. So when I go back now to give you the answer of the quiz, it's two. We have reached peak child. The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child. And the world population will stop growing. The United Nations Population Division has said it will stop growing at 10 billion. But why do they grow if the number of children doesn't grow? Well I will show you here. I will use these card boxes in which your notebooks came. They are quite useful for educational purposes. Each card box is one billion people. And there are two billion children in the world. There are two billion young people between 15 and 30. These are rounded numbers. Then there is one billion between 30 and 45, almost one between 45 and 60. And then it's my box. This is me: 60-plus. We are here on top. So what will happen now is what we call "the big fill-up." You can see that it's like three billion missing here. They are not missing because they've died; they were never born. Because before 1980, there were much fewer people born than there were during the last 30 years. So what will happen now is quite straightforward. The old, sadly, we will die. The rest of you, you will grow older and you will get two billion children. Then the old will die. The rest will grow older and get two billion children. And then again the old will die and you will get two billion children. (Applause) This is the great fill-up. It's inevitable. And can you see that this increase took place without life getting longer and without adding children? Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman. All the religions in the world are fully capable to maintain their values and adapt to this new world. And we will be just 10 billion in this world, if the poorest people get out of poverty, their children survive, they get access to family planning. That is needed. But it's inevitable that we will be two to three billion more. So when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future, for human beings on this planet, you have to plan for 10 billion. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The journey across the high wire

{0: 'High-wire artist Philippe Petit surprised the world when he walked illegally between the Twin Towers in 1974.'}

TED2012

This sound, this smell, this sight all remind me of the campfires of my childhood, when anyone could become a storyteller in front of the dancing flames. There was this wondrous ending when people and fire fell asleep almost in unison. It was dreaming time. Now my story has a lot to do with dreaming, although I'm known to make my dreams come true. Last year, I created a one-man show. For an hour and a half I shared with the audience a lifetime of creativity, how I pursue perfection, how I cheat the impossible. And then TED challenged me: "Philippe, can you shrink this lifetime to 18 minutes?" (Laughter) Eighteen minutes, clearly impossible. But here I am. One solution was to rehearse a machine gun delivery in which every syllable, every second will have its importance and hope to God the audience will be able to follow me. No, no, no. No, the best way for me to start is to pay my respects to the gods of creativity. So please join me for a minute of silence. Okay, I cheated, it was a mere 20 seconds. But hey, we're on TED time. When I was six years old, I fell in love with magic. For Christmas I got a magic box and a very old book on card manipulation. Somehow I was more interested in pure manipulation than in all the silly little tricks in the box. So I looked in the book for the most difficult move, and it was this. Now I'm not supposed to share that with you, but I have to show you the card is hidden in the back of the hand. Now that manipulation was broken down into seven moves described over seven pages. One, two, three, four, five, six and seven. And let me show you something else. The cards were bigger than my hands. Two months later, six years old, I'm able to do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And I go to see a famous magician and proudly ask him, "Well what do you think?" Six years old. The magician looked at me and said, "This is a disaster. You cannot do that in two seconds and have a minuscule part of the card showing. For the move to be professional, it has to be less than one second and it has to be perfect." Two years later, one — zoop. And I'm not cheating. It's in the back. It's perfect. Passion is the motto of all my actions. As I'm studying magic, juggling is mentioned repeatedly as a great way to acquire dexterity and coordination. Now I had long admired how fast and fluidly jugglers make objects fly. So that's it. I'm 14; I'm becoming a juggler. I befriend a young juggler in a juggling troupe, and he agrees to sell me three clubs. But in America you have to explain. What are clubs? Nothing to do with golf. They are those beautiful oblong objects, but quite difficult to make. They have to be precisely lathed. Oh, when I was buying the clubs, somehow the young juggler was hiding from the others. Well I didn't think much of it at the time. Anyway, here I was progressing with my new clubs. But I could not understand. I was pretty fast, but I was not fluid at all. The clubs were escaping me at each throw. And I was trying constantly to bring them back to me. Until one day I practiced in front of Francis Brunn, the world's greatest juggler. And he was frowning. And he finally asked, "Can I see those?" So I proudly showed him my clubs. He said, "Philippe, you have been had. These are rejects. They are completely out of alignment. They are impossible to juggle." Tenacity is how I kept at it against all odds. So I went to the circus to see more magicians, more jugglers, and I saw — oh no, no, no, I didn't see. It was more interesting; I heard. I heard about those amazing men and women who walk on thin air — the high-wire walkers. Now I have been playing with ropes and climbing all my childhood, so that's it. I'm 16; I'm becoming a wire walker. I found two trees — but not any kind of trees, trees with character — and then a very long rope. And I put the rope around and around and around and around and around till I had no more rope. Now I have all of those ropes parallel like this. I get a pair of pliers and some coat hangers, and I gather them together in some kind of ropey path. So I just created the widest tightrope in the world. What did I need? I needed the widest shoes in the world. So I found some enormous, ridiculous, giant ski boots and then wobbly, wobbly I get on the ropes. Well within a few days I'm able to do one crossing. So I cut one rope off. And the next day one rope off. And a few days later, I was practicing on a single tightrope. Now you can imagine at that time I had to switch the ridiculous boots for some slippers. So that is how — in case there are people here in the audience who would like to try — this is how not to learn wire walking. (Laughter) Intuition is a tool essential in my life. In the meantime, I am being thrown out of five different schools because instead of listening to the teachers, I am my own teacher, progressing in my new art and becoming a street juggler. On the high wire, within months, I'm able to master all the tricks they do in the circus, except I am not satisfied. I was starting to invent my own moves and bring them to perfection. But nobody wanted to hire me. So I started putting a wire up in secret and performing without permission. Notre Dame, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the World Trade Center. And I developed a certitude, a faith that convinced me that I will get safely to the other side. If not, I will never do that first step. Well nonetheless, on the top of the World Trade Center my first step was terrifying. All of a sudden the density of the air is no longer the same. Manhattan no longer spreads its infinity. The murmur of the city dissolves into a squall whose chilling power I no longer feel. I lift the balancing pole. I approach the edge. I step over the beam. I put my left foot on the cable, the weight of my body raised on my right leg anchored to the flank of the building. Shall I ever so slightly shift my weight to the left? My right leg will be unburdened, my right foot will freely meet the wire. On one side, a mass of a mountain, a life I know. On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown we think it's empty. At my feet, the path to the north tower — 60 yards of wire rope. It's a straight line, which sags, which sways, which vibrates, which rolls on itself, which is ice, which is three tons tight, ready to explode, ready to swallow me. An inner howl assails me, the wild longing to flee. But it is too late. The wire is ready. Decisively my other foot sets itself onto the cable. Faith is what replaces doubt in my dictionary. So after the walk people ask me, "How can you top that?" Well I didn't have that problem. I was not interested in collecting the gigantic, in breaking records. In fact, I put my World Trade Center crossing at the same artistic level as some of my smaller walks — or some completely different type of performance. Let's see, such as my street juggling, for example. So each time I draw my circle of chalk on the pavement and enter as the improvising comic silent character I created 45 years ago, I am as happy as when I am in the clouds. But this here, this is not the street. So I cannot street juggle here, you understand. So you don't want me to street juggle here, right? You know that, right? You don't want me to juggle, right? (Applause) (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Each time I street juggle I use improvisation. Now improvisation is empowering because it welcomes the unknown. And since what's impossible is always unknown, it allows me to believe I can cheat the impossible. Now I have done the impossible not once, but many times. So what should I share? Oh, I know. Israel. Some years ago I was invited to open the Israel Festival by a high-wire walk. And I chose to put my wire between the Arab quarters and the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem over the Ben Hinnom Valley. And I thought it would be incredible if in the middle of the wire I stopped and, like a magician, I produce a dove and send her in the sky as a living symbol of peace. Well now I must say, it was a little bit hard to find a dove in Israel, but I got one. And in my hotel room, each time I practiced making it appear and throwing her in the air, she would graze the wall and end up on the bed. So I said, now it's okay. The room is too small. I mean, a bird needs space to fly. It will go perfectly on the day of the walk. Now comes the day of the walk. Eighty thousand people spread over the entire valley. The mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, comes to wish me the best. But he seemed nervous. There was tension in my wire, but I also could feel tension on the ground. Because all those people were made up of people who, for the most part, considered each other enemies. So I start the walk. Everything is fine. I stop in the middle. I make the dove appear. People applaud in delight. And then in the most magnificent gesture, I send the bird of peace into the azure. But the bird, instead of flying away, goes flop, flop, flop and lands on my head. (Laughter) And people scream. So I grab the dove, and for the second time I send her in the air. But the dove, who obviously didn't go to flying school, goes flop, flop, flop and ends up at the end of my balancing pole. (Laughter) You laugh, you laugh. But hey. I sit down immediately. It's a reflex of wire walkers. Now in the meantime, the audience, they go crazy. They must think this guy with this dove, he must have spent years working with him. What a genius, what a professional. (Laughter) So I take a bow. I salute with my hand. And at the end I bang my hand against the pole to dislodge the bird. Now the dove, who, now you know, obviously cannot fly, does for the third time a little flop, flop, flop and ends up on the wire behind me. And the entire valley goes crazy. Now but hold on, I'm not finished. So now I'm like 50 yards from my arrival and I'm exhausted, so my steps are slow. And something happened. Somebody somewhere, a group of people, starts clapping in rhythm with my steps. And within seconds the entire valley is applauding in unison with each of my steps. But not an applause of delight like before, an applause encouragement. For a moment, the entire crowd had forgotten their differences. They had become one, pushing me to triumph. I want you just for a second to experience this amazing human symphony. So let's say I am here and the chair is my arrival. So I walk, you clap, everybody in unison. (Clapping) (Applause) So after the walk, Teddy and I become friends. And he tells me, he has on his desk a picture of me in the middle of the wire with a dove on my head. He didn't know the true story. And whenever he's daunted by an impossible situation to solve in this hard-to-manage city, instead of giving up, he looks at the picture and he says, "If Philippe can do that, I can do this," and he goes back to work. Inspiration. By inspiring ourselves we inspire others. I will never forget this music, and I hope now neither will you. Please take this music with you home, and start gluing feathers to your arms and take off and fly, and look at the world from a different perspective. And when you see mountains, remember mountains can be moved. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

HIV -- how to fight an epidemic of bad laws

{0: 'Shereen El Feki works and writes on sexuality and social change in the Arab world.'}

TEDxSummit

Let's begin with a story. Once upon a time — well actually less than two years ago — in a kingdom not so very far away, there was a man who traveled many miles to come to work at the jewel in the kingdom's crown — an internationally famous company. Let's call it Island Networks. Now this kingdom had many resources and mighty ambitions, but the one thing it lacked was people. And so it invited workers from around the world to come and help it build the nation. But in order to enter and to stay these migrants had to pass a few tests. And so it was, our man presented himself to authorities in the kingdom, looking forward to settling into his new life. But then something unexpected happened. The medical personnel who took blood samples from the man never actually told him what they were testing for. He wasn't offered counseling before or after the test, which is best medical practice. He was never informed of the results of the test. And yet, a couple of weeks later, he was picked up and taken to prison where he was subjected to a medical exam, including a full-body search in full view of the others in the cell. He was released, but then a day or two later, he was taken to the airport and he was deported. What on earth did this man do to merit this treatment? What was his terrible crime? He was infected with HIV. Now the kingdom is one of about 50 countries that imposes restrictions on the entry or stay of people living with HIV. The kingdom argues that its laws allow it to detain or deport foreigners who pose a risk to the economy or the security or the public health or the morals of the state. But these laws, when applied to people living with HIV, are a violation of international human rights agreements to which these countries are signatories. But you know what? Matters of principle aside, practically speaking, these laws drive HIV underground. People are less likely to come forth to be tested or treated or to disclose their condition, none of which helps these individuals or the communities these laws purport to protect. Today we can prevent the transmission of HIV. And with treatment, it is a manageable condition. We are very far from the days when the only practical response to dread disease was to have banished the afflicted — like this, "The Exile of the Leper." So you tell me why, in our age of science, we still have laws and policies which come from an age of superstition. Time for a quick show of hands. Who here has been touched by HIV — either because you yourself have the virus or you have a family member or a friend or a colleague who is living with HIV? Hands up. Wow. Wow. That's a significant number of us. You know better than anyone that HIV brings out the best and the worst in humanity. And the laws reflect these attitudes. I'm not just talking about laws on the books, but laws as they are enforced on the streets and laws as they are decided in the courts. And I'm not just talking about laws as they relate to people living with HIV, but people who are at greatest risk of infection — people such as those who inject drugs or sex workers or men who have sex with men or transgendered persons or migrants or prisoners. And in many parts of the world that includes women and children who are especially vulnerable. Now there are laws in many parts of the world which reflect the best of human nature. These laws treat people touched by HIV with compassion and acceptance. These laws respect universal human rights and they are grounded in evidence. These laws ensure that people living with HIV and those at greatest risk are protected from violence and discrimination and that they get access to prevention and to treatment. Unfortunately, these good laws are counter-balanced by a mass of really bad law — law which is grounded in moral judgement and in fear and in misinformation, laws which specifically punish people living with HIV or those at greatest risk. These laws fly in the face of science, and they are grounded in prejudice and in ignorance and in a rewriting of tradition and a selective reading of religion. But you know what? You don't have to take my word for it. We're going to hear from two people who are on the sharp end of the law. The first is Nick Rhoades. He's an American. And he was convicted under the U.S. State of Iowa's law on HIV transmission and exposure — neither of which offense he actually committed. (Video) Nick Rhoades: If something is against the law then that is telling society that is unacceptable, that's bad behavior. And I think the severity of that punishment tells you how bad you are as a person. You're a class B felon, lifetime sex offender. You are a very, very, very bad person. And you did a very, very, very bad thing. And so that's just programmed into you. And you go through the correctional system and everyone's telling you the same thing. And you're just like, I'm a very bad person. Shereen El-Feki: It's not just a question of unfair or ineffective laws. Some countries have good laws, laws which could stem the tide of HIV. The problem is that these laws are flouted. Because stigma gives unofficial license to treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk unlike other citizens. And this is exactly what happened to Helma and Dongo from Namibia. (Video) Hilma: I found out when I went to the hospital for a pregnancy check-up. The nurse announced that every pregnant woman must also be tested for HIV that day. I took the test and the result showed I was positive. That's the day I found out. The nurse said to me, "Why should you people bcome pregnant when you know you are HIV positive? Why are you pregnant when you are living positive?" I am sure now that is the reason they sterilized me. Because I am HIV positive. They didn't give the forms to me or explain what was in the form. The nurse just came with it already marked where I had to sign. And with the labor pain, I didn't have the strength to ask them to read it to me. I just signed. SE: Hilma and Nick and our man in the kingdom are among the 34 million people living with HIV according to recent estimates. They're the lucky ones because they're still alive. According to those same estimates, in 2010 1.8 million people died of AIDS related causes. These are terrible and tragic figures. But if we look a little more broadly into the statistics, we actually see some reason for hope. Looking globally, the number of new infections of HIV is declining. And looking globally as well, deaths are also starting to fall. There are many reasons for these positive developments, but one of the most remarkable is in the increase in the number of people around the world on anti-retroviral therapy, the medicines they need to keep their HIV in check. Now there are still many problems. Only about half of the people who need treatment are currently receiving it. In some parts of the world — like here in the Middle East and North Africa — new infections are rising and so are deaths. And the money, the money we need for the global response to HIV, that is shrinking. But for the first time in three decades into this epidemic we have a real chance to come to grips with HIV. But in order to do that we need to tackle an epidemic of really bad law. It's for this reason that the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, of which I'm a member, was established by the agencies of the United Nations — to look at the ways that legal environments are affecting people living with HIV and those at greatest risk, and to recommend what should be done to make the law an ally, not an enemy, of the global response to HIV. Let me give you just one example of the way a legal environment can make a positive difference. People who inject drugs are one of those groups I mentioned. They're at high risk of HIV through contaminated injection equipment and other risk-related behaviors. In fact, one in every 10 new infections of HIV is among people who inject drugs. Now drug use or possession is illegal in almost every country. But some countries take a harder line on this than others. In Thailand people who use drugs, or are merely suspected of using drugs, are placed in detention centers, like the one you see here, where they are supposed to clean up. There is absolutely no evidence to show that throwing people into detention cures their drug dependence. There is, however, ample evidence to show that incarcerating people increases their risk of HIV and other infections. We know how to reduce HIV transmission and other risks in people who inject drugs. It's called harm reduction, and it involves, among other things, providing clean needles and syringes, offering opioid substitution therapy and other evidence-based treatments to reduce drug dependence. It involves providing information and education and condoms to reduce HIV transmission, and also providing HIV testing and counseling and treatment should people become infected. Where the legal environment allows for harm reduction the results are striking. Australia and Switzerland were two countries which introduced harm reduction very early on in their HIV epidemics, and they have a very low rate of HIV among injecting drug users. The U.S. and Malaysia came to harm reduction a little later, and they have higher rates of HIV in these populations. Thailand and Russia, however, have resisted harm reduction and have stringent laws which punish drug use. And hey, surprise, very high rates of HIV among people who are injecting drugs. At the Global Commission we have studied the evidence, and we've heard the experiences of over 700 people from 140 countries. And the trend? Well the trend is clear. Where you criminalize people living with HIV or those at greatest risk, you fuel the epidemic. Now coming up with a vaccine for HIV or a cure for AIDS — now that's rocket science. But changing the law isn't. And in fact, a number of countries are starting to make progress on a number of points. To begin, countries need to review their legislation as it touches HIV and vulnerable groups. On the back of those reviews, governments should repeal laws that punish or discriminate against people living with HIV or those at greatest risk. Repealing a law isn't easy, and it's particularly difficult when it relates to touchy subjects like drugs and sex. But there's plenty you can do while that process is underway. One of the key points is to reform the police so that they have better practices on the ground. So for example, outreach workers who are distributing condoms to vulnerable populations are not themselves subject to police harassment or abuse or arbitrary arrest. We can also train judges so that they find flexibilities in the law and so that they rule on the side of tolerance rather than prejudice. We can retool prisons so that HIV prevention and harm reduction is available to prisoners. The key to all this is reinforcing civil society. Because civil society is key to raising awareness among vulnerable groups of their legal rights. But awareness needs action. And so we need to ensure that these people who are living with HIV or at greatest risk of HIV have access to legal services and they have equal access to the courts. And also important is talking to communities so that we change interpretations of religious or customary law, which is too often used to justify punishment and fuel stigma. For many of us here HIV is not an abstract threat. It hits very close to home. The law, on the other hand, can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists, but it isn't. Because for those of us who live in democracies, or in aspiring democracies, the law begins with us. Laws that treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk with respect start with the way that we treat them ourselves: as equals. If we are going to stop the spread of HIV in our lifetime, then that is the change we need to spread. Thank you. (Applause)

Beats that defy boxes

{0: 'Reggie Watts creates unpredictably brilliant performances on the spot using his voice, looping pedals and his giant brain.'}

TED2012

(Non English) (French) Mais Des fois on peut voir parce Que Les gens ici faire Des choses on peut manger. (French) Mais quand tu es fâché avec quelqu'un c'est pas passé the first time. (British English) And that's one of the things that I enjoy most about this convention. It's not so much, as so little has to do with what everything is. (Laughter) But it is within our self-interest to understand the topography of our lives unto ourselves. (Laughter) The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living. (Laughter) Common knowledge, but important nonetheless. (Laughter) As we face fear in these times, and fear is all around us, we also have anti-fear. It's hard to imagine or measure. The background radiation is simply too static to be able to be seen under the normal spectral analysis. (American accent) But we feel as though there are times when a lot of us — you know what I'm saying? But — you know what I'm saying? Because, as a hip hop thing, you know what I'm saying, TED be rocking — you know what I'm saying. Like so I wrote a song, and I hope you guys dig it. It's a song about people and sasquatches — (Laughter) And other French science stuff. That's French science. Okay, here we go. (Singing) I've been trying inside I know that I'm in trouble (Applause) that I'm in trouble by myself But every time it gets me (Vocalization) (Beatbox) (Singing) And I've been trying to be the one that you believe in And you're the one that I want to be so saucy And you're the one I want to [unclear], baby And you can do anything as long as you don't get hurt along the way back (Beatbox) If I survive, I'm going to tell you what is wrong Because if you were [unclear] And I think that you're looking like a [unclear] I give you what I want to be (Music) (Music ends abruptly) (British accent) And it's like, you could use as many of those things that you want. (Applause) And the computer models, no matter how many that you have and how many people that you use, are never going to be able to arrive at the same conclusions. Four years ago I worked with a few people at the Brookings Institute, and I arrived at a conclusion. (Laughter) Tomorrow is another day. (Laughter) Not just any day, but it is a day. It will get here, there's no question. And the important thing to remember is that this simulation is a good one. It's believable, it's tactile. You can reach out — things are solid. You can move objects from one area to another. You can feel your body. You can say, "I'd like to go over to this location," and you can move this mass of molecules through the air over to another location, at will. (Laughter) That's something you live inside of every day. Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from. (Laughter) So, as I say before the last piece, feel not as though it is a sphere we live on, rather an infinite plane which has the illusion of leading yourself back to the point of origin. (Laughter) Once we understand that all the spheres in the sky are just large infinite planes, it will be plain to see. (Laughter) (Audience) (Laughter) This is my final piece. And just remember, everything you are — it's more important to realize the negative space, as music is only the division of space; it is the space we are listening to divided as such, which gives us the information in comparison to something other that gives us the idea of what the idea that wants to be transmitted wants to be. So please, without further ado. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) This is a fun one. It goes like this. (Beatbox) (Gibberish) (Music ends) Okay, for the last piece I'd like to do, this one goes very similar to this. I hope you guys recognize it. Here we go. Okay, that still works. Okay, good. All right, here we go. (Laughter) (Beatbox) Here we go. (Beatbox) Yeah, yo, yo, yo (Gibberish) (Music fades out) Thank you. Enjoy the rest. (Applause)

A reality check on renewables

{0: 'As an information theorist and computer scientist,\xa0David MacKay uses hard math to assess our renewable energy options.'}

TEDxWarwick

When the Industrial Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting underneath Britain in the form of coal was as big as the amount of carbon sitting under Saudi Arabia in the form of oil. This carbon powered the Industrial Revolution, it put the "Great" in Great Britain, and led to Britain's temporary world domination. And then, in 1918, coal production in Britain peaked, and has declined ever since. In due course, Britain started using oil and gas from the North Sea, and in the year 2000, oil and gas production from the North Sea also peaked, and they're now on the decline. These observations about the finiteness of easily accessible, local, secure fossil fuels, is a motivation for saying, "Well, what's next? What is life after fossil fuels going to be like? Shouldn't we be thinking hard about how to get off fossil fuels?" Another motivation, of course, is climate change. And when people talk about life after fossil fuels and climate change action, I think there's a lot of fluff, a lot of greenwash, a lot of misleading advertising, and I feel a duty as a physicist to try to guide people around the claptrap and help people understand the actions that really make a difference, and to focus on ideas that do add up. Let me illustrate this with what physicists call a back-of-envelope calculation. We love back-of-envelope calculations. You ask a question, write down some numbers, and get an answer. It may not be very accurate, but it may make you say, "Hmm." So here's a question: Imagine if we said, "Oh yes, we can get off fossil fuels. We'll use biofuels. Problem solved. Transport ... We don't need oil anymore." Well, what if we grew the biofuels for a road on the grass verge at the edge of the road? How wide would the verge have to be for that to work out? OK, so let's put in some numbers. Let's have our cars go at 60 miles per hour. Let's say they do 30 miles per gallon. That's the European average for new cars. Let's say the productivity of biofuel plantations is 1,200 liters of biofuel per hectare per year. That's true of European biofuels. And let's imagine the cars are spaced 80 meters apart from each other, and they're perpetually going along this road. The length of the road doesn't matter, because the longer the road, the more biofuel plantation. What do we do with these numbers? Take the first number, divide by the other three, and get eight kilometers. And that's the answer. That's how wide the plantation would have to be, given these assumptions. And maybe that makes you say, "Hmm. Maybe this isn't going to be quite so easy." And it might make you think, perhaps there's an issue to do with areas. And in this talk, I'd like to talk about land areas, and ask: Is there an issue about areas? The answer is going to be yes, but it depends which country you are in. So let's start in the United Kingdom, since that's where we are today. The energy consumption of the United Kingdom, the total energy consumption — not just transport, but everything — I like to quantify it in lightbulbs. It's as if we've all got 125 lightbulbs on all the time, 125 kilowatt-hours per day per person is the energy consumption of the UK. So there's 40 lightbulbs' worth for transport, 40 lightbulbs' worth for heating, and 40 lightbulbs' worth for making electricity, and other things are relatively small, compared to those three big fish. It's actually a bigger footprint if we take into account the embodied energy in the stuff we import into our country as well. And 90 percent of this energy, today, still comes from fossil fuels, and 10 percent, only, from other, greener — possibly greener — sources, like nuclear power and renewables. So. That's the UK. The population density of the UK is 250 people per square kilometer. I'm now going to show you other countries by these same two measures. On the vertical axis, I'm going to show you how many lightbulbs — what our energy consumption per person is. We're at 125 lightbulbs per person, and that little blue dot there is showing you the land area of the United Kingdom. The population density is on the horizontal axis, and we're 250 people per square kilometer. Let's add European countries in blue, and you can see there's quite a variety. I should emphasize, both of these axes are logarithmic; as you go from one gray bar to the next gray bar, you're going up a factor of 10. Next, let's add Asia in red, the Middle East and North Africa in green, sub-Saharan Africa in blue, black is South America, purple is Central America, and then in pukey-yellow, we have North America, Australia and New Zealand. You can see the great diversity of population densities and of per capita consumptions. Countries are different from each other. Top left, we have Canada and Australia, with enormous land areas, very high per capita consumption — 200 or 300 lightbulbs per person — and very low population densities. Top right: Bahrain has the same energy consumption per person, roughly, as Canada — over 300 lightbulbs per person, but their population density is a factor of 300 times greater, 1,000 people per square kilometer. Bottom right: Bangladesh has the same population density as Bahrain, but consumes 100 times less per person. Bottom left: well, there's no one. But there used to be a whole load of people. Here's another message from this diagram. I've added on little blue tails behind Sudan, Libya, China, India, Bangladesh. That's 15 years of progress. Where were they 15 years ago, and where are they now? And the message is, most countries are going to the right, and they're going up. Up and to the right: bigger population density and higher per capita consumption. So, we may be off in the top right-hand corner, slightly unusual, the United Kingdom accompanied by Germany, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and a bunch of other slightly odd countries, but many other countries are coming up and to the right to join us. So we're a picture, if you like, of what the future energy consumption might be looking like in other countries, too. I've also added in this diagram now some pink lines that go down and to the right. Those are lines of equal power consumption per unit area, which I measure in watts per square meter. So, for example, the middle line there, 0.1 watts per square meter, is the energy consumption per unit area of Saudi Arabia, Norway, Mexico in purple, and Bangladesh 15 years ago. Half of the world's population lives in countries that are already above that line. The United Kingdom is consuming 1.25 watts per square meter. So is Germany, and Japan is consuming a bit more. So, let's now say why this is relevant. Why is it relevant? Well, we can measure renewables in the same units and other forms of power production in the same units. Renewables is one of the leading ideas for how we could get off our 90 percent fossil-fuel habit. So here come some renewables. Energy crops deliver half a watt per square meter in European climates. What does that mean? You might have anticipated that result, given what I told you about the biofuel plantation a moment ago. Well, we consume 1.25 watts per square meter. What this means is, even if you covered the whole of the United Kingdom with energy crops, you couldn't match today's energy consumption. Wind power produces a bit more — 2.5 watts per square meter. But that's only twice as big as 1.25 watts per square meter. So that means if you wanted, literally, to produce total energy consumption in all forms, on average, from wind farms, you need wind farms half the area of the UK. I've got data to back up all these assertions, by the way. Next, let's look at solar power. Solar panels, when you put them on a roof, deliver about 20 watts per square meter in England. If you really want to get a lot from solar panels, you need to adopt the traditional Bavarian farming method, where you leap off the roof, and coat the countryside with solar panels, too. Solar parks, because of the gaps between the panels, deliver less. They deliver about 5 watts per square meter of land area. And here's a solar park in Vermont, with real data, delivering 4.2 watts per square meter. Remember where we are, 1.25 watts per square meter, wind farms 2.5, solar parks about five. So whichever of those renewables you pick, the message is, whatever mix of those renewables you're using, if you want to power the UK on them, you're going to need to cover something like 20 percent or 25 percent of the country with those renewables. I'm not saying that's a bad idea; we just need to understand the numbers. I'm absolutely not anti-renewables. I love renewables. But I'm also pro-arithmetic. (Laughter) Concentrating solar power in deserts delivers larger powers per unit area, because you don't have the problem of clouds. So, this facility delivers 14 watts per square meter; this one 10 watts per square meter; and this one in Spain, 5 watts per square meter. Being generous to concentrating solar power, I think it's perfectly credible it could deliver 20 watts per square meter. So that's nice. Of course, Britain doesn't have any deserts. Yet. (Laughter) So here's a summary so far: All renewables, much as I love them, are diffuse. They all have a small power per unit area, and we have to live with that fact. And that means, if you do want renewables to make a substantial difference for a country like the United Kingdom on the scale of today's consumption, you need to be imagining renewable facilities that are country-sized. Not the entire country, but a fraction of the country, a substantial fraction. There are other options for generating power as well, which don't involve fossil fuels. So there's nuclear power, and on this ordinance survey map, you can see there's a Sizewell B inside a blue square kilometer. That's one gigawatt in a square kilometer, which works out to 1,000 watts per square meter. So by this particular metric, nuclear power isn't as intrusive as renewables. Of course, other metrics matter, too, and nuclear power has all sorts of popularity problems. But the same goes for renewables as well. Here's a photograph of a consultation exercise in full swing in the little town of Penicuik just outside Edinburgh, and you can see the children of Penicuik celebrating the burning of the effigy of the windmill. So — (Laughter) People are anti-everything, and we've got to keep all the options on the table. What can a country like the UK do on the supply side? Well, the options are, I'd say, these three: power renewables, and recognizing that they need to be close to country-sized; other people's renewables, so we could go back and talk very politely to the people in the top left-hand side of the diagram and say, "Uh, we don't want renewables in our backyard, but, um, please could we put them in yours instead?" And that's a serious option. It's a way for the world to handle this issue. So countries like Australia, Russia, Libya, Kazakhstan, could be our best friends for renewable production. And a third option is nuclear power. So that's some supply-side options. In addition to the supply levers that we can push — and remember, we need large amounts, because at the moment, we get 90 percent of our energy from fossil fuels — in addition to those levers, we could talk about other ways of solving this issue. Namely, we could reduce demand, and that means reducing population — I'm not sure how to do that — or reducing per capita consumption. So let's talk about three more big levers that could really help on the consumption side. First, transport. Here are the physics principles that tell you how to reduce the energy consumption of transport. People often say, "Technology can answer everything. We can make vehicles that are 100 times more efficient." And that's almost true. Let me show you. The energy consumption of this typical tank here is 80 kilowatt hours per hundred person kilometers. That's the average European car. Eighty kilowatt hours. Can we make something 100 times better by applying the physics principles I just listed? Yes. Here it is. It's the bicycle. It's 80 times better in energy consumption, and it's powered by biofuel, by Weetabix. (Laughter) And there are other options in between, because maybe the lady in the tank would say, "No, that's a lifestyle change. Don't change my lifestyle, please." We could persuade her to take a train, still a lot more efficient than a car, but that might be a lifestyle change. Or there's the EcoCAR, top-left. It comfortably accommodates one teenager and it's shorter than a traffic cone, and it's almost as efficient as a bicycle, as long as you drive it at 15 miles per hour. In between, perhaps some more realistic options on the transport lever are electric vehicles, so electric bikes and electric cars in the middle, perhaps four times as energy efficient as the standard petrol-powered tank. Next, there's the heating lever. Heating is a third of our energy consumption in Britain, and quite a lot of that is going into homes and other buildings, doing space heating and water heating. So here's a typical crappy British house. It's my house, with a Ferrari out front. (Laughter) What can we do to it? Well, the laws of physics are written up there, which describe how the power consumption for heating is driven by the things you can control. The things you can control are the temperature difference between the inside and the outside. There's this remarkable technology called a thermostat: you grasp it, rotate it to the left, and your energy consumption in the home will decrease. I've tried it. It works. Some people call it a lifestyle change. (Laughter) You can also get the fluff men in to reduce the leakiness of your building — put fluff in the walls, fluff in the roof, a new front door, and so forth. The sad truth is, this will save you money. That's not sad, that's good. But the sad truth is, it'll only get about 25 percent of the leakiness of your building if you do these things, which are good ideas. If you really want to get a bit closer to Swedish building standards with a crappy house like this, you need to be putting external insulation on the building, as shown by this block of flats in London. You can also deliver heat more efficiently using heat pumps, which use a smaller bit of high-grade energy like electricity to move heat from your garden into your house. The third demand-side option I want to talk about, the third way to reduce energy consumption is: read your meters. People talk a lot about smart meters, but you can do it yourself. Use your own eyes and be smart. Read your meter, and if you're anything like me, it'll change your life. Here's a graph I made. I was writing a book about sustainable energy, and a friend asked me, "How much energy do you use at home?" I was embarrassed; I didn't actually know. And so I started reading the meter every week. The old meter readings are shown in the top half of the graph, and then 2007 is shown in green at the bottom. That was when I was reading the meter every week. And my life changed, because I started doing experiments and seeing what made a difference. My gas consumption plummeted, because I started tinkering with the thermostat and the timing on the heating system, and I knocked more than half off my gas bills. There's a similar story for my electricity consumption, where switching off the DVD players, the stereos, the computer peripherals that were on all the time, and just switching them on when I needed them, knocked another third off my electricity bills, too. So we need a plan that adds up. I've described for you six big levers. We need big action, because we get 90 percent of our energy from fossil fuels, and so you need to push hard on most, if not all, of these levers. Most of these levers have popularity problems, and if there is a lever you don't like the use of, well, please do bear in mind that means you need even stronger effort on the other levers. So I'm a strong advocate of having grown-up conversations that are based on numbers and facts. And I want to close with this map that just visualizes for you the requirement of land and so forth in order to get just 16 lightbulbs per person from four of the big possible sources. So, if you wanted to get 16 lightbulbs — remember, today our total energy consumption is 125 lightbulbs' worth — if you wanted 16 from wind, this map visualizes a solution for the UK. It's got 160 wind farms, each 100 square kilometers in size, and that would be a twentyfold increase over today's amount of wind. Nuclear power: to get 16 lightbulbs per person, you'd need two gigawatts at each of the purple dots on the map. That's a fourfold increase over today's levels of nuclear power. Biomass: to get 16 lightbulbs per person, you'd need a land area something like three and a half Wales' worth, either in our country, or in someone else's country, possibly Ireland, possibly somewhere else. (Laughter) And a fourth supply-side option: concentrating solar power in other people's deserts. If you wanted to get 16 lightbulbs' worth, then we're talking about these eight hexagons down at the bottom right. The total area of those hexagons is two Greater London's worth of someone else's Sahara, and you'll need power lines all the way across Spain and France to bring the power from the Sahara to Surrey. (Laughter) We need a plan that adds up. We need to stop shouting and start talking. And if we can have a grown-up conversation, make a plan that adds up and get building, maybe this low-carbon revolution will actually be fun. Thank you very much for listening. (Applause)

4 lessons from robots about being human

{0: 'Ken Goldberg works reflect the intersection of robotics, social media, and art.'}

TEDxBerkeley

I know this is going to sound strange, but I think robots can inspire us to be better humans. See, I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the home of Bethlehem Steel. My father was an engineer, and when I was growing up, he would teach me how things worked. We would build projects together, like model rockets and slot cars. Here's the go-kart that we built together. That's me behind the wheel, with my sister and my best friend at the time. And one day, he came home, when I was about 10 years old, and at the dinner table, he announced that for our next project, we were going to build ... a robot. A robot. Now, I was thrilled about this, because at school, there was a bully named Kevin, and he was picking on me, because I was the only Jewish kid in class. So I couldn't wait to get started to work on this, so I could introduce Kevin to my robot. (Laughter) (Robot noises) (Laughter) But that wasn't the kind of robot my dad had in mind. (Laughter) See, he owned a chromium-plating company, and they had to move heavy steel parts between tanks of chemicals. And so he needed an industrial robot like this, that could basically do the heavy lifting. But my dad didn't get the kind of robot he wanted, either. He and I worked on it for several years, but it was the 1970s, and the technology that was available to amateurs just wasn't there yet. So Dad continued to do this kind of work by hand. And a few years later, he was diagnosed with cancer. You see, what the robot we were trying to build was telling him was not about doing the heavy lifting. It was a warning about his exposure to the toxic chemicals. He didn't recognize that at the time, and he contracted leukemia. And he died at the age of 45. I was devastated by this. And I never forgot the robot that he and I tried to build. When I was at college, I decided to study engineering, like him. And I went to Carnegie Mellon, and I earned my PhD in robotics. I've been studying robots ever since. So what I'd like to tell you about are four robot projects, and how they've inspired me to be a better human. By 1993, I was a young professor at USC, and I was just building up my own robotics lab, and this was the year the World Wide Web came out. And I remember my students were the ones who told me about it, and we would — we were just amazed. We started playing with this, and that afternoon, we realized that we could use this new, universal interface to allow anyone in the world to operate the robot in our lab. So, rather than have it fight or do industrial work, we decided to build a planter, put the robot into the center of it, and we called it the Telegarden. And we had put a camera in the gripper of the hand of the robot, and we wrote some special scripts and software, so that anyone in the world could come in, and by clicking on the screen, they could move the robot around and visit the garden. But we also set up some other software that lets you participate and help us water the garden, remotely. And if you watered it a few times, we'd give you your own seed to plant. Now, this was an engineering project, and we published some papers on the system design of it, but we also thought of it as an art installation. It was invited, after the first year, by the Ars Electronica Museum in Austria, to have it installed in their lobby. And I'm happy to say, it remained online there, 24 hours a day, for almost nine years. That robot was operated by more people than any other robot in history. Now, one day, I got a call out of the blue from a student, who asked a very simple but profound question. He said, "Is the robot real?" Now, everyone else had assumed it was, and we knew it was, because we were working with it. But I knew what he meant, because it would be possible to take a bunch of pictures of flowers in a garden and then, basically, index them in a computer system, such that it would appear that there was a real robot, when there wasn't. And the more I thought about it, I couldn't think of a good answer for how he could tell the difference. This was right about the time that I was offered a position here at Berkeley. And when I got here, I looked up Hubert Dreyfus, who's a world-renowned professor of philosophy, And I talked with him about this and he said, "This is one of the oldest and most central problems in philosophy. It goes back to the Skeptics and up through Descartes. It's the issue of epistemology, the study of how do we know that something is true." So he and I started working together, and we coined a new term: "telepistemology," the study of knowledge at a distance. We invited leading artists, engineers and philosophers to write essays about this, and the results are collected in this book from MIT Press. So thanks to this student, who questioned what everyone else had assumed to be true, this project taught me an important lesson about life, which is to always question assumptions. Now, the second project I'll tell you about grew out of the Telegarden. As it was operating, my students and I were very interested in how people were interacting with each other, and what they were doing with the garden. So we started thinking: what if the robot could leave the garden and go out into some other interesting environment? Like, for example, what if it could go to a dinner party at the White House? (Laughter) So, because we were interested more in the system design and the user interface than in the hardware, we decided that, rather than have a robot replace the human to go to the party, we'd have a human replace the robot. We called it the Tele-Actor. We got a human, someone who's very outgoing and gregarious, and she was outfitted with a helmet with various equipment, cameras and microphones, and then a backpack with wireless Internet connection. And the idea was that she could go into a remote and interesting environment, and then over the Internet, people could experience what she was experiencing. So they could see what she was seeing, but then, more importantly, they could participate, by interacting with each other and coming up with ideas about what she should do next and where she should go, and then conveying those to the Tele-Actor. So we got a chance to take the Tele-Actor to the Webby Awards in San Francisco. And that year, Sam Donaldson was the host. Just before the curtain went up, I had about 30 seconds to explain to Mr. Donaldson what we were going to do. And I said, "The Tele-Actor is going to be joining you onstage. This is a new experimental project, and people are watching her on their screens, there's cameras involved and there's microphones and she's got an earbud in her ear, and people over the network are giving her advice about what to do next." And he said, "Wait a second. That's what I do." (Laughter) So he loved the concept, and when the Tele-Actor walked onstage, she walked right up to him, and she gave him a big kiss right on the lips. (Laughter) We were totally surprised — we had no idea that would happen. And he was great, he just gave her a big hug in return, and it worked out great. But that night, as we were packing up, I asked the Tele-Actor, how did the Tele-Directors decide that they would give a kiss to Sam Donaldson? And she said they hadn't. She said, when she was just about to walk onstage, the Tele-Directors still were trying to agree on what to do, and so she just walked onstage and did what felt most natural. (Laughter) So, the success of the Tele-Actor that night was due to the fact that she was a wonderful actor. She knew when to trust her instincts. And so that project taught me another lesson about life, which is that, when in doubt, improvise. (Laughter) Now, the third project grew out of my experience when my father was in the hospital. He was undergoing a treatment — chemotherapy treatments — and there's a related treatment called brachytherapy, where tiny, radioactive seeds are placed into the body to treat cancerous tumors. And the way it's done, as you can see here, is that surgeons insert needles into the body to deliver the seeds. And all these needles are inserted in parallel. So it's very common that some of the needles penetrate sensitive organs. And as a result, the needles damage these organs, cause damage, which leads to trauma and side effects. So my students and I wondered: what if we could modify the system, so that the needles could come in at different angles? So we simulated this; we developed some optimization algorithms and we simulated this. And we were able to show that we are able to avoid the delicate organs, and yet still achieve the coverage of the tumors with the radiation. So now, we're working with doctors at UCSF and engineers at Johns Hopkins, and we're building a robot that has a number of — it's a specialized design with different joints that can allow the needles to come in at an infinite variety of angles. And as you can see here, they can avoid delicate organs and still reach the targets they're aiming for. So, by questioning this assumption that all the needles have to be parallel, this project also taught me an important lesson: When in doubt, when your path is blocked, pivot. And the last project also has to do with medical robotics. And this is something that's grown out of a system called the da Vinci surgical robot. And this is a commercially available device. It's being used in over 2,000 hospitals around the world. The idea is it allows the surgeon to operate comfortably in his own coordinate frame. Many of the subtasks in surgery are very routine and tedious, like suturing, and currently, all of these are performed under the specific and immediate control of the surgeon. So the surgeon becomes fatigued over time. And we've been wondering, what if we could program the robot to perform some of these subtasks, and thereby free the surgeon to focus on the more complicated parts of the surgery, and also cut down on the time that the surgery would take if we could get the robot to do them a little bit faster? Now, it's hard to program a robot to do delicate things like this. But it turns out my colleague Pieter Abbeel, who's here at Berkeley, has developed a new set of techniques for teaching robots from example. So he's gotten robots to fly helicopters, do incredibly interesting, beautiful acrobatics, by watching human experts fly them. So we got one of these robots. We started working with Pieter and his students. And we asked a surgeon to perform a task — with the robot. So what we're doing is asking the surgeon to perform the task, and we record the motions of the robot. So here's an example. I'll use tracing out a figure eight as an example. So here's what it looks like when the robot — this is what the robot's path looks like, those three examples. Now, those are much better than what a novice like me could do, but they're still jerky and imprecise. So we record all these examples, the data, and then go through a sequence of steps. First, we use a technique called dynamic time warping from speech recognition. And this allows us to temporally align all of the examples. And then we apply Kalman filtering, a technique from control theory, that allows us to statistically analyze all the noise and extract the desired trajectory that underlies them. Now we take those human demonstrations — they're all noisy and imperfect — and we extract from them an inferred task trajectory and control sequence for the robot. We then execute that on the robot, we observe what happens, then we adjust the controls, using a sequence of techniques called iterative learning. Then what we do is we increase the velocity a little bit. We observe the results, adjust the controls again, and observe what happens. And we go through this several rounds. And here's the result. That's the inferred task trajectory, and here's the robot moving at the speed of the human. Here's four times the speed of the human. Here's seven times. And here's the robot operating at 10 times the speed of the human. So we're able to get a robot to perform a delicate task like a surgical subtask, at 10 times the speed of a human. So this project also, because of its involved practicing and learning, doing something over and over again, this project also has a lesson, which is: if you want to do something well, there's no substitute for practice, practice, practice. So these are four of the lessons that I've learned from robots over the years. And the field of robotics has gotten much better over time. Nowadays, high school students can build robots, like the industrial robot my dad and I tried to build. But, it's very — now ... And now, I have a daughter, named Odessa. She's eight years old. And she likes robots, too. Maybe it runs in the family. (Laughter) I wish she could meet my dad. And now I get to teach her how things work, and we get to build projects together. And I wonder what kind of lessons she'll learn from them. Robots are the most human of our machines. They can't solve all of the world's problems, but I think they have something important to teach us. I invite all of you to think about the innovations that you're interested in, the machines that you wish for. And think about what they might be telling you. Because I have a hunch that many of our technological innovations, the devices we dream about, can inspire us to be better humans. Thank you. (Applause)

Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes

{0: 'William Noel is a curator who believes museums should make their collections free and available on the Internet.'}

TEDxSummit

The great texts of the ancient world don't survive to us in their original form. They survive because medieval scribes copied them and copied them and copied them. And so it is with Archimedes, the great Greek mathematician. Everything we know about Archimedes as a mathematician we know about because of just three books, and they're called A, B and C. And A was lost by an Italian humanist in 1564. And B was last heard of in the Pope's Library about a hundred miles north of Rome in Viterbo in 1311. Now Codex C was only discovered in 1906, and it landed on my desk in Baltimore on the 19th of January, 1999. And this is Codex C here. Now Codex C is actually buried in this book. It's buried treasure. Because this book is actually a prayer book. It was finished by a guy called Johannes Myrones on the 14th of April, 1229. And to make his prayer book he used parchment. But he didn't use new parchment, he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts, and there were seven of them. And Archimedes Codex C was just one of those seven. He took apart the Archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts. He erased all of their texts, and then he cut the sheets down in the middle, he shuffled them up, and he rotated them 90 degrees, and he wrote prayers on top of these books. And essentially these seven manuscripts disappeared for 700 years, and we have a prayer book. The prayer book was discovered by this guy, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, in 1906. And with just a magnifying glass, he transcribed as much of the text as he could. And the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript that were unique texts. They weren't in A and B at all; they were completely new texts by Archimedes, and they were called "The Method" and "The Stomachion." And it became a world famous manuscript. Now it should be clear by now that this book is in bad condition. It got in worse condition in the 20th century after Heiberg saw it. Forgeries were painted over it, and it suffered very badly from mold. This book is the definition of a write-off. It's the sort of book that you thought would be in an institution. But it's not in an institution, it was bought by a private owner in 1998. Why did he buy this book? Because he wanted to make that which was fragile safe. He wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous. He wanted to make that which was expensive free. And he wanted to do this as a matter of principle. Because not many people are really going to read Archimedes in ancient Greek, but they should have the chance to do it. So he gathered around himself the friends of Archimedes, and he promised to pay for all the work. And it was an expensive job, but actually it wouldn't be as much as you think because these people, they didn't come from money, they came from Archimedes. And they came from all sorts of different backgrounds. They came from particle physics, they came from classical philology, they came from book conservation, they came from ancient mathematics, they came from data management, they came from scientific imaging and program management. And they got together to work on this manuscript. The first problem was a conservation problem. And this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with: There was glue on the spine of the book. And if you look at this photograph carefully, the bottom half of this is rather brown. And that glue is hide glue. Now if you're a conservator, you can take off this glue reasonably easily. The top half is Elmer's wood glue. It's polyvinyl acetate emulsion that doesn't dissolve in water once it's dry. And it's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on. And so before we could start imaging Archimedes, we had to take this book apart. So it took four years to take apart. And this is a rare action shot, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) Another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax, because this was used in the liturgical services of the Greek Orthodox Church and they'd used candle wax. And the candle wax was dirty, and we couldn't image through the wax. So very carefully we had to mechanically scrape off all the wax. It's hard to tell you exactly how bad this condition of this book is, but it came out in little bits very often. And normally in a book, you wouldn't worry about the little bits, but these little bits might contain unique Archimedes text. So, tiny fragments we actually managed to put back in the right place. Then, having done that, we started to image the manuscript. And we imaged the manuscript in 14 different wavebands of light. Because if you look at something in different wavebands of light, you see different things. And here is an image of a page imaged in 14 different wavebands of light. But none of them worked. So what we did was we processed the images together, and we put two images into one blank screen. And here are two different images of the Archimedes manuscript. And the image on the left is the normal red image. And the image on the right is an ultraviolet image. And in the image on the right you might be able to see some of the Archimedes writing. If you merge them together into one digital canvas, the parchment is bright in both images and it comes out bright. The prayer book is dark in both images and it comes out dark. The Archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another. And it'll come out dark but red, and then you can start to read it rather clearly. And that's what it looks like. Now that's a before and after image, but you don't read the image on the screen like that. You zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in, and you can just read it now. (Applause) If you process the same two images in a different way, you can actually get rid of the prayer book text. And this is terribly important, because the diagrams in the manuscript are the unique source for the diagrams that Archimedes drew in the sand in the fourth century B.C. And there we are, I can give them to you. With this kind of imaging — this kind of infrared, ultraviolet, invisible light imaging — we were never going to image through the gold ground forgeries. How were we going to do that? Well we took the manuscript, and we decided to image it in X-ray fluorescence imaging. So an X-ray comes in in the diagram on the left and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom. And that electron disappears. And as it disappears, an electron from a shell farther out jumps in and takes its place. And when it takes its place, it sheds electromagnetic radiation. It sheds an X-ray. And this X-ray is specific in its wavelength to the atom that it hits. And what we wanted to get was the iron. Because the ink was written in iron. And if we can map where this X-ray that comes out, where it comes from, we can map all the iron on the page, then theoretically we can read the image. The thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this. So we took it to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in California, which is a particle accelerator. Electrons go around one way, positrons go around the other. They meet in the middle, and they create subatomic particles like the charm quark and the tau lepton. Now we weren't actually going to put Archimedes in that beam. But as the electrons go round at the speed of light, they shed X-rays. And this is the most powerful light source in the solar system. This is called synchrotron radiation, and it's normally used to look at things like proteins and that sort of thing. But we wanted it to look at atoms, at iron atoms, so that we could read the page from before and after. And lo and behold, we found that we could do it. It took about 17 minutes to do a single page. So what did we discover? Well one of the unique texts in Archimedes is called "The Stomachion." And this didn't exist in Codices A and B. And we knew that it involved this square. And this is a perfect square, and it's divided into 14 bits. But no one knew what Archimedes was doing with these 14 bits. And now we think we know. He was trying to work out how many ways you can recombine those 14 bits and still make a perfect square. Anyone want to guess the answer? It's 17,152 divided into 536 families. And the important point about this is that it's the earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics. And combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics. The really astonishing thing though about this manuscript is that we looked at the other manuscripts that the palimpsester had made, the scribe had made his book out of, and one of them was a manuscript containing text by Hyperides. Now Hyperides was an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C. He was an exact contemporary of Demosthenes. And in 338 B.C. he and Demosthenes together decided that they wanted to stand up to the military might of Philip of Macedon. So Athens and Thebes went out to fight Philip of Macedon. This was a bad idea, because Philip of Macedon had a son called Alexander the Great, and they lost the battle of Chaeronea. Alexander the Great went on to conquer the known world; Hyperides found himself on trial for treason. And this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial — and it's a great speech: "Best of all," he says, "is to win. But if you can't win, then you should fight for a noble cause, because then you'll be remembered. Consider the Spartans. They won enumerable victories, but no one remembers what they are because they were all fought for selfish ends. The one battle that the Spartans fought that everybody remembers is the the battle of Thermopylae where they were butchered to a man, but fought for the freedom of Greece." It was such a great speech that the Athenian law courts let him off. He lived for another 10 years, then the Macedonian faction caught up with him. They cut out his tongue in mockery of his oratory, and no one knows what they did with his body. So this is the discovery of a lost voice from antiquity, speaking to us, not from the grave, because his grave doesn't exist, but from the Athenian law courts. Now I should say at this point that normally when you're looking at medieval manuscripts that have been scraped off, you don't find unique texts. And to find two in one manuscript is really something. To find three is completely weird. And we found three. Aristotle's "Categories" is one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy. And we found a third century A.D. commentary on it, possibly by Galen and probably by Porphyry. Now all this data that we collected, all the images, all the raw images, all the transcriptions that we made and that sort of thing have been put online under a Creative Commons license for anyone to use for any commercial purpose. (Applause) Why did the owner of the manuscript do this? He did this because he understands data as well as books. Now the thing to do with books, if you want to ensure their long-term utility, is to hide them away in closets and let very few people look at them. The thing to do with data, if you want it to survive, is to let it out and have everybody have it with as little control on that data as possible. And that's what he did. And institutions can learn from this. Because institutions at the moment confine their data with copyright restrictions and that sort of thing. And if you want to look at medieval manuscripts on the Web, at the moment you have to go to the National Library of Y's site or the University Library of X's site, which is about the most boring way in which you can deal with digital data. What you want to do is to aggregate it all together. Because the Web of the ancient manuscripts of the future isn't going to be built by institutions. It's going to be built by users, by people who get this data together, by people who want to aggregate all sorts of maps from wherever they come from, all sorts of medieval romances from wherever they come from, people who just want to curate their own glorious selection of beautiful things. And that is the future of the Web. And it's an attractive and beautiful future, if only we can make it happen. Now we at the Walters Art Museum have followed this example, and we have put up all our manuscripts on the Web for people to enjoy — all the raw data, all the descriptions, all the metadata. under a Creative Commons license. Now the Walters Art Museum is a small museum and it has beautiful manuscripts, but the data is fantastic. And the result of this is that if you do a Google search on images right now and you type in "Illuminated manuscript Koran" for example, 24 of the 28 images you'll find come from my institution. (Applause) Now, let's think about this for a minute. What's in it for the institution? There are all sorts of things that are in it for the institution. You can talk about the Humanities and that sort of thing, but let's talk about selfish things. Because what's really in it for the institution is this: Now why do people go to the Louvre? They go to see the Mona Lisa. Why do they go to see the Mona Lisa? Because they already know what she looks like. And they know what she looks like because they've seen pictures of her absolutely everywhere. Now, there is no need for these restrictions at all. And I think that institutions should stand up and release all their data under unrestricted licenses, and it would be a great benefit to everybody. Why don't we just let everybody have access to this data and curate their own collection of ancient knowledge and wonderful and beautiful things and increase the beauty and the cultural significance of the Internet. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)

The attitudes that sparked Arab Spring

{0: 'Researcher and pollster Dalia Mogahed is an author, advisor and consultant who studies Muslim communities.'}

TEDxSummit

My talk today is about something maybe a couple of you have already heard about. It's called the Arab Spring. Anyone heard of it? (Applause) So in 2011, power shifted, from the few to the many, from oval offices to central squares, from carefully guarded airwaves to open-source networks. But before Tahrir was a global symbol of liberation, there were representative surveys already giving people a voice in quieter but still powerful ways. I study Muslim societies around the world at Gallup. Since 2001, we've interviewed hundreds of thousands of people — young and old, men and women, educated and illiterate. My talk today draws on this research to reveal why Arabs rose up and what they want now. Now this region's very diverse, and every country is unique. But those who revolted shared a common set of grievances and have similar demands today. I'm going to focus a lot of my talk on Egypt. It has nothing to do with the fact that I was born there, of course. But it's the largest Arab country and it's also one with a great deal of influence. But I'm going to end by widening the lens to the entire region to look at the mundane topics of Arab views of religion and politics and how this impacts women, revealing some surprises along the way. So after analyzing mounds of data, what we discovered was this: Unemployment and poverty alone did not lead to the Arab revolts of 2011. If an act of desperation by a Tunisian fruit vendor sparked these revolutions, it was the difference between what Arabs experienced and what they expected that provided the fuel. To tell you what I mean, consider this trend in Egypt. On paper the country was doing great. In fact, it attracted accolades from multinational organizations because of its economic growth. But under the surface was a very different reality. In 2010, right before the revolution, even though GDP per capita had been growing at five percent for several years, Egyptians had never felt worse about their lives. Now this is very unusual, because globally we find that, not surprisingly, people feel better as their country gets richer. And that's because they have better job opportunities and their state offers better social services. But it was exactly the opposite in Egypt. As the country got more well-off, unemployment actually rose and people's satisfaction with things like housing and education plummeted. But it wasn't just anger at economic injustice. It was also people's deep longing for freedom. Contrary to the clash of civilizations theory, Arabs didn't despise Western liberty, they desired it. As early as 2001, we asked Arabs, and Muslims in general around the world, what they admired most about the West. Among the most frequent responses was liberty and justice. In their own words to an open-ended question we heard, "Their political system is transparent and it's following democracy in its true sense." Another said it was "liberty and freedom and being open-minded with each other." Majorities as high as 90 percent and greater in Egypt, Indonesia and Iran told us in 2005 that if they were to write a new constitution for a theoretical new country that they would guarantee freedom of speech as a fundamental right, especially in Egypt. Eighty-eight percent said moving toward greater democracy would help Muslims progress — the highest percentage of any country we surveyed. But pressed up against these democratic aspirations was a very different day-to-day experience, especially in Egypt. While aspiring to democracy the most, they were the least likely population in the world to say that they had actually voiced their opinion to a public official in the last month — at only four percent. So while economic development made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for. So rather than viewing their former regimes as generous if overprotective fathers, they viewed them as essentially prison wardens. So now that Egyptians have ended Mubarak's 30-year rule, they potentially could be an example for the region. If Egypt is to succeed at building a society based on the rule of law, it could be a model. If, however, the core issues that propelled the revolution aren't addressed, the consequences could be catastrophic — not just for Egypt, but for the entire region. The signs don't look good, some have said. Islamists, not the young liberals that sparked the revolution, won the majority in Parliament. The military council has cracked down on civil society and protests and the country's economy continues to suffer. Evaluating Egypt on this basis alone, however, ignores the real revolution. Because Egyptians are more optimistic than they have been in years, far less divided on religious-secular lines than we would think and poised for the demands of democracy. Whether they support Islamists or liberals, Egyptians' priorities for this government are identical, and they are jobs, stability and education, not moral policing. But most of all, for the first time in decades, they expect to be active participants, not spectators, in the affairs of their country. I was meeting with a group of newly-elected parliamentarians from Egypt and Tunisia a couple of weeks ago. And what really struck me about them was that they weren't only optimistic, but they kind of struck me as nervous, for lack of a better word. One said to me, "Our people used to gather in cafes to watch football" — or soccer, as we say in America — "and now they gather to watch Parliament." (Laughter) "They're really watching us, and we can't help but worry that we're not going to live up to their expectations." And what really struck me is that less than 24 months ago, it was the people that were nervous about being watched by their government. And the reason that they're expecting a lot is because they have a new-found hope for the future. So right before the revolution we said that Egyptians had never felt worse about their lives, but not only that, they thought their future would be no better. What really changed after the ouster of Mubarak wasn't that life got easier. It actually got harder. But people's expectations for their future went up significantly. And this hope, this optimism, endured a year of turbulent transition. One reason that there's this optimism is because, contrary to what many people have said, most Egyptians think things really have changed in many ways. So while Egyptians were known for their single-digit turnout in elections before the revolution, the last election had around 70 percent voter turnout — men and women. Where scarcely a quarter believed in the honesty of elections in 2010 — I'm surprised it was a quarter — 90 percent thought that this last election was honest. Now why this matters is because we discovered a link between people's faith in their democratic process and their faith that oppressed people can change their situation through peaceful means alone. (Applause) Now I know what some of you are thinking. The Egyptian people, and many other Arabs who've revolted and are in transition, have very high expectations of the government. They're just victims of a long-time autocracy, expecting a paternal state to solve all their problems. But this conclusion would ignore a tectonic shift taking place in Egypt far from the cameras in Tahrir Square. And that is Egyptians' elevated expectations are placed first on themselves. In the country once known for its passive resignation, where, as bad as things got, only four percent expressed their opinion to a public official, today 90 percent tell us that if there's a problem in their community, it's up to them to fix it. (Applause) And three-fourths believe they not only have the responsibility, but the power to make change. And this empowerment also applies to women, whose role in the revolts cannot be underestimated. They were doctors and dissidents, artists and organizers. A full third of those who braved tanks and tear gas to ask or to demand liberty and justice in Egypt were women. (Applause) Now people have raised some real concerns about what the rise of Islamist parties means for women. What we've found about the role of religion in law and the role of religion in society is that there's no female consensus. We found that women in one country look more like the men in that country than their female counterparts across the border. Now what this suggests is that how women view religion's role in society is shaped more by their own country's culture and context than one monolithic view that religion is simply bad for women. Where women agree, however, is on their own role, and that it must be central and active. And here is where we see the greatest gender difference within a country — on the issue of women's rights. Now how men feel about women's rights matters to the future of this region. Because we discovered a link between men's support for women's employment and how many women are actually employed in professional fields in that country. So the question becomes, What drives men's support for women's rights? What about men's views of religion and law? [Does] a man's opinion of the role of religion in politics shape their view of women's rights? The answer is no. We found absolutely no correlation, no impact whatsoever, between these two variables. What drives men's support for women's employment is men's employment, their level of education as well as a high score on their country's U.N. Human Development Index. What this means is that human development, not secularization, is what's key to women's empowerment in the transforming Middle East. And the transformation continues. From Wall Street to Mohammed Mahmoud Street, it has never been more important to understand the aspirations of ordinary people. Thank you. (Applause)

What your designs say about you

{0: 'Sebastian Deterding is an interface designer who thinks deeply about persuasive and gameful design.'}

TEDxHogeschoolUtrecht

We are today talking about moral persuasion: What is moral and immoral in trying to change people's behaviors by using technology and using design? And I don't know what you expect, but when I was thinking about that issue, I early on realized what I'm not able to give you are answers. I'm not able to tell you what is moral or immoral, because we're living in a pluralist society. My values can be radically different from your values, which means that what I consider moral or immoral based on that might not necessarily be what you consider moral or immoral. But I also realized there is one thing that I could give you, and that is what this guy behind me gave the world — Socrates. It is questions. What I can do and what I would like to do with you is give you, like that initial question, a set of questions to figure out for yourselves, layer by layer, like peeling an onion, getting at the core of what you believe is moral or immoral persuasion. And I'd like to do that with a couple of examples of technologies where people have used game elements to get people to do things. So it's at first a very simple, very obvious question I would like to give you: What are your intentions if you are designing something? And obviously, intentions are not the only thing, so here is another example for one of these applications. There are a couple of these kinds of Eco dashboards right now — dashboards built into cars — which try to motivate you to drive more fuel-efficiently. This here is Nissan's MyLeaf, where your driving behavior is compared with the driving behavior of other people, so you can compete for who drives a route the most fuel-efficiently. And these things are very effective, it turns out — so effective that they motivate people to engage in unsafe driving behaviors, like not stopping at a red light, because that way you have to stop and restart the engine, and that would use quite some fuel, wouldn't it? So despite this being a very well-intended application, obviously there was a side effect of that. Here's another example for one of these side effects. Commendable: a site that allows parents to give their kids little badges for doing the things that parents want their kids to do, like tying their shoes. And at first that sounds very nice, very benign, well-intended. But it turns out, if you look into research on people's mindset, caring about outcomes, caring about public recognition, caring about these kinds of public tokens of recognition is not necessarily very helpful for your long-term psychological well-being. It's better if you care about learning something. It's better when you care about yourself than how you appear in front of other people. So that kind of motivational tool that is used actually, in and of itself, has a long-term side effect, in that every time we use a technology that uses something like public recognition or status, we're actually positively endorsing this as a good and normal thing to care about — that way, possibly having a detrimental effect on the long-term psychological well-being of ourselves as a culture. So that's a second, very obvious question: What are the effects of what you're doing — the effects you're having with the device, like less fuel, as well as the effects of the actual tools you're using to get people to do things — public recognition? Now is that all — intention, effect? Well, there are some technologies which obviously combine both. Both good long-term and short-term effects and a positive intention like Fred Stutzman's "Freedom," where the whole point of that application is — well, we're usually so bombarded with constant requests by other people, with this device, you can shut off the Internet connectivity of your PC of choice for a pre-set amount of time, to actually get some work done. And I think most of us will agree that's something well-intended, and also has good consequences. In the words of Michel Foucault, it is a "technology of the self." It is a technology that empowers the individual to determine its own life course, to shape itself. But the problem is, as Foucault points out, that every technology of the self has a technology of domination as its flip side. As you see in today's modern liberal democracies, the society, the state, not only allows us to determine our self, to shape our self, it also demands it of us. It demands that we optimize ourselves, that we control ourselves, that we self-manage continuously, because that's the only way in which such a liberal society works. These technologies want us to stay in the game that society has devised for us. They want us to fit in even better. They want us to optimize ourselves to fit in. Now, I don't say that is necessarily a bad thing; I just think that this example points us to a general realization, and that is: no matter what technology or design you look at, even something we consider as well-intended and as good in its effects as Stutzman's Freedom, comes with certain values embedded in it. And we can question these values. We can question: Is it a good thing that all of us continuously self-optimize ourselves to fit better into that society? Or to give you another example: What about a piece of persuasive technology that convinces Muslim women to wear their headscarves? Is that a good or a bad technology in its intentions or in its effects? Well, that basically depends on the kind of values you bring to bear to make these kinds of judgments. So that's a third question: What values do you use to judge? And speaking of values: I've noticed that in the discussion about moral persuasion online and when I'm talking with people, more often than not, there is a weird bias. And that bias is that we're asking: Is this or that "still" ethical? Is it "still" permissible? We're asking things like: Is this Oxfam donation form, where the regular monthly donation is the preset default, and people, maybe without intending it, are encouraged or nudged into giving a regular donation instead of a one-time donation, is that "still' permissible? Is it "still" ethical? We're fishing at the low end. But in fact, that question, "Is it 'still' ethical?" is just one way of looking at ethics. Because if you look at the beginning of ethics in Western culture, you see a very different idea of what ethics also could be. For Aristotle, ethics was not about the question, "Is that still good, or is it bad?" Ethics was about the question of how to live life well. And he put that in the word "arête," which we, from [Ancient Greek], translate as "virtue." But really, it means "excellence." It means living up to your own full potential as a human being. And that is an idea that, I think, Paul Richard Buchanan put nicely in a recent essay, where he said, "Products are vivid arguments about how we should live our lives." Our designs are not ethical or unethical in that they're using ethical or unethical means of persuading us. They have a moral component just in the kind of vision and the aspiration of the good life that they present to us. And if you look into the designed environment around us with that kind of lens, asking, "What is the vision of the good life that our products, our design, present to us?", then you often get the shivers, because of how little we expect of each other, of how little we actually seem to expect of our life, and what the good life looks like. So that's a fourth question I'd like to leave you with: What vision of the good life do your designs convey? And speaking of design, you'll notice that I already broadened the discussion, because it's not just persuasive technology that we're talking about here, it's any piece of design that we put out here in the world. I don't know whether you know the great communication researcher Paul Watzlawick who, back in the '60s, made the argument that we cannot not communicate. Even if we choose to be silent, we chose to be silent, and we're communicating something by choosing to be silent. And in the same way that we cannot not communicate, we cannot not persuade: whatever we do or refrain from doing, whatever we put out there as a piece of design, into the world, has a persuasive component. It tries to affect people. It puts a certain vision of the good life out there in front of us, which is what Peter-Paul Verbeek, the Dutch philosopher of technology, says. No matter whether we as designers intend it or not, we materialize morality. We make certain things harder and easier to do. We organize the existence of people. We put a certain vision of what good or bad or normal or usual is in front of people, by everything we put out there in the world. Even something as innocuous as a set of school chairs is a persuasive technology, because it presents and materializes a certain vision of the good life — a good life in which teaching and learning and listening is about one person teaching, the others listening; in which it is about learning-is-done-while-sitting; in which you learn for yourself; in which you're not supposed to change these rules, because the chairs are fixed to the ground. And even something as innocuous as a single-design chair, like this one by Arne Jacobsen, is a persuasive technology, because, again, it communicates an idea of the good life: a good life — a life that you, as a designer, consent to by saying, "In a good life, goods are produced as sustainably or unsustainably as this chair. Workers are treated as well or as badly as the workers were treated that built that chair." The good life is a life where design is important because somebody obviously took the time and spent the money for that kind of well-designed chair; where tradition is important, because this is a traditional classic and someone cared about this; and where there is something as conspicuous consumption, where it is OK and normal to spend a humongous amount of money on such a chair, to signal to other people what your social status is. So these are the kinds of layers, the kinds of questions I wanted to lead you through today; the question of: What are the intentions that you bring to bear when you're designing something? What are the effects, intended and unintended, that you're having? What are the values you're using to judge those? What are the virtues, the aspirations that you're actually expressing in that? And how does that apply, not just to persuasive technology, but to everything you design? Do we stop there? I don't think so. I think that all of these things are eventually informed by the core of all of this, and this is nothing but life itself. Why, when the question of what the good life is informs everything that we design, should we stop at design and not ask ourselves: How does it apply to our own life? "Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?" as Michel Foucault puts it. Just to give you a practical example of Buster Benson. This is Buster setting up a pull-up machine at the office of his new start-up, Habit Labs, where they're trying to build other applications like "Health Month" for people. And why is he building a thing like this? Well, here is the set of axioms that Habit Labs, Buster's start-up, put up for themselves on how they wanted to work together as a team when they're building these applications — a set of moral principles they set themselves for working together — one of them being, "We take care of our own health and manage our own burnout." Because ultimately, how can you ask yourselves and how can you find an answer on what vision of the good life you want to convey and create with your designs without asking the question: What vision of the good life do you yourself want to live? And with that, I thank you. (Applause)

Dancing with light

{0: 'Anthony Magliano\xa0and\xa0Mica Thomas\xa0are the founder and artistic directors of Quixotic, a mixed-media theater/performance/aerialist company.'}

TED2012

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause)

ET is (probably) out there -- get ready

{0: 'Seth Shostak is an astronomer, alien hunter and bulwark of good, exciting science.'}

TEDxSanJoseCA

Is E.T. out there? Well, I work at the SETI Institute. That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face. I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate. Now, a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic, ridiculous, maybe even hopeless, but I just want to talk to you a little bit about why I think that the job I have is actually a privilege, okay, and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into this line of work, if that's what you call it. This thing — whoops, can we go back? Hello, come in, Earth. There we go. All right. This is the Owens Valley Radio Observatory behind the Sierra Nevadas, and in 1968, I was working there collecting data for my thesis. Now, it's kinda lonely, it's kinda tedious, just collecting data, so I would amuse myself by taking photos at night of the telescopes or even of myself, because, you know, at night, I would be the only hominid within about 30 miles. So here are pictures of myself. The observatory had just acquired a new book, written by a Russian cosmologist by the name of Joseph Shklovsky, and then expanded and translated and edited by a little-known Cornell astronomer by the name of Carl Sagan. And I remember reading that book, and at 3 in the morning I was reading this book and it was explaining how the antennas I was using to measure the spins of galaxies could also be used to communicate, to send bits of information from one star system to another. Now, at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're all alone, haven't had much sleep, that was a very romantic idea, but it was that idea — the fact that you could in fact prove that there's somebody out there just using this same technology — that appealed to me so much that 20 years later I took a job at the SETI Institute. Now, I have to say that my memory is notoriously porous, and I've often wondered whether there was any truth in this story, or I was just, you know, misremembering something, but I recently just blew up this old negative of mine, and sure enough, there you can see the Shklovsky and Sagan book underneath that analog calculating device. So it was true. All right. Now, the idea for doing this, it wasn't very old at the time that I made that photo. The idea dates from 1960, when a young astronomer by the name of Frank Drake used this antenna in West Virginia, pointed it at a couple of nearby stars in the hopes of eavesdropping on E.T. Now, Frank didn't hear anything. Actually he did, but it turned out to be the U.S. Air Force, which doesn't count as extraterrestrial intelligence. But Drake's idea here became very popular because it was very appealing — and I'll get back to that — and on the basis of this experiment, which didn't succeed, we have been doing SETI ever since, not continuously, but ever since. We still haven't heard anything. We still haven't heard anything. In fact, we don't know about any life beyond Earth, but I'm going to suggest to you that that's going to change rather soon, and part of the reason, in fact, the majority of the reason why I think that's going to change is that the equipment's getting better. This is the Allen Telescope Array, about 350 miles from whatever seat you're in right now. This is something that we're using today to search for E.T., and the electronics have gotten very much better too. This is Frank Drake's electronics in 1960. This is the Allen Telescope Array electronics today. Some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately 100 trillion times better than they were in 1960, 100 trillion times better. That's a degree of an improvement that would look good on your report card, okay? But something that's not appreciated by the public is, in fact, that the experiment continues to get better, and, consequently, tends to get faster. This is a little plot, and every time you show a plot, you lose 10 percent of the audience. I have 12 of these. (Laughter) But what I plotted here is just some metric that shows how fast we're searching. In other words, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. We know how big the haystack is. It's the galaxy. But we're going through the haystack no longer with a teaspoon but with a skip loader, because of this increase in speed. In fact, those of you who are still conscious and mathematically competent, will note that this is a semi-log plot. In other words, the rate of increase is exponential. It's exponentially improving. Now, exponential is an overworked word. You hear it on the media all the time. They don't really know what exponential means, but this is exponential. In fact, it's doubling every 18 months, and, of course, every card-carrying member of the digerati knows that that's Moore's Law. So this means that over the course of the next two dozen years, we'll be able to look at a million star systems, a million star systems, looking for signals that would prove somebody's out there. Well, a million star systems, is that interesting? I mean, how many of those star systems have planets? And the facts are, we didn't know the answer to that even as recently as 15 years ago, and in fact, we really didn't know it even as recently as six months ago. But now we do. Recent results suggest that virtually every star has planets, and more than one. They're like, you know, kittens. You get a litter. You don't get one kitten. You get a bunch. So in fact, this is a pretty accurate estimate of the number of planets in our galaxy, just in our galaxy, by the way, and I remind the non-astronomy majors among you that our galaxy is only one of 100 billion that we can see with our telescopes. That's a lot of real estate, but of course, most of these planets are going to be kind of worthless, like, you know, Mercury, or Neptune. Neptune's probably not very big in your life. So the question is, what fraction of these planets are actually suitable for life? We don't know the answer to that either, but we will learn that answer this year, thanks to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, and in fact, the smart money, which is to say the people who work on this project, the smart money is suggesting that the fraction of planets that might be suitable for life is maybe one in a thousand, one in a hundred, something like that. Well, even taking the pessimistic estimate, that it's one in a thousand, that means that there are at least a billion cousins of the Earth just in our own galaxy. Okay, now I've given you a lot of numbers here, but they're mostly big numbers, okay, so, you know, keep that in mind. There's plenty of real estate, plenty of real estate in the universe, and if we're the only bit of real estate in which there's some interesting occupants, that makes you a miracle, and I know you like to think you're a miracle, but if you do science, you learn rather quickly that every time you think you're a miracle, you're wrong, so probably not the case. All right, so the bottom line is this: Because of the increase in speed, and because of the vast amount of habitable real estate in the cosmos, I figure we're going to pick up a signal within two dozen years. And I feel strongly enough about that to make a bet with you: Either we're going to find E.T. in the next two dozen years, or I'll buy you a cup of coffee. So that's not so bad. I mean, even with two dozen years, you open up your browser and there's news of a signal, or you get a cup of coffee. Now, let me tell you about some aspect of this that people don't think about, and that is, what happens? Suppose that what I say is true. I mean, who knows, but suppose it happens. Suppose some time in the next two dozen years we pick up a faint line that tells us we have some cosmic company. What is the effect? What's the consequence? Now, I might be at ground zero for this. I happen to know what the consequence for me would be, because we've had false alarms. This is 1997, and this is a photo I made at about 3 o'clock in the morning in Mountain View here, when we were watching the computer monitors because we had picked up a signal that we thought, "This is the real deal." All right? And I kept waiting for the Men in Black to show up. Right? I kept waiting for — I kept waiting for my mom to call, somebody to call, the government to call. Nobody called. Nobody called. I was so nervous that I couldn't sit down. I just wandered around taking photos like this one, just for something to do. Well, at 9:30 in the morning, with my head down on my desk because I obviously hadn't slept all night, the phone rings and it's The New York Times. And I think there's a lesson in that, and that lesson is that if we pick up a signal, the media, the media will be on it faster than a weasel on ball bearings. It's going to be fast. You can be sure of that. No secrecy. That's what happens to me. It kind of ruins my whole week, because whatever I've got planned that week is kind of out the window. But what about you? What's it going to do to you? And the answer is that we don't know the answer. We don't know what that's going to do to you, not in the long term, and not even very much in the short term. I mean, that would be a bit like asking Chris Columbus in 1491, "Hey Chris, you know, what happens if it turns out that there's a continent between here and Japan, where you're sailing to, what will be the consequences for humanity if that turns out to be the case?" And I think Chris would probably offer you some answer that you might not have understood, but it probably wouldn't have been right, and I think that to predict what finding E.T.'s going to mean, we can't predict that either. But here are a couple things I can say. To begin with, it's going to be a society that's way in advance of our own. You're not going to hear from alien Neanderthals. They're not building transmitters. They're going to be ahead of us, maybe by a few thousand years, maybe by a few millions years, but substantially ahead of us, and that means, if you can understand anything that they're going to say, then you might be able to short-circuit history by getting information from a society that's way beyond our own. Now, you might find that a bit hyperbolic, and maybe it is, but nonetheless, it's conceivable that this will happen, and, you know, you could consider this like, I don't know, giving Julius Caesar English lessons and the key to the library of Congress. It would change his day, all right? That's one thing. Another thing that's for sure going to happen is that it will calibrate us. We will know that we're not that miracle, right, that we're just another duck in a row, we're not the only kids on the block, and I think that that's philosophically a very profound thing to learn. We're not a miracle, okay? The third thing that it might tell you is somewhat vague, but I think interesting and important, and that is, if you find a signal coming from a more advanced society, because they will be, that will tell you something about our own possibilities, that we're not inevitably doomed to self-destruction. Because they survived their technology, we could do it too. Normally when you look out into the universe, you're looking back in time. All right? That's interesting to cosmologists. But in this sense, you actually can look into the future, hazily, but you can look into the future. So those are all the sorts of things that would come from a detection. Now, let me talk a little bit about something that happens even in the meantime, and that is, SETI, I think, is important, because it's exploration, and it's not only exploration, it's comprehensible exploration. Now, I gotta tell you, I'm always reading books about explorers. I find exploration very interesting, Arctic exploration, you know, people like Magellan, Amundsen, Shackleton, you see Franklin down there, Scott, all these guys. It's really nifty, exploration. And they're just doing it because they want to explore, and you might say, "Oh, that's kind of a frivolous opportunity," but that's not frivolous. That's not a frivolous activity, because, I mean, think of ants. You know, most ants are programmed to follow one another along in a long line, but there are a couple of ants, maybe one percent of those ants, that are what they call pioneer ants, and they're the ones that wander off. They're the ones you find on the kitchen countertop. You gotta get them with your thumb before they find the sugar or something. But those ants, even though most of them get wiped out, those ants are the ones that are essential to the survival of the hive. So exploration is important. I also think that exploration is important in terms of being able to address what I think is a critical lack in our society, and that is the lack of science literacy, the lack of the ability to even understand science. Now, look, a lot has been written about the deplorable state of science literacy in this country. You've heard about it. Well, here's one example, in fact. Polls taken, this poll was taken 10 years ago. It shows like roughly one third of the public thinks that aliens are not only out there, we're looking for them out there, but they're here, right? Sailing the skies in their saucers and occasionally abducting people for experiments their parents wouldn't approve of. Well, that would be interesting if it was true, and job security for me, but I don't think the evidence is very good. That's more, you know, sad than significant. But there are other things that people believe that are significant, like the efficacy of homeopathy, or that evolution is just, you know, sort of a crazy idea by scientists without any legs, or, you know, evolution, all that sort of thing, or global warming. These sorts of ideas don't really have any validity, that you can't trust the scientists. Now, we've got to solve that problem, because that's a critically important problem, and you might say, "Well, okay, how are we gonna solve that problem with SETI?" Well, let me suggest to you that SETI obviously can't solve the problem, but it can address the problem. It can address the problem by getting young people interested in science. Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right? In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up. Now, that's not true anymore. Today, you've got to spend years in grad school and post-doc positions just to figure out what the important questions are. It's hard. There's no doubt about it. And in fact, here's an example: the Higgs boson, finding the Higgs boson. Ask the next 10 people you see on the streets, "Hey, do you think it's worthwhile to spend billions of Swiss francs looking for the Higgs boson?" And I bet the answer you're going to get, is, "Well, I don't know what the Higgs boson is, and I don't know if it's important." And probably most of the people wouldn't even know the value of a Swiss franc, okay? And yet we're spending billions of Swiss francs on this problem. Okay? So that doesn't get people interested in science because they can't comprehend what it's about. SETI, on the other hand, is really simple. We're going to use these big antennas and we're going to try to eavesdrop on signals. Everybody can understand that. Yes, technologically, it's very sophisticated, but everybody gets the idea. So that's one thing. The other thing is, it's exciting science. It's exciting because we're naturally interested in other intelligent beings, and I think that's part of our hardwiring. I mean, we're hardwired to be interested in beings that might be, if you will, competitors, or if you're the romantic sort, possibly even mates. Okay? I mean, this is analogous to our interest in things that have big teeth. Right? We're interested in things that have big teeth, and you can see the evolutionary value of that, and you can also see the practical consequences by watching Animal Planet. You notice they make very few programs about gerbils. It's mostly about things that have big teeth. Okay, so we're interested in these sorts of things. And not just us. It's also kids. This allows you to pay it forward by using this subject as a hook to science, because SETI involves all kinds of science, obviously biology, obviously astronomy, but also geology, also chemistry, various scientific disciplines all can be presented in the guise of, "We're looking for E.T." So to me this is interesting and important, and in fact, it's my policy, even though I give a lot of talks to adults, you give talks to adults, and two days later they're back where they were. But if you give talks to kids, you know, one in 50 of them, some light bulb goes off, and they think, "Gee, I'd never thought of that," and then they go, you know, read a book or a magazine or whatever. They get interested in something. Now it's my theory, supported only by anecdotal, personal anecdotal evidence, but nonetheless, that kids get interested in something between the ages of eight and 11. You've got to get them there. So, all right, I give talks to adults, that's fine, but I try and make 10 percent of the talks that I give, I try and make those for kids. I remember when a guy came to our high school, actually, it was actually my junior high school. I was in sixth grade. And he gave some talk. All I remember from it was one word: electronics. It was like Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate," right, when he said "plastics," whatever that means, plastics. All right, so the guy said electronics. I don't remember anything else. In fact, I don't remember anything that my sixth grade teacher said all year, but I remember electronics. And so I got interested in electronics, and you know, I studied to get my ham license. I was wiring up stuff. Here I am at about 15 or something, doing that sort of stuff. Okay? That had a big effect on me. So that's my point, that you can have a big effect on these kids. In fact, this reminds me, I don't know, a couple years ago I gave a talk at a school in Palo Alto where there were about a dozen 11-year-olds that had come to this talk. I had been brought in to talk to these kids for an hour. Eleven-year-olds, they're all sitting in a little semi-circle looking up at me with big eyes, and I started, there was a white board behind me, and I started off by writing a one with 22 zeroes after it, and I said, "All right, now look, this is the number of stars in the visible universe, and this number is so big there's not even a name for it." And one of these kids shot up his hand, and he said, "Well, actually there is a name for it. It's a sextra-quadra-hexa-something or other." Right? Now, that kid was wrong by four orders of magnitude, but there was no doubt about it, these kids were smart. Okay? So I stopped giving the lecture. All they wanted to do was ask questions. In fact, my last comments to these kids, at the end I said, "You know, you kids are smarter than the people I work with." Now — (Laughter) They didn't even care about that. What they wanted was my email address so they could ask me more questions. (Laughter) Let me just say, look, my job is a privilege because we're in a special time. Previous generations couldn't do this experiment at all. In another generation down the line, I think we will have succeeded. So to me, it is a privilege, and when I look in the mirror, the facts are that I really don't see myself. What I see is the generation behind me. These are some kids from the Huff School, fourth graders. I talked there, what, two weeks ago, something like that. I think that if you can instill some interest in science and how it works, well, that's a payoff beyond easy measure. Thank you very much. (Applause)