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The world needs all kinds of minds

{0: 'Through groundbreaking research and the lens of her own autism, Temple Grandin brings startling insight into two worlds.'}

TED2010

I think I'll start out and just talk a little bit about what exactly autism is. Autism is a very big continuum that goes from very severe — the child remains nonverbal — all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers. And I actually feel at home here, because there's a lot of autism genetics here. (Laughter) You wouldn't have any — (Applause) It's a continuum of traits. When does a nerd turn into Asperger, which is just mild autism? I mean, Einstein and Mozart and Tesla would all be probably diagnosed as autistic spectrum today. And one of the things that is really going to concern me is getting these kids to be the ones that are going to invent the next energy things that Bill Gates talked about this morning. OK, now, if you want to understand autism: animals. I want to talk to you now about different ways of thinking. You have to get away from verbal language. I think in pictures. I don't think in language. Now, the thing about the autistic mind is it attends to details. This is a test where you either have to pick out the big letters or the little letters, and the autistic mind picks out the little letters more quickly. And the thing is, the normal brain ignores the details. Well, if you're building a bridge, details are pretty important because it'll fall down if you ignore the details. And one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today is things are getting too abstract. People are getting away from doing hands-on stuff. I'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out the hands-on classes, because art, and classes like that — those are the classes where I excelled. In my work with cattle, I noticed a lot of little things that most people don't notice would make the cattle balk. For example, this flag waving right in front of the veterinary facility. This feed yard was going to tear down their whole veterinary facility; all they needed to do was move the flag. Rapid movement, contrast. In the early '70s when I started, I got right down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing. People thought that was crazy. A coat on a fence would make them balk, shadows would make them balk, a hose on the floor — people weren't noticing these things. A chain hanging down ... And that's shown very, very nicely in the movie. In fact, I loved the movie, how they duplicated all my projects. That's the geek side. My drawings got to star in the movie, too. And, actually, it's called "Temple Grandin," not "Thinking in Pictures." So what is thinking in pictures? It's literally movies in your head. My mind works like Google for images. When I was a young kid, I didn't know my thinking was different. I thought everybody thought in pictures. Then when I did my book, "Thinking in Pictures," I started interviewing people about how they think. And I was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different. Like if I say, "Think about a church steeple," most people get this sort of generalized generic one. Now, maybe that's not true in this room, but it's going to be true in a lot of different places. I see only specific pictures. They flash up into my memory, just like Google for pictures. And in the movie, they've got a great scene in there, where the word "shoe" is said, and a whole bunch of '50s and '60s shoes pop into my imagination. OK, there's my childhood church; that's specific. There's some more, Fort Collins. OK, how about famous ones? And they just kind of come up, kind of like this. Just really quickly, like Google for pictures. And they come up one at a time, and then I think, "OK, well, maybe we can have it snow, or we can have a thunderstorm," and I can hold it there and turn them into videos. Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities. And I've worked really hard on improving how cattle are treated at the slaughter plant. I'm not going to go into any gucky slaughter slides. I've got that stuff up on YouTube, if you want to look at it. (Laughter) But one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could test-run a piece of equipment in my mind, just like a virtual reality computer system. And this is an aerial view of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie. That was like just so super cool. And there were a lot of, kind of, Asperger types and autism types working out there on the movie set, too. (Laughter) But one of the things that really worries me is: Where's the younger version of those kids going today? They're not ending up in Silicon Valley, where they belong. (Laughter) (Applause) One of the things I learned very early on because I wasn't that social, is I had to sell my work, and not myself. And the way I sold livestock jobs is I showed off my drawings, I showed off pictures of things. Another thing that helped me as a little kid is, boy, in the '50s, you were taught manners. You were taught you can't pull the merchandise off the shelves in the store and throw it around. When kids get to be in third or fourth grade, you might see that this kid's going to be a visual thinker, drawing in perspective. Now, I want to emphasize that not every autistic kid is going to be a visual thinker. Now, I had this brain scan done several years ago, and I used to joke around about having a gigantic Internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex. This is tensor imaging. And my great big Internet trunk line is twice as big as the control's. The red lines there are me, and the blue lines are the sex and age-matched control. And there I got a gigantic one, and the control over there, the blue one, has got a really small one. And some of the research now is showing that people on the spectrum actually think with the primary visual cortex. Now, the thing is, the visual thinker is just one kind of mind. You see, the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind — good at one thing, bad at something else. And where I was bad was algebra. And I was never allowed to take geometry or trig. Gigantic mistake. I'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra, go right to geometry and trig. Now, another kind of mind is the pattern thinker. More abstract. These are your engineers, your computer programmers. This is pattern thinking. That praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper — no scotch tape, no cuts. And there in the background is the pattern for folding it. Here are the types of thinking: photo-realistic visual thinkers, like me; pattern thinkers, music and math minds. Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading. You also will see these kind of problems with kids that are dyslexic. You'll see these different kinds of minds. And then there's a verbal mind, they know every fact about everything. Now, another thing is the sensory issues. I was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face. And I came in half an hour beforehand so I could have it put on and kind of get used to it, and they got it bent so it's not hitting my chin. But sensory is an issue. Some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights; others have problems with sound sensitivity. You know, it's going to be variable. Now, visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight into the animal mind. Because think about it: an animal is a sensory-based thinker, not verbal — thinks in pictures, thinks in sounds, thinks in smells. Think about how much information there is on the local fire hydrant. He knows who's been there — (Laughter) When they were there. Are they friend or foe? Is there anybody he can go mate with? There's a ton of information on that fire hydrant. It's all very detailed information. And looking at these kind of details gave me a lot of insight into animals. Now, the animal mind, and also my mind, puts sensory-based information into categories. Man on a horse, and a man on the ground — that is viewed as two totally different things. You could have a horse that's been abused by a rider. They'll be absolutely fine with the veterinarian and with the horseshoer, but you can't ride him. You have another horse, where maybe the horseshoer beat him up, and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground with the veterinarian, but a person can ride him. Cattle are the same way. Man on a horse, a man on foot — they're two different things. You see, it's a different picture. See, I want you to think about just how specific this is. Now, this ability to put information into categories, I find a lot of people are not very good at this. When I'm out troubleshooting equipment or problems with something in a plant, they don't seem to be able to figure out: "Do I have a training-people issue? Or do I have something wrong with the equipment?" In other words, categorize equipment problem from a people problem. I find a lot of people have difficulty doing that. Now, let's say I figure out it's an equipment problem. Is it a minor problem, with something simple I can fix? Or is the whole design of the system wrong? People have a hard time figuring that out. Let's just look at something like, you know, solving problems with making airlines safer. Yeah, I'm a million-mile flier. I do lots and lots of flying, and if I was at the FAA, what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of? It would be their airplane tails. You know, five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years, the tail either came off, or steering stuff inside the tail broke in some way. It's tails, pure and simple. And when the pilots walk around the plane, guess what? They can't see that stuff inside the tail. Now as I think about that, I'm pulling up all of that specific information. It's specific. See, my thinking's bottom-up. I take all the little pieces and I put the pieces together like a puzzle. Now, here is a horse that was deathly afraid of black cowboy hats. He'd been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat. White cowboy hats, that was absolutely fine. Now, the thing is, the world is going to need all of the different kinds of minds to work together. We've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds. And one of the things that is driving me really crazy as I travel around and I do autism meetings, is I'm seeing a lot of smart, geeky, nerdy kids, and they just aren't very social, and nobody's working on developing their interest in something like science. And this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher. My science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie. I was a goofball student when I was in high school. I just didn't care at all about studying, until I had Mr. Carlock's science class. He was now Dr. Carlock in the movie. And he got me challenged to figure out an optical illusion room. This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids interesting stuff. You know, one of the things that I think maybe TED ought to do is tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on TED, and there's all kinds of great stuff on the Internet to get these kids turned on. Because I'm seeing a lot of these geeky, nerdy kids, and the teachers out in the Midwest and other parts of the country when you get away from these tech areas, they don't know what to do with these kids. And they're not going down the right path. The thing is, you can make a mind to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind, or your mind can be wired to be more social. And what some of the research now has shown in autism is there may by extra wiring back here in the really brilliant mind, and we lose a few social circuits here. It's kind of a trade-off between thinking and social. And then you can get to the point where it's so severe, you're going to have a person that's going to be non-verbal. In the normal human mind, language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals. This is the work of Dr. Bruce Miller. He studied Alzheimer's patients that had frontal temporal lobe dementia. And the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain. And then this artwork came out of somebody who used to install stereos in cars. Now, Van Gogh doesn't know anything about physics, but I think it's very interesting that there was some work done to show that this eddy pattern in this painting followed a statistical model of turbulence, which brings up the whole interesting idea of maybe some of this mathematical patterns is in our own head. And the Wolfram stuff — I was taking notes and writing down all the search words I could use, because I think that's going to go on in my autism lectures. We've got to show these kids interesting stuff. And they've taken out the auto-shop class and the drafting class and the art class. I mean, art was my best subject in school. We've got to think about all these different kinds of minds, and we've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds, because we absolutely are going to need these kinds of people in the future. And let's talk about jobs. OK, my science teacher got me studying, because I was a goofball that didn't want to study. But you know what? I was getting work experience. I'm seeing too many of these smart kids who haven't learned basic things, like how to be on time — I was taught that when I was eight years old. How to have table manners at granny's Sunday party. I was taught that when I was very, very young. And when I was 13, I had a job at a dressmaker's shop sewing clothes. I did internships in college, I was building things, and I also had to learn how to do assignments. You know, all I wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when I was little. My mother said, "Well let's do a picture of something else." They've got to learn how to do something else. Let's say the kid is fixated on Legos. Let's get him working on building different things. The thing about the autistic mind is it tends to be fixated. Like if the kid loves race cars, let's use race cars for math. Let's figure out how long it takes a race car to go a certain distance. In other words, use that fixation in order to motivate that kid, that's one of the things we need to do. I really get fed up when the teachers, especially when you get away from this part of the country, they don't know what to do with these smart kids. It just drives me crazy. What can visual thinkers do when they grow up? They can do graphic design, all kinds of stuff with computers, photography, industrial design. The pattern thinkers — they're the ones that are going to be your mathematicians, your software engineers, your computer programmers, all of those kinds of jobs. And then you've got the word minds; they make great journalists, and they also make really, really good stage actors. Because the thing about being autistic is, I had to learn social skills like being in a play. You just kind of ... you just have to learn it. And we need to be working with these students. And this brings up mentors. You know, my science teacher was not an accredited teacher. He was a NASA space scientist. Some states now are getting it to where, if you have a degree in biology or in chemistry, you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry. We need to be doing that. Because what I'm observing is, the good teachers, for a lot of these kids, are out in the community colleges. But we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools. Another thing that can be very, very, very successful is: there's a lot of people that may have retired from working in the software industry, and they can teach your kid. And it doesn't matter if what they teach them is old, because what you're doing is you're lighting the spark. You're getting that kid turned on. And you get him turned on, then you'll learn all the new stuff. Mentors are just essential. I cannot emphasize enough what my science teacher did for me. And we've got to mentor them, hire them. And if you bring them in for internships in your companies, the thing about the autism, Asperger-y kind of mind, you've got to give them a specific task. Don't just say, "Design new software." You've got to tell them something more specific: "We're designing software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing, and it can only use so much memory." That's the kind of specificity you need. Well, that's the end of my talk. And I just want to thank everybody for coming. It was great to be here. (Applause) (Applause ends) Oh — you have a question for me? OK. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you so much for that. You know, you once wrote — I like this quote: "If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave." (Laughter) Temple Grandin: Because who do you think made the first stone spear? It was the Asperger guy, and if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there'd be no more Silicon Valley, and the energy crisis would not be solved. (Applause) CA: I want to ask you a couple other questions, and if any of these feel inappropriate, it's OK just to say, "Next question." But if there is someone here who has an autistic child, or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them, what advice would you give them? TG: Well, first of all, we've got to look at age. If you have a two, three or four-year-old, no speech, no social interaction, I can't emphasize enough: Don't wait. You need at least 20 hours a week of one-to-one teaching. The thing is, autism comes in different degrees. About half of the people on the spectrum are not going to learn to talk, and they won't be working in Silicon Valley. That would not be a reasonable thing for them to do. But then you get these smart, geeky kids with a touch of autism, and that's where you've got to get them turned on with doing interesting things. I got social interaction through shared interests — I rode horses with other kids, I made model rockets with other kids, did electronics lab with other kids. And in the '60s, it was gluing mirrors onto a rubber membrane on a speaker to make a light show. That was, like, we considered that super cool. (Laughter) CA: Is it unrealistic for them to hope or think that that child loves them, as some might, as most, wish? TG: Well, I tell you, that child will be loyal, and if your house is burning down, they're going to get you out of it. CA: Wow. So most people, if you ask them what they're most passionate about, they'd say things like, "My kids" or "My lover." What are you most passionate about? TG: I'm passionate about that the things I do are going to make the world a better place. When I have a mother of an autistic child say, "My kid went to college because of your book or one of your lectures," that makes me happy. You know, the slaughter plants I worked with in the '80s; they were absolutely awful. I developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants, where you just measure outcomes: How many cattle fell down? How many got poked with the prodder? How many cattle are mooing their heads off? And it's very, very simple. You directly observe a few simple things. It's worked really well. I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that, and a lot less abstract stuff. CA: Totally. (Applause) CA: When we were talking on the phone, one of the things you said that really astonished me was that one thing you were passionate about was server farms. Tell me about that. TG: Well, the reason why I got really excited when I read about that, it contains knowledge. It's libraries. And to me, knowledge is something that is extremely valuable. So, maybe over 10 years ago now, our library got flooded. This is before the Internet got really big. And I was really upset about all the books being wrecked, because it was knowledge being destroyed. And server farms, or data centers, are great libraries of knowledge. CA: Temple, can I just say, it's an absolute delight to have you at TED. Thank you so much. TG: Well, thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause)

How brains learn to see

{0: 'Pawan Sinha researches how our brains interpret what our eyes see -- and uses that research to give blind children the gift of sight. '}

TEDIndia 2009

If you are a blind child in India, you will very likely have to contend with at least two big pieces of bad news. The first bad news is that the chances of getting treatment are extremely slim to none, and that's because most of the blindness alleviation programs in the country are focused on adults, and there are very, very few hospitals that are actually equipped to treat children. In fact, if you were to be treated, you might well end up being treated by a person who has no medical credentials as this case from Rajasthan illustrates. This is a three-year-old orphan girl who had cataracts. So, her caretakers took her to the village medicine man, and instead of suggesting to the caretakers that the girl be taken to a hospital, the person decided to burn her abdomen with red-hot iron bars to drive out the demons. The second piece of bad news will be delivered to you by neuroscientists, who will tell you that if you are older than four or five years of age, that even if you have your eye corrected, the chances of your brain learning how to see are very, very slim — again, slim or none. So when I heard these two things, it troubled me deeply, both because of personal reasons and scientific reasons. So let me first start with the personal reason. It'll sound corny, but it's sincere. That's my son, Darius. As a new father, I have a qualitatively different sense of just how delicate babies are, what our obligations are towards them and how much love we can feel towards a child. I would move heaven and earth in order to get treatment for Darius, and for me to be told that there might be other Dariuses who are not getting treatment, that's just viscerally wrong. So that's the personal reason. Scientific reason is that this notion from neuroscience of critical periods — that if the brain is older than four or five years of age, it loses its ability to learn — that doesn't sit well with me, because I don't think that idea has been tested adequately. The birth of the idea is from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel's work, two researchers who were at Harvard, and they got the Nobel Prize in 1981 for their studies of visual physiology, which are remarkably beautiful studies, but I believe some of their work has been extrapolated into the human domain prematurely. So, they did their work with kittens, with different kinds of deprivation regiments, and those studies, which date back to the '60s, are now being applied to human children. So I felt that I needed to do two things. One: provide care to children who are currently being deprived of treatment. That's the humanitarian mission. And the scientific mission would be to test the limits of visual plasticity. And these two missions, as you can tell, thread together perfectly. One adds to the other; in fact, one would be impossible without the other. So, to implement these twin missions, a few years ago, I launched Project Prakash. Prakash, as many of you know, is the Sanskrit word for light, and the idea is that in bringing light into the lives of children, we also have a chance of shedding light on some of the deepest mysteries of neuroscience. And the logo — even though it looks extremely Irish, it's actually derived from the Indian symbol of Diya, an earthen lamp. The Prakash, the overall effort has three components: outreach, to identify children in need of care; medical treatment; and in subsequent study. And I want to show you a short video clip that illustrates the first two components of this work. This is an outreach station conducted at a school for the blind. (Text: Most of the children are profoundly and permanently blind ...) Pawan Sinha: So, because this is a school for the blind, many children have permanent conditions. That's a case of microphthalmos, which is malformed eyes, and that's a permanent condition; it cannot be treated. That's an extreme of micropthalmos called enophthalmos. But, every so often, we come across children who show some residual vision, and that is a very good sign that the condition might actually be treatable. So, after that screening, we bring the children to the hospital. That's the hospital we're working with in Delhi, the Schroff Charity Eye Hospital. It has a very well-equipped pediatric ophthalmic center, which was made possible in part by a gift from the Ronald McDonald charity. So, eating burgers actually helps. (Text: Such examinations allow us to improve eye-health in many children, and ... ... help us find children who can participate in Project Prakash.) PS: So, as I zoom in to the eyes of this child, you will see the cause of his blindness. The whites that you see in the middle of his pupils are congenital cataracts, so opacities of the lens. In our eyes, the lens is clear, but in this child, the lens has become opaque, and therefore he can't see the world. So, the child is given treatment. You'll see shots of the eye. Here's the eye with the opaque lens, the opaque lens extracted and an acrylic lens inserted. And here's the same child three weeks post-operation, with the right eye open. (Applause) Thank you. So, even from that little clip, you can begin to get the sense that recovery is possible, and we have now provided treatment to over 200 children, and the story repeats itself. After treatment, the child gains significant functionality. In fact, the story holds true even if you have a person who got sight after several years of deprivation. We did a paper a few years ago about this woman that you see on the right, SRD, and she got her sight late in life, and her vision is remarkable at this age. I should add a tragic postscript to this — she died two years ago in a bus accident. So, hers is just a truly inspiring story — unknown, but inspiring story. So when we started finding these results, as you might imagine, it created quite a bit of stir in the scientific and the popular press. Here's an article in Nature that profiled this work, and another one in Time. So, we were fairly convinced — we are convinced — that recovery is feasible, despite extended visual deprivation. The next obvious question to ask: What is the process of recovery? So, the way we study that is, let's say we find a child who has light sensitivity. The child is provided treatment, and I want to stress that the treatment is completely unconditional; there is no quid pro quo. We treat many more children then we actually work with. Every child who needs treatment is treated. After treatment, about every week, we run the child on a battery of simple visual tests in order to see how their visual skills are coming on line. And we try to do this for as long as possible. This arc of development gives us unprecedented and extremely valuable information about how the scaffolding of vision gets set up. What might be the causal connections between the early developing skills and the later developing ones? And we've used this general approach to study many different visual proficiencies, but I want to highlight one particular one, and that is image parsing into objects. So, any image of the kind that you see on the left, be it a real image or a synthetic image, it's made up of little regions that you see in the middle column, regions of different colors, different luminances. The brain has this complex task of putting together, integrating, subsets of these regions into something that's more meaningful, into what we would consider to be objects, as you see on the right. And nobody knows how this integration happens, and that's the question we asked with Project Prakash. So, here's what happens very soon after the onset of sight. Here's a person who had gained sight just a couple of weeks ago, and you see Ethan Myers, a graduate student from MIT, running the experiment with him. His visual-motor coordination is quite poor, but you get a general sense of what are the regions that he's trying to trace out. If you show him real world images, if you show others like him real world images, they are unable to recognize most of the objects because the world to them is over-fragmented; it's made up of a collage, a patchwork, of regions of different colors and luminances. And that's what's indicated in the green outlines. When you ask them, "Even if you can't name the objects, just point to where the objects are," these are the regions that they point to. So the world is this complex patchwork of regions. Even the shadow on the ball becomes its own object. Interestingly enough, you give them a few months, and this is what happens. Doctor: How many are these? Patient: These are two things. Doctor: What are their shapes? Patient: Their shapes ... This one is a circle, and this is a square. PS: A very dramatic transformation has come about. And the question is: What underlies this transformation? It's a profound question, and what's even more amazing is how simple the answer is. The answer lies in motion and that's what I want to show you in the next clip. Doctor: What shape do you see here? Patient: I can't make it out. Doctor: Now? Patient: Triangle. Doctor: How many things are these? Now, how many things are these? Patient: Two. Doctor: What are these things? Patient: A square and a circle. PS: And we see this pattern over and over again. The one thing the visual system needs in order to begin parsing the world is dynamic information. So the inference we are deriving from this, and several such experiments, is that dynamic information processing, or motion processing, serves as the bedrock for building the rest of the complexity of visual processing; it leads to visual integration and eventually to recognition. This simple idea has far reaching implications. And let me just quickly mention two, one, drawing from the domain of engineering, and one from the clinic. So, from the perspective of engineering, we can ask: Goven that we know that motion is so important for the human visual system, can we use this as a recipe for constructing machine-based vision systems that can learn on their own, that don't need to be programmed by a human programmer? And that's what we're trying to do. I'm at MIT, at MIT you need to apply whatever basic knowledge you gain. So we are creating Dylan, which is a computational system with an ambitious goal of taking in visual inputs of the same kind that a human child would receive, and autonomously discovering: What are the objects in this visual input? So, don't worry about the internals of Dylan. Here, I'm just going to talk about how we test Dylan. The way we test Dylan is by giving it inputs, as I said, of the same kind that a baby, or a child in Project Prakash would get. But for a long time we couldn't quite figure out: Wow can we get these kinds of video inputs? So, I thought, could we have Darius serve as our babycam carrier, and that way get the inputs that we feed into Dylan? So that's what we did. (Laughter) I had to have long conversations with my wife. (Laughter) In fact, Pam, if you're watching this, please forgive me. So, we modified the optics of the camera in order to mimic the baby's visual acuity. As some of you might know, babyies are born pretty much legally blind. Their acuity — our acuity is 20/20; babies' acuity is like 20/800, so they are looking at the world in a very, very blurry fashion. Here's what a baby-cam video looks like. (Laughter) (Applause) Thankfully, there isn't any audio to go with this. What's amazing is that working with such highly degraded input, the baby, very quickly, is able to discover meaning in such input. But then two or three days afterward, babies begin to pay attention to their mother's or their father's face. How does that happen? We want Dylan to be able to do that, and using this mantra of motion, Dylan actually can do that. So, given that kind of video input, with just about six or seven minutes worth of video, Dylan can begin to extract patterns that include faces. So, it's an important demonstration of the power of motion. The clinical implication, it comes from the domain of autism. Visual integration has been associated with autism by several researchers. When we saw that, we asked: Could the impairment in visual integration be the manifestation of something underneath, of dynamic information processing deficiencies in autism? Because, if that hypothesis were to be true, it would have massive repercussions in our understanding of what's causing the many different aspects of the autism phenotype. What you're going to see are video clips of two children — one neurotypical, one with autism, playing Pong. So, while the child is playing Pong, we are tracking where they're looking. In red are the eye movement traces. This is the neurotypical child, and what you see is that the child is able to make cues of the dynamic information to predict where the ball is going to go. Even before the ball gets to a place, the child is already looking there. Contrast this with a child with autism playing the same game. Instead of anticipating, the child always follows where the ball has been. The efficiency of the use of dynamic information seems to be significantly compromised in autism. So we are pursuing this line of work and hopefully we'll have more results to report soon. Looking ahead, if you think of this disk as representing all of the children we've treated so far, this is the magnitude of the problem. The red dots are the children we have not treated. So, there are many, many more children who need to be treated, and in order to expand the scope of the project, we are planning on launching The Prakash Center for Children, which will have a dedicated pediatric hospital, a school for the children we are treating and also a cutting-edge research facility. The Prakash Center will integrate health care, education and research in a way that truly creates the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. So, to summarize: Prakash, in its five years of existence, it's had an impact in multiple areas, ranging from basic neuroscience plasticity and learning in the brain, to clinically relevant hypotheses like in autism, the development of autonomous machine vision systems, education of the undergraduate and graduate students, and most importantly in the alleviation of childhood blindness. And for my students and I, it's been just a phenomenal experience because we have gotten to do interesting research, while at the same time helping the many children that we have worked with. Thank you very much. (Applause)

My 5 lives as an artist

{0: "Raghava KK's paintings and drawings use cartoonish shapes and colors to examine the body, society, our world. "}

TED2010

I think it was in my second grade that I was caught drawing the bust of a nude by Michelangelo. I was sent straight away to my school principal, and my school principal, a sweet nun, looked at my book with disgust, flipped through the pages, saw all the nudes — you know, I'd been seeing my mother draw nudes and I'd copy her — and the nun slapped me on my face and said, "Sweet Jesus, this kid has already begun." I had no clue what she was talking about, but it was convincing enough for me never to draw again until the ninth grade. Thanks to a really boring lecture, I started caricaturing my teachers in school. And, you know, I got a lot of popularity. I don't play sports. I'm really bad at sports. I don't have the fanciest gadgets at home. I'm not on top of the class. So for me, cartooning gave me a sense of identity. I got popular, but I was scared I'd get caught again. So what I did was I quickly put together a collage of all the teachers I had drawn, glorified my school principal, put him right on top, and gifted it to him. He had a good laugh at the other teachers and put it up on the notice board. (Laughter) This is a part of that. And I became a school hero. All my seniors knew me. I felt really special. I have to tell you a little bit about my family. That's my mother. I love her to bits. She's the one who taught me how to draw and, more importantly, how to love. She's a bit of a hippie. She said, "Don't say that," but I'm saying it anyway. The rest of my family are boring academics, busy collecting Ivy League decals for our classic Ambassador car. My father's a little different. My father believed in a holistic approach to living, and, you know, every time he taught us, he'd say, "I hate these books, because these books are hijacked by Industrial Revolution." While he still held that worldview, I was 16, I got the best lawyer in town, my older brother Karthik, and I sat him down, and I said, "Pa, from today onwards I've decided I'm going to be disciplined, I'm going to be curious, I'm going to learn something new every day, I'm going to be very hard working, and I'm not going to depend on you emotionally or financially." And he was very impressed. He was all tearing up. Ready to hug me. And I said, "Hold that thought." I said, "Can I quit school then?" But, to cut a long story short, I quit school to pursue a career as a cartoonist. I must have done about 30,000 caricatures. I would do birthday parties, weddings, divorces, anything for anyone who wanted to use my services. But, most importantly, while I was traveling, I taught children cartooning, and in exchange, I learned how to be spontaneous. And mad and crazy and fun. When I started teaching them, I said let me start doing this professionally. When I was 18 I started my own school. However, an 18 year-old trying to start a school is not easy unless you have a big patron or a big supporter. So I was flipping through the pages of the Times of India when I saw that the Prime Minister of India was visiting my home town, Bangalore. And, you know, just like how every cartoonist knows Bush here, and if you had to meet Bush, it would be the funnest thing because his face was a cartoonist's delight. I had to meet my Prime Minister. I went to the place where his helicopter was about to land. I saw layers of security. I caricatured my way through three layers by just impressing the guards, but I got stuck. I got stuck at the third. And what happened was, to my luck, I saw a nuclear scientist at whose party I had done cartoons. I ran up to him, and said, "Hello, sir. How do you do?" He said, "What are you doing here, Raghava?" I said, "I'm here to meet the Prime Minister." He said, "Oh, so am I." I hopped into his car, and off we went through the remaining layers of security. (Applause) Thank you. I sat him down, I caricatured him, and since then I've caricatured hundreds of celebrities. This is one I remember fondly. Salman Rushdie was pissed-off I think because I altered the map of New York, if you notice. (Laughter) Anyway, the next slide I'm about to show you — (Laughter) Should I just turn that off? The next slide I'm about to show you, is a little more serious. I was hesitant to include this in my presentation because this cartoon was published soon after 9/11. What was, for me, a very naive observation, turned out to be a disaster. That evening, I came home to hundreds of hate mails, hundreds of people telling me how they could have lived another day without seeing this. I was also asked to leave the organization, a cartoonists' organization in America, that for me was my lifeline. That's when I realized, you know, cartoons are really powerful, art comes with responsibility. Anyway, what I did was I decided that I need to take a break. I quit my job at the papers, I closed my school, and I wrapped up my pencils and my brushes and inks, and I decided to go traveling. When I went traveling, I remember, I met this fabulous old man, who I met when I was caricaturing, who turned out to be an artist, in Italy. He invited me to his studio. He said, "Come and visit." When I went, I saw the ghastliest thing ever. I saw this dead, naked effigy of himself hanging from the ceiling. I said, "Oh, my God. What is that?" And I asked him, and he said, "Oh, that thing? In the night, I die. In the morning, I am born again." I thought he was koo koo, but something about that really stuck. I loved it. I thought there was something really beautiful about that. So I said, "I am dead, so I need to be born again." So, I wanted to be a painter like him, except, I don't know how to paint. So, I tried going to the art store. You know, there are a hundred types of brushes. Forget it, they will confuse you even if you know how to draw. So I decided, I'm going to learn to paint by myself. I'm going to show you a very quick clip to show you how I painted and a little bit about my city, Bangalore. (Music) They had to be larger than life. Everything had to be larger. The next painting was even bigger. And even bigger. And for me it was, I had to dance while I painted. It was so exciting. Except, I even started painting dancers. Here for example is a Flamenco dancer, except there was one problem. I didn't know the dance form, so I started following them, and I made some money, sold my paintings and would rush off to France or Spain and work with them. That's Pepe Linares, the renowned Flamenco singer. But I had one problem, my paintings never danced. As much energy as I put into them while making them, they never danced. So I decided — I had this crazy epiphany at two in the morning. I called my friends, painted on their bodies, and had them dance in front of a painting. And, all of a sudden, my paintings came alive. And then I was fortunate enough to actually perform this in California with Velocity Circus. And I sat like you guys there in the audience. And I saw my work come alive. You know, normally you work in isolation, and you show at a gallery, but here, the work was coming alive, and it had some other artists working with me. The collaborative effort was fabulous. I said, I'm going to collaborate with anybody and everybody I meet. I started doing fashion. This is a fashion show we held in London. The best collaboration, of course, is with children. They are ruthless, they are honest, but they're full of energy and fun. This is a work, a library I designed for the Robin Hood Foundation. And I must say, I spent time in the Bronx working with these kids. And, in exchange for me working with them, they taught me how to be cool. I don't think I've succeeded, but they've taught me. They said, "Stop saying sorry. Say, my bad." (Laughter) Then I said, all this is good, but I want to paint like a real painter. American education is so expensive. I was in India, and I was walking down the streets, and I saw a billboard painter. And these guys paint humongous paintings, and they look really good. And I wondered how they did it from so close. So, one day I had the opportunity to meet one of these guys, and I said, "How do you paint like that? Who taught you?" And he said, "Oh, it's very easy. I can teach you, but we're leaving the city, because billboard painters are a dying, extinct bunch of artists, because digital printing has totally replaced them and hijacked them." I said, in exchange for education in how to paint, I will support them, and I started a company. And since then, I've been painting all over the place. This is a painting I did of my wife in my apartment. This is another painting. And, in fact, I started painting on anything, and started sending them around town. Since I mentioned my wife, the most important collaboration has been with her, Netra. Netra and I met when she was 18. I must have been 19 and a half then, and it was love at first sight. I lived in India. She lived in America. She'd come every two months to visit me, and then I said I'm the man, I'm the man, and I have to reciprocate. I have to travel seven oceans, and I have to come and see you. I did that twice, and I went broke. So then I said, "Nets, what do I do?" She said, "Why don't you send me your paintings? My dad knows a bunch of rich guys. We'll try and con them into buying it, and then..." But it turned out, after I sent the works to her, that her dad's friends, like most of you, are geeks. I'm joking. (Laughter) No, they were really big geeks, and they didn't know much about art. So Netra was stuck with 30 paintings of mine. So what we did was we rented a little van and we drove all over the east coast trying to sell it. She contacted anyone and everyone who was willing to buy my work. She made enough money, she sold off the whole collection and made enough money to move me for four years with lawyers, a company, everything, and she became my manager. That's us in New York. Notice one thing, we're equal here. Something happened along the line. (Laughter) But this brought me — with Netra managing my career — it brought me a lot of success. I was really happy. I thought of myself as a bit of a rockstar. I loved the attention. This is all the press we got, and we said, it's time to celebrate. And I said that the best way to celebrate is to marry Netra. I said, "Let's get married." And I said, "Not just married. Let's invite everyone who's helped us, all the people who bought our work." And you won't believe it, we put together a list of 7,000 people, who had made a difference — a ridiculous list, but I was determined to bring them to India, so — a lot of them were in India. 150 artists volunteered to help me with my wedding. We had fashion designers, installation artists, models, we had makeup artists, jewelry designers, all kinds of people working with me to make my wedding an art installation. And I had a special installation in tribute to my in-laws. I had the vegetable carvers work on that for me. But all this excitement led to the press writing about us. We were in the papers, we're still in the news three years later, but, unfortunately, something tragic happened right after. My mother fell very ill. I love my mother and I was told all of a sudden that she was going to die. And they said you have to say bye to her, you have to do what you have to do. And I was devastated. I had shows booked up for another year. I was on a high. And I couldn't. I could not. My life was not exuberant. I could not live this larger than life person. I started exploring the darker abscesses of the human mind. Of course, my work turned ugly, but another thing happened. I lost all my audiences. The Bollywood stars who I would party with and buy my work disappeared. The collectors, the friends, the press, everyone said, "Nice, but thank you." "No thank you," was more like it. But I wanted people to actually feel my work from their gut, because I was painting it from my gut. If they wanted beauty, I said, this is the beauty I'm willing to give you. It's politicized. Of course, none of them liked it. My works also turned autobiographical. At this point, something else happened. A very, very dear friend of mine came out of the closet, and in India at that time, it was illegal to be gay, and it's disgusting to see how people respond to a gay person. I was very upset. I remember the time when my mother used to dress me up as a little girl — that's me there — because she wanted a girl, and she has only boys. (Laughter) Anyway, I don't know what my friends are going to say after this talk. It's a secret. So, after this, my works turned a little violent. I talked about this masculinity that one need not perform. And I talked about the weakness of male sexuality. This time, not only did my collectors disappear, the political activists decided to ban me and to threaten me and to forbid me from showing. It turned nasty, and I'm a bit of a chicken. I can't deal with any threat. This was a big threat. So, I decided it was time to end and go back home. This time I said let's try something different. I need to be reborn again. And I thought the best way, as most of you know who have children, the best way to have a new lease on life, is to have a child. I decided to have a child, and before I did that, I quickly studied what can go wrong. How can a family get dysfunctional? And Rudra was born. That's my little son. And two magical things happened after he was born. My mother miraculously recovered after a serious operation, and this man was elected president of this country. You know I sat at home and I watched. I teared up and I said that's where I want to be. So Netra and I wound up our life, closed up everything we had, and we decided to move to New York. And this was just eight months ago. I moved back to New York, my work has changed. Everything about my work has become more whimsical. This one is called "What the Fuck Was I Thinking?" It talks about mental incest. You know, I may appear to be a very nice, clean, sweet boy. But I'm not. I'm capable of thinking anything. But I'm very civil in my action, I assure you. (Laughter) These are just different cartoons. And, before I go, I want to tell you a little story. I was talking to mother and father this morning, and my dad said, "I know you have so much you want to say, but you have to talk about your work with children." So I said, okay. I work with children all over the world, and that's an entirely different talk, but I want to leave you with one story that really, really inspired me. I met Belinda when she was 16. I was 17. I was in Australia, and Belinda had cancer, and I was told she's not going to live very long. They, in fact, told me three weeks. I walk into her room, and there was a shy girl, and she was bald, and she was trying to hide her baldness. I whipped out my pen, and I started drawing on her head and I drew a crown for her. And then, we started talking, and we spent a lovely time — I told her how I ended up in Australia, how I backpacked and who I conned, and how I got a ticket, and all the stories. And I drew it out for her. And then I left. Belinda died and within a few days of her death, they published a book for her, and she used my cartoon on the cover. And she wrote a little note, she said, "Hey Rags, thank you for the magic carpet ride around the world." For me, my art is my magic carpet ride. I hope you will join me in this magic carpet ride, and touch children and be honest. Thank you so much. (Applause)

The riddle of experience vs. memory

{0: "Widely regarded as the world's most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics -- exploring the irrational ways we make decisions about risk."}

TED2010

Everybody talks about happiness these days. I had somebody count the number of books with "happiness" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more. There is a huge wave of interest in happiness, among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier. But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness. And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps. This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is. The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. It turns out that the word "happiness" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things. I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is. The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory; basically, it's between being happy in your life, and being happy about your life or happy with your life. And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness. And the third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. There's just no way of getting it right. Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story, and that was a story — He said he'd been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn't. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches — you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt now when I touch you here?" And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that. Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness. Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories — it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. And let me begin with one example. This is an old study. Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. Here are two patients, those are their recordings. And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?" And it's a very easy question. Clearly, Patient B suffered more — his colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had, Patient B had, and more. But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" And here is a surprise. The surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. The stories of the colonoscopies were different, and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends. And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great — but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end; it's a bad story. How do we know that? Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory. Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. Now, what you could do with Patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does work — you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before. And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A a lot better off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. What defines a story? And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated. Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other. And you can ask: What happens to these moments? And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever. I mean, most of the moments of our life — and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 — most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us. So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story. Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need. I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case; that is, we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self. And this is a bit hard to justify I think. I mean, how much do we consume our memories? That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self. And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had, and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other vacations. And I probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years. Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour. Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half. There seems to be a discrepancy. Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of this, there is a genuine question: Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences? So I want you to think about a thought experiment. Imagine that for your next vacation, you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter) And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer, and if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves. Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self. So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self? And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life? And they're all — happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. What are the emotions that can be measured? And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. This is not about how happily a person lives. It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. Very different notion. Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way. The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately. The Gallup Organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences, and there have been other efforts along those lines. So in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. And the main lesson I think that we have learned is they are really different. You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa. Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about .5. What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, "Oh his father is six feet tall," how much would you know about his height? Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. You have that much uncertainty. If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. So the correlation is low. We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. We know that money is very important, goals are very important. We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. It is a completely different notion. Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life, and we actually live. So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get to the correct answer. When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California if, say, you live in Ohio. (Laughter) And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that contrast, say, is in climate. Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are. But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up — some people may end up moving to California. And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. Well, their experiencing self is not going to get happier. We know that. But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio, and they will feel they made the right decision. It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you. Thank you so much. Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey. Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now? Daniel Kahneman: Sure. I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self. When we looked at how feelings, vary with income. And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans — and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, so it's a large representative sample — below an income of 600,000 dollars a year... CA: 60,000. DK: 60,000. (Laughter) 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat. Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly. In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. That does not hold for emotions. CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about, like for example, taxation policy and so forth. Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally, would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it? DK: You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy. The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, no question about that, but in the U.K., it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. It's going to take a while, and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon. How to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self. This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come. In the United States, efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population. This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two, part of national statistics. CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will — or at least should be — the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics. Thank you, Danny Kahneman.

The rise of cricket, the rise of India

{0: 'Harsha Bhogle can talk about the business side of cricket, the technicalities of play and the psychology of the players with equal authority.'}

TEDIndia 2009

So, what I'm going to do is just give you the latest episode of India's — maybe the world's — longest running soap opera, which is cricket. And may it run forever, because it gives people like me a living. It's got everything that you'd want a normal soap opera to want: It's got love, joy, happiness, sadness, tears, laughter, lots of deceit, intrigue. And like all good soaps, it jumps 20 years when the audience interest changes. And that's exactly what cricket has done. It's jumped 20 years into 20-over game. And that's what I'm going to talk about, how a small change leads to a very big revolution. But it wasn't always like that. Cricket wasn't always this speed-driven generations game. There was a time when you played cricket, you played timeless test matches, when you played on till the game got over. And there was this game in March 1939 that started on the third of March and ended on the 14th of March. And it only ended because the English cricketers had to go from Durban to Cape Town, which is a two-hour train journey, to catch the ship that left on the 17th, because the next ship wasn't around for a long time. So, the match was ended in between. And one of the English batsmen said, "You know what? Another half an hour and we would have won." (Laughter) Another half an hour after 12 days. There were two Sundays in between. But of course, Sundays are church days, so you don't play on Sundays. And one day it rained, so they all sat around making friends with each other. But there is a reason why India fell in love with cricket: because we had about the same pace of life. (Laughter) The Mahabharata was like that as well, wasn't it? You fought by day, then it was sunset, so everyone went back home. And then you worked out your strategy, and you came and fought the next day, and you went back home again. The only difference between the Mahabharata and our cricket was that in cricket, everybody was alive to come back and fight the next day. Princes patronize the game, not because they love the game, but because it was a means of ingratiating themselves to the British rulers. But there is one other reason why India fell in love with cricket, which was, all you needed was a plank of wood and a rubber ball, and any number of people could play it anywhere. Take a look: You could play it in the dump with some rocks over there, you could play it in a little alley — you couldn't hit square anywhere, because the bat hit the wall; don't forget the air conditioning and the cable wires. (Laughter) You could play it on the banks of the Ganges — that's as clean as the Ganges has been for a long time. Or you could play many games in one small patch of land, even if you didn't know which game you were actually in. (Laughter) As you can see, you can play anywhere. But slowly the game moved on, you know, finally. You don't always have five days. So, we moved on, and we started playing 50-over cricket. And then an enormous accident took place. In Indian sport we don't make things happen, accidents happen and we're in the right place at the right time, sometimes. And we won this World Cup in 1983. And suddenly we fell in love with the 50-over game, and we played it virtually every day. There was more 50-over cricket than anywhere. But there was another big date. 1983 was when we won the World Cup. 1991,'92, we found a finance minister and a prime minister willing to let the world look at India, rather than be this great country of intrigue and mystery in this closed country. And so we allowed multinationals into India. We cut customs duties, we reduced import duties, and we got all the multinationals coming in, with multinational budgets, who looked at per-capita income and got very excited about the possibilities in India, and were looking for a vehicle to reach every Indian. And there are only two vehicles in India — one real, one scripted. The scripted one is what you see in the movies, the real one was cricket. And so one of my friends sitting right here in front of me, Ravi Dhariwal from Pepsi, decided he's going to take it all over the world. And Pepsi was this big revolution, because they started taking cricket all over. And so cricket started becoming big; cricket started bringing riches in. Television started covering cricket. For a long time television said, "We won't cover cricket unless you pay us to cover it." Then they said, "OK, the next rights are sold for 55 million dollars. The next rights are sold for 612 million dollars." So, it's a bit of a curve, that. And then another big accident happened in our cricket. England invented 20 overs cricket, and said, "The world must play 20 overs cricket." Just as England invented cricket, and made the rest of the world play it. Thank God for them. (Laughter) And so, India had to go and play the T20 World Cup, you see. India didn't want to play the T20 World Cup. But we were forced to play it by an 8-1 margin. And then something very dramatic happened. We got to the final, and then this moment, that will remain enshrined forever, for everybody, take a look. (Crowd cheering) The Pakistani batsman trying to clear the fielder. Announcer: And Zishan takes it! India wins! What a match for a Twenty20 final. India, the world champions. (Cheering) India, T20 champions. But what a game we had, M. S. Dhoni got it right in the air, but Misbah-ul-Haq, what a player. A massive, massive success: India, the world TT champions. Harsha Bhogle: Suddenly India discovered this power of 20-overs cricket. The accident, of course, there, was that the batsman thought the bowler was bowling fast. (Laughter) If he had bowled fast, the ball would have gone where it was meant to go, but it didn't go. And we suddenly discovered that we could be good at this game. And what it also did was it led to a certain pride in the fact that India could be the best in the world. It was at a time when investment was coming in, India was feeling a little more confident about itself. And so there was a feeling that there was great pride in what we can do. And thankfully for all of us, the English are very good at inventing things, and then the gracious people that they are, they let the world become very good at it. (Laughter) And so England invented T20 cricket, and allowed India to hijack it. It was not like reengineering that we do in medicine, we just took it straight away, as is. (Laughter) And so, we launched our own T20 league. Six weeks, city versus city. It was a new thing for us. We had only ever supported our country — the only two areas in which India was very proud about their country, representing itself on the field. One was war, the Indian army, which we don't like to happen very often. The other was Indian cricket. Now, suddenly we had to support city leagues. But the people getting into these city leagues were people who were taking their cues from the West. America is a home of leagues. And they said, "Right, we'll build some glitzy leagues here in India." But was India ready for it? Because cricket, for a long time in India was always organized. It was never promoted, it was never sold — it was organized. And look what they did with our beautiful, nice, simple family game. All of a sudden, you had that happening. (Music) An opening ceremony to match every other. This was an India that was buying Corvettes. This was an India that was buying Jaguar. This was an India that was adding more mobile phones per month than New Zealand's population twice over. So, it was a different India. But it was also a slightly more orthodox India that was very happy to be modern, but didn't want to say that to people. And so, they were aghast when the cheerleaders arrived. Everyone secretly watched them, but everyone claimed not to. (Music) (Laughter) The new owners of Indian cricket were not the old princes. They were not bureaucrats who were forced into sport because they didn't actually love it; these were people who ran serious companies. And so they started promoting cricket big time, started promoting clubs big time. And they've started promoting them with huge money behind it. I mean the IPL had 2.3 billion dollars before a ball was bowled, 1.6 billion dollars for television revenue over 10 years, and another 70 million dollars plus from all these franchises that were putting in money. And then they had to appeal to their cities, but they had to do it like the West, right? Because we are setting up leagues. But what they were very good at doing was making it very localized. So, just to give you an example of how they did it — not Manchester United style promotion, but very Mumbai style promotion. Take a look. (Music) Of course, a lot of people said, "Maybe they dance better than they play." (Laughter) But that's all right. What it did also is it changed the way we looked at cricket. All along, if you wanted a young cricketer, you picked him up from the bylanes of your own little locality, your own city, and you were very proud of the system that produced those cricketers. Now, all of the sudden, if you were to bowl a shot — if Mumbai were to bowl a shot, for example, they needn't go to Kalbadevi or Shivaji Park or somewhere to source them, they could go to Trinidad. This was the new India, wasn't it? This was the new world, where you can source from anywhere as long as you get the best product at the best price. And all of a sudden, Indian sport had awakened to the reality that you can source the best product for the best price anywhere in the world. So, the Mumbai Indians flew in Dwayne Bravo from Trinidad and Tobago, overnight. And when he had to go back to represent the West Indies, they asked him, "When do you have to reach?" He said, "I have to be there by a certain time, so I have to leave today." We said, "No, no, no. It's not about when you have to leave; it's about when do you have to reach there?" And so he said, "I've got to reach on date X." And they said, "Fine, you play to date X, minus one." So, he played in Hyderabad, went, straight after the game, went from the stadium to Hyderabad airport, sat in a private corporate jet — first refueling in Portugal, second refueling in Brazil; he was in West Indies in time. (Laughter) Never would India have thought on this scale before. Never would India have said, "I want a player to play one game for me, and I will use a corporate jet to send him all the way back to Kingston, Jamaica to play a game." And I just thought to myself, "Wow, we've arrived somewhere in the world, you know? We have arrived somewhere. We are thinking big." But what this also did was it started marrying the two most important things in Indian cricket, which is cricket and the movies in Indian entertainment. There is cricket and the movies. And they came together because people in the movies now started owning clubs. And so, people started going to the cricket to watch Preity Zinta. They started going to the cricket to watch Shah Rukh Khan. And something very interesting happened. We started getting song and dance in Indian cricket. And so it started resembling the Indian movies more and more. And of course, if you were on Preity Zinta's team — as you will see on the clip that follows — if you did well, you got a hug from Preity Zinta. So that was the ultimate reason to do well. Take a look — everyone's watching Preity Zinta. (Music) And then of course there was Shah Rukh playing the Kolkata crowd. We'd all seen matches in Kolkata, but we'd never seen anything like this: Shah Rukh, with the Bengali song, getting the audiences all worked up for Kolkata — not for India, but for Kolkata. But take a look at this. (Music) An Indian film star hugging a Pakistani cricketer because they'd won in Kolkata. Can you imagine? And do you know what the Pakistani cricketer said? (Applause) "I wish I was playing for Preity Zinta's team." (Laughter) But I thought I'd take this opportunity — there's a few people from Pakistan in here. I'm so happy that you're here because I think we can show that we can both be together and be friends, right? We can play cricket together, we can be friends. So thank you very much for coming, all of you from Pakistan. (Applause) There was criticism too because they said, "Players are being bought and sold? Are they grain? Are they cattle?" Because we had this auction, you see. How do you fix a price for a player? And so the auction that followed literally had people saying, "Bang! so many million dollars for so-and-so player." There it is. (Music) Auctioneer: Going at 1,500,000 dollars. Chennai. Shane Warne sold for 450,000 dollars. HB: Suddenly, a game which earned its players 50 rupees a day — so 250 rupees for a test match, but if you finish in four days you only got 200. The best Indian players who played every test match — every one of the internationals, the top of the line players — standard contracts are 220,000 dollars in a whole year. Now they were getting 500,000 for six days' work. Then Andrew Flintoff came by from England, he got one and a half million dollars, and he went back and said, "For four weeks, I'm earning more than Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, and I'm earning more than the footballers, wow." And where was he earning it from? From a little club in India. Could you have imagined that day would come? One and a half million dollars for six weeks' work. That's not bad, is it? So, at 2.3 billion dollars before the first ball was bowled. What India was doing, though, was benchmarking itself against the best in the world, and it became a huge brand. Lalit Modi was on the cover of Business Today. IPL became the biggest brand in India and, because our elections, had to be moved to South Africa, and we had to start the tournament in three weeks. Move a whole tournament to South Africa in three weeks. But we did it. You know why? Because no country works as slowly as we do till three weeks before an event, and nobody works fast as we do in the last three weeks. (Applause) Our population, which for a long time we thought was a problem, suddenly became our biggest asset because there were more people watching — the huge consuming class — everybody came to watch the cricket. We'd also made cricket the only sport in India, which is a pity, but in India every other sport pushes cricket to become big, which is a bit of a tragedy of our times. Now, this last minute before I go — there's a couple of side effects of all this. For a long time, India was this country of poverty, dust, beggars, snake charmers, filth, Delhi belly — people heard Delhi belly stories before they came. And, all of a sudden, India was this land of opportunity. Cricketers all over the world said, "You know, we love India. We love to play in India." And that felt good, you know? We said, "The dollar's quite powerful actually." Can you imagine, you've got the dollar on view and there's no Delhi belly in there anymore. There's no filth, there's no beggars, all the snake charmers have vanished, everybody's gone. This tells you how the capitalist world rules. Right so, finally, an English game that India usurped a little bit, but T20 is going to be the next missionary in the world. If you want to take the game around the world, it's got to be the shortest form of the game. You can't take a timeless test to China and sit through 14 days with no result in the end, or you can't take it all over the world. So that's what T20 is doing. Hopefully, it'll make everyone richer, hopefully it'll make the game bigger and hopefully it'll give cricket commentators more time in the business. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)

Is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

{0: 'Gary Flake is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and the founder and director of Live Labs.'}

TED2010

If I can leave you with one big idea today, it's that the whole of the data in which we consume is greater that the sum of the parts, and instead of thinking about information overload, what I'd like you to think about is how we can use information so that patterns pop and we can see trends that would otherwise be invisible. So what we're looking at right here is a typical mortality chart organized by age. This tool that I'm using here is a little experiment. It's called Pivot, and with Pivot what I can do is I can choose to filter in one particular cause of deaths — say, accidents. And, right away, I see there's a different pattern that emerges. This is because, in the mid-area here, people are at their most active, and over here they're at their most frail. We can step back out again and then reorganize the data by cause of death, seeing that circulatory diseases and cancer are the usual suspects, but not for everyone. If we go ahead and we filter by age — say 40 years or less — we see that accidents are actually the greatest cause that people have to be worried about. And if you drill into that, it's especially the case for men. So you get the idea that viewing information, viewing data in this way, is a lot like swimming in a living information info-graphic. And if we can do this for raw data, why not do it for content as well? So what we have right here is the cover of every single Sports Illustrated ever produced. It's all here; it's all on the web. You can go back to your rooms and try this after my talk. With Pivot, you can drill into a decade. You can drill into a particular year. You can jump right into a specific issue. So I'm looking at this; I see the athletes that have appeared in this issue, the sports. I'm a Lance Armstrong fan, so I'll go ahead and I'll click on that, which reveals, for me, all the issues in which Lance Armstrong's been a part of. (Applause) Now, if I want to just kind of take a peek at these, I might think, "Well, what about taking a look at all of cycling?" So I can step back, and expand on that. And I see Greg LeMond now. And so you get the idea that when you navigate over information this way — going narrower, broader, backing in, backing out — you're not searching, you're not browsing. You're doing something that's actually a little bit different. It's in between, and we think it changes the way information can be used. So I want to extrapolate on this idea a bit with something that's a little bit crazy. What we're done here is we've taken every single Wikipedia page and we reduced it down to a little summary. So the summary consists of just a little synopsis and an icon to indicate the topical area that it comes from. I'm only showing the top 500 most popular Wikipedia pages right here. But even in this limited view, we can do a lot of things. Right away, we get a sense of what are the topical domains that are most popular on Wikipedia. I'm going to go ahead and select government. Now, having selected government, I can now see that the Wikipedia categories that most frequently correspond to that are Time magazine People of the Year. So this is really important because this is an insight that was not contained within any one Wikipedia page. It's only possible to see that insight when you step back and look at all of them. Looking at one of these particular summaries, I can then drill into the concept of Time magazine Person of the Year, bringing up all of them. So looking at these people, I can see that the majority come from government; some have come from natural sciences; some, fewer still, have come from business — there's my boss — and one has come from music. And interestingly enough, Bono is also a TED Prize winner. So we can go, jump, and take a look at all the TED Prize winners. So you see, we're navigating the web for the first time as if it's actually a web, not from page-to-page, but at a higher level of abstraction. And so I want to show you one other thing that may catch you a little bit by surprise. I'm just showing the New York Times website here. So Pivot, this application — I don't want to call it a browser; it's really not a browser, but you can view web pages with it — and we bring that zoomable technology to every single web page like this. So I can step back, pop right back into a specific section. Now the reason why this is important is because, by virtue of just viewing web pages in this way, I can look at my entire browsing history in the exact same way. So I can drill into what I've done over specific time frames. Here, in fact, is the state of all the demo that I just gave. And I can sort of replay some stuff that I was looking at earlier today. And, if I want to step back and look at everything, I can slice and dice my history, perhaps by my search history — here, I was doing some nepotistic searching, looking for Bing, over here for Live Labs Pivot. And from these, I can drill into the web page and just launch them again. It's one metaphor repurposed multiple times, and in each case it makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts with the data. So right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse. We talk about the curse of information overload. We talk about drowning in data. What if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down, so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things, and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden? If we can do that, then instead of being trapped in data, we might actually extract information. And, instead of dealing just with information, we can tease out knowledge. And if we get the knowledge, then maybe even there's wisdom to be found. So with that, I thank you. (Applause)

Before Avatar ... a curious boy

{0: "James Cameron is the director of Avatar, Titanic, Terminator, The Abyss and many other blockbusters. While his outsize films push the bounds of technology, they're always anchored in human stories with heart and soul."}

TED2010

I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school, I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had. And you know, that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn't in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking "samples" — frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water — and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility. And my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late '60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it. And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there weren't video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author's description, put something on the movie screen in our heads. And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. That was — the creativity had to find its outlet somehow. And an interesting thing happened: The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday — that seemed pretty darn unlikely. But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books. So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. But I didn't let that daunt me. I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. And I actually got certified in a pool at a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didn't see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California. Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, and 500 hours of that was in submersibles. And I've learned that that deep-ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was. But when I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking. And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories with my urges to create images. And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. So, filmmaking was the way to put pictures and stories together, and that made sense. And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: "Terminator," "Aliens" and "The Abyss." And with "The Abyss," I was putting together my love of underwater and diving with filmmaking. So, you know, merging the two passions. Something interesting came out of "The Abyss," which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. And even though the film didn't make any money — barely broke even, I should say — I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic. You know, it's Arthur Clarke's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They were seeing something magical. And so that got me very excited. And I thought, "Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art." So, with "Terminator 2," which was my next film, we took that much farther. Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. The success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. And it did, and we created magic again, and we had the same result with an audience — although we did make a little more money on that one. So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience came to, "This is going to be a whole new world," this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. And the concept of the company was that we would leapfrog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while. But we found ourselves lagging in the mid '90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do. So, I wrote this piece called "Avatar," which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects, of CG effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in CG, and the main characters would all be in CG, and the world would be in CG. And the envelope pushed back, and I was told by the folks at my company that we weren't going to be able to do this for a while. So, I shelved it, and I made this other movie about a big ship that sinks. (Laughter) You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as "'Romeo and Juliet' on a ship: "It's going to be this epic romance, passionate film." Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of "Titanic." And that's why I made the movie. (Applause) And that's the truth. Now, the studio didn't know that. But I convinced them. I said, "We're going to dive to the wreck. We're going to film it for real. We'll be using it in the opening of the film. It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook." And I talked them into funding an expedition. (Laughter) Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality. Because we actually created a reality where six months later, I find myself in a Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a view port. Not a movie, not HD — for real. (Applause) Now, that blew my mind. And it took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things. But, it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives, was like a space mission. You know, where it was highly technical, and it required enormous planning. You get in this capsule, you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you can't get back by yourself. And I thought like, "Wow. I'm like, living in a science fiction movie. This is really cool." And so, I really got bitten by the bug of deep-ocean exploration. Of course, the curiosity, the science component of it — it was everything. It was adventure, it was curiosity, it was imagination. And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn't give me. Because, you know, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn't imagine what I was seeing out that window. As we did some of our subsequent expeditions, I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them. So, I was completely smitten by this, and had to do more. And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. After the success of "Titanic," I said, "OK, I'm going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a full-time explorer for a while." And so, we started planning these expeditions. And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. We went back to the Titanic wreck. We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it. So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. And I'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. When I say, "I'm operating it," but my mind is in the vehicle. I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I've ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship. So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. And it really made me realize that the telepresence experience — that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. It was really, really quite profound. And it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan. So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals — they're basically aliens right here on Earth. They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. They don't survive on sunlight-based system the way we do. And so, you're seeing animals that are living next to a 500-degree-Centigrade water plumes. You think they can't possibly exist. At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well — again, it's the science fiction influence, as a kid. And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. And this was fascinating. But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. And taking them down so that they had access — astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments — taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on. So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing. I didn't really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. Because I had to, at a certain point, say, "What am I doing out here? Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it?" We don't make money at these damn shows. We barely break even. There is no fame in it. People sort of think I went away between "Titanic" and "Avatar" and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience. No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? You're doing it for the task itself, for the challenge — and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is — for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. Because we would do these things with 10, 12 people, working for years at a time, sometimes at sea for two, three months at a time. And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you've done a task that you can't explain to someone else. When you come back to the shore and you say, "We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and the that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human-performance aspects of working at sea," you can't explain it to people. It's that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect. So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was "Avatar," I tried to apply that same principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. And it really changed the dynamic. So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory, doing "Avatar," coming up with new technology that didn't exist before. Tremendously exciting. Tremendously challenging. And we became a family, over a four-and-half year period. And it completely changed how I do movies. So, people have commented on how, "Well, you know, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora." To me, it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that. So, what can we synthesize out of all this? You know, what are the lessons learned? Well, I think number one is curiosity. It's the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. I have young filmmakers come up to me and say, "Give me some advice for doing this." And I say, "Don't put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you — don't do it to yourself, don't bet against yourself, and take risks." NASA has this phrase that they like: "Failure is not an option." But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it's a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. So, that's the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you're doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you. (Applause)

In the Internet age, dance evolves ...

{0: 'The LXD (the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers) are building an interactive web series that represents the next evolution of dance.\r\n'}

TED2010

(Music) (Applause) I'm Jon M. Chu. And I'm not a dancer, I'm not a choreographer — I'm actually a filmmaker, a storyteller. I directed a movie two years ago called "Step Up 2: The Streets." Anybody? Anybody? Yeah! During that movie I got to meet a ton of hip-hop dancers — amazing, the best in the world — and they brought me into a society, the sort of underground street culture that blew my mind. I mean, this is literally human beings with super-human strength and abilities. They could fly in the air. They could bend their elbow all the way back. They could spin on their heads for 80 times in a row. I'd never seen anything like that. When I was growing up, my heroes were people like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson. I grew up in a musical family. (Laughter) And those guys, those were like, ultimate heroes. Being a shy, little, skinny Asian kid growing up in the Silicon Valley with low self-esteem, those guys made me believe in something bigger. Those guys made me want to, like, "I'm going to do that moonwalk at that bar mitzvah tonight for that girl." (Applause) And it seems like those dance heroes have disappeared, sort of relegated to the background of pop stars and music videos. But after seeing what I've seen, the truth is, they have not disappeared at all. They're here, getting better and better every day. And dance has progressed. It is insane what dance is right now. Dance has never had a better friend than technology. Online videos and social networking ... dancers have created a whole global laboratory online for dance, where kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it with a Philly flair to create a whole new dance style in itself. And this is happening every day. And from these bedrooms and living rooms and garages, with cheap webcams, lies the world's great dancers of tomorrow. Our Fred Astaires, our Gene Kellys our Michael Jacksons are right at our fingertips, and may not have that opportunity, except for us. So, we created the LXD, sort of a — the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, a justice league of dancers that believe that dance can have a transformative effect on the world. A living, breathing comic book series, but unlike Spiderman and Iron Man, these guys can actually do it. And we're going to show you some today. So, let me introduce to you, some of our heroes right now. We got Madd Chadd, Lil' C, Kid David and J Smooth. Please be excited, have fun, yell, scream. Ladies and gentlemen: The LXD. (Applause) (Video): Madd Chadd: When people first see me, I get a lot of different reactions actually. Sometimes you would think that maybe kids would enjoy it, but sometimes they get a little freaked out. And, I don't know, I kind of get a kick out of that a little bit. (Music) (Applause) J Smooth: When I'm in the zone — I'm dancing and free styling it — I actually visually kind of picture lines, and moving them. I think of like, Transformers, like how panels open and then they fold, they fold in, and then you close that panel. And then another thing opens, you close that. (Music) (Applause) Kid David: It's kind of like, honestly a lot of times I don't really know what's going on when I'm dancing. Because at that point it's just really like, it's my body and the music. It's not really a conscious decision, "I'm going to do this next, I'm going to do this." It's kind of like this other level where you can't make choices anymore, and it's just your body reacting to certain sounds in the music. I got my name just because I was so young. I was young when I started. I was younger than a lot of the people I was dancing with. So, it was always like, they called me Kid David, because I was the kid. (Music) (Applause) L'il C: I tell them to create a ball, and then you just use that ball of energy. And instead of throwing it out, people would think that's a krump move, that's a krump move. That's not a krump move. You're going to throw it out, you throw it out, and you hold it. And you let it go, and then right when you see the tail, you grab it by the tail, then you bring it back in. And you just got this piece of energy and you just, you're manipulating it. You know, you create power, then you tame it. (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause)

The year open data went worldwide

{0: "Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He leads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), overseeing the Web's standards and development."}

TED2010

Last year here at TED I asked you to give me your data, to put your data on the web, on the basis that if people put data onto the web — government data, scientific data, community data, whatever it is — it will be used by other people to do wonderful things, in ways that they never could have imagined. So, today I'm back just to show you a few things, to show you, in fact, there is an open data movement afoot, now, around the world. The cry of "Raw data now!" which I made people make in the auditorium, was heard around the world. So, let's roll the video. A classic story, the first one which lots of people picked up, was when in March — on March 10th in fact, soon after TED — Paul Clarke, in the U.K. government, blogged, "Oh, I've just got some raw data. Here it is, it's about bicycle accidents." Two days it took the Times Online to make a map, a mashable map — we call these things mash-ups — a mashed-up user interface that allows you to go in there and have a look and find out whether your bicycle route to work was affected. Here's more data, traffic survey data, again, put out by the U.K. government, and because they put it up using the Linked Data standards, then a user could just make a map, just by clicking. Does this data affect things? Well, let's get back to 2008. Look at Zanesville, Ohio. Here's a map a lawyer made. He put on it the water plant, and which houses are there, which houses have been connected to the water. And he got, from other data sources, information to show which houses are occupied by white people. Well, there was too much of a correlation, he felt, between which houses were occupied by white people and which houses had water, and the judge was not impressed either. The judge was not impressed to the tune of 10.9 million dollars. That's the power of taking one piece of data, another piece of data, putting it together, and showing the result. Let's look at some data from the U.K. now. This is U.K. government data, a completely independent site, Where Does My Money Go. It allows anybody to go there and burrow down. You can burrow down by a particular type of spending, or you can go through all the different regions and compare them. So, that's happening in the U.K. with U.K. government data. Yes, certainly you can do it over here. Here's a site which allows you to look at recovery spending in California. Take an arbitrary example, Long Beach, California, you can go and have a look at what recovery money they've been spending on different things such as energy. In fact, this is the graph of the number of data sets in the repositories of data.gov, and data.gov.uk. And I'm delighted to see a great competition between the U.K. in blue, and the U.S. in red. How can you use this stuff? Well, for example, if you have lots of data about places you can take, from a postcode — which is like a zip plus four — for a specific group of houses, you can make paper, print off a paper which has got very, very specific things about the bus stops, the things specifically near you. On a larger scale, this is a mash-up of the data which was released about the Afghan elections. It allows you to set your own criteria for what sort of things you want to look at. The red circles are polling stations, selected by your criteria. And then you can select also other things on the map to see what other factors, like the threat level. So, that was government data. I also talked about community-generated data — in fact I edited some. This is the wiki map, this is the Open Street Map. "Terrace Theater" I actually put on the map because it wasn't on the map before TED last year. I was not the only person editing the open street map. Each flash on this visualization — put together by ITO World — shows an edit in 2009 made to the Open Street Map. Let's now spin the world during the same year. Every flash is an edit. Somebody somewhere looking at the Open Street Map, and realizing it could be better. You can see Europe is ablaze with updates. Some places, perhaps not as much as they should be. Here focusing in on Haiti. The map of Port au-Prince at the end of 2009 was not all it could be, not as good as the map of California. Fortunately, just after the earthquake, GeoEye, a commercial company, released satellite imagery with a license, which allowed the open-source community to use it. This is January, in time lapse, of people editing ... that's the earthquake. After the earthquake, immediately, people all over the world, mappers who wanted to help, and could, looked at that imagery, built the map, quickly building it up. We're focusing now on Port-au-Prince. The light blue is refugee camps these volunteers had spotted from the [satellite images]. So, now we have, immediately, a real-time map showing where there are refugee camps — rapidly became the best map to use if you're doing relief work in Port-au-Prince. Witness the fact that it's here on this Garmin device being used by rescue team in Haiti. There's the map showing, on the left-hand side, that hospital — actually that's a hospital ship. This is a real-time map that shows blocked roads, damaged buildings, refugee camps — it shows things that are needed [for rescue and relief work]. So, if you've been involved in that at all, I just wanted to say: Whatever you've been doing, whether you've just been chanting, "Raw data now!" or you've been putting government or scientific data online, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say: Thank you very much, and we have only just started! (Applause)

Take Turns

{0: 'Gary Lauder is the managing partner of Lauder Partners, a VC firm, and the co-creator of the Socrates Society at the Aspen Institute.'}

TED2010

I only have three minutes so I'm going to have to talk fast, and it will use up your spare mental cycles, so multitasking may be hard. So, 27 years ago I got a traffic ticket that got me thinking. I've had some time to think it over. And energy efficiency is more than just about the vehicle — it's also about the road. Road design makes a difference, particularly intersections, of which there are two types: signalized and unsignalized, which means stop signs. Fifty percent of crashes happen at intersections. Roundabouts are much better. A study of 24 intersections has found crashes drop 40 percent from when you convert a traffic light into a roundabout. Injury crashes have dropped 76 percent, fatal crashes down 90 percent. But that's just safety. What about time and gas? So, traffic keeps flowing, so that means less braking, which means less accelerating, less gas and less pollution, less time wasted, and that partly accounts for Europe's better efficiency than we have in the United States. So, unsignalized intersections, meaning stop signs, they save many lives, but there's an excessive proliferation of them. Small roundabouts are starting to appear. This is one in my neighborhood. And they are much better — better than traffic lights, better than four-way stop signs. They're expensive to install, but they are more expensive not to. So, we should look at that. But they are not applicable in all situations. So, take, for example, the three-way intersection. So, it's logical that you'd have one there, on the minor road entering the major. But the other two are somewhat questionable. So, here's one. There's another one which I studied. Cars rarely appear on that third road. And so, the question is, what does that cost us? That intersection I looked at had about 3,000 cars per day in each direction, and so that's two ounces of gas to accelerate out of. That's five cents each, and times 3,000 cars per day, that's $51,000 per year. That's just the gasoline cost. There is also pollution, wear on the car, and time. What's that time worth? Well, at 10 seconds per 3,000 cars, that's 8.3 hours per day. The average wage in the U.S. is $20 an hour. That is 60,000 per year. Add that together with the gas, and it's $112,000 per year, just for that sign in each direction. Discount that back to the present, at five percent: over two million dollars for a stop sign, in each direction. Now, if you look at what that adjacent property is worth, you could actually buy the property, cut down the shrubbery to improve the sight line, and then sell it off again. And you'd still come out ahead. So, it makes one wonder, "Why is it there?" I mean, why is there that stop sign in each direction? Because it is saving lives. So, is there a better way to accomplish that goal? The answer is to enable cars to come in from that side road safely. Because there are a lot of people who might live up there and if they're waiting forever a long queue could form because the cars aren't slowing down on the main road. Can that be accomplished with existing signs? So, there is a long history of stop signs and yield signs. Stop signs were invented in 1915, yield signs in 1950. But that's all we got. So, why not use a yield sign? Well the meaning of yield is: You must yield the right-of-way. That means that if there are five cars waiting, you have to wait till they all go, then you go. It lacks the notion of alternating, or taking turns, and it's always on the minor road, allowing the major one to have primacy. So, it's hard to create a new meaning for the existing sign. You couldn't suddenly tell everyone, "OK, remember what you used to do at yield signs? Now do something different." That would not work. So, what the world needs now is a new type of sign. (Applause) So, you'd have a little instruction below it, you know, for those who didn't see the public service announcements. And it merges the stop sign and yield signs. It's kind of shaped like a T, as in taking turns. And uncertainty results in caution. When people come to an unfamiliar situation they don't know how to deal with they slow down. So, now that you are all "Road Scholars" ... (Laughter) don't wait for that sign to be adopted, these things don't change quickly. But you all are members of communities, and you can exercise your community influence to create more sensible traffic flows. And you can have more impact on the environment just getting your neighborhood to change these things than by changing your vehicle. Thank you very much. (Applause)

How I fell in love with a fish

{0: 'Dan Barber is a chef and a scholar -- relentlessly pursuing the stories and reasons behind the foods we grow and eat. '}

TED2010

So, I've known a lot of fish in my life. I've loved only two. That first one, it was more like a passionate affair. It was a beautiful fish: flavorful, textured, meaty, a bestseller on the menu. What a fish. (Laughter) Even better, it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability. So you could feel good about selling it. I was in a relationship with this beauty for several months. One day, the head of the company called and asked if I'd speak at an event about the farm's sustainability. "Absolutely," I said. Here was a company trying to solve what's become this unimaginable problem for us chefs: How do we keep fish on our menus? For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love — the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish — they've collapsed. There's almost nothing left. So, for better or for worse, aquaculture, fish farming, is going to be a part of our future. A lot of arguments against it: Fish farms pollute — most of them do anyway — and they're inefficient. Take tuna, a major drawback. It's got a feed conversion ratio of 15 to one. That means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. Not very sustainable. It doesn't taste very good either. So here, finally, was a company trying to do it right. I wanted to support them. The day before the event, I called the head of P.R. for the company. Let's call him Don. "Don," I said, "just to get the facts straight, you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea, you don't pollute." "That's right," he said. "We're so far out, the waste from our fish gets distributed, not concentrated." And then he added, "We're basically a world unto ourselves. That feed conversion ratio? 2.5 to one," he said. "Best in the business." 2.5 to one, great. "2.5 what? What are you feeding?" "Sustainable proteins," he said. "Great," I said. Got off the phone. And that night, I was lying in bed, and I thought: What the hell is a sustainable protein? (Laughter) So the next day, just before the event, I called Don. I said, "Don, what are some examples of sustainable proteins?" He said he didn't know. He would ask around. Well, I got on the phone with a few people in the company; no one could give me a straight answer until finally, I got on the phone with the head biologist. Let's call him Don too. (Laughter) "Don," I said, "what are some examples of sustainable proteins?" Well, he mentioned some algaes and some fish meals, and then he said chicken pellets. I said, "Chicken pellets?" He said, "Yeah, feathers, skin, bone meal, scraps, dried and processed into feed." I said, "What percentage of your feed is chicken?" Thinking, you know, two percent. "Well, it's about 30 percent," he said. I said, "Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?" (Laughter) There was a long pause on the line, and he said, "There's just too much chicken in the world." (Laughter) I fell out of love with this fish. (Laughter) No, not because I'm some self-righteous, goody-two shoes foodie. I actually am. (Laughter) No, I actually fell out of love with this fish because, I swear to God, after that conversation, the fish tasted like chicken. (Laughter) This second fish, it's a different kind of love story. It's the romantic kind, the kind where the more you get to know your fish, you love the fish. I first ate it at a restaurant in southern Spain. A journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time. She kind of set us up. (Laughter) It came to the table a bright, almost shimmering, white color. The chef had overcooked it. Like twice over. Amazingly, it was still delicious. Who can make a fish taste good after it's been overcooked? I can't, but this guy can. Let's call him Miguel — actually his name is Miguel. (Laughter) And no, he didn't cook the fish, and he's not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand it. He's a biologist at Veta La Palma. It's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of Spain. It's at the tip of the Guadalquivir river. Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. They did it by draining the land. They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. Well, they couldn't make it work, not economically. And ecologically, it was a disaster. It killed like 90 percent of the birds, which, for this place, is a lot of birds. And so in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land. What did they do? They reversed the flow of water. They literally flipped the switch. Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. They flooded the canals. They created a 27,000-acre fish farm — bass, mullet, shrimp, eel — and in the process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction. The farm's incredible. I mean, you've never seen anything like this. You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland. I was there not long ago with Miguel. He's an amazing guy, like three parts Charles Darwin and one part Crocodile Dundee. (Laughter) Okay? There we are slogging through the wetlands, and I'm panting and sweating, got mud up to my knees, and Miguel's calmly conducting a biology lecture. Here, he's pointing out a rare Black-shouldered Kite. Now, he's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton. And here, here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the Tanzanian Giraffe. It turns out, Miguel spent the better part of his career in the Mikumi National Park in Africa. I asked him how he became such an expert on fish. He said, "Fish? I didn't know anything about fish. I'm an expert in relationships." And then he's off, launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants. And don't get me wrong, that was really fascinating, you know, the biotic community unplugged, kind of thing. It's great, but I was in love. And my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish I had the night before. So I interrupted him. I said, "Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?" He pointed at the algae. "I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships: It's amazing. But what are your fish eating? What's the feed conversion ratio?" Well, he goes on to tell me it's such a rich system that the fish are eating what they'd be eating in the wild. The plant biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, it's what feeds the fish. The system is so healthy, it's totally self-renewing. There is no feed. Ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals? Later that day, I was driving around this property with Miguel, and I asked him, I said, "For a place that seems so natural, unlike like any farm I'd ever been at, how do you measure success?" At that moment, it was as if a film director called for a set change. And we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight: thousands and thousands of pink flamingos, a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see. "That's success," he said. "Look at their bellies, pink. They're feasting." Feasting? I was totally confused. I said, "Miguel, aren't they feasting on your fish?" (Laughter) "Yes," he said. (Laughter) "We lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds. Well, last year, this property had 600,000 birds on it, more than 250 different species. It's become, today, the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of Europe." I said, "Miguel, isn't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm?" (Laughter) He shook his head, no. He said, "We farm extensively, not intensively. This is an ecological network. The flamingos eat the shrimp. The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. So the pinker the belly, the better the system." Okay, so let's review: a farm that doesn't feed its animals, and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators. A fish farm, but also a bird sanctuary. Oh, and by the way, those flamingos, they shouldn't even be there in the first place. They brood in a town 150 miles away, where the soil conditions are better for building nests. Every morning, they fly 150 miles into the farm. And every evening, they fly 150 miles back. (Laughter) They do that because they're able to follow the broken white line of highway A92. (Laughter) No kidding. I was imagining a "March of the Penguins" thing, so I looked at Miguel. I said, "Miguel, do they fly 150 miles to the farm, and then do they fly 150 miles back at night? Do they do that for the children?" He looked at me like I had just quoted a Whitney Houston song. (Laughter) He said, "No; they do it because the food's better." (Laughter) I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious — and I don't like fish skin; I don't like it seared, I don't like it crispy. It's that acrid, tar-like flavor. I almost never cook with it. Yet, when I tasted it at that restaurant in southern Spain, it tasted not at all like fish skin. It tasted sweet and clean, like you were taking a bite of the ocean. I mentioned that to Miguel, and he nodded. He said, "The skin acts like a sponge. It's the last defense before anything enters the body. It evolved to soak up impurities." And then he added, "But our water has no impurities." OK. A farm that doesn't feed its fish, a farm that measures its success by the success of its predators. And then I realized when he says, "A farm that has no impurities," he made a big understatement, because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River. It's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days: chemical contaminants, pesticide runoff. And when it works its way through the system and leaves, the water is cleaner than when it entered. The system is so healthy, it purifies the water. So, not just a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators, but a farm that's literally a water purification plant — and not just for those fish, but for you and me as well. Because when that water leaves, it dumps out into the Atlantic. A drop in the ocean, I know, but I'll take it, and so should you, because this love story, however romantic, is also instructive. You might say it's a recipe for the future of good food, whether we're talking about bass or beef cattle. What we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good. (Laughter) (Applause) But for a lot people, that's a bit too radical. We're not realists, us foodies; we're lovers. We love farmers' markets, we love small family farms, we talk about local food, we eat organic. And when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food, someone, somewhere stands up and says, "Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how are you going to feed the world?" How are you going to feed the world? Can I be honest? I don't love that question. No, not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world. One billion people will go hungry today. One billion — that's more than ever before — because of gross inequalities in distribution, not tonnage. Now, I don't love this question because it's determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years. Feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to soil, chicken to fish, and all along agribusiness has simply asked, "If we're feeding more people more cheaply, how terrible could that be?" That's been the motivation, it's been the justification: it's been the business plan of American agriculture. We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible. That's not a business, and it isn't agriculture. Our breadbasket is threatened today, not because of diminishing supply, but because of diminishing resources. Not by the latest combine and tractor invention, but by fertile land; not by pumps, but by fresh water; not by chainsaws, but by forests; and not by fishing boats and nets, but by fish in the sea. Want to feed the world? Let's start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves? Or better: How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself? (Applause) To do that, don't look at the agribusiness model for the future. It's really old, and it's tired. It's high on capital, chemistry and machines, and it's never produced anything really good to eat. Instead, let's look to the ecological model. That's the one that relies on two billion years of on-the-job experience. Look to Miguel, farmers like Miguel. Farms that aren't worlds unto themselves; farms that restore instead of deplete; farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively; farmers that are not just producers, but experts in relationships. Because they're the ones that are experts in flavor, too. And if I'm going to be really honest, they're a better chef than I'll ever be. You know, I'm okay with that, because if that's the future of good food, it's going to be delicious. Thank you. (Applause)

The magic of the placebo

{0: 'Eric Mead is a prolific magician, mentalist and comedian who worked his way up from doing magic on the street to appearing at exclusive events around the world. '}

TEDMED 2009

For some time I have been interested in the placebo effect, which might seem like an odd thing for a magician to be interested in, unless you think of it in the terms that I do, which is, "Something fake is believed in enough by somebody that it becomes something real." In other words, sugar pills have a measurable effect in certain kinds of studies, the placebo effect, just because the person thinks that what's happening to them is a pharmaceutical or some sort of a — for pain management, for example, if they believe it enough there is a measurable effect in the body called the placebo effect. Something fake becomes something real because of someone's perception of it. In order for us to understand each other, I want to start by showing you a rudimentary, very simple magic trick. And I'm going to show you how it works. This is a trick that's been in every children's magic book since at least the 1950s. I learned it myself from Cub Scout Magic in the 1970s. I'll do it for you, and then I'll explain it. And then I'll explain why I explained it. So, here's what happens. The knife, which you can examine; my hand, which you could examine. I'm just going to hold the knife in my fist like this. I'll get my sleeve back. And to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve I'm just going to squeeze my wrist right here. That way you can see that at no time can anything travel, as long as I'm squeezing there nothing can go up or down my sleeve. And the object of this is quite simple. I'm going to open my hand, and hopefully, if all is well, my pure animal magnetism will hold the knife. In fact it's held so tightly in place that I can shake it, and the knife does not come off. Nothing goes up or down my sleeve, no trickery. And you can examine everything. Ta-da! (Applause) So, this is a trick that I often teach to young children that are interested in magic, because you can learn a great deal about deception by studying this very — even though it's a very simple trick methodologically. Probably many of you in the room know this trick. What happens is this. I hold the knife in my hand. I say I'm going to grab hold of my wrist to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve, that is a lie. The reason I'm holding onto my wrist is because that's actually the secret of the illusion. In a moment when my hand moves from facing you to being away from you, this finger right here, my index finger is just going to shift from where it is, to a position pointing out like this. Nice one. Someone who didn't have a childhood is out there. (Laughter) So, it goes like this, from here, right. And as I move around my finger shifts. And we could talk about why this is deceptive, why you don't notice there are only three fingers down here, because the mind, and the way it processes information, it doesn't count, one, two, three. It groups them. But that's not really what this is about. Right? And then I open my hand up. Obviously it's clinging there, not by animal magnetism, but by chicanery, my index finger being there. And then when I close my finger, same thing, as I move back, this motion kind of covers the moving back of my finger. I take this hand away. You give the knife out. There is a trick you can do for your friends and neighbors. Thanks. Now, (Laughter) what does that have to do with the placebo effect? I read a study a year or so ago that really blew my mind wide open. I'm not a doctor or a researcher, so this, to me, was an astonishing thing. It turns out that if you administer a placebo in the form of a white pill, that's like aspirin shaped — it's just a round white pill — it has some certain measurable effect. But if you change the form that you give the placebo in, like you make a smaller pill, and color it blue, and stamp a letter into it, it is actually measurably more effective. Even though neither one of these things has any pharmaceutical — they're sugar pills. But a white pill is not as good as a blue pill. What? (Laughter) That really flipped me out. Turns out though, that that's not even where it stops. If you have capsules, they're more effective than tablets in any form. A colored capsule, that's yellow on one end and red on the other is better than a white capsule. Dosage has something to do with this. One pill twice a day is not as good at three pills — I don't remember the statistic now. Sorry. But the point is ... (Laughter) ... these dosages have something to do with it. And the form has something to do with it. And if you want the ultimate in placebo, you've go to the needle. Right? A syringe with some inert — a couple CCs of some inert something, and you inject this into a patient ... Well this is such a powerful image in their mind, it's so much stronger than the white pill. It's a really, this graph, well I'll show it to you some other time when we have slides. The point is the white pill is not as good as the blue pill is not as good as the capsule is not as good as the needle. And none of it has any real pharmaceutical quality, it's only your belief that makes it real in your body and makes a stronger effect. I wanted to see if I could take that idea and apply it to a magic trick. And take something that is obviously a fake trick and make it seem real. And we know from that study that when you want reality, you go to the needle. This is a seven-inch hatpin. It's very, very sharp, and I'm going to just sterilize it a tiny bit. This is really my flesh. This is not Damian's special-grown flesh. That's my skin right there. This is not a Hollywood special effect. I'm going to pierce my skin and run this needle through to the other side. If you're queasy — (Laughs) if you faint easily — I was doing this for some friends in the hotel room last night, and some people that I didn't know, and one woman almost passed out. So, I suggest if you get queasy easy that you look away for about the next 30 — in fact, you know what, I'll do the first bad part behind it. You'll get to see, you can look away too if you'd like to. So, here is what happens, right here, the beginning of my flesh at the lower part of my arm I just make a little pierce. I'm sorry, man. Am I freaking you out? OK, and then just through my skin a tiny bit, and then out the other side like this. Now, essentially we're in the same position we were in with the knife trick. (Laughter) Sort of. But you can't count my fingers right now can you? So, let me show them to you. That's one, two three, four, five. Yes, well... I know what people think when they see this. They go, "Well, he's certainly not dumb enough to stab himself through the skin to entertain us for a few minutes. So, let me give you a little peek. How's that look out there? Pretty good. (Laughs) Yeah, I know. (Laughs) And the people in the back go, "OK, I didn't really see that." People in the satellite room are starting to move in now. Let me give you good close look at this. That really is my skin. That is not a Hollywood special effect. That's my flesh, and I can twist that around. I'm sorry. If you're getting queasy, look away, don't look at the thing. People in the back or people on video years from now watching this will go, "Well yeah, that looks kind of neat in some sort of effect there, but if it were real he would be — see there's a hole there and a hole there, if it were real he would be bleeding. Well let me work up some blood for you. (Laughter) Yes, there it is. (Applause) (Laughter) Normally now, I would take the needle out. I would clean off my arm, and I would show you that there are no wounds. But I think in this context and with the idea of taking something fake and making it into something real, I'm just going to leave it there, and walk off the stage. (Laughter) I will be seeing you several times over the next few days. I hope you're looking forward to that. Thank you very much. (Laughter) (Applause)

Suspended animation is within our grasp

{0: "Mark Roth's research has reawakened an unusual notion from the annals of science: reversible metabolic hibernation. Yes, putting living organisms into suspended animation -- and bringing them back safely."}

TED2010

I'm going to talk to you today about my work on suspended animation. Now, usually when I mention suspended animation, people will flash me the Vulcan sign and laugh. But now, I'm not talking about gorking people out to fly to Mars or even Pandora, as much fun as that may be. I'm talking about the concept of using suspended animation to help people out in trauma. So what do I mean when I say "suspended animation"? It is the process by which animals de-animate, appear dead and then can wake up again without being harmed. OK, so here is the sort of big idea: If you look out at nature, you find that as you tend to see suspended animation, you tend to see immortality. And so, what I'm going to tell you about is a way to tell a person who's in trauma — find a way to de-animate them a bit so they're a little more immortal when they have that heart attack. An example of an organism or two that happens to be quite immortal would be plant seeds or bacterial spores. These creatures are some of the most immortal life forms on our planet, and they tend to spend most of their time in suspended animation. Bacterial spores are thought now by scientists to exist as individual cells that are alive, but in suspended animation for as long as 250 million years. To suggest that this all, sort of, about little, tiny creatures, I want to bring it close to home. In the immortal germ line of human beings — that is, the eggs that sit in the ovaries — they actually sit there in a state of suspended animation for up to 50 years in the life of each woman. So then there's also my favorite example of suspended animation. This is Sea-Monkeys. Those of you with children, you know about them. You go to the pet store or the toy store, and you can buy these things. You just open the bag, and you just dump them into the plastic aquarium, and in about a week or so, you'll have little shrimps swimming around. Well, I wasn't so interested in the swimming. I was interested in what was going on in the bag, the bag on the toy store shelf where those shrimp sat in suspended animation indefinitely. So these ideas of suspended animation are not just about cells and weird, little organisms. Occasionally, human beings are briefly de-animated, and the stories of people who are briefly de-animated that interest me the most are those having to do with the cold. Ten years ago, there was a skier in Norway that was trapped in an icy waterfall, and she was there for two hours before they extracted her. She was extremely cold, and she had no heartbeat — for all intents and purposes she was dead, frozen. Seven hours later, still without a heartbeat, they brought her back to life, and she went on to be the head radiologist in the hospital that treated her. A couple of years later — so I get really excited about these things — about a couple of years later, there was a 13-month-old, she was from Canada. Her father had gone out in the wintertime; he was working night shift, and she followed him outside in nothing but a diaper. And they found her hours later, frozen, lifeless, and they brought her back to life. There was a 65-year-old woman in Duluth, Minnesota last year that was found frozen and without a pulse in her front yard one morning in the winter, and they brought her back to life. The next day, she was doing so well, they wanted to run tests on her. She got cranky and just went home. (Laughter) So, these are miracles, right? These are truly miraculous things that happen. Doctors have a saying that, in fact, "You're not dead until you're warm and dead." And it's true. It's true. In the New England Journal of Medicine, there was a study published that showed that with appropriate rewarming, people who had suffered without a heartbeat for three hours could be brought back to life without any neurologic problems. That's over 50 percent. So what I was trying to do is think of a way that we could study suspended animation to think about a way to reproduce, maybe, what happened to the skier. Well, I have to tell you something very odd, and that is that being exposed to low oxygen does not always kill. So, in this room, there's 20 percent oxygen or so, and if we reduce the oxygen concentration, we will all be dead. And, in fact, the animals we were working with in the lab — these little garden worms, nematodes — they were also dead when we exposed them to low oxygen. And here's the thing that should freak you out. And that is that, when we lower the oxygen concentration further by 100 times, to 10 parts per million, they were not dead, they were in suspended animation, and we could bring them back to life without any harm. And this precise oxygen concentration, 10 parts per million, that caused suspended animation, is conserved. We can see it in a variety of different organisms. One of the creatures we see it in is a fish. And we can turn its heartbeat on and off by going in and out of suspended animation like you would a light switch. So this was pretty shocking to me, that we could do this. And so I was wondering, when we were trying to reproduce the work with the skier, that we noticed that, of course, she had no oxygen consumption, and so maybe she was in a similar state of suspended animation. But, of course, she was also extremely cold. So we wondered what would happen if we took our suspended animals and exposed them to the cold. And so, what we found out was that, if you take animals that are animated like you and I, and you make them cold — that is, these were the garden worms — now they're dead. But if you have them in suspended animation, and move them into the cold, they're all alive. And there's the very important thing there: If you want to survive the cold, you ought to be suspended. Right? It's a really good thing. And so, we were thinking about that, about this relationship between these things, and thinking about whether or not that's what happened to the skier. And so we wondered: Might there be some agent that is in us, something that we make ourselves, that we might be able to regulate our own metabolic flexibility in such a way as to be able to survive when we got extremely cold, and might otherwise pass away? I thought it might be interesting to sort of hunt for such things. You know? I should mention briefly here that physiology textbooks that you can read about will tell you that this is a kind of heretical thing to suggest. We have, from the time we are slapped on the butt until we take our last dying breath — that's when we're newborn to when we're dead — we cannot reduce our metabolic rate below what's called a standard, or basal metabolic rate. But I knew that there were examples of creatures, also mammals, that do reduce their metabolic rate such as ground squirrels and bears, they reduce their metabolic rate in the wintertime when they hibernate. So I wondered: Might we be able to find some agent or trigger that might induce such a state in us? And so, we went looking for such things. And this was a period of time when we failed tremendously. Ken Robinson is here. He talked about the glories of failure. Well, we had a lot of them. We tried many different chemicals and agents, and we failed over and over again. So, one time, I was at home watching television on the couch while my wife was putting our child to bed, and I was watching a television show. It was a television show — it was a NOVA show on PBS — about caves in New Mexico. And this particular cave was Lechuguilla, and this cave is incredibly toxic to humans. The researchers had to suit up just to enter it. It's filled with this toxic gas, hydrogen sulfide. Now, hydrogen sulfide is curiously present in us. We make it ourselves. The highest concentration is in our brains. Yet, it was used as a chemical warfare agent in World War I. It's an extraordinarily toxic thing. In fact, in chemical accidents, hydrogen sulfide is known to — if you breathe too much of it, you collapse to the ground, you appear dead, but if you were brought out into room air, you can be reanimated without harm, if they do that quickly. So, I thought, "Wow, I have to get some of this." (Laughter) Now, it's post-9/11 America, and when you go into the research institute, and you say, "Hi. I'd like to buy some concentrated, compressed gas cylinders of a lethal gas because I have these ideas, see, about wanting to suspend people. It's really going to be OK." So that's kind of a tough day, but I said, "There really is some basis for thinking why you might want to do this." As I said, this agent is in us, and, in fact, here's a curious thing, it binds to the very place inside of your cells where oxygen binds, and where you burn it, and that you do this burning to live. And so we thought, like in a game of musical chairs, might we be able to give a person some hydrogen sulfide, and might it be able to occupy that place like in a game of musical chairs where oxygen might bind? And because you can't bind the oxygen, maybe you wouldn't consume it, and then maybe it would reduce your demand for oxygen. I mean, who knows? So — (Laughter) So, there's the bit about the dopamine and being a little bit, what do you call it, delusional, and you might suggest that was it. And so, we wanted to find out might we be able to use hydrogen sulfide in the presence of cold, and we wanted to see whether we could reproduce this skier in a mammal. Now, mammals are warm-blooded creatures, and when we get cold, we shake and we shiver, right? We try to keep our core temperature at 37 degrees by actually burning more oxygen. So, it was interesting for us when we applied hydrogen sulfide to a mouse when it was also cold because what happened is the core temperature of the mouse got cold. It stopped moving. It appeared dead. Its oxygen consumption rate fell by tenfold. And here's the really important point. I told you hydrogen sulfide is in us. It's rapidly metabolized, and all you have to do after six hours of being in this state of de-animation is simply put the thing out in room air, and it warms up, and it's none the worse for wear. Now, this was cosmic. Really. Because we had found a way to de-animate a mammal, and it didn't hurt it. Now, we'd found a way to reduce its oxygen consumption to rock-bottom levels, and it was fine. Now, in this state of de-animation, it could not go out dancing, but it was not dead, and it was not harmed. So we started to think: Is this the agent that might have been present in the skier, and might have she had more of it than someone else, and might that have been able to reduce her demand for oxygen before she got so cold that she otherwise would have died, as we found out with our worm experiments? So, we wondered: Can we do anything useful with this capacity to control metabolic flexibility? And one of the things we wondered — I'm sure some of you out there are economists, and you know all about supply and demand. And when supply is equal to demand, everything's fine, but when supply falls, in this case of oxygen, and demand stays high, you're dead. So, what I just told you is we can now reduce demand. We ought to be able to lower supply to unprecedented low levels without killing the animal. And with money we got from DARPA, we could show just that. If you give mice hydrogen sulfide, you can lower their demand for oxygen, and you can put them into oxygen concentrations that are as low as 5,000 feet above the top of Mt. Everest, and they can sit there for hours, and there's no problem. Well this was really cool. We also found out that we could subject animals to otherwise lethal blood loss, and we could save them if we gave them hydrogen sulfide. So these proof of concept experiments led me to say "I should found a company, and we should take this out to a wider playing field." I founded a company called Ikaria with others' help. And this company, the first thing it did was make a liquid formulation of hydrogen sulfide an injectable form that we could put in and send it out to physician scientists all over the world who work on models of critical care medicine, and the results are incredibly positive. In one model of heart attack, animals given hydrogen sulfide showed a 70 percent reduction in heart damage compared to those who got the standard of care that you and I would receive if we were to have a heart attack here today. Same is true for organ failure, when you have loss of function owing to poor perfusion of kidney, of liver, acute respiratory distress syndrome and damage suffered in cardiac-bypass surgery. So, these are the thought leaders in trauma medicine all over the world saying this is true, so it seems that exposure to hydrogen sulfide decreases damage that you receive from being exposed to otherwise lethal-low oxygen. And I should say that the concentrations of hydrogen sulfide required to get this benefit are low, incredibly low. In fact, so low that physicians will not have to lower or dim the metabolism of people much at all to see the benefit I just mentioned, which is a wonderful thing, if you're thinking about adopting this. You don't want to be gorking people out just to save them, it's really confusing. (Laughter) So, I want to say that we're in human trials. Now, and so — (Applause) Thank you. The Phase 1 safety studies are over, and we're doing fine, we're now moved on. We have to get to Phase 2 and Phase 3. It's going to take us a few years. This has all moved very quickly, and the mouse experiments of hibernating mice happened in 2005; the first human studies were done in 2008, and we should know in a couple of years whether it works or not. And this all happened really quickly because of a lot of help from a lot of people. I want to mention that, first of all, my wife, without whom this talk and my work would not be possible, so thank you very much. Also, the brilliant scientists who work at my lab and also others on staff, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington — wonderful place to work. And also the wonderful scientists and businesspeople at Ikaria. One thing those people did out there was take this technology of hydrogen sulfide, which is this start-up company that's burning venture capital very quickly, and they fused it with another company that sells another toxic gas that's more toxic than hydrogen sulfide, and they give it to newborn babies who would otherwise die from a failure to be able to oxygenate their tissues properly. And this gas that is delivered in over a thousand critical care hospitals worldwide, now is approved, on label, and saves thousands of babies a year from certain death. (Applause) So it's really incredible for me to be a part of this. And I want to say that I think we're on the path of understanding metabolic flexibility in a fundamental way, and that in the not too distant future, an EMT might give an injection of hydrogen sulfide, or some related compound, to a person suffering severe injuries, and that person might de-animate a bit, they might become a little more immortal. Their metabolism will fall as though you were dimming a switch on a lamp at home. And then, they will have the time, that will buy them the time, to be transported to the hospital to get the care they need. And then, after they get that care — like the mouse, like the skier, like the 65-year-old woman — they'll wake up. A miracle? We hope not, or maybe we just hope to make miracles a little more common. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Take health care off the mainframe

{0: 'Eric Dishman does health care research for Intel -- studying how new technology can solve big problems in the system for the sick, the aging and, well, all of us.'}

TEDMED 2009

If you think about the phone — and Intel has tested a lot of the things I'm going to show you, over the last 10 years, in about 600 elderly households — 300 in Ireland, and 300 in Portland — trying to understand: How do we measure and monitor behavior in a medically meaningful way? And if you think about the phone, right, it's something that we can use for some incredible ways to help people actually take the right medication at the right time. We're testing these kinds of simple sensor-network technologies in the home so that any phone that a senior is already comfortable with can help them deal with their medications. And a lot of what they do is they pick up the phone, and it's our system whispering to them which pill they need to take, and they fake like they're having a conversation with a friend. And they're not embarrassed by a meds caddy that's ugly, that sits on their kitchen table and says, "I'm old. I'm frail." It's surreptitious technology that's helping them do a simple task of taking the right pill at the right time. Now, we also do some pretty amazing things with these phones. Because that moment when you answer the phone is a cognitive test every time that you do it. Think about it, all right? I'm going to answer the phone three different times. "Hello? Hey." All right? That's the first time. "Hello? Uh, hey." "Hello? Uh, who? Oh, hey." All right? Very big differences between the way I answered the phone the three times. And as we monitor phone usage by seniors over a long period of time, down to the tenths of a microsecond, that recognition moment of whether they can figure out that person on the other end is a friend and we start talking to them immediately, or they do a lot of what's called trouble talk, where they're like, "Wait, who is this? Oh." Right? Waiting for that recognition moment may be the best early indicator of the onset of dementia than anything that shows up clinically today. We call these behavioral markers. There's lots of others. Is the person going to the phone as quickly, when it rings, as they used to? Is it a hearing problem or is it a physicality problem? Has their voice gotten more quiet? We're doing a lot of work with people with Alzheimer's and particularly with Parkinson's, where that quiet voice that sometimes shows up with Parkinson's patients may be the best early indicator of Parkinson's five to 10 years before it shows up clinically. But those subtle changes in your voice over a long period of time are hard for you or your spouse to notice until it becomes so extreme and your voice has become so quiet. So, sensors are looking at that kind of voice. When you pick up the phone, how much tremor are you having, and what is that like, and what is that trend like over a period of time? Are you having more trouble dialing the phone than you used to? Is it a dexterity problem? Is it the onset of arthritis? Are you using the phone? Are you socializing less than you used to? And looking at that pattern. And what does that decline in social health mean, as a kind of a vital sign of the future? And then wow, what a radical idea, we — except in the United States — might be able to use this newfangled technology to actually interact with a nurse or a doctor on the other end of the line. Wow, what a great day that will be once we're allowed to actually do those kinds of things. So, these are what I would call behavioral markers. And it's the whole field that we've been trying to work on for the last 10 years at Intel. How do you put simple disruptive technologies, and the first of five phrases that I'm going to talk about in this talk? Behavioral markers matter. How do we change behavior? How do we measure changes in behavior in a meaningful way that's going to help us with prevention of disease, early onset of disease, and tracking the progression of disease over a long period of time? Now, why would Intel let me spend a lot of time and money, over the last 10 years, trying to understand the needs of seniors and start thinking about these kinds of behavioral markers? This is some of the field work that we've done. We have now lived with 1,000 elderly households in 20 countries over the last 10 years. We study people in Rochester, New York. We go live with them in the winter because what they do in the winter, and their access to healthcare, and how much they socialize, is very different than in the summer. If they have a hip fracture we go with them and we study their entire discharge experience. If they have a family member who is a key part of their care network, we fly and study them as well. So, we study the holistic health experience of 1,000 seniors over the last 10 years in 20 different countries. Why is Intel willing to fund that? It's because of the second slogan that I want to talk about. Ten years ago, when I started trying to convince Intel to let me go start looking at disruptive technologies that could help with independent living, this is what I called it: "Y2K + 10." You know, back in 2000, we were all so obsessed with paying attention to the aging of our computers, and whether or not they were going to survive the tick of the clock from 1999 to 2000, that we missed a moment that only demographers were paying attention to. It was right around New Years. And that switchover, when we had the larger number of older people on the planet, for the first time than younger people. For the first time in human history — and barring aliens landing or some major other pandemic, that's the expectation from demographers, going forward. And 10 years ago it seemed like I had a lot of time to convince Intel to work on this. Right? Y2K + 10 was coming, the baby boomers starting to retire. Well folks, it's like we know these demographics here. This is a map of the entire world. It's like the lights are on, but nobody's home on this demographic Y2K + 10 problem. Right? I mean we sort of get it here, but we don't get it here, and we're not doing anything about it. The health reform bill is largely ignoring the realities of the age wave that's coming, and the implications for what we need to do to change not only how we pay for care, but deliver care in some radically different ways. And in fact, it's upon us. I mean you probably saw these headlines. This is Catherine Casey who is the first boomer to actually get Social Security. That actually occurred this year. She took early retirement. She was born one second after midnight in 1946. A retired school teacher, there she is with a Social Security administrator. The first boomer actually, we didn't even wait till 2011, next year. We're already starting to see early retirement occur this year. All right, so it's here. This Y2K + 10 problem is at our door. This is 50 tsunamis scheduled on the calendar, but somehow we can't sort of marshal our government and innovative forces to sort of get out in front of it and do something about it. We'll wait until it's more of a catastrophe, and react, as opposed to prepare for it. So, one of the reasons it's so challenging to prepare for this Y2K problem is, I want to argue, we have what I would call mainframe poisoning. Andy Grove, about six or seven years ago, he doesn't even know or remember this, in a Fortune Magazine article he used the phrase "mainframe healthcare," and I've been extending and expanding this. He saw it written down somewhere. He's like, "Eric that's a really cool concept." I was like, "Actually it was your idea. You said it in a Fortune Magazine article. I just extended it." You know, this is the mainframe. This mentality of traveling to and timesharing large, expensive healthcare systems actually began in 1787. This is the first general hospital in Vienna. And actually the second general hospital in Vienna, in about 1850, was where we started to build out an entire curriculum for teaching med students specialties. And it's a place in which we started developing architecture that literally divided the body, and divided care into departments and compartments. And it was reflected in our architecture, it was reflected in the way that we taught students, and this mainframe mentality persists today. Now, I'm not anti-hospital. With my own healthcare problems, I've taken drug therapies, I've traveled to this hospital and others, many, many times. But we worship the high hospital on a hill. Right? And this is mainframe healthcare. And just as 30 years ago we couldn't conceive that we would have the power of a mainframe computer that took up a room this size in our purses and on our belts, that we're carrying around in our cell phone today, and suddenly, computing, that used to be an expert driven system, it was a personal system that we all owned as part of our daily lives — that shift from mainframe to personal computing is what we have to do for healthcare. We have to shift from this mainframe mentality of healthcare to a personal model of healthcare. We are obsessed with this way of thinking. When Intel does surveys all around the world and we say, "Quick response: healthcare." The first word that comes up is "doctor." The second that comes up is "hospital." And the third is "illness" or "sickness." Right? We are wired, in our imagination, to think about healthcare and healthcare innovation as something that goes into that place. Our entire health reform discussion right now, health I.T., when we talk with policy makers, equals "How are we going to get doctors using electronic medical records in the mainframe?" We're not thinking about how do we shift from the mainframe to the home. And the problem with this is the way we conceive healthcare. Right? This is a very reactive, crisis-driven system. We're doing 15-minute exams with patients. It's population-based. We collect a bunch of biological information in this artificial setting, and we fix them up, like Humpty-Dumpty all over again, and send them home, and hope — we might hand them a brochure, maybe an interactive website — that they do as asked and don't come back into the mainframe. And the problem is we can't afford it today, folks. We can't afford mainframe healthcare today to include the uninsured. And now we want to do a double-double of the age wave coming through? Business as usual in healthcare is broken and we've got to do something different. We've got to focus on the home. We've got to focus on a personal healthcare paradigm that moves care to the home. How do we be more proactive, prevention-driven? How do we collect vital signs and other kinds of information 24 by 7? How do we get a personal baseline about what's going to work for you? How do we collect not just biological data but behavioral data, psychological data, relational data, in and on and around the home? And how do we drive compliance to be a customized care plan that uses all this great technology that's around us to change our behavior? That's what we need to do for our personal health model. I want to give you a couple of examples. This is Mimi from one of our studies — in her 90s, had to move out of her home because her family was worried about falls. Raise your hand if you had a serious fall in your household, or any of your loved ones, your parents or so forth. Right? Classic. Hip fracture often leads to institutionalization of a senior. This is what was happening to Mimi; the family was worried about it, moved her out of her own home into an assisted living facility. She tripped over her oxygen tank. Many people in this generation won't press the button, even if they have an alert call system, because they don't want to bother anybody, even though they've been paying 30 dollars a month. Boomers will press the button. Trust me. They're going to be pressing that button non-stop. Right? Mimi broke her pelvis, lay all night, all morning, finally somebody came in and found her, sent her to the hospital. They fixed her back up. She was never going to be able to move back into the assisted living. They put her into the nursing home unit. First night in the nursing home unit where she had been in the same assisted living facility, moved her from one bed to another, kind of threw her, rebroke her pelvis, sent her back to the hospital that she had just come from, no one read the chart, put her on Tylenol, which she is allergic to, broke out, got bedsores, basically, had heart problems, and died from the fall and the complications and the errors that were there. Now, the most frightening thing about this is this is my wife's grandmother. Now, I'm Eric Dishman. I speak English, I work for Intel, I make a good salary, I'm smart about falls and fall-related injuries — it's an area of research that I work on. I have access to senators and CEOs. I can't stop this from happening. What happens if you don't have money, you don't speak English or don't have the kind of access to deal with these kinds of problems that inevitably occur? How do we actually prevent the vast majority of falls from ever occurring in the first place? Let me give you a quick example of work that we're doing to try to do exactly that. I've been wearing a little technology that we call Shimmer. It's a research platform. It has accelerometry. You can plug in a three-lead ECG. There is all kinds of sort of plug-and-play kind of Legos that you can do to capture, in the wild, in the real world, things like tremor, gait, stride length and those kinds of things. The problem is, our understanding of falls today, like Mimi, is get a survey in the mail three months after you fell, from the State, saying, "What were you doing when you fell?" That's sort of the state of the art. But with something like Shimmer, or we have something called the Magic Carpet, embedded sensors in carpet, or camera-based systems that we borrowed from sports medicine, we're starting for the first time in those 600 elderly households to collect actual kinematic motion data to understand: What are the subtle changes that are occurring that can show us that mom has become risk at falls? And most often we can do two interventions, fix the meds mix. I'm a qualitative researcher, but when I look at these data streams coming in from these homes, I can look at the data and tell you the day that some doctor prescribed them something that nobody else knew that they were on, because we see the changes in their patterns in the household. Right? These discoveries of behavioral markers, and behavioral changes are game changing, and like the discovery of the microscope because of our collecting data streams that we've actually never done before. This is an example in our TRIL Clinic in Ireland of — actually what you're seeing is she's looking at data, in this picture, from the Magic Carpet. So, we have a little carpet that you can look at your amount of postural sway, and look at the changes in your postural sway over many months. Here's what some of this data might look like. This is actually sensor firings. These are two different subjects in our study. It's about a year's worth of data. The color represents different rooms they are in the house. This person on the left is living in their own home. This person on the right is actually living in an assisted living facility. I know this because look at how punctuated meal time is when they are no longer in their particular rooms here. Right? Now, this doesn't mean that much to you. But when we look at these cycles of data over a longer period of time — and we're looking at everything from motion around different rooms in the house, to sort of micro-motions that Shimmer picks up, about gait and stride length — these streams of data are starting to tell us things about behavioral patterns that we've never understood before. You can go to ORCATech.org — it has nothing to do with whales, it's the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology — to see more about that. The problem is, Intel is still one of the largest funders in the world of independent living technology research. I'm not bragging about how much we fund; it's how little anyone else actually pays attention to aging and funds innovation on aging, chronic disease management and independent living in the home. So, my mantra here, my fourth slogan is: 10,000 households or bust. We need to drive a national, if not international, Framingham-type heart study of independent living technologies, where we have 10,000 elderly connected households with broadband, full medical characterization, and a platform by which we can start to experiment and turn these from 20-household anecdotal studies that the universities fund, to large clinical trials that prove out the value of these technologies. So, 10,000 households or bust. These are just some of the households that we've done in the Intel studies. My fifth and final phrase: I have tried for two years, and there were moments when we were quite close, to make this healthcare reform bill be about reform from something and to something, from a mainframe model to a personal health model, or to mean something more than just a debate about the public option and how we're going to finance. It doesn't matter how we finance healthcare. We're going to figure something out for the next 10 years, and try it. No matter who pays for it, we better start doing care in a fundamentally different way and treating the home and the patient and the family member and the caregivers as part of these coordinated care teams and using disruptive technologies that are already here to do care in some pretty fundamental different ways. The president needs to stand up and say, at the end of a healthcare reform debate, "Our goal as a country is to move 50 percent of care out of institutions, clinics, hospitals and nursing homes, to the home, in 10 years." It's achievable. We should do it economically, we should do it morally, and we should do it for quality of life. But there is no goal within this health reform. It's just a mess today. So, you know, that's my last message to you. How do we set a going-to-the-moon goal of dealing with the Y2K +10 problem that's coming? It's not that innovation and technology is going to be the magic pill that cures all, but it's going to be part of the solution. And if we don't create a personal health movement, something that we're all aiming towards in reform, then we're going to move nowhere. So, I hope you'll turn this conference into that kind of movement forward. Thanks very much. (Applause)

Gaming can make a better world

{0: 'Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.'}

TED2010

I'm Jane McGonigal. I'm a game designer. I've been making games online now for 10 years, and my goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games. Now, I have a plan for this, and it entails convincing more people, including all of you, to spend more time playing bigger and better games. Right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games. Some of you might be thinking, "That's a lot of time to spend playing games. Maybe too much time, considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world." But actually, according to my research at the Institute for the Future, actually the opposite is true. Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems. In fact, I believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that total dramatically. I've calculated the total we need at 21 billion hours of game play every week. So, that's probably a bit of a counter-intuitive idea, so I'll say it again, let it sink in: If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade. (Laughter) No. I'm serious. I am. Here's why. This picture pretty much sums up why I think games are so essential to the future survival of the human species. (Laughter) Truly. This is a portrait by photographer Phil Toledano. He wanted to capture the emotion of gaming, so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing. And this is a classic gaming emotion. Now, if you're not a gamer, you might miss some of the nuance in this photo. You probably see the sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but intense concentration, deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem. If you are a gamer, you will notice a few nuances here: the crinkle of the eyes up, and around the mouth is a sign of optimism, and the eyebrows up is surprise. This is a gamer who's on the verge of something called an "epic win." (Laughter) Oh, you've heard of that. OK, good, so we have some gamers among us. An epic win is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive, you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it. It was almost beyond the threshold of imagination, and when you get there, you're shocked to discover what you're truly capable of. That's an epic win. This is a gamer on the verge of an epic win. And this is the face that we need to see on millions of problem-solvers all over the world as we try to tackle the obstacles of the next century — the face of someone who, against all odds, is on the verge of an epic win. Now, unfortunately this is more of the face that we see in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems. This is what I call the "I'm Not Good At Life" face. This is actually me making it. Can you see? Yes. Good. This is me making the "I'm Not Good At Life" face. This is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where I did my PhD on why we're better in games than we are in real life. And this is a problem that a lot of gamers have. We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games. I don't mean just good as in successful, although that's part of it. We do achieve more in game worlds. But I also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters — inspired to collaborate and to cooperate. And when we're in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves — the most likely to help at a moment's notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again. And in real life, when we face failure, when we confront obstacles, we often don't feel that way. We feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. We never have those feelings when we're playing games, they just don't exist in games. So that's what I wanted to study when I was a graduate student. What about games makes it impossible to feel that we can't achieve everything? How can we take those feelings from games and apply them to real-world work? So I looked at games like World of Warcraft, which is really the ideal collaborative problem-solving environment. And I started to notice a few things that make epic wins so possible in online worlds. The first thing is whenever you show up in one of these online games, especially in World of Warcraft, there are lots and lots of different characters who are willing to trust you with a world-saving mission, right away. But not just any mission, it's a mission that is perfectly matched with your current level in the game. Right? So you can do it. They never give you a challenge you can't achieve. But it is on the verge of what you're capable of, so you have to try hard. But there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft; no sitting around, wringing your hands — there's always something specific and important to be done. There are also tons of collaborators. Everywhere you go, hundreds of thousands of people ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission. That's not something we have in real life that easily, this sense that at our fingertips are tons of collaborators. And there's this epic story, this inspiring story of why we're there, and what we're doing, and we get all this positive feedback. You guys have heard of leveling up, +1 strength, +1 intelligence. We don't get that kind of constant feedback in real life. When I get off this stage, I'm not going to have +1 speaking, and +1 crazy idea, +20 crazy idea. I don't get that feedback in real life. Now, the problem with collaborative online environments like World of Warcraft is that it's so satisfying to be on the verge of an epic win all the time, we decide to spend all our time in these game worlds. It's just better than reality. So, so far, collectively all the World of Warcraft gamers have spent 5.93 million years solving the virtual problems of Azeroth. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It might sound like it's a bad thing. But to put that in context: 5.93 million years ago was when our earliest primate human ancestors stood up. That was the first upright primate. So when we talk about how much time we're currently investing in playing games, the only way it makes sense to even think about it is to talk about time at the magnitude of human evolution, which is an extraordinary thing. But it's also apt, because it turns out that by spending all this time playing games, we're actually changing what we are capable of as human beings. We're evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species. This is true. I believe this. So, consider this really interesting statistic; it was recently published by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University: The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. First of all, for children in the United States, 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school, from fifth grade to high school graduation, if you have perfect attendance. (Laughter) So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on, where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they're learning about everything else in school. Some of you have probably read Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers," so you would have heard of his theory of success, the "10,000 hours" theory of success. It's based on this great cognitive-science research that says if we can master 10,000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we're looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers. So, the big question is, "What exactly are gamers getting so good at?" Because if we could figure that out, we would have a virtually unprecedented human resource on our hands. This is how many people we now have in the world who spend at least an hour a day playing online games. These are our virtuoso gamers, 500 million people who are extraordinarily good at something. And in the next decade, we're going to have another billion gamers who are extraordinarily good at whatever that is. If you don't know it already, this is coming. The game industry is developing consoles that are low-energy and that work with the wireless phone networks instead of broadband Internet, so that gamers all over the world, particularly in India, China, Brazil, can get online. They expect one billion more gamers in the next decade. It will bring us up to 1.5 billion gamers. So I've started to think about what these games are making us virtuosos at. Here are the four things I came up with. The first is urgent optimism. OK, think of this as extreme self-motivation. Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it's always worth trying, and trying now. Gamers don't sit around. Gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric. There's a lot of interesting research that shows we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they've beaten us badly. And the reason is, it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goal, stay with the game until it's over. And so, playing a game together actually builds up bonds and trust and cooperation. And we actually build stronger social relationships as a result. Blissful productivity. I love it. You know, there's a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week — kind of a half-time job. It's because we know, when we're playing a game, that we're actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out. We know that we are optimized as human beings, to do hard and meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they're given the right work. Finally: epic meaning. Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions to human planetary-scale stories. So, just one bit of trivia that helps put that into perspective: So, you all know Wikipedia, biggest wiki in the world. Second biggest wiki in the world, with nearly 80,000 articles, is the World of Warcraft wiki. Five million people use it every month. They have compiled more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other topic covered on any other wiki in the world. They are building an epic story. They are building an epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft. Okay, so these are four superpowers that add up to one thing: Gamers are super-empowered hopeful individuals. These are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. And the only problem is, they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. That's the problem that I'm trying to solve. There's an economist named Edward Castronova. His work is brilliant. He looks at why people are investing so much time and energy and money in online worlds. And he says, "We're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments." And he's an economist, so he's rational. And he says — (Laughter) Not like me, I'm a game designer; I'm exuberant. But he says that this makes perfect sense, because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life; they get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. So he says, for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. We have to start making the real world work more like a game. I take my inspiration from something that happened 2,500 years ago. These are ancient dice, made out of sheep's knuckles. Before we had awesome game controllers, we had sheep's knuckles. And these represent the first game equipment designed by human beings, and if you're familiar with the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, you might know this history, which is the history of who invented games and why. Herodotus says that games, particularly dice games, were invented in the kingdom of Lydia, during a time of famine. Apparently, there was such a severe famine that the king of Lydia decided they had to do something crazy. People were suffering. People were fighting. It was an extreme situation, they needed an extreme solution. So, according to Herodotus, they invented dice games, and they set up a kingdom-wide policy: On one day, everybody would eat, and on the next day, everybody would play games. And they would be so immersed in playing the dice games, because games are so engaging, and immerse us in such satisfying, blissful productivity, they would ignore the fact that they had no food to eat. And then on the next day, they would play games; and on the next day, they would eat. And according to Herodotus, they passed 18 years this way, surviving through a famine, by eating on one day, and playing games on the next. Now, this is exactly, I think, how we're using games today. We're using games to escape real-world suffering — we're using games to get away from everything that's broken in the real environment, everything that's not satisfying about real life, and we're getting what we need from games. But it doesn't have to end there. This is really exciting. According to Herodotus, after 18 years the famine wasn't getting better, so the king decided they would play one final dice game. They divided the entire kingdom in half. They played one dice game, and the winners of that game got to go on an epic adventure. They would leave Lydia, and they would go out in search of a new place to live, leaving behind just enough people to survive on the resources that were available, and hopefully to take their civilization somewhere else where they could thrive. Now, this sounds crazy, right? But recently, DNA evidence has shown that the Etruscans, who then led to the Roman Empire, actually share the same DNA as the ancient Lydians. And so, recently, scientists have suggested that Herodotus' crazy story is actually true. And geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly 20 years, that could have explained the famine. So this crazy story might be true. They might have actually saved their culture by playing games, escaping to games for 18 years, and then been so inspired, and knew so much about how to come together with games, that they actually saved the entire civilization that way. Okay, we can do that. (Laughter) We've been playing Warcraft since 1994. That was the first real-time strategy game from the World of Warcraft series. That was 16 years ago. They played dice games for 18 years, we've been playing Warcraft for 16 years. I say we are ready for our own epic game. Now, they had half the civilization go off in search of a new world, so that's where I get my 21 billion hours a week of game-play from. Let's get half of us to agree to spend an hour a day playing games, until we solve real-world problems. Now, I know you're asking, "How are we going to solve real-world problems in games?" Well, that's what I've devoted my work to over the past few years, at the Institute for the Future. We have this banner in our offices in Palo Alto, and it expresses our view of how we should try to relate to the future. We do not want to try to predict the future. What we want to do is make the future. We want to imagine the best-case scenario outcome, and then we want to empower people to make that outcome a reality. We want to imagine epic wins, and then give people the means to achieve the epic win. I'm just going to very briefly show you three games that I've made that are an attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. This is World Without Oil. We made this game in 2007. This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it's real, and to live your real life as if we've run out of oil. So when you come to the game, you sign up, tell us where you live, and then we give you real-time news videos, data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what's not available, how food supply is being affected, how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if there's rioting, and you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos. We piloted this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we've tracked them for the three years since. And I can tell you that this is a transformative experience. Nobody wants to change how they live, just because it's good for the world, or because we're supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, "We've run out of oil. This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive," most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game. So for the next world-saving game, we decided to aim higher — bigger problem than just peak oil. We did a game called Superstruct at the Institute for the Future. And the premise was, a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. This supercomputer was called the Global Extinction Awareness System, of course. We asked people to come online — almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team — you've got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world. (Laughter) But in our game, instead of just having five people on the dream team, we said, "Everybody's on the dream team, and it's your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net." We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, Google "Superstruct," and see. So, finally, the last game, we're launching it March 3rd. This is a game done with the World Bank Institute. If you complete the game, you will be certified by the World Bank Institute as a Social Innovator, class of 2010. Working with universities all over sub-Saharan Africa, and we are inviting them to learn social innovation skills. We've got a graphic novel, we've got leveling up in skills like local insight, knowledge networking, sustainability, vision and resourcefulness. I would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people, anywhere in the world, particularly in developing areas, who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world. So, I'm going to wrap up now. I want to ask a question. What do you think happens next? We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning. I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. That's my hope, that you will join me in making and playing games like this. When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want, so I say: Let the world-changing games begin. Thank you. (Applause)

Medical miracle on Everest

{0: 'Ken Kamler has served as doctor on some of the world’s most daring expeditions, but also performs delicate microsurgery when at home in New York. '}

TEDMED 2009

OK. We've heard a lot of people speak at this conference about the power of the human mind. And what I'd like to do today is give you a vivid example of how that power can be unleashed when someone is in a survival situation, how the will to survive can bring that out in people. This is an incident which occurred on Mount Everest; it was the worst disaster in the history of Everest. And when it occurred, I was the only doctor on the mountain. So I'll take you through that and we'll see what it's like when someone really summons the will to survive. OK, this is Mount Everest. It's 29,035 feet high. I've been there six times: Four times I did work with National Geographic, making tectonic plate measurements; twice, I went with NASA doing remote sensing devices. It was on my fourth trip to Everest that a comet passed over the mountain. Hyakutake. And the Sherpas told us then that was a very bad omen, and we should have listened to them. Everest is an extreme environment. There's only one-third as much oxygen at the summit as there is at sea level. Near the summit, temperatures can be 40 degrees below zero. You can have winds 20 to 40 miles an hour. It's actually a wind-chill factor which is lower than a summer day on Mars. I remember one time being up near the summit, I reached into my down jacket for a drink from my water bottle, inside my down jacket, only to discover that the water was already frozen solid. That gives you an idea of just how severe things are near the summit. OK, this is the route up Everest. It starts at base camp, at 17,500 feet. Camp One, 2,000 feet higher. Camp Two, another 2,000 feet higher up, what's called the Western Cwm. CampThree is at the base of Lhotse, which is the fourth highest mountain in the world, but it's dwarfed by Everest. And then Camp Four is the highest camp; that's 3,000 feet short of the summit. This is a view of base camp. This is pitched on a glacier at 17,500 feet. It's the highest point you can bring your yaks before you have to unload. And this is what they unloaded for me: I had four yak loads of medical supplies, which are dumped in a tent, and here I am trying to arrange things. This was our expedition. It was a National Geographic expedition, but it was organized by The Explorers Club. There were three other expeditions on the mountain, an American team, a New Zealand team and an IMAX team. And, after actually two months of preparation, we built our camps all the way up the mountain. This is a view looking up the icefall, the first 2,000 feet of the climb up from base camp. And here's a picture in the icefall; it's a waterfall, but it's frozen, but it moves very slowly, and it actually changes every day. When you're in it, you're like a rat in a maze; you can't even see over the top. This is near the top of the icefall. You want to climb through at night when the ice is frozen. That way, it's less likely to tumble down on you. These are some climbers reaching the top of the icefall just at sun-up. This is me crossing a crevasse. We cross on aluminum ladders with safety ropes attached. That's another crevasse. Some of these things are 10 stories deep or more, and one of my climbing friends says that the reason we actually climb at night is because if we ever saw the bottom of what we're climbing over, we would never do it. Okay. This is Camp One. It's the first flat spot you can reach after you get up to the top of the icefall. And from there we climb up to Camp Two, which is sort of the foreground. These are climbers moving up the Lhotse face, that mountain toward Camp Three. They're on fixed ropes here. A fall here, if you weren't roped in, would be 5,000 feet down. This is a view taken from camp three. You can see the Lhotse face is in profile, it's about a 45 degree angle. It takes two days to climb it, so you put the camp halfway through. If you notice, the summit of Everest is black. There's no ice over it. And that's because Everest is so high, it's in the jet stream, and winds are constantly scouring the face, so no snow gets to accumulate. What looks like a cloud behind the summit ridge is actually snow being blown off the summit. This is on the way up from Camp Three to Camp Four, moving in, up through the clouds. And this is at Camp Four. Once you get to Camp Four, you have maybe 24 hours to decide if you're going to go for the summit or not. Everybody's on oxygen, your supplies are limited, and you either have to go up or go down, make that decision very quickly. This is a picture of Rob Hall. He was the leader of the New Zealand team. This is a radio he used later to call his wife that I'll tell you about. These are some climbers waiting to go to the summit. They're up at Camp Four, and you can see that there's wind blowing off the summit. This is not good weather to climb in, so the climbers are just waiting, hoping that the wind's going to die down. And, in fact, the wind does die down at night. It becomes very calm, there's no wind at all. This looks like a good chance to go for the summit. So here are some climbers starting out for the summit on what's called the Triangular Face. It's the first part of climb. It's done in the dark, because it's actually less steep than what comes next, and you can gain daylight hours if you do this in the dark. So that's what happened. The climbers got on the southeast ridge. This is the view looking at the southeast ridge. The summit would be in the foreground. From here, it's about 1,500 feet up at a 30-degree angle to the summit. But what happened that year was the wind suddenly and unexpectedly picked up. A storm blew in that no one was anticipating. You can see here some ferocious winds blowing snow way high off the summit. And there were climbers on that summit ridge. This is a picture of me in that area taken a year before, and you can see I've got an oxygen mask on with a rebreather. I have an oxygen hose connected here. You can see on this climber, we have two oxygen tanks in the backpack — little titanium tanks, very lightweight — and we're not carrying much else. This is all you've got. You're very exposed on the summit ridge. OK, this is a view taken on the summit ridge itself. This is on the way toward the summit, on that 1,500-foot bridge. All the climbers here are climbing unroped, and the reason is because the drop off is so sheer on either side that if you were roped to somebody, you'd wind up just pulling them off with you. So each person climbs individually. And it's not a straight path at all, it's very difficult climbing, and there's always the risk of falling on either side. If you fall to your left, you're going to fall 8,000 feet into Nepal; if you fall to your right, you're going to fall 12,000 feet into Tibet. So it's probably better to fall into Tibet because you'll live longer. (Laughter) But, either way, you fall for the rest of your life. OK. Those climbers were up near the summit, along that summit ridge that you see up there, and I was down here in Camp Three. My expedition was down in Camp Three, while these guys were up there in the storm. The storm was so fierce that we had to lay, fully dressed, fully equipped, laid out on the tent floor to stop the tent from blowing off the mountain. It was the worst winds I've ever seen. And the climbers up on the ridge were that much higher, 2,000 feet higher, and completely exposed to the elements. We were in radio contact with some of them. This is a view taken along the summit ridge. Rob Hall, we heard by radio, was up here, at this point in the storm with Doug Hansen. And we heard that Rob was OK, but Doug was too weak to come down. He was exhausted, and Rob was staying with him. We also got some bad news in the storm that Beck Weathers, another climber, had collapsed in the snow and was dead. There were still 18 other climbers that we weren't aware of their condition. They were lost. There was total confusion on the mountain; all the stories were confusing, most of them were conflicting. We really had no idea what was going on during that storm. We were just hunkered down in our tents at Camp Three. Our two strongest climbers, Todd Burleson and Pete Athans, decided to go up to try to rescue who they could even though there was a ferocious storm going. They tried to radio a message to Rob Hall, who was a superb climber stuck, sort of, with a weak climber up near the summit. I expected them to say to Rob, "Hold on. We're coming." But in fact, what they said was, "Leave Doug and come down yourself. There's no chance of saving him, and just try to save yourself at this point." And Rob got that message, but his answer was, "We're both listening." Todd and Pete got up to the summit ridge, up in here, and it was a scene of complete chaos up there. But they did what they could to stabilize the people. I gave them radio advice from Camp Three, and we sent down the climbers that could make it down under their own power. The ones that couldn't we just sort of decided to leave up at Camp Four. So the climbers were coming down along this route. This is taken from Camp Three, where I was. And they all came by me so I could take a look at them and see what I could do for them, which is really not much, because Camp Three is a little notch cut in the ice in the middle of a 45-degree angle. You can barely stand outside the tent. It's really cold; it's 24,000 feet. The only supplies I had at that altitude were two plastic bags with preloaded syringes of painkiller and steroids. So, as the climbers came by me, I sort of assessed whether or not they were in condition to continue on further down. The ones that weren't that lucid or were not that well coordinated, I would give an injection of steroids to try to give them some period of lucidity and coordination where they could then work their way further down the mountain. It's so awkward to work up there that sometimes I even gave the injections right through their clothes. It was just too hard to maneuver any other way up there. While I was taking care of them, we got more news about Rob Hall. There was no way we could get up high enough to rescue him. He called in to say that he was alone now. Apparently, Doug had died higher up on the mountain. But Rob was now too weak to come down himself, and with the fierce winds and up at that altitude, he was just beyond rescue and he knew it. At that point, he asked to be paged into his wife. He was carrying a radio. His wife was home in New Zealand, seven months pregnant with their first child, and Rob asked to be patched into her. That was done, and Rob and his wife had their last conversation. They picked the name for their baby. Rob then signed off, and that was the last we ever heard of him. I was faced with treating a lot of critically ill patients at 24,000 feet, which was an impossibility. So what we did was, we got the victims down to 21,000 feet, where it was easier for me to treat them. This was my medical kit. It's a tackle box filled with medical supplies. This is what I carried up the mountain. I had more supplies lower down, which I asked to be brought up to meet me at the lower camp. And this was scene at the lower camp. The survivors came in one by one. Some of them were hypothermic, some of them were frostbitten, some were both. What we did was try to warm them up as best we could, put oxygen on them and try to revive them, which is difficult to do at 21,000 feet, when the tent is freezing. This is some severe frostbite on the feet, severe frostbite on the nose. This climber was snow blind. As I was taking care of these climbers, we got a startling experience. Out of nowhere, Beck Weathers, who we had already been told was dead, stumbled into the tent, just like a mummy, he walked into the tent. I expected him to be incoherent, but, in fact, he walked into the tent and said to me, "Hi, Ken. Where should I sit?" And then he said, "Do you accept my health insurance?" (Laughter) He really said that. (Laughter) So he was completely lucid, but he was very severely frostbitten. You can see his hand is completely white; his face, his nose, is burned. First, it turns white, and then when it's completed necrosis, it turns black, and then it falls off. It's the last stage, just like a scar. So, as I was taking care of Beck, he related what had been going on up there. He said he had gotten lost in the storm, collapsed in the snow, and just laid there, unable to move. Some climbers had come by and looked at him, and he heard them say, "He's dead." But Beck wasn't dead; he heard that, but he was completely unable to move. He was in some sort of catatonic state where he could be aware of his surroundings, but couldn't even blink to indicate that he was alive. So the climbers passed him by, and Beck lay there for a day, a night and another day, in the snow. And then he said to himself, "I don't want to die. I have a family to come back to." And the thoughts of his family, his kids and his wife, generated enough energy, enough motivation in him, so that he actually got up. After laying in the snow that long a time, he got up and found his way back to the camp. And Beck told me that story very quietly, but I was absolutely stunned by it. I couldn't imagine anybody laying in the snow that long a time and then getting up. He apparently reversed an irreversible hypothermia. And I can only try to speculate on how he did it. So, what if we had Beck hooked up to a SPECT scan, something that could actually measure brain function? Just very simply, the three parts of the brain: the frontal lobe, where you focus your attention and concentration; you have the temporal lobe, where you form images and keep memories; and the posterior part of your brain, which contains the cerebellum, which controls motion; and the brain stem, where you have your basic maintenance functions, like heartbeat and respiration. So let's take a cut through the brain here, and imagine that Beck was hooked up to a SPECT scan. This measures dynamic blood flow and therefore energy flow within the brain. So you have the prefrontal cortex here, lighting up in red. This is a pretty evenly distributed scan. You have the middle area, where the temporal lobe might be, in here, and the posterior portion, where the maintenance functions are in the back. This is a roughly normal scan, showing equal distribution of energy. Now, you go to this one and you see how much more the frontal lobes are lighting up. This might be what Beck would be experiencing when he realizes he's in danger. He's focusing all his attention on getting himself out of trouble. These parts of the brain are quieting down. He's not thinking about his family or anybody else at this point, and he's working pretty hard. He's trying to get his muscles going and get out of this. OK, but he's losing ground here. He's running out of energy. It's too cold; he can't keep his metabolic fires going, and, you see, there's no more red here; his brain is quieting down. He's collapsed in the snow here. Everything is quiet, there's very little red anywhere. Beck is powering down. He's dying. You go on to the next scan, but, in Beck's case, you can see that the middle part of his brain is beginning to light up again. He's beginning to think about his family. He's beginning to have images that are motivating him to get up. He's developing energy in this area through thought. And this is how he's going to turn thought back into action. This part of the brain is called the anterior cingulate gyrus. It's an area in which a lot of neuroscientists believe the seat of will exists. This is where people make decisions, where they develop willpower. And, you can see, there's an energy flow going from the mid portion of his brain, where he's got images of his family, into this area, which is powering his will. Okay. This is getting stronger and stronger to the point where it's actually going to be a motivating factor. He's going to develop enough energy in that area — after a day, a night and a day — to actually motivate himself to get up. And you can see here, he's starting to get more energy into the frontal lobe. He's beginning to focus, he can concentrate now. He's thinking about what he's got to do to save himself. So this energy has been transmitted up toward the front of his brain, and it's getting quieter down here, but he's using this energy to think about what he has to do to get himself going. And then, that energy is sort of spreading throughout his thought areas. He's not thinking about his family now, and he's getting himself motivated. This is the posterior part, where his muscles are going to be moving, and he's going to be pacing himself. His heart and lungs are going to pick up speed. So this is what I can speculate might have been going on had we been able to do a SPECT scan on Beck during this survival epic. So here I am taking care of Beck at 21,000 feet, and I felt what I was doing was completely trivial compared to what he had done for himself. It just shows you what the power of the mind can do. He was critically ill, there were other critically ill patients; luckily, we were able to get a helicopter in to rescue these guys. A helicopter came in at 21,000 feet and carried out the highest helicopter rescue in history. It was able to land on the ice, take away Beck and the other survivors, one by one, and get them off to Kathmandu in a clinic before we even got back to base camp. This is a scene at base camp, at one of the camps where some of the climbers were lost. And we had a memorial service there a few days later. These are Serphas lighting juniper branches. They believe juniper smoke is holy. And the climbers stood around on the high rocks and spoke of the climbers who were lost up near the summit, turning to the mountain, actually, to talk to them directly. There were five climbers lost here. This was Scott Fischer, Rob Hall, Andy Harris, Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba. And one more climber should have died that day, but didn't, and that's Beck Weathers. He was able to survive because he was able to generate that incredible willpower, he was able to use all the power of his mind to save himself. These are Tibetan prayer flags. These Sherpas believe that if you write prayers on these flags, the message will be carried up to the gods, and that year, Beck's message was answered. Thank you. (Applause)

We are the stories we tell ourselves

{0: 'Shekhar Kapur is a visionary filmmaker and storyteller who works at the intersection of art, myth and activism.'}

TEDIndia 2009

So, I was just asked to go and shoot this film called "Elizabeth." And we're all talking about this great English icon and saying, "She's a fantastic woman, she does everything. How are we going to introduce her?" So we went around the table with the studio and the producers and the writer, and they came to me and said, "Shekhar, what do you think?" And I said, "I think she's dancing." And I could see everybody looked at me, somebody said, "Bollywood." The other said, "How much did we hire him for?" And the third said, "Let's find another director." I thought I had better change. So we had a lot of discussion on how to introduce Elizabeth, and I said, "OK, maybe I am too Bollywood. Maybe Elizabeth, this great icon, dancing? What are you talking about?" So I rethought the whole thing, and then we all came to a consensus. And here was the introduction of this great British icon called "Elizabeth." Leicester: May I join you, my lady? Elizabeth: If it please you, sir. (Music) Shekhar Kapur: So she was dancing. So how many people who saw the film did not get that here was a woman in love, that she was completely innocent and saw great joy in her life, and she was youthful? And how many of you did not get that? That's the power of visual storytelling, that's the power of dance, that's the power of music: the power of not knowing. When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience. So I come up, and I say, "What am I going to do today?" I'm not going to do what I planned to do, and I put myself into absolute panic. It's my one way of getting rid of my mind, getting rid of this mind that says, "Hey, you know what you're doing. You know exactly what you're doing. You're a director, you've done it for years." So I've got to get there and be in complete panic. It's a symbolic gesture. I tear up the script, I go and I panic myself, I get scared. I'm doing it right now; you can watch me. I'm getting nervous, I don't know what to say, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't want to go there. And as I go there, of course, my A.D. says, "You know what you're going to do, sir." I say, "Of course I do." And the studio executives, they would say, "Hey, look at Shekhar. He's so prepared." And inside I've just been listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan because he's chaotic. I'm allowing myself to go into chaos because out of chaos, I'm hoping some moments of truth will come. All preparation is preparation. I don't even know if it's honest. I don't even know if it's truthful. The truth of it all comes on the moment, organically, and if you get five great moments of great, organic stuff in your storytelling, in your film, your film, audiences will get it. So I'm looking for those moments, and I'm standing there and saying, "I don't know what to say." So, ultimately, everybody's looking at you, 200 people at seven in the morning who got there at quarter to seven, and you arrived at seven, and everybody's saying, "Hey. What's the first thing? What's going to happen?" And you put yourself into a state of panic where you don't know, and so you don't know. And so, because you don't know, you're praying to the universe because you're praying to the universe that something — I'm going to try and access the universe the way Einstein — say a prayer — accessed his equations, the same source. I'm looking for the same source because creativity comes from absolutely the same source that you meditate somewhere outside yourself, outside the universe. You're looking for something that comes and hits you. Until that hits you, you're not going to do the first shot. So what do you do? So Cate says, "Shekhar, what do you want me to do?" And I say, "Cate, what do you want to do?" (Laughter) "You're a great actor, and I like to give to my actors — why don't you show me what you want to do?" (Laughter) What am I doing? I'm trying to buy time. I'm trying to buy time. So the first thing about storytelling that I learned, and I follow all the time is: Panic. Panic is the great access of creativity because that's the only way to get rid of your mind. Get rid of your mind. Get out of it, get it out. And let's go to the universe because there's something out there that is more truthful than your mind, that is more truthful than your universe. [unclear], you said that yesterday. I'm just repeating it because that's what I follow constantly to find the shunyata somewhere, the emptiness. Out of the emptiness comes a moment of creativity. So that's what I do. When I was a kid — I was about eight years old. You remember how India was. There was no pollution. In Delhi, we used to live — we used to call it a chhat or the khota. Khota's now become a bad word. It means their terrace — and we used to sleep out at night. At school I was being just taught about physics, and I was told that if there is something that exists, then it is measurable. If it is not measurable, it does not exist. And at night I would lie out, looking at the unpolluted sky, as Delhi used to be at that time when I was a kid, and I used to stare at the universe and say, "How far does this universe go?" My father was a doctor. And I would think, "Daddy, how far does the universe go?" And he said, "Son, it goes on forever." So I said, "Please measure forever because in school they're teaching me that if I cannot measure it, it does not exist. It doesn't come into my frame of reference." So, how far does eternity go? What does forever mean? And I would lie there crying at night because my imagination could not touch creativity. So what did I do? At that time, at the tender age of seven, I created a story. What was my story? And I don't know why, but I remember the story. There was a woodcutter who's about to take his ax and chop a piece of wood, and the whole galaxy is one atom of that ax. And when that ax hits that piece of wood, that's when everything will destroy and the Big Bang will happen again. But all before that there was a woodcutter. And then when I would run out of that story, I would imagine that woodcutter's universe is one atom in the ax of another woodcutter. So every time, I could tell my story again and again and get over this problem, and so I got over the problem. How did I do it? Tell a story. So what is a story? A story is our — all of us — we are the stories we tell ourselves. In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves. So that's as wide as we look at stories. A story is the relationship that you develop between who you are, or who you potentially are, and the infinite world, and that's our mythology. We tell our stories, and a person without a story does not exist. So Einstein told a story and followed his stories and came up with theories and came up with theories and then came up with his equations. Alexander had a story that his mother used to tell him, and he went out to conquer the world. We all, everybody, has a story that they follow. We tell ourselves stories. So, I will go further, and I say, "I tell a story, and therefore I exist." I exist because there are stories, and if there are no stories, we don't exist. We create stories to define our existence. If we do not create the stories, we probably go mad. I don't know; I'm not sure, but that's what I've done all the time. Now, a film. A film tells a story. I often wonder when I make a film — I'm thinking of making a film of the Buddha — and I often wonder: If Buddha had all the elements that are given to a director — if he had music, if he had visuals, if he had a video camera — would we get Buddhism better? But that puts some kind of burden on me. I have to tell a story in a much more elaborate way, but I have the potential. It's called subtext. When I first went to Hollywood, they said — I used to talk about subtext, and my agent came to me, "Would you kindly not talk about subtext?" And I said, "Why?" He said, "Because nobody is going to give you a film if you talk about subtext. Just talk about plot and say how wonderful you'll shoot the film, what the visuals will be." So when I look at a film, here's what we look for: We look for a story on the plot level, then we look for a story on the psychological level, then we look for a story on the political level, then we look at a story on a mythological level. And I look for stories on each level. Now, it is not necessary that these stories agree with each other. What is wonderful is, at many times, the stories will contradict with each other. So when I work with Rahman who's a great musician, I often tell him, "Don't follow what the script already says. Find that which is not. Find the truth for yourself, and when you find the truth for yourself, there will be a truth in it, but it may contradict the plot, but don't worry about it." So, the sequel to "Elizabeth," "Golden Age." When I made the sequel to "Elizabeth," here was a story that the writer was telling: A woman who was threatened by Philip II and was going to war, and was going to war, fell in love with Walter Raleigh. Because she fell in love with Walter Raleigh, she was giving up the reasons she was a queen, and then Walter Raleigh fell in love with her lady in waiting, and she had to decide whether she was a queen going to war or she wanted... Here's the story I was telling: The gods up there, there were two people. There was Philip II, who was divine because he was always praying, and there was Elizabeth, who was divine, but not quite divine because she thought she was divine, but the blood of being mortal flowed in her. But the divine one was unjust, so the gods said, "OK, what we need to do is help the just one." And so they helped the just one. And what they did was, they sent Walter Raleigh down to physically separate her mortal self from her spirit self. And the mortal self was the girl that Walter Raleigh was sent, and gradually he separated her so she was free to be divine. And the two divine people fought, and the gods were on the side of divinity. Of course, all the British press got really upset. They said, "We won the Armada." But I said, "But the storm won the Armada. The gods sent the storm." So what was I doing? I was trying to find a mythic reason to make the film. Of course, when I asked Cate Blanchett, I said, "What's the film about?" She said, "The film's about a woman coming to terms with growing older." Psychological. The writer said "It's about history, plot." I said "It's about mythology, the gods." So let me show you a film — a piece from that film — and how a camera also — so this is a scene, where in my mind, she was at the depths of mortality. She was discovering what mortality actually means, and if she is at the depths of mortality, what really happens. And she's recognizing the dangers of mortality and why she should break away from mortality. Remember, in the film, to me, both her and her lady in waiting were parts of the same body, one the mortal self and one the spirit self. So can we have that second? (Music) Elizabeth: Bess? Bess? Bess Throckmorton? Bess: Here, my lady. Elizabeth: Tell me, is it true? Are you with child? Are you with child? Bess: Yes, my lady. Elizabeth: Traitorous. You dare to keep secrets from me? You ask my permission before you rut, before you breed. My bitches wear my collars. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Walsingham: Majesty. Please, dignity. Mercy. Elizabeth: This is no time for mercy, Walsingham. You go to your traitor brother and leave me to my business. Is it his? Tell me. Say it. Is the child his? Is it his? Bess: Yes. My lady, it is my husband's child. Elizabeth: Bitch! (Cries) Raleigh: Majesty. This is not the queen I love and serve. Elizabeth: This man has seduced a ward of the queen, and she has married without royal consent. These offenses are punishable by law. Arrest him. Go. You no longer have the queen's protection. Bess: As you wish, Majesty. Elizabeth: Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out. (Music) Shekhar Kapur: So, what am I trying to do here? Elizabeth has realized, and she's coming face-to-face with her own sense of jealousy, her own sense of mortality. What am I doing with the architecture? The architecture is telling a story. The architecture is telling a story about how, even though she's the most powerful woman in the world at that time, there is the other, the architecture's bigger. The stone is bigger than her because stone is an organic. It'll survive her. So it's telling you, to me, stone is part of her destiny. Not only that, why is the camera looking down? The camera's looking down at her because she's in the well. She's in the absolute well of her own sense of being mortal. That's where she has to pull herself out from the depths of mortality, come in, release her spirit. And that's the moment where, in my mind, both Elizabeth and Bess are the same person. But that's the moment she's surgically removing herself from that. So the film is operating on many many levels in that scene. And how we tell stories visually, with music, with actors, and at each level it's a different sense and sometimes contradictory to each other. So how do I start all this? What's the process of telling a story? About ten years ago, I heard this little thing from a politician, not a politician that was very well respected in India. And he said that these people in the cities, in one flush, expend as much water as you people in the rural areas don't get for your family for two days. That struck a chord, and I said, "That's true." I went to see a friend of mine, and he made me wait in his apartment in Malabar Hill on the twentieth floor, which is a really, really upmarket area in Mumbai. And he was having a shower for 20 minutes. I got bored and left, and as I drove out, I drove past the slums of Bombay, as you always do, and I saw lines and lines in the hot midday sun of women and children with buckets waiting for a tanker to come and give them water. And an idea started to develop. So how does that become a story? I suddenly realized that we are heading towards disaster. So my next film is called "Paani" which means water. And now, out of the mythology of that, I'm starting to create a world. What kind of world do I create, and where does the idea, the design of that come? So, in my mind, in the future, they started to build flyovers. You understand flyovers? Yeah? They started to build flyovers to get from A to B faster, but they effectively went from one area of relative wealth to another area of relative wealth. And then what they did was they created a city above the flyovers. And the rich people moved to the upper city and left the poorer people in the lower cities, about 10 to 12 percent of the people have moved to the upper city. Now, where does this upper city and lower city come? There's a mythology in India about — where they say, and I'll say it in Hindi, [Hindi] Right. What does that mean? It says that the rich are always sitting on the shoulders and survive on the shoulders of the poor. So, from that mythology, the upper city and lower city come. So the design has a story. And now, what happens is that the people of the upper city, they suck up all the water. Remember the word I said, suck up. They suck up all the water, keep to themselves, and they drip feed the lower city. And if there's any revolution, they cut off the water. And, because democracy still exists, there's a democratic way in which you say "Well, if you give us what [we want], we'll give you water." So, okay my time is up. But I can go on about telling you how we evolve stories, and how stories effectively are who we are and how these get translated into the particular discipline that I am in, which is film. But ultimately, what is a story? It's a contradiction. Everything's a contradiction. The universe is a contradiction. And all of us are constantly looking for harmony. When you get up, the night and day is a contradiction. But you get up at 4 a.m. That first blush of blue is where the night and day are trying to find harmony with each other. Harmony is the notes that Mozart didn't give you, but somehow the contradiction of his notes suggest that. All contradictions of his notes suggest the harmony. It's the effect of looking for harmony in the contradiction that exists in a poet's mind, a contradiction that exists in a storyteller's mind. In a storyteller's mind, it's a contradiction of moralities. In a poet's mind, it's a conflict of words, in the universe's mind, between day and night. In the mind of a man and a woman, we're looking constantly at the contradiction between male and female, we're looking for harmony within each other. The whole idea of contradiction, but the acceptance of contradiction is the telling of a story, not the resolution. The problem with a lot of the storytelling in Hollywood and many films, and as [unclear] was saying in his, that we try to resolve the contradiction. Harmony is not resolution. Harmony is the suggestion of a thing that is much larger than resolution. Harmony is the suggestion of something that is embracing and universal and of eternity and of the moment. Resolution is something that is far more limited. It is finite; harmony is infinite. So that storytelling, like all other contradictions in the universe, is looking for harmony and infinity in moral resolutions, resolving one, but letting another go, letting another go and creating a question that is really important. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Science can answer moral questions

{0: "Sam Harris's work focuses on how our growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live."}

TED2010

I'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values. Now, it's generally understood that questions of morality — questions of good and evil and right and wrong — are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And, consequently, most people — I think most people probably here — think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, "What is worth living for?" "What is worth dying for?" "What constitutes a good life?" So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion — that the separation between science and human values is an illusion — and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don't we feel compassion for rocks? It's because we don't think rocks can suffer. And if we're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. Now, the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim: This is something that we could be right or wrong about. And if we have misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects. And there's no notion, no version of human morality and human values that I've ever come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes. Even if you get your values from religion, even if you think that good and evil ultimately relate to conditions after death — either to an eternity of happiness with God or an eternity of suffering in hell — you are still concerned about consciousness and its changes. And to say that such changes can persist after death is itself a factual claim, which, of course, may or may not be true. Now, to speak about the conditions of well-being in this life, for human beings, we know that there is a continuum of such facts. We know that it's possible to live in a failed state, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong — where mothers cannot feed their children, where strangers cannot find the basis for peaceful collaboration, where people are murdered indiscriminately. And we know that it's possible to move along this continuum towards something quite a bit more idyllic, to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable. And we know — we know — that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space. Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea? Probably not. Would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye, so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors? Probably not. There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish, whether or not we understand these truths. And morality relates to these truths. So, in talking about values we are talking about facts. Now, of course our situation in the world can be understood at many levels — from the level of the genome on up to the level of economic systems and political arrangements. But if we're going to talk about human well-being we are, of necessity, talking about the human brain. Because we know that our experience of the world and of ourselves within it is realized in the brain — whatever happens after death. Even if the suicide bomber does get 72 virgins in the afterlife, in this life, his personality — his rather unfortunate personality — is the product of his brain. So the contributions of culture — if culture changes us, as indeed it does, it changes us by changing our brains. And so therefore whatever cultural variation there is in how human beings flourish can, at least in principle, be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind — neuroscience, psychology, etc. So, what I'm arguing is that value's reduced to facts — to facts about the conscious experience of conscious beings. And we can therefore visualize a space of possible changes in the experience of these beings. And I think of this as kind of a moral landscape, with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well-being of conscious creatures, both personal and collective. And one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human well-being that we rarely access, that few people access. And these await our discovery. Perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual. Perhaps there are other states that we can't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them. Now, let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space, or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question. I don't think, for instance, that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child, or whether we should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, or whether you can deduct the full cost of TED as a business expense. (Laughter) But if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. And just admitting this — just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish — will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future. For instance, there are 21 states in our country where corporal punishment in the classroom is legal, where it is legal for a teacher to beat a child with a wooden board, hard, and raising large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin. And hundreds of thousands of children, incidentally, are subjected to this every year. The locations of these enlightened districts, I think, will fail to surprise you. We're not talking about Connecticut. And the rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious. The creator of the universe himself has told us not to spare the rod, lest we spoil the child — this is in Proverbs 13 and 20, and I believe, 23. But we can ask the obvious question: Is it a good idea, generally speaking, to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior? (Laughter) Is there any doubt that this question has an answer, and that it matters? Now, many of you might worry that the notion of well-being is truly undefined, and seemingly perpetually open to be re-construed. And so, how therefore can there be an objective notion of well-being? Well, consider by analogy, the concept of physical health. The concept of physical health is undefined. As we just heard from Michael Specter, it has changed over the years. When this statue was carved the average life expectancy was probably 30. It's now around 80 in the developed world. There may come a time when we meddle with our genomes in such a way that not being able to run a marathon at age 200 will be considered a profound disability. People will send you donations when you're in that condition. (Laughter) Notice that the fact that the concept of health is open, genuinely open for revision, does not make it vacuous. The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science. Another thing to notice is there may be many peaks on the moral landscape: There may be equivalent ways to thrive; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing. Now, why wouldn't this undermine an objective morality? Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. But there's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison. The fact that there are many right answers to the question, "What is food?" does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition. Many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions. So, for instance, if it's really wrong to lie, it must always be wrong to lie, and if you can find an exception, well then there's no such thing as moral truth. Why would we think this? Consider, by analogy, the game of chess. Now, if you're going to play good chess, a principle like, "Don't lose your Queen," is very good to follow. But it clearly admits some exceptions. There are moments when losing your Queen is a brilliant thing to do. There are moments when it is the only good thing you can do. And yet, chess is a domain of perfect objectivity. The fact that there are exceptions here does not change that at all. Now, this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere. Consider the great problem of women's bodies: What to do about them? Well this is one thing you can do about them: You can cover them up. Now, it is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this, we might think of this as "wrong" in Boston or Palo Alto, who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? And who are we to say, even, that they're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable, or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way? Well, who are we not to say this? Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this? I'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil — women should be able to wear whatever they want, as far as I'm concerned. But what does voluntary mean in a community where, when a girl gets raped, her father's first impulse, rather often, is to murder her out of shame? Just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute: Your daughter gets raped, and what you want to do is kill her. What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing? Now, to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society. For instance, this is what it's like to go to a newsstand almost anywhere in the civilized world. Now, granted, for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images. (Laughter) But if we are in a reflective mood, we can ask, "Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women's bodies?" I mean, is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children? Probably not. OK, so perhaps there's some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance. (Applause) Perhaps there are many such places — again, given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape. But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak. Now the irony, from my perspective, is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another. And of course they think they have right answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind, not because they made an intelligent analysis of the causes and condition of human and animal well-being. In fact, the endurance of religion as a lens through which most people view moral questions has separated most moral talk from real questions of human and animal suffering. This is why we spend our time talking about things like gay marriage and not about genocide or nuclear proliferation or poverty or any other hugely consequential issue. But the demagogues are right about one thing: We need a universal conception of human values. Now, what stands in the way of this? Well, one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality — especially secular, academic, scientist types. When talking about morality we value differences of opinion in a way that we don't in any other area of our lives. So, for instance the Dalai Lama gets up every morning meditating on compassion, and he thinks that helping other human beings is an integral component of human happiness. On the other hand, we have someone like Ted Bundy; Ted Bundy was very fond of abducting and raping and torturing and killing young women. So, we appear to have a genuine difference of opinion about how to profitably use one's time. (Laughter) Most Western intellectuals look at this situation and say, "Well, there's nothing for the Dalai Lama to be really right about — really right about — or for Ted Bundy to be really wrong about that admits of a real argument that potentially falls within the purview of science. He likes chocolate, he likes vanilla. There's nothing that one should be able to say to the other that should persuade the other." Notice that we don't do this in science. On the left you have Edward Witten. He's a string theorist. If you ask the smartest physicists around who is the smartest physicist around, in my experience half of them will say Ed Witten. The other half will tell you they don't like the question. (Laughter) So, what would happen if I showed up at a physics conference and said,"String theory is bogus. It doesn't resonate with me. It's not how I chose to view the universe at a small scale. I'm not a fan." (Laughter) Well, nothing would happen because I'm not a physicist; I don't understand string theory. I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory. (Laughter) I wouldn't want to belong to any string theory club that would have me as a member. But this is just the point. Whenever we are talking about facts certain opinions must be excluded. That is what it is to have a domain of expertise. That is what it is for knowledge to count. How have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there is no such thing as moral expertise, or moral talent, or moral genius even? How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count? How have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering? Does the Taliban have a point of view on physics that is worth considering? No. (Laughter) How is their ignorance any less obvious on the subject of human well-being? (Applause) So, this, I think, is what the world needs now. It needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing, and morality relates to that domain of facts. It is possible for individuals, and even for whole cultures, to care about the wrong things, which is to say that it's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering. Just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality. We live in a world in which the boundaries between nations mean less and less, and they will one day mean nothing. We live in a world filled with destructive technology, and this technology cannot be uninvented; it will always be easier to break things than to fix them. It seems to me, therefore, patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes. We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life. And to do that, we have to admit that these questions have answers. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So, some combustible material there. Whether in this audience or people elsewhere in the world, hearing some of this, may well be doing the screaming-with-rage thing, after as well, some of them. Language seems to be really important here. When you're talking about the veil, you're talking about women dressed in cloth bags. I've lived in the Muslim world, spoken with a lot of Muslim women. And some of them would say something else. They would say, "No, you know, this is a celebration of female specialness, it helps build that and it's a result of the fact that" — and this is arguably a sophisticated psychological view — "that male lust is not to be trusted." I mean, can you engage in a conversation with that kind of woman without seeming kind of cultural imperialist? Sam Harris: Yeah, well I think I tried to broach this in a sentence, watching the clock ticking, but the question is: What is voluntary in a context where men have certain expectations, and you're guaranteed to be treated in a certain way if you don't veil yourself? And so, if anyone in this room wanted to wear a veil, or a very funny hat, or tattoo their face — I think we should be free to voluntarily do whatever we want, but we have to be honest about the constraints that these women are placed under. And so I think we shouldn't be so eager to always take their word for it, especially when it's 120 degrees out and you're wearing a full burqa. CA: A lot of people want to believe in this concept of moral progress. But can you reconcile that? I think I understood you to say that you could reconcile that with a world that doesn't become one dimensional, where we all have to think the same. Paint your picture of what rolling the clock 50 years forward, 100 years forward, how you would like to think of the world, balancing moral progress with richness. SH: Well, I think once you admit that we are on the path toward understanding our minds at the level of the brain in some important detail, then you have to admit that we are going to understand all of the positive and negative qualities of ourselves in much greater detail. So, we're going to understand positive social emotion like empathy and compassion, and we're going to understand the factors that encourage it — whether they're genetic, whether they're how people talk to one another, whether they're economic systems, and insofar as we begin to shine light on that we are inevitably going to converge on that fact space. So, everything is not going to be up for grabs. It's not going to be like veiling my daughter from birth is just as good as teaching her to be confident and well-educated in the context of men who do desire women. I mean I don't think we need an NSF grant to know that compulsory veiling is a bad idea — but at a certain point we're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved and actually interrogate them. Do people love their daughters just as much in these systems? And I think there are clearly right answers to that. CA: And if the results come out that actually they do, are you prepared to shift your instinctive current judgment on some of these issues? SH: Well yeah, modulo one obvious fact, that you can love someone in the context of a truly delusional belief system. So, you can say like, "Because I knew my gay son was going to go to hell if he found a boyfriend, I chopped his head off. And that was the most compassionate thing I could do." If you get all those parts aligned, yes I think you could probably be feeling the emotion of love. But again, then we have to talk about well-being in a larger context. It's all of us in this together, not one man feeling ecstasy and then blowing himself up on a bus. CA: Sam, this is a conversation I would actually love to continue for hours. We don't have that, but maybe another time. Thank you for coming to TED. SH: Really an honor. Thank you. (Applause)

The fight to end rare-animal trafficking in Brazil

{0: 'Brazilian-born biologist Juliana Machado Ferreira wants, simply, to save the world one bird at a time. She is a TED Senior Fellow.'}

TED2010

Illegal wildlife trade in Brazil is one of the major threats against our fauna, especially birds, and mainly to supply the pet market with thousands of animals taken from nature every month, and transported far from their origins, to be sold mainly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. It is estimated that all kinds of illegal wildlife trade in Brazil withdraw from nature almost 38 million animals every year, a business worth almost two billion dollars. The police intercepts these huge cargos with live animals, intended to supply the pet market, or they seize the animals directly from the people's houses, and this is how we end up, every month, with thousands of seized animals. And for us to understand what happens with them, we're going to follow Brad. In the eyes of many people, after the animals are seized, they say, "Yay, justice has been served. The good guys arrived, took the cute, mistreated animals from the hands of the evil traffickers, and everyone lived happily ever after." But did they? Actually, no, and this is where many of our problems begin. Because we have to figure out what to do with all these animals. In Brazil, they are usually first sent to governmental triage facilities, in which most of the cases, the conditions are as bad as with the traffickers. In 2002, these centers received 45,000 animals, of which 37,000 were birds. And the police estimates that we seize only five percent of what's being trafficked. Some lucky ones — and among them, Brad — go to serious rehabilitation centers after that. And in these places they are cared for. They train their flying, they learn how to recognize the food they will find in nature, and they are able to socialize with others from the same species. (Laughter) But then what? The Brazil Ornithological Society — so now we're talking only birds — claims that we have too little knowledge about the species in nature. Therefore, it would be too risky to release these animals, both for the released and for the natural populations. They also claim that we spend too many resources in their rehabilitation. Following this argument, they suggest that all the birds seized from non-threatened species should be euthanized. However, this would mean having killed 26,267 birds, only in the state of São Paulo, only in 2006. But, some researchers, myself included — some NGOs and some people from the Brazilian government — believe there is an alternative. We think that if and when the animals meet certain criteria concerning their health, behavior, inferred origin and whatever we know about the natural populations, then technically responsible releases are possible, both for the well-being of the individual, and for the conservation of the species and their ecosystems, because we will be returning genes for these populations — which could be important for them in facing environmental challenges — and also we could be returning potential seed dispersers, predators, preys, etc. All of these were released by us. On the top, the turtles are just enjoying freedom. (Laughter) On the middle, this guy nested a couple of weeks after the release. And on the bottom, my personal favorite, the little male over there, four hours after his release he was together with a wild female. So, this is not new, people have been doing this around the world. But it's still a big issue in Brazil. We believe we have performed responsible releases. We've registered released animals mating in nature and having chicks. So, these genes are indeed going back to the populations. However this is still a minority for the very lack of knowledge. So, I say, "Let's study more, let's shed light on this issue, let's do whatever we can." I'm devoting my career to that. And I'm here to urge each and every one of you to do whatever is in your reach: Talk to your neighbor, teach your children, make sure your pet is from a legal breeder. We need to act, and act now, before these ones are the only ones left. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Let's simplify legal jargon!

{0: 'A branding expert and one of the leading authorities on business communication, Alan Siegel wants to put plain English into legal documents for government and business.'}

TED2010

So, basically we have public leaders, public officials who are out of control; they are writing bills that are unintelligible, and out of these bills are going to come maybe 40,000 pages of regulations, total complexity, which has a dramatically negative impact on our life. If you're a veteran coming back from Iraq or Vietnam you face a blizzard of paperwork to get your benefits; if you're trying to get a small business loan, you face a blizzard of paperwork. What are we going to do about it? I define simplicity as a means to achieving clarity, transparency and empathy, building humanity into communications. I've been simplifying things for 30 years. I come out of the advertising and design business. My focus is understanding you people, and how you interact with the government to get your benefits, how you interact with corporations to decide whom you're going to do business with, and how you view brands. So, very quickly, when President Obama said, "I don't see why we can't have a one-page, plain English consumer credit agreement." So, I locked myself in a room, figured out the content, organized the document, and wrote it in plain English. I've had this checked by the two top consumer credit lawyers in the country. This is a real thing. Now, I went one step further and said, "Why do we have to stick with the stodgy lawyers and just have a paper document? Let's go online." And many people might need help in computation. Working with the Harvard Business School, you'll see this example when you talk about minimum payment: If you spent 62 dollars for a meal, the longer you take to pay out that loan, you see, over a period of time using the minimum payment it's 99 dollars and 17 cents. How about that? Do you think your bank is going to show that to people? But it's going to work. It's more effective than just computational aids. And what about terms like "over the limit"? Perhaps a stealth thing. Define it in context. Tell people what it means. When you put it in plain English, you almost force the institution to give the people a way, a default out of that, and not put themselves at risk. Plain English is about changing the content. And one of the things I'm most proud of is this agreement for IBM. It's a grid, it's a calendar. At such and such a date, IBM has responsibilities, you have responsibilities. Received very favorably by business. And there is some good news to report today. Each year, one in 10 taxpayers receives a notice from the IRS. There are 200 million letters that go out. Running through this typical letter that they had, I ran it through my simplicity lab, it's pretty unintelligible. All the parts of the document in red are not intelligible. We looked at doing over 1,000 letters that cover 70 percent of their transactions in plain English. They have been tested in the laboratory. When I run it through my lab, this heat-mapping shows everything is intelligible. And the IRS has introduced the program. (Applause) There are a couple of things going on right now that I want to bring to your attention. There is a lot of discussion now about a consumer financial protection agency, how to mandate simplicity. We see all this complexity. It's incumbent upon us, and this organization, I believe, to make clarity, transparency and empathy a national priority. There is no way that we should allow government to communicate the way they communicate. There is no way we should do business with companies that have agreements with stealth provisions and that are unintelligible. So, how are we going to change the world? Make clarity, transparency and simplicity a national priority. I thank you. (Applause)

Why we need to go back to Mars

{0: "Joel Levine studies the atmospheres of Earth and Mars, looking at their origin, evolution, structure and chemistry and climate change. He's the principal investigator of the proposed ARES Mars Airplane Mission."}

TEDxNASA

I want to talk about 4.6 billion years of history in 18 minutes. That's 300 million years per minute. Let's start with the first photograph NASA obtained of planet Mars. This is fly-by, Mariner IV. It was taken in 1965. When this picture appeared, that well-known scientific journal, The New York Times, wrote in its editorial, "Mars is uninteresting. It's a dead world. NASA should not spend any time or effort studying Mars anymore." Fortunately, our leaders in Washington at NASA headquarters knew better and we began a very extensive study of the red planet. One of the key questions in all of science, "Is there life outside of Earth?" I believe that Mars is the most likely target for life outside the Earth. I'm going to show you in a few minutes some amazing measurements that suggest there may be life on Mars. But let me start with a Viking photograph. This is a composite taken by Viking in 1976. Viking was developed and managed at the NASA Langley Research Center. We sent two orbiters and two landers in the summer of 1976. We had four spacecraft, two around Mars, two on the surface — an amazing accomplishment. This is the first photograph taken from the surface of any planet. This is a Viking Lander photograph of the surface of Mars. And yes, the red planet is red. Mars is half the size of the Earth, but because two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water, the land area on Mars is comparable to the land area on Earth. So, Mars is a pretty big place even though it's half the size. We have obtained topographic measurements of the surface of Mars. We understand the elevation differences. We know a lot about Mars. Mars has the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons. Mars has the Grand Canyon of the solar system, Valles Marineris. Very, very interesting planet. Mars has the largest impact crater in the solar system, Hellas Basin. This is 2,000 miles across. If you happened to be on Mars when this impactor hit, it was a really bad day on Mars. (Laughter) This is Olympus Mons. This is bigger than the state of Arizona. Volcanoes are important, because volcanoes produce atmospheres and they produce oceans. We're looking at Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, superimposed on a map of the United States, 3,000 miles across. One of the most intriguing features about Mars, the National Academy of Science says one of the 10 major mysteries of the space age, is why certain areas of Mars are so highly magnetized. We call this crustal magnetism. There are regions on Mars, where, for some reason — we don't understand why at this point — the surface is very, very highly magnetized. Is there water on Mars? The answer is no, there is no liquid water on the surface of Mars today. But there is intriguing evidence that suggests that the early history of Mars there may have been rivers and fast flowing water. Today Mars is very very dry. We believe there's some water in the polar caps, there are polar caps of North Pole and South Pole. Here are some recent images. This is from Spirit and Opportunity. These images that show at one time, there was very fast flowing water on the surface of Mars. Why is water important? Water is important because if you want life you have to have water. Water is the key ingredient in the evolution, the origin of life on a planet. Here is some picture of Antarctica and a picture of Olympus Mons, very similar features, glaciers. So, this is frozen water. This is ice water on Mars. This is my favorite picture. This was just taken a few weeks ago. It has not been seen publicly. This is European space agency Mars Express, image of a crater on Mars and in the middle of the crater we have liquid water, we have ice. Very intriguing photograph. We now believe that in the early history of Mars, which is 4.6 billion years ago, 4.6 billion years ago, Mars was very Earth-like. Mars had rivers, Mars had lakes, but more important Mars had planetary-scale oceans. We believe that the oceans were in the northern hemisphere, and this area in blue, which shows a depression of about four miles, was the ancient ocean area on the surface of Mars. Where did the ocean's worth of water on Mars go? Well, we have an idea. This is a measurement we obtained a few years ago from a Mars-orbiting satellite called Odyssey. Sub-surface water on Mars, frozen in the form of ice. And this shows the percent. If it's a blueish color, it means 16 percent by weight. Sixteen percent, by weight, of the interior contains frozen water, or ice. So, there is a lot of water below the surface. The most intriguing and puzzling measurement, in my opinion, we've obtained of Mars, was released earlier this year in the magazine Science. And what we're looking at is the presence of the gas methane, CH4, in the atmosphere of Mars. And you can see there are three distinct regions of methane. Why is methane important? Because on Earth, almost all — 99.9 percent — of the methane is produced by living systems, not little green men, but microscopic life below the surface or at the surface. We now have evidence that methane is in the atmosphere of Mars, a gas that, on Earth, is biogenic in origin, produced by living systems. These are the three plumes: A, B1, B2. And this is the terrain it appears over, and we know from geological studies that these regions are the oldest regions on Mars. In fact, the Earth and Mars are both 4.6 billion years old. The oldest rock on Earth is only 3.6 billion. The reason there is a billion-year gap in our geological understanding is because of plate tectonics, The crust of the Earth has been recycled. We have no geological record prior for the first billion years. That record exists on Mars. And this terrain that we're looking at dates back to 4.6 billion years when Earth and Mars were formed. It was a Tuesday. (Laughter) This is a map that shows where we've put our spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Here is Viking I, Viking II. This is Opportunity. This is Spirit. This is Mars Pathfinder. This is Phoenix, we just put two years ago. Notice all of our rovers and all of our landers have gone to the northern hemisphere. That's because the northern hemisphere is the region of the ancient ocean basin. There aren't many craters. And that's because the water protected the basin from being impacted by asteroids and meteorites. But look in the southern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere there are impact craters, there are volcanic craters. Here's Hellas Basin, a very very different place, geologically. Look where the methane is, the methane is in a very rough terrain area. What is the best way to unravel the mysteries on Mars that exist? We asked this question 10 years ago. We invited 10 of the top Mars scientists to the Langley Research Center for two days. We addressed on the board the major questions that have not been answered. And we spent two days deciding how to best answer this question. And the result of our meeting was a robotic rocket-powered airplane we call ARES. It's an Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Surveyor. There's a model of ARES here. This is a 20-percent scale model. This airplane was designed at the Langley Research Center. If any place in the world can build an airplane to fly on Mars, it's the Langley Research Center, for almost 100 years a leading center of aeronautics in the world. We fly about a mile above the surface. We cover hundreds of miles, and we fly about 450 miles an hour. We can do things that rovers can't do and landers can't do: We can fly above mountains, volcanoes, impact craters; we fly over valleys; we can fly over surface magnetism, the polar caps, subsurface water; and we can search for life on Mars. But, of equal importance, as we fly through the atmosphere of Mars, we transmit that journey, the first flight of an airplane outside of the Earth, we transmit those images back to Earth. And our goal is to inspire the American public who is paying for this mission through tax dollars. But more important we will inspire the next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. And that's a critical area of national security and economic vitality, to make sure we produce the next generation of scientists, engineers, mathematicians and technologists. This is what ARES looks like as it flies over Mars. We preprogram it. We will fly where the methane is. We will have instruments aboard the plane that will sample, every three minutes, the atmosphere of Mars. We will look for methane as well as other gasses produced by living systems. We will pinpoint where these gases emanate from, because we can measure the gradient where it comes from, and there, we can direct the next mission to land right in that area. How do we transport an airplane to Mars? In two words, very carefully. The problem is we don't fly it to Mars, we put it in a spacecraft and we send it to Mars. The problem is the spacecraft's largest diameter is nine feet; ARES is 21-foot wingspan, 17 feet long. How do we get it to Mars? We fold it, and we transport it in a spacecraft. And we have it in something called an aeroshell. This is how we do it. And we have a little video that describes the sequence. Video: Seven, six. Green board. Five, four, three, two, one. Main engine start, and liftoff. Joel Levine: This is a launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is the spacecraft taking nine months to get to Mars. It enters the atmosphere of Mars. A lot of heating, frictional heating. It's going 18 thousand miles an hour. A parachute opens up to slow it down. The thermal tiles fall off. The airplane is exposed to the atmosphere for the first time. It unfolds. The rocket engine begins. We believe that in a one-hour flight we can rewrite the textbook on Mars by making high-resolution measurements of the atmosphere, looking for gases of biogenic origin, looking for gases of volcanic origin, studying the surface, studying the magnetism on the surface, which we don't understand, as well as about a dozen other areas. Practice makes perfect. How do we know we can do it? Because we have tested ARES model, several models in a half a dozen wind tunnels at the NASA Langley Research Center for eight years, under Mars conditions. And, of equal importance is, we test ARES in the Earth's atmosphere, at 100,000 feet, which is comparable to the density and pressure of the atmosphere on Mars where we'll fly. Now, 100,000 feet, if you fly cross-country to Los Angeles, you fly 37,000 feet. We do our tests at 100,000 feet. And I want to show you one of our tests. This is a half-scale model. This is a high-altitude helium balloon. This is over Tilamook, Oregon. We put the folded airplane on the balloon — it took about three hours to get up there — and then we released it on command at 103,000 feet, and we deploy the airplane and everything works perfectly. And we've done high-altitude and low-altitude tests, just to perfect this technique. We're ready to go. I have a scale model here. But we have a full-scale model in storage at the NASA Langley Research Center. We're ready to go. All we need is a check from NASA headquarters (Laughter) to cover the costs. I'm prepared to donate my honorarium for today's talk for this mission. There's actually no honorarium for anyone for this thing. This is the ARES team; we have about 150 scientists, engineers; where we're working with Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, Ames Research Center and half a dozen major universities and corporations in developing this. It's a large effort. It's all at NASA Langley Research Center. And let me conclude by saying not too far from here, right down the road in Kittyhawk, North Carolina, a little more than 100 years ago history was made when we had the first powered flight of an airplane on Earth. We are on the verge right now to make the first flight of an airplane outside the Earth's atmosphere. We are prepared to fly this on Mars, rewrite the textbook about Mars. If you're interested in more information, we have a website that describes this exciting and intriguing mission, and why we want to do it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

How to combat modern slavery

{0: 'Kevin Bales is the co-founder of Free the Slaves, whose mission is to end all forms of human slavery within the next 25 years. He\'s the author of "Ending Slavery: How We Free Today\'s Slaves."'}

TED2010

You know for me, the interest in contemporary forms of slavery started with a leaflet that I picked up in London. It was the early '90s, and I was at a public event. I saw this leaflet and it said, "There are millions of slaves in the world today." And I thought, "No way, no way." And I'm going to admit to hubris. Because I also, I'm going to admit to you, I also thought, "How can I be like a hot-shot young full professor who teaches human rights and not know this? So it can't be true." Well, if you teach, if you worship in the temple of learning, do not mock the gods, because they will take you, fill you with curiosity and desire, and drive you. Drive you with a passion to change things. I went out and did a lit review, 3,000 articles on the key word "slavery." Two turned out to be about contemporary — only two. All the rest were historical. They were press pieces and they were full of outrage, they were full of speculation, they were anecdotal — no solid information. So, I began to do a research project of my own. I went to five countries around the world. I looked at slaves. I met slaveholders, and I looked very deeply into slave-based businesses because this is an economic crime. People do not enslave people to be mean to them. They do it to make a profit. And I've got to tell you, what I found out in the world in four different continents, was depressingly familiar. Like this: Agricultural workers in Africa, whipped and beaten, showing us how they were beaten in the fields before they escaped from slavery and met up with our film crew. It was mind-blowing. And I want to be very clear. I'm talking about real slavery. This is not about lousy marriages, this is not about jobs that suck. This is about people who can not walk away, people who are forced to work without pay, people who are operating 24/7 under a threat of violence and have no pay. It's real slavery in exactly the same way that slavery would be recognized throughout all of human history. Now, where is it? Well, this map in the sort of redder, yellower colors are the places with the highest densities of slavery. But in fact that kind of bluey color are the countries where we can't find any cases of slavery. And you might notice that it's only Iceland and Greenland where we can't find any cases of enslavement around the world. We're also particularly interested and looking very carefully at places where slaves are being used to perpetrate extreme environmental destruction. Around the world, slaves are used to destroy the environment, cutting down trees in the Amazon; destroying forest areas in West Africa; mining and spreading mercury around in places like Ghana and the Congo; destroying the coastal ecosystems in South Asia. It's a pretty harrowing linkage between what's happening to our environment and what's happening to our human rights. Now, how on Earth did we get to a situation like this, where we have 27 million people in slavery in the year 2010? That's double the number that came out of Africa in the entire transatlantic slave trade. Well, it builds up with these factors. They are not causal, they are actually supporting factors. One we all know about, the population explosion: the world goes from two billion people to almost seven billion people in the last 50 years. Being numerous does not make you a slave. Add in the increased vulnerability of very large numbers of people in the developing world, caused by civil wars, ethnic conflicts, kleptocratic governments, disease ... you name it, you know it. We understand how that works. In some countries all of those things happen at once, like Sierra Leone a few years ago, and push enormous parts ... about a billion people in the world, in fact, as we know, live on the edge, live in situations where they don't have any opportunity and are usually even destitute. But that doesn't make you a slave either. What it takes to turn a person who is destitute and vulnerable into a slave, is the absence of the rule of law. If the rule of law is sound, it protects the poor and it protects the vulnerable. But if corruption creeps in and people don't have the opportunity to have that protection of the rule of law, then if you can use violence, if you can use violence with impunity, you can reach out and harvest the vulnerable into slavery. Well, that is precisely what has happened around the world. Though, for a lot of people, the people who step into slavery today don't usually get kidnapped or knocked over the head. They come into slavery because someone has asked them this question. All around the world I've been told an almost identical story. People say, "I was home, someone came into our village, they stood up in the back of a truck, they said, 'I've got jobs, who needs a job?'" And they did exactly what you or I would do in the same situation. They said, "That guy looked sketchy. I was suspicious, but my children were hungry. We needed medicine. I knew I had to do anything I could to earn some money to support the people I care about." They climb into the back of the truck. They go off with the person who recruits them. Ten miles, 100 miles, 1,000 miles later, they find themselves in dirty, dangerous, demeaning work. They take it for a little while, but when they try to leave, bang!, the hammer comes down, and they discover they're enslaved. Now, that kind of slavery is, again, pretty much what slavery has been all through human history. But there is one thing that is particularly remarkable and novel about slavery today, and that is a complete collapse in the price of human beings — expensive in the past, dirt cheap now. Even the business programs have started picking up on this. I just want to share a little clip for you. Daphne: OK. Llively discussion guaranteed here, as always, as we get macro and talk commodities. Continuing here in the studio with our guest Michael O'Donohue, head of commodities at Four Continents Capital Management. And we're also joined by Brent Lawson from Lawson Frisk Securities. Brent Lawson: Happy to be here. D: Good to have you with us, Brent. Now, gentlemen ... Brent, where is your money going this year? BL: Well Daphne, we've been going short on gas and oil recently and casting our net just a little bit wider. We really like the human being story a lot. If you look at a long-term chart, prices are at historical lows and yet global demand for forced labor is still real strong. So, that's a scenario that we think we should be capitalizing on. D: Michael, what's your take on the people story? Are you interested? Michael O'Donoghue: Oh definitely. Non-voluntary labor's greatest advantage as an asset is the endless supply. We're not about to run out of people. No other commodity has that. BL: Daphne, if I may draw your attention to one thing. That is that private equity has been sniffing around, and that tells me that this market is about to explode. Africans and Indians, as usual, South Americans, and Eastern Europeans in particular are on our buy list. D: Interesting. Micheal, bottom line, what do you recommend? MO: We're recommending to our clients a buy and hold strategy. There's no need to play the market. There's a lot of vulnerable people out there. It's very exciting. D: Exciting stuff indeed. Gentlemen, thank you very much. Kevin Bales: Okay, you figured it out. That's a spoof. Though I enjoyed watching your jaws drop, drop, drop, until you got it. MTV Europe worked with us and made that spoof, and they've been slipping it in between music videos without any introduction, which I think is kind of fun. Here's the reality. The price of human beings across the last 4,000 years in today's money has averaged about 40,000 dollars. Capital purchase items. You can see that the lines cross when the population explodes. The average price of a human being today, around the world, is about 90 dollars. They are more expensive in places like North America. Slaves cost between 3,000 to 8,000 dollars in North America, but I could take you places in India or Nepal where human beings can be acquired for five or 10 dollars. They key here is that people have ceased to be that capital purchase item and become like Styrofoam cups. You buy them cheaply, you use them, you crumple them up, and then when you're done with them you just throw them away. These young boys are in Nepal. They are basically the transport system on a quarry run by a slaveholder. There are no roads there, so they carry loads of stone on their backs, often of their own weight, up and down the Himalaya Mountains. One of their mothers said to us, "You know, we can't survive here, but we can't even seem to die either." It's a horrible situation. And if there is anything that makes me feel very positive about this, it's that there are also — in addition to young men like this who are still enslaved — there are ex-slaves who are now working to free others. Or, we say, Frederick Douglass is in the house. I don't know if you've ever had a daydream about, "Wow. What would it be like to meet Harriet Tubman? What would it be like to meet Frederick Douglass?" I've got to say, one of the most exciting parts about my job is that I get to, and I want to introduce you to one of those. His name is James Kofi Annan. He was a slave child in Ghana enslaved in the fishing industry, and he now, after escape and building a new life, has formed an organization that we work closely with to go back and get people out of slavery. This is not James, this is one of the kids that he works with. James Kofi Annan (Video): He was hit with a paddle in the head. And this reminds me of my childhood when I used to work here. KB: James and our country director in Ghana, Emmanuel Otoo are now receiving regular death threats because the two of them managed to get convictions and imprisonment for three human traffickers for the very first time in Ghana for enslaving people, from the fishing industry, for enslaving children. Now, everything I've been telling you, I admit, is pretty disheartening. But there is actually a very positive side to this, and that is this: The 27 million people who are in slavery today, that's a lot of people, but it's also the smallest fraction of the global population to ever be in slavery. And likewise, the 40 billion dollars that they generate into the global economy each year is the tiniest proportion of the global economy to ever be represented by slave labor. Slavery, illegal in every country has been pushed to the edges of our global society. And in a way, without us even noticing, has ended up standing on the precipice of its own extinction, waiting for us to give it a big boot and knock it over. And get rid of it. And it can be done. Now, if we do that, if we put the resources and the focus to it, what does it actually cost to get people out of slavery? Well, first, before I even tell you the cost I've got to be absolutely clear. We do not buy people out of slavery. Buying people out of slavery is like paying a burglar to get your television back; it's abetting a crime. Liberation, however, costs some money. Liberation, and more importantly all the work that comes after liberation. It's not an event, it's a process. It's about helping people to build lives of dignity, stability, economic autonomy, citizenship. Well, amazingly, in places like India where costs are very low, that family, that three-generation family that you see there who were in hereditary slavery — so, that granddad there, was born a baby into slavery — but the total cost, amortized across the rest of the work, was about 150 dollars to bring that family out of slavery and then take them through a two year process to build a stable life of citizenship and education. A boy in Ghana rescued from fishing slavery, about 400 dollars. In the United States, North America, much more expensive. Legal costs, medical costs ... we understand that it's expensive here: about 30,000 dollars. But most of the people in the world in slavery live in those places where the costs are lowest. And in fact, the global average is about what it is for Ghana. And that means, when you multiply it up, the estimated cost of not just freedom but sustainable freedom for the entire 27 million people on the planet in slavery is something like 10.8 billion dollars — what Americans spend on potato chips and pretzels, what Seattle is going to spend on its light rail system: usually the annual expenditure in this country on blue jeans, or in the last holiday period when we bought GameBoys and iPods and other tech gifts for people, we spent 10.8 billion dollars. Intel's fourth quarter earnings: 10.8 billion. It's not a lot of money at the global level. In fact, it's peanuts. And the great thing about it is that it's not money down a hole, there is a freedom dividend. When you let people out of slavery to work for themselves, are they motivated? They take their kids out of the workplace, they build a school, they say, "We're going to have stuff we've never had before like three squares, medicine when we're sick, clothing when we're cold." They become consumers and producers and local economies begin to spiral up very rapidly. That's important, all of that about how we rebuild sustainable freedom, because we'd never want to repeat what happened in this country in 1865. Four million people were lifted up out of slavery and then dumped. Dumped without political participation, decent education, any kind of real opportunity in terms of economic lives, and then sentenced to generations of violence and prejudice and discrimination. And America is still paying the price for the botched emancipation of 1865. We have made a commitment that we will never let people come out of slavery on our watch, and end up as second class citizens. It's just not going to happen. This is what liberation really looks like. Children rescued from slavery in the fishing industry in Ghana, reunited with their parents, and then taken with their parents back to their villages to rebuild their economic well-being so that they become slave-proof — absolutely unenslaveable. Now, this woman lived in a village in Nepal. We'd been working there about a month. They had just begun to come out of a hereditary kind of slavery. They'd just begun to light up a little bit, open up a little bit. But when we went to speak with her, when we took this photograph, the slaveholders were still menacing us from the sidelines. They hadn't been really pushed back. I was frightened. We were frightened. We said to her, "Are you worried? Are you upset?" She said, "No, because we've got hope now. How could we not succeed," she said, "when people like you from the other side of the world are coming here to stand beside us?" Okay, we have to ask ourselves, are we willing to live in a world with slavery? If we don't take action, we just leave ourselves open to have someone else jerk the strings that tie us to slavery in the products we buy, and in our government policies. And yet, if there's one thing that every human being can agree on, I think it's that slavery should end. And if there is a fundamental violation of our human dignity that we would all say is horrific, it's slavery. And we've got to say, what good is all of our intellectual and political and economic power — and I'm really thinking intellectual power in this room — if we can't use it to bring slavery to an end? I think there is enough intellectual power in this room to bring slavery to an end. And you know what? If we can't do that, if we can't use our intellectual power to end slavery, there is one last question: Are we truly free? Okay, thank you so much. (Applause)

Teaching one child at a time

{0: 'Shukla Bose is the founder and head of the Parikrma Humanity Foundation, a nonprofit that runs four extraordinary schools for poor children.'}

TEDIndia 2009

I'm standing in front of you today in all humility, wanting to share with you my journey of the last six years in the field of service and education. And I'm not a trained academic. Neither am I a veteran social worker. I was 26 years in the corporate world, trying to make organizations profitable. And then in 2003 I started Parikrma Humanity Foundation from my kitchen table. The first thing that we did was walk through the slums. You know, by the way, there are two million people in Bangalore, who live in 800 slums. We couldn't go to all the slums, but we tried to cover as much as we could. We walked through these slums, identified houses where children would never go to school. We talked to the parents, tried to convince them about sending their children to school. We played with the children, and came back home really tired, exhausted, but with images of bright faces, twinkling eyes, and went to sleep. We were all excited to start, but the numbers hit us then: 200 million children between four to 14 that should be going to school, but do not; 100 million children who go to school but cannot read; 125 million who cannot do basic maths. We also heard that 250 billion Indian rupees was dedicated for government schooling. Ninety percent of it was spent on teachers' salary and administrators' salary. And yet, India has nearly the highest teacher absenteeism in the world, with one out of four teachers not going to school at all the entire academic year. Those numbers were absolutely mind-boggling, overwhelming, and we were constantly asked, "When will you start? How many schools will you start? How many children will you get? How are you going to scale? How are you going to replicate?" It was very difficult not to get scared, not to get daunted. But we dug our heels and said, "We're not in the number game. We want to take one child at a time and take the child right through school, sent to college, and get them prepared for better living, a high value job." So, we started Parikrma. The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums. And that rooftop did not have any ceiling, only half a tin sheet. That was our first school. One hundred sixty-five children. Indian academic year begins in June. So, June it rains, so many a times all of us would be huddled under the tin roof, waiting for the rain to stop. My God! What a bonding exercise that was. And all of us that were under that roof are still here together today. Then came the second school, the third school, the fourth school and a junior college. In six years now, we have four schools, one junior college, 1,100 children coming from 28 slums and four orphanages. (Applause) Our dream is very simple: to send each of these kids, get them prepared to be educated but also to live peacefully, contented in this conflict-ridden chaotic globalized world. Now, when you talk global you have to talk English. And so all our schools are English medium schools. But they know there is this myth that children from the slums cannot speak English well. No one in their family has spoken English. No one in their generation has spoken English. But how wrong it is. Girl: I like adventurous books, and some of my favorites are Alfred Hitchcock and [unclear] and Hardy Boys. Although they are like in different contexts, one is magical, the other two are like investigation, I like those books because they have something special in them. The vocabulary used in those books and the style of writing. I mean like once I pick up one book I cannot put it down until I finish the whole book. Even if it takes me four and a half hours, or three and half hours to finish my book, I do it. Boy: I did good research and I got the information [on the] world's fastest cars. I like Ducati ZZ143, because it is the fastest, the world's fastest bike, and I like Pulsar 220 DTSI because it is India's fastest bike. (Laughter) Shukla Bose: Well, that girl that you saw, her father sells flowers on the roadside. And this little boy has been coming to school for five years. But isn't it strange that little boys all over the world love fast bikes? (Laughter) He hasn't seen one, he hasn't ridden one, of course, but he has done a lot of research through Google search. You know, when we started with our English medium schools we also decided to adopt the best curriculum possible, the ICSE curriculum. And again, there were people who laughed at me and said, "Don't be crazy choosing such a tough curriculum for these students. They'll never be able to cope." Not only do our children cope very well, but they excel in it. You should just come across to see how well our children do. There is also this myth that parents from the slums are not interested in their children going to school; they'd much rather put them to work. That's absolute hogwash. All parents all over the world want their children to lead a better life than themselves, but they need to believe that change is possible. Video: (Hindi) SB: We have 80 percent attendance for all our parents-teachers meeting. Sometimes it's even 100 percent, much more than many privileged schools. Fathers have started to attend. It's very interesting. When we started our school the parents would give thumbprints in the attendance register. Now they have started writing their signature. The children have taught them. It's amazing how much children can teach. We have, a few months ago, actually late last year, we had a few mothers who came to us and said, "You know, we want to learn how to read and write. Can you teach us?" So, we started an afterschool for our parents, for our mothers. We had 25 mothers who came regularly after school to study. We want to continue with this program and extend it to all our other schools. Ninety-eight percent of our fathers are alcoholics. So, you can imagine how traumatized and how dysfunctional the houses are where our children come from. We have to send the fathers to de-addiction labs and when they come back, most times sober, we have to find a job for them so that they don't regress. We have about three fathers who have been trained to cook. We have taught them nutrition, hygiene. We have helped them set up the kitchen and now they are supplying food to all our children. They do a very good job because their children are eating their food, but most importantly this is the first time they have got respect, and they feel that they are doing something worthwhile. More than 90 percent of our non-teaching staff are all parents and extended families. We've started many programs just to make sure that the child comes to school. Vocational skill program for the older siblings so the younger ones are not stopped from coming to school. There is also this myth that children from the slums cannot integrate with mainstream. Take a look at this little girl who was one of the 28 children from all privileged schools, best schools in the country that was selected for the Duke University talent identification program and was sent to IIM Ahmedabad. Video: Girl: Duke IIMA Camp. Whenever we see that IIMA, it was such a pride for us to go to that camp. Everybody was very friendly, especially I got a lot of friends. And I felt that my English has improved a lot going there and chatting with friends. There they met children who are with a different standard and a different mindset, a totally different society. I mingled with almost everyone. They were very friendly. I had very good friends there, who are from Delhi, who are from Mumbai. Even now we are in touch through Facebook. After this Ahmedabad trip I've been like a totally different mingling with people and all of those. Before that I feel like I wasn't like this. I don't even mingle, or start speaking with someone so quickly. My accent with English improved a lot. And I learned football, volleyball, Frisbee, lots of games. And I wouldn't want to go to Bangalore. Let me stay here. Such beautiful food, I enjoyed it. It was so beautiful. I enjoyed eating food like [unclear] would come and ask me, "Yes ma'am, what you want?" It was so good to hear! (Laughter) (Applause) SB: This girl was working as a maid before she came to school. And today she wants to be a neurologist. Our children are doing brilliantly in sports. They are really excelling. There is an inter-school athletic competition that is held every year in Bangalore, where 5,000 children participate from 140 best schools in the city. We've got the best school award for three years successively. And our children are coming back home with bags full of medals, with lots of admirers and friends. Last year there were a couple of kids from elite schools that came to ask for admissions in our school. We also have our very own dream team. Why is this happening? Why this confidence? Is it the exposure? We have professors from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Indian Institute of Science who come and teach our children lots of scientific formulas, experiments, much beyond the classroom. Art, music are considered therapy and mediums of expression. We also believe that it's the content that is more important. It is not the infrastructure, not the toilets, not the libraries, but it is what actually happens in this school that is more important. Creating an environment of learning, of inquiry, of exploration is what is true education. When we started Parikrma we had no idea which direction we were taking. We didn't hire McKinsey to do a business plan. But we know for sure that what we want to do today is take one child at a time, not get bogged with numbers, and actually see the child complete the circle of life, and unleash his total potential. We do not believe in scale because we believe in quality, and scale and numbers will automatically happen. We have corporates that have stood behind us, and we are able to, now, open more schools. But we began with the idea of one child at a time. This is five-year-old Parusharam. He was begging by a bus stop a few years ago, got picked up and is now in an orphanage, has been coming to school for the last four and a half months. He's in kindergarten. He has learned how to speak English. We have a model by which kids can speak English and understand English in three month's time. He can tell you stories in English of the thirsty crow, of the crocodile and of the giraffe. And if you ask him what he likes to do he will say, "I like sleeping. I like eating. I like playing." And if you ask him what he wants to do, he will say, "I want to horsing." Now, "horsing" is going for a horse ride. So, Parusharam comes to my office every day. He comes for a tummy rub, because he believes that will give me luck. (Laughter) When I started Parikrma I began with a great deal of arrogance of transforming the world. But today I have been transformed. I have been changed with my children. I've learned so much from them: love, compassion, imagination and such creativity. Parusharam is Parikrma with a simple beginning but a long way to go. I promise you, Parusharam will speak in the TED conference a few years from now. Thank you. (Applause)

What adults can learn from kids

{0: 'A prolific short story writer and blogger since age seven, Adora Svitak (now 12) speaks around the United States to adults and children as an advocate for literacy.'}

TED2010

Now, I want to start with a question: When was the last time you were called "childish"? For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish. Which really bothers me. After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. Ask yourself, who's responsible? Adults. Now, what have kids done? Well, Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust. Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States. And, most recently, Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti, on his little bike. So as you can see evidenced by such examples, age has absolutely nothing to do with it. The traits the word "childish" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking. (Applause) Thank you. Then again, who's to say that certain types of irrational thinking aren't exactly what the world needs? Maybe you've had grand plans before, but stopped yourself, thinking, "That's impossible," or "That costs too much," or "That won't benefit me." For better or worse, we kids aren't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things. Kids can be full of inspiring aspirations and hopeful thinking, like my wish that no one went hungry, or that everything were free, a kind of utopia. How many of you still dream like that, and believe in the possibilities? Sometimes a knowledge of history and the past failures of Utopian ideals can be a burden, because you know that if everything were free, then the food stocks would become depleted and scarce and lead to chaos. On the other hand, we kids still dream about perfection. And that's a good thing, because in order to make anything a reality, you have to dream about it first. In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility. For instance, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, my home state — yoohoo, Washington! (Applause) has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art. The resident artist said they got some of their best ideas from the program, because kids don't think about the limitations of how hard it can be to blow glass into certain shapes, they just think of good ideas. Now, when you think of glass, you might think of colorful Chihuly designs, or maybe Italian vases, but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that, into the realm of brokenhearted snakes and bacon boys, who you can see has meat vision. (Laughter) Now, our inherent wisdom doesn't have to be insider's knowledge. Kids already do a lot of learning from adults, and we have a lot to share. I think that adults should start learning from kids. Now, I do most of my speaking in front of an education crowd — teachers and students, and I like this analogy: It shouldn't be a teacher at the head of the class, telling students, "Do this, do that." The students should teach their teachers. Learning between grown-ups and kids should be reciprocal. The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it. Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right? If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me, until she pays it back. (Laughter) True story, by the way. Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every "Don't do that, don't do this" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use. As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control. And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules, when really, the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population. Now, what's even worse than restriction, is that adults often underestimate kids' abilities. We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them. My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister. Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." Well, we heard that one too, but "Pioneer Germ Fighters" totally rules. (Laughter) I loved to write from the age of four, and when I was six, my mom bought me my own laptop equipped with Microsoft Word. Thank you, Bill Gates, and thank you, Ma. I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop, and I wanted to get published. Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published, or saying wait until you're older, my parents were really supportive. Many publishers were not quite so encouraging. One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children. Children's publisher not working with children? I don't know, you're kind of alienating a large client there. (Laughter) One publisher, Action Publishing, was willing to take that leap and trust me, and to listen to what I had to say. They published my first book, "Flying Fingers," you see it here. And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you. I appreciate your attention today, because to show that you truly care, you listen. But there's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults. Kids grow up and become adults just like you. (Laughter) Or just like you? Really? The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather, better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging, considering your guys' credentials. (Laughter) But the way progress happens, is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. It's the reason we're not in the Dark Ages anymore. No matter your position or place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children, so that we can grow up to blow you away. (Laughter) Adults and fellow TEDsters, you need to listen and learn from kids, and trust us and expect more from us. You must lend an ear today, because we are the leaders of tomorrow, which means we're going to take care of you when you're old and senile. No, just kidding. (Laughter) No, really, we are going to be the next generation, the ones who will bring this world forward. And in case you don't think that this really has meaning for you, remember that cloning is possible, and that involves going through childhood again, in which case you'll want to be heard, just like my generation. Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. Are you ready to make the match? Because the world's problems shouldn't be the human family's heirloom. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you.

How to start a movement

{0: 'Through his new project, MuckWork, Derek Sivers wants to lessen the burdens (and boredom) of creative people.'}

TED2010

Ladies and gentlemen, at TED we talk a lot about leadership and how to make a movement. So let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under three minutes and dissect some lessons from it. First, of course you know, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. What he's doing is so easy to follow. Here's his first follower with a crucial role; he's going to show everyone else how to follow. Now, notice that the leader embraces him as an equal. Now it's not about the leader anymore; it's about them, plural. Now, there he is calling to his friends. Now, if you notice that the first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. It takes guts to stand out like that. The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader. (Laughter) (Applause) And here comes a second follower. Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts — three is a crowd, and a crowd is news. So a movement must be public. It's important to show not just the leader, but the followers, because you find that new followers emulate the followers, not the leader. Now, here come two more people, and immediately after, three more people. Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. Now we've got a movement. (Laughter) So, notice that, as more people join in, it's less risky. So those that were sitting on the fence before now have no reason not to. They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, but they will be part of the in-crowd if they hurry. (Laughter) So, over the next minute, you'll see all of those that prefer to stick with the crowd because eventually they would be ridiculed for not joining in. And that's how you make a movement. But let's recap some lessons from this. So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it's clearly about the movement, not you. (Laughter) Okay, but we might have missed the real lesson here. The biggest lesson, if you noticed — did you catch it? — is that leadership is over-glorified. Yes, it was the shirtless guy who was first, and he'll get all the credit, but it was really the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader. So, as we're told that we should all be leaders, that would be really ineffective. If you really care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow. And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in. And what a perfect place to do that, at TED. Thanks. (Applause)

And now, the real news

{0: 'Kirk Citron began his career as a fast-rising advertising executive, but now writes and provides media consultation for select non-profits.'}

TED2010

We are drowning in news. Reuters alone puts out three and a half million news stories a year. That's just one source. My question is: How many of those stories are actually going to matter in the long run? That's the idea behind The Long News. It's a project by The Long Now Foundation, which was founded by TEDsters including Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand. And what we're looking for is news stories that might still matter 50 or 100 or 10,000 years from now. And when you look at the news through that filter, a lot falls by the wayside. To take the top stories from the A.P. this last year, is this going to matter in a decade? Or this? Or this? Really? Is this going to matter in 50 or 100 years? Okay, that was kind of cool. (Laughter) But the top story of this past year was the economy, and I'm just betting that, sooner or later, this particular recession is going to be old news. So, what kind of stories might make a difference for the future? Well, let's take science. Someday, little robots will go through our bloodstreams fixing things. That someday is already here if you're a mouse. Some recent stories: nanobees zap tumors with real bee venom; they're sending genes into the brain; a robot they built that can crawl through the human body. What about resources? How are we going to feed nine billion people? We're having trouble feeding six billion today. As we heard yesterday, there's over a billion people hungry. Britain will starve without genetically modified crops. Bill Gates, fortunately, has bet a billion on [agricultural] research. What about global politics? The world's going to be very different when and if China sets the agenda, and they may. They've overtaken the U.S. as the world's biggest car market, they've overtaken Germany as the largest exporter, and they've started doing DNA tests on kids to choose their careers. We're finding all kinds of ways to push back the limits of what we know. Some recent discoveries: There's an ant colony from Argentina that has now spread to every continent but Antarctica; there's a self-directed robot scientist that's made a discovery — soon, science may no longer need us, and life may no longer need us either; a microbe wakes up after 120,000 years. It seems that with or without us, life will go on. But my pick for the top Long News story of this past year was this one: water found on the moon. Makes it a lot easier to put a colony up there. And if NASA doesn't do it, China might, or somebody in this room might write a big check. My point is this: In the long run, some news stories are more important than others. (Applause)

Sex, drugs and HIV -- let's get rational

{0: 'In Elizabeth Pisani\'s latest book, she explores the "improbable nation" of Indonesia.'}

TED2010

"People do stupid things. That's what spreads HIV." This was a headline in a U.K. newspaper, The Guardian, not that long ago. I'm curious, show of hands, who agrees with it? Well, one or two brave souls. This is actually a direct quote from an epidemiologist who's been in field of HIV for 15 years, worked on four continents, and you're looking at her. And I am now going to argue that this is only half true. People do get HIV because they do stupid things, but most of them are doing stupid things for perfectly rational reasons. Now, "rational" is the dominant paradigm in public health, and if you put your public health nerd glasses on, you'll see that if we give people the information that they need about what's good for them and what's bad for them, if you give them the services that they can use to act on that information, and a little bit of motivation, people will make rational decisions and live long and healthy lives. Wonderful. That's slightly problematic for me because I work in HIV, and although I'm sure you all know that HIV is about poverty and gender inequality, and if you were at TED '07 it's about coffee prices ... Actually, HIV's about sex and drugs, and if there are two things that make human beings a little bit irrational, they are erections and addiction. (Laughter) So, let's start with what's rational for an addict. Now, I remember speaking to an Indonesian friend of mine, Frankie. We were having lunch and he was telling me about when he was in jail in Bali for a drug injection. It was someone's birthday, and they had very kindly smuggled some heroin into jail, and he was very generously sharing it out with all of his colleagues. And so everyone lined up, all the smackheads in a row, and the guy whose birthday it was filled up the fit, and he went down and started injecting people. So he injects the first guy, and then he's wiping the needle on his shirt, and he injects the next guy. And Frankie says, "I'm number 22 in line, and I can see the needle coming down towards me, and there is blood all over the place. It's getting blunter and blunter. And a small part of my brain is thinking, 'That is so gross and really dangerous,' but most of my brain is thinking, 'Please let there be some smack left by the time it gets to me. Please let there be some left.'" And then, telling me this story, Frankie said, "You know ... God, drugs really make you stupid." And, you know, you can't fault him for accuracy. But, actually, Frankie, at that time, was a heroin addict and he was in jail. So his choice was either to accept that dirty needle or not to get high. And if there's one place you really want to get high, it's when you're in jail. But I'm a scientist and I don't like to make data out of anecdotes, so let's look at some data. We talked to 600 drug addicts in three cities in Indonesia, and we said, "Well, do you know how you get HIV?" "Oh yeah, by sharing needles." I mean, nearly 100 percent. Yeah, by sharing needles. And, "Do you know where you can get a clean needle at a price you can afford to avoid that?" "Oh yeah." Hundred percent. "We're smackheads; we know where to get clean needles." "So are you carrying a needle?" We're actually interviewing people on the street, in the places where they're hanging out and taking drugs. "Are you carrying clean needles?" One in four, maximum. So no surprises then that the proportion that actually used clean needles every time they injected in the last week is just about one in 10, and the other nine in 10 are sharing. So you've got this massive mismatch; everyone knows that if they share they're going to get HIV, but they're all sharing anyway. So what's that about? Is it like you get a better high if you share or something? We asked that to a junkie and they're like, "Are you nuts?" You don't want to share a needle anymore than you want to share a toothbrush even with someone you're sleeping with. There's just kind of an ick factor there. "No, no. We share needles because we don't want to go to jail." So, in Indonesia at this time, if you were carrying a needle and the cops rounded you up, they could put you into jail. And that changes the equation slightly, doesn't it? Because your choice now is either I use my own needle now, or I could share a needle now and get a disease that's going to possibly kill me 10 years from now, or I could use my own needle now and go to jail tomorrow. And while junkies think that it's a really bad idea to expose themselves to HIV, they think it's a much worse idea to spend the next year in jail where they'll probably end up in Frankie's situation and expose themselves to HIV anyway. So, suddenly it becomes perfectly rational to share needles. Now, let's look at it from a policy maker's point of view. This is a really easy problem. For once, your incentives are aligned. We've got what's rational for public health. You want people to use clean needles — and junkies want to use clean needles. So we could make this problem go away simply by making clean needles universally available and taking away the fear of arrest. Now, the first person to figure that out and do something about it on a national scale was that well-known, bleeding heart liberal Margaret Thatcher. And she put in the world's first national needle exchange program, and other countries followed suit: Australia, The Netherlands and few others. And in all of those countries, you can see, not more than four percent of injectors ever became infected with HIV. Now, places that didn't do this — New York City for example, Moscow, Jakarta — we're talking, at its peak, one in two injectors infected with this fatal disease. Now, Margaret Thatcher didn't do this because she has any great love for junkies. She did it because she ran a country that had a national health service. So, if she didn't invest in effective prevention, she was going to have pick up the costs of treatment later on, and obviously those are much higher. So she was making a politically rational decision. Now, if I take out my public health nerd glasses here and look at these data, it seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it? But in this country, where the government apparently does not feel compelled to provide health care for citizens, (Laughter) we've taken a very different approach. So what we've been doing in the United States is reviewing the data — endlessly reviewing the data. So, these are reviews of hundreds of studies by all the big muckety-mucks of the scientific pantheon in the United States, and these are the studies that show needle programs are effective — quite a lot of them. Now, the ones that show that needle programs aren't effective — you think that's one of these annoying dynamic slides and I'm going to press my dongle and the rest of it's going to come up, but no — that's the whole slide. (Laughter) There is nothing on the other side. So, completely irrational, you would think. Except that, wait a minute, politicians are rational, too, and they're responding to what they think the voters want. So what we see is that voters respond very well to things like this and not quite so well to things like this. (Laughter) So it becomes quite rational to deny services to injectors. Now let's talk about sex. Are we any more rational about sex? Well, I'm not even going to address the clearly irrational positions of people like the Catholic Church, who think somehow that if you give out condoms, everyone's going to run out and have sex. I don't know if Pope Benedict watches TEDTalks online, but if you do, I've got news for you Benedict — I carry condoms all the time and I never get laid. (Laughter) (Applause) It's not that easy! Here, maybe you'll have better luck. (Applause) Okay, seriously, HIV is actually not that easy to transmit sexually. So, it depends on how much virus there is in your blood and in your body fluids. And what we've got is a very, very high level of virus right at the beginning when you're first infected, then you start making antibodies, and then it bumps along at quite low levels for a long time — 10 or 12 years — you have spikes if you get another sexually transmitted infection. But basically, nothing much is going on until you start to get symptomatic AIDS, and by that stage, you're not looking great, you're not feeling great, you're not having that much sex. So the sexual transmission of HIV is essentially determined by how many partners you have in these very short spaces of time when you have peak viremia. Now, this makes people crazy because it means that you have to talk about some groups having more sexual partners in shorter spaces of time than other groups, and that's considered stigmatizing. I've always been a bit curious about that because I think stigma is a bad thing, whereas lots of sex is quite a good thing, but we'll leave that be. The truth is that 20 years of very good research have shown us that there are groups that are more likely to turnover large numbers of partners in a short space of time. And those groups are, globally, people who sell sex and their more regular partners. They are gay men on the party scene who have, on average, three times more partners than straight people on the party scene. And they are heterosexuals who come from countries that have traditions of polygamy and relatively high levels of female autonomy, and almost all of those countries are in east or southern Africa. And that is reflected in the epidemic that we have today. You can see these horrifying figures from Africa. These are all countries in southern Africa where between one in seven, and one in three of all adults, are infected with HIV. Now, in the rest of the world, we've got basically nothing going on in the general population — very, very low levels — but we have extraordinarily high levels of HIV in these other populations who are at highest risk: drug injectors, sex workers and gay men. And you'll note, that's the local data from Los Angeles: 25 percent prevalence among gay men. Of course, you can't get HIV just by having unprotected sex. You can only HIV by having unprotected sex with a positive person. In most of the world, these few prevention failures notwithstanding, we are actually doing quite well these days in commercial sex: condom use rates are between 80 and 100 percent in commercial sex in most countries. And, again, it's because of an alignment of the incentives. What's rational for public health is also rational for individual sex workers because it's really bad for business to have another STI. No one wants it. And, actually, clients don't want to go home with a drip either. So essentially, you're able to achieve quite high rates of condom use in commercial sex. But in "intimate" relations it's much more difficult because, with your wife or your boyfriend or someone that you hope might turn into one of those things, we have this illusion of romance and trust and intimacy, and nothing is quite so unromantic as the, "My condom or yours, darling?" question. So in the face of that, you really need quite a strong incentive to use condoms. This, for example, this gentleman is called Joseph. He's from Haiti and he has AIDS. And he's probably not having a lot of sex right now, but he is a reminder in the population, of why you might want to be using condoms. This is also in Haiti and is a reminder of why you might want to be having sex, perhaps. Now, funnily enough, this is also Joseph after six months on antiretroviral treatment. Not for nothing do we call it the Lazarus Effect. But it is changing the equation of what's rational in sexual decision-making. So, what we've got — some people say, "Oh, it doesn't matter very much because, actually, treatment is effective prevention because it lowers your viral load and therefore makes it more difficult to transmit HIV." So, if you look at the viremia thing again, if you do start treatment when you're sick, well, what happens? Your viral load comes down. But compared to what? What happens if you're not on treatment? Well, you die, so your viral load goes to zero. And all of this green stuff here, including the spikes — which are because you couldn't get to the pharmacy, or you ran out of drugs, or you went on a three day party binge and forgot to take your drugs, or because you've started to get resistance, or whatever — all of that is virus that wouldn't be out there, except for treatment. Now, am I saying, "Oh, well, great prevention strategy. Let's just stop treating people." Of course not, of course not. We need to expand antiretroviral treatment as much as we can. But what I am doing is calling into question those people who say that more treatment is all the prevention we need. That's simply not necessarily true, and I think we can learn a lot from the experience of gay men in rich countries where treatment has been widely available for going on 15 years now. And what we've seen is that, actually, condom use rates, which were very, very high — the gay community responded very rapidly to HIV, with extremely little help from public health nerds, I would say — that condom use rate has come down dramatically since treatment for two reasons really: One is the assumption of, "Oh well, if he's infected, he's probably on meds, and his viral load's going to be low, so I'm pretty safe." And the other thing is that people are simply not as scared of HIV as they were of AIDS, and rightly so. AIDS was a disfiguring disease that killed you, and HIV is an invisible virus that makes you take a pill every day. And that's boring, but is it as boring as having to use a condom every time you have sex, no matter how drunk you are, no matter how many poppers you've taken, whatever? If we look at the data, we can see that the answer to that question is, mmm. So these are data from Scotland. You see the peak in drug injectors before they started the national needle exchange program. Then it came way down. And both in heterosexuals — mostly in commercial sex — and in drug users, you've really got nothing much going on after treatment begins, and that's because of that alignment of incentives that I talked about earlier. But in gay men, you've got quite a dramatic rise starting three or four years after treatment became widely available. This is of new infections. What does that mean? It means that the combined effect of being less worried and having more virus out there in the population — more people living longer, healthier lives, more likely to be getting laid with HIV — is outweighing the effects of lower viral load, and that's a very worrisome thing. What does it mean? It means we need to be doing more prevention the more treatment we have. Is that what's happening? No, and I call it the "compassion conundrum." We've talked a lot about compassion the last couple of days, and what's happening really is that people are unable quite to bring themselves to put in good sexual and reproductive health services for sex workers, unable quite to be giving out needles to junkies. But once they've gone from being transgressive people whose behaviors we don't want to condone to being AIDS victims, we come over all compassionate and buy them incredibly expensive drugs for the rest of their lives. It doesn't make any sense from a public health point of view. I want to give what's very nearly the last word to Ines. Ines is a a transgender hooker on the streets of Jakarta; she's a chick with a dick. Why does she do that job? Well, of course, because she's forced into it because she doesn't have any better option, etc., etc. And if we could just teach her to sew and get her a nice job in a factory, all would be well. This is what factory workers earn in an hour in Indonesia: on average, 20 cents. It varies a bit province to province. I do speak to sex workers, 15,000 of them for this particular slide, and this is what sex workers say they earn in an hour. So it's not a great job, but for a lot of people it really is quite a rational choice. Okay, Ines. We've got the tools, the knowledge and the cash, and commitment to preventing HIV too. Ines: So why is prevalence still rising? It's all politics. When you get to politics, nothing makes sense. Elizabeth Pisani: "When you get to politics, nothing makes sense." So, from the point of view of a sex worker, politicians are making no sense. From the point of view of a public health nerd, junkies are doing dumb things. The truth is that everyone has a different rationale. There are as many different ways of being rational as there are human beings on the planet, and that's one of the glories of human existence. But those ways of being rational are not independent of one another, so it's rational for a drug injector to share needles because of a stupid decision that's made by a politician, and it's rational for a politician to make that stupid decision because they're responding to what they think the voters want. But here's the thing: we are the voters. We're not all of them, of course, but TED is a community of opinion leaders. And everyone who's in this room, and everyone who's watching this out there on the web, I think, has a duty to demand of their politicians that we make policy based on scientific evidence and on common sense. It's going to be really hard for us to individually affect what's rational for every Frankie and every Ines out there, but you can at least use your vote to stop politicians doing stupid things that spread HIV. Thank you. (Applause)

The emotion behind invention

{0: 'Dean Kamen landed in the limelight with the Segway, but he has been innovating since high school, with more than 150 patents under his belt. Recent projects include portable energy and water purification for the developing world, and a prosthetic arm for maimed soldiers.'}

TEDMED 2009

It's not about technology, it's about people and stories. I could show you what recently was on television as a high quality video: 60 Minutes, many of you may have seen it. And it was the now director of the entire piece of the veteran's administration — who, himself, had lost an arm 39 years ago in Vietnam — who was adamantly opposed to these crazy devices that don't work. And it turns out that with 60 Minutes cameras rolling in the background, after he pretty much made his position clear on this — he had his hook and he had his — he wore this arm for less than two hours and was able to pour himself a drink and got quite emotional over the fact that, quote — his quote — it's the first time he's felt like he's had an arm in 39 years. But that would sort of be jumping to the middle of the story, and I'm not going to show you that polished video. I'm going to, instead, in a minute or two, show you an early, crude video because I think it's a better way to tell a story. A few years ago I was visited by the guy that runs DARPA, the people that fund all the advanced technologies that businesses and universities probably wouldn't take the risk of doing. They have a particular interest in ones that will help our soldiers. I get this sort of unrequested — by me anyway — visit, and sitting in my conference room is a very senior surgeon from the military and the guy that runs DARPA. They proceed to tell me a story which comes down to basically the following. We have used such advanced technologies now and made them available in the most remote places that we put soldiers: hills of Afghanistan, Iraq ... They were quite proud of the fact that you know, before the dust clears, if some soldier has been hurt they will have collected him or her, they will have brought him back, they will be getting world-class triage emergency care faster than you and I would be getting it if we were hurt in a car accident in a major city in the United States. That's the good news. The bad news is if they've collected this person and he or she is missing an arm or leg, part of the face, it's probably not coming back. So, they started giving me the statistics on how many of these kids had lost an arm. And then the surgeon pointed out, with a lot of anger, he said, "Why is it? At the end of the Civil War, they were shooting each other with muskets. If somebody lost an arm, we gave them a wooden stick with a hook on it. Now we've got F18s and F22s, and if somebody loses an arm, we give them a plastic stick with a hook on it." And they basically said, "This is unacceptable," and then the punchline: "So, Dean, we're here because you make medical stuff. You're going to give us an arm." And I was waiting for the 500 pages of bureaucracy, paperwork and DODs. No, the guy says, "We're going to bring a guy into this conference room, and wearing the arm you're going to give us, he or she is going to pick up a raisin or a grape off this table. If it's the grape, they won't break it." Great he needs efferent, afferent, haptic response sensors. "If it's the raisin, they won't drop it." So he wants fine motor control: flex at the wrist, flex at the elbow, abduct and flex at the shoulder. Either way they were going to eat it. "Oh, by the way Dean. It's going to fit on a 50th percentile female frame — namely 32 inches from the long finger — and weigh less than nine pounds." 50th percentile female frame. "And it's going to be completely self contained including all its power." So, they finished that. And I, as you can tell, am a bashful guy. I told them they're nuts. (Laughter) They've been watching too much "Terminator." (Laughter) Then, the surgeon says to me, "Dean, you need to know more than two dozen of these kids have come back bilateral." Now, I cannot imagine — I'm sorry, you may have a better imagination than I do — I can't imagine losing my arm, and typically at 22 years old. But compared to that, losing two? Seems like that would be an inconvenience. Anyway, I went home that night. I thought about it. I literally could not sleep thinking about, "I wonder how you'd roll over with no shoulders." So, I decided we've got to do this. And trust me, I've got a day job, I've got a lot of day jobs. Most of my day job keeps me busy funding my fantasies like FIRST and water and power .... And I've got a lot of day jobs. But I figured I gotta do this. Did a little investigation, went down to Washington, told them I still think they're nuts but we're going to do it. And I told them I'd build them an arm. I told them it would probably take five years to get through the FDA, and probably 10 years to be reasonably functional. Look what it takes to make things like iPods. "Great," he said, "You got two years." (Laughter) I said, "I'll tell you what. I'll build you an arm that's under nine pounds that has all that capability in one year. It will take the other nine to make it functional and useful." We sort of agreed to disagree. I went back and I started putting a team together, the best guys I could find with a passion to do this. At the end of exactly one year we had a device with 14 degrees of freedom, all the sensors, all the microprocessors, all the stuff inside. I could show you it with a cosmesis on it that's so real it's eerie, but then you wouldn't see all this cool stuff. I then thought it would be years before we'd be able to make it really, really useful. It turned out, as I think you could see in Aimee's capabilities and attitudes, people with a desire to do something are quite remarkable and nature is quite adaptable. Anyway, with less than 10 hours of use, two guys — one that's bilateral. He's literally, he's got no shoulder on one side, and he's high trans-humeral on the other. And that's Chuck and Randy together, after 10 hours — were playing in our office. And we took some pretty cruddy home movies. At the end of the one I'm going to show, it's only about a minute and a couple of seconds long, Chuck does something that to this day I'm jealous of, I can't do it. He picks up a spoon, picks it up, scoops out some Shredded Wheat and milk, holds the spoon level as he translates it, moving all these joints simultaneously, to his mouth, and he doesn't drop any milk. (Laughter) I cannot do that. (Laughter) His wife was standing behind me. She's standing behind me at the time and she says, "Dean, Chuck hasn't fed himself in 19 years. So, you've got a choice: We keep the arm, or you keep Chuck." (Laughter) (Applause) So, can we see that? This is Chuck showing simultaneous control of all the joints. He's punching our controls guy. The guy behind him is our engineer/surgeon, which is a convenient guy to have around. There's Randy, these guys are passing a rubber little puck between them. And just as in the spirit of FIRST, gracious professionalism, they are quite proud of this, so they decide to share a drink. This is a non-trivial thing to do, by the way. Imagine doing that with a wooden stick and a hook on the end of it, doing either of those. Now Chuck is doing something quite extraordinary, at least for my limited physical skill. And now he's going to do what DARPA asked me for. He's going to pick up a grape — he didn't drop it, he didn't break it — and he's going to eat it. So, that's where we were at the end of about 15 months. (Applause) But, as I've learned from Richard, the technology, the processors, the sensors, the motors, is not the story. I hadn't dealt with this kind of problem or frankly, this whole segment of the medical world. I'll give you some astounding things that have happened as we started this. After we were pretty much convinced we had a good design, and we'd have to make all the standard engineering trade-offs you always make — you can always get three out of four of anything you want; the weight, the size, the cost, the functionality — I put a bunch of guys in my plane and I said, "We're flying down to Walter Reed, and we're going talk to these kids, because frankly it doesn't matter whether we like this arm. It doesn't matter whether the Department of Defense likes this arm." When I told them that they weren't entirely enthusiastic, but I told them, "It really doesn't matter what their opinion is. There is only one opinion that matters, the kids that are either going to use it or not." I told a bunch of my engineers, "Look we're going to walk into Walter Reed, and you're going to see people, lots of them, missing major body parts. They're probably going to be angry, depressed, frustrated. We're probably going to have to give them support, encouragement. But we've got to extract from them enough information to make sure we're doing the right thing." We walked into Walter Reed and I could not have been more wrong. We did see a bunch of people, a lot of them missing a lot of body parts, and parts they had left were burned; half a face gone, an ear burned off. They were sitting at a table. They were brought together for us. And we started asking them all questions. "Look," I'd say to them, "We're not quite as good as nature yet. I could give you fine motor control, or I could let you curl 40 pounds; I probably can't do both. I can give you fast control with low reduction ratios in these gears, or I can give you power; I can't give you both. And we were trying to get them to all help us know what to give them. Not only were they enthusiastic, they kept thinking they're there to help us. "Well, would it help if I ..." "Guys, and woman, you've given enough. We're here to help you. We need data. We need to know what you need." After a half an hour, maybe, there was one guy at the far end of the table who wasn't saying much. You could see he was missing an arm. He was leaning on his other arm. I called down to the end, "Hey, you haven't said much. If we needed this or this, what would you want?" And he said, "You know, I'm the lucky guy at this table. I lost my right arm, but I'm a lefty." (Laughter) So, he wouldn't say much. He had a great spirit, like all the rest of them had great spirits. And he made a few comments. And then the meeting ended. We said goodbye to all these guys. And that guy pushed himself back from the table ... he has no legs. So, we left. And I was thinking, "We didn't give them support and encouragement; they gave it to us. They're not finished giving yet." It was astounding. So, we went back. And I started working harder, faster. Then we went out to Brooke Army Medical Center. And we saw lots of these kids, lots of them. And it was astounding how positive they are. So, we went back, and we've been working harder yet. We're in clinical trials, we've got five of them on people. We're screaming along. And I get a call and we go back to Washington. We go back to Walter Reed, and a kid, literally, 20 some-odd days before that was blown up. And they shipped him to Germany and 24 hours later they shipped him from Germany to Walter Reed. And he was there, and they said we needed to come. And I went down and they rolled him into a room. He's got no legs. He's got no arms. He's got a small residual limb on one side. Half of his face is gone, but they said his vision is coming back. He had one good eye. His name is Brandon Marrocco. And he said, "I need your arms, but I need two of them." "You'll get them." This kid was from Staten Island. And he said, "I had a truck, before I went over there, and it had a stick. You think I'll be able to drive it?" "Sure." And I turned around and went, "How are we going to do this?" (Laughter) Anyway, he was just like all the rest of them. He doesn't really want a lot. He wants to help. He told me that he wanted to go back to help his buddies. So, I was on my way out here. I was asked to stop at Texas. There were 3,500 people, the Veteran's Administration, U.S. ... just 3,500 at this huge event to help the families of all the kids — some that have died, some that are like Brandon — and they wanted me to speak. I said, "What am I going to say? This is not a happy thing. Look, if this happens to you, I can give you ... This stuff is still not as good at the original equipment." "You need to come." So, I went. And, as I think you get the point, there were a lot people there recovering. Some further along than others. But universally, these people that had been through this had astounding attitudes, and just the fact that people care makes a huge difference to them. I'll shut up, except one message or concern I have. I don't think anybody does it intentionally, but there were people there literally talking about, "Well, how much will they get?" You know, this country is involved as we've all heard, in this great healthcare debate. "Who is entitled to what? Who is entitled to how much? Who is going to pay for it?" Those are tough questions. I don't have an answer to that. Not everybody can be entitled to everything simply because you were born here. It's not possible. It would be nice but let's be realistic. They were tough questions. There's polarized groups down there. I don't know the answers. There are other questions that are tough. "Should we be there? How do we get out? What do we need to do?" There's very polarized answers to that question too, and I don't have any answers to that. Those are political questions, economic questions, strategic questions. I don't have the answer. But let me give you a simple concern or maybe statement, then. It is an easy answer. I know what these kids deserve on the healthcare side. I was talking to one of them, and he was really liking this arm — it's way, way, way better than a plastic stick with a hook on it — but there's nobody in this room that would rather have that than the one you got. But I was saying to him, "You know, the first airplane went 100 feet in 1903. Wilbur and Orville. But you know what? It wouldn't have made an old pigeon jealous. But now we got Eagles out there, F15s, even that Bald Eagle. I've never seen a bird flying around at Mach 2. I think eventually we'll make these things extraordinary." And I said to that kid, "I'll stop when your buddies are envious of your Luke arm because of what it can do, and how it does it. And we'll keep working. And I'm not going to stop working until we do that." And I think this country ought to continue its great debate, whining and complaining, "I'm entitled." "You're a victim." And whining and complaining about what our foreign policy ought to be. But while we have the luxury of whining and complaining about who's paying for what and how much we get, the people that are out there giving us that great privilege of whining and complaining, I know what they deserve: everything humanly possible. And we ought to give it to them. (Applause)

My seven species of robot -- and how we created them

{0: 'Dennis Hong is the founder and director of RoMeLa -- a Virginia Tech robotics lab that has pioneered several breakthroughs in robot design and engineering. '}

TEDxNASA

So the first robot to talk about is called STriDER. It stands for Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot. It's a robot that has three legs, which is inspired by nature. But have you seen anything in nature, an animal that has three legs? Probably not. So why do I call this a biologically inspired robot? How would it work? But before that, let's look at pop culture. So, you know H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," novel and movie. And what you see over here is a very popular video game, and in this fiction, they describe these alien creatures and robots that have three legs that terrorize Earth. But my robot, STriDER, does not move like this. This is an actual dynamic simulation animation. I'm going to show you how the robot works. It flips its body 180 degrees and it swings its leg between the two legs and catches the fall. So that's how it walks. But when you look at us human beings, bipedal walking, what you're doing is, you're not really using muscle to lift your leg and walk like a robot. What you're doing is, you swing your leg and catch the fall, stand up again, swing your leg and catch the fall. You're using your built-in dynamics, the physics of your body, just like a pendulum. We call that the concept of passive dynamic locomotion. What you're doing is, when you stand up, potential energy to kinetic energy, potential energy to kinetic energy. It's a constantly falling process. So even though there is nothing in nature that looks like this, really, we're inspired by biology and applying the principles of walking to this robot. Thus, it's a biologically inspired robot. What you see here, this is what we want to do next. We want to fold up the legs and shoot it up for long-range motion. And it deploys legs — it looks almost like "Star Wars" — so when it lands, it absorbs the shock and starts walking. What you see over here, this yellow thing, this is not a death ray. (Laughter) This is just to show you that if you have cameras or different types of sensors, because it's 1.8 meters tall, you can see over obstacles like bushes and those kinds of things. So we have two prototypes. The first version, in the back, that's STriDER I. The one in front, the smaller, is STriDER II. The problem we had with STriDER I is, it was just too heavy in the body. We had so many motors aligning the joints and those kinds of things. So we decided to synthesize a mechanical mechanism so we could get rid of all the motors, and with a single motor, we can coordinate all the motions. It's a mechanical solution to a problem, instead of using mechatronics. So with this, now the top body is lighted up; it's walking in our lab. This was the very first successful step. It's still not perfected, its coffee falls down, so we still have a lot of work to do. The second robot I want to talk about is called IMPASS. It stands for Intelligent Mobility Platform with Actuated Spoke System. It's a wheel-leg hybrid robot. So think of a rimless wheel or a spoke wheel, but the spokes individually move in and out of the hub; so, it's a wheel-leg hybrid. We're literally reinventing the wheel here. Let me demonstrate how it works. So in this video we're using an approach called the reactive approach. Just simply using the tactile sensors on the feet, it's trying to walk over a changing terrain, a soft terrain where it pushes down and changes. And just by the tactile information, it successfully crosses over these types of terrains. But, when it encounters a very extreme terrain — in this case, this obstacle is more than three times the height of the robot — then it switches to a deliberate mode, where it uses a laser range finder and camera systems to identify the obstacle and the size. And it carefully plans the motion of the spokes and coordinates it so it can show this very impressive mobility. You probably haven't seen anything like this out there. This is a very high-mobility robot that we developed called IMPASS. Ah, isn't that cool? When you drive your car, when you steer your car, you use a method called Ackermann steering. The front wheels rotate like this. For most small-wheeled robots, they use a method called differential steering where the left and right wheel turn the opposite direction. For IMPASS, we can do many, many different types of motion. For example, in this case, even though the left and right wheels are connected with a single axle rotating at the same angle of velocity, we simply change the length of the spoke, it affects the diameter, then can turn to the left and to the right. These are just some examples of the neat things we can do with IMPASS. This robot is called CLIMBeR: Cable-suspended Limbed Intelligent Matching Behavior Robot. I've been talking to a lot of NASA JPL scientists — at JPL, they are famous for the Mars rovers — and the scientists, geologists always tell me that the real interesting science, the science-rich sites, are always at the cliffs. But the current rovers cannot get there. So, inspired by that, we wanted to build a robot that can climb a structured cliff environment. So this is CLIMBeR. It has three legs. It's probably difficult to see, but it has a winch and a cable at the top. It tries to figure out the best place to put its foot. And then once it figures that out, in real time, it calculates the force distribution: how much force it needs to exert to the surface so it doesn't tip and doesn't slip. Once it stabilizes that, it lifts a foot, and then with the winch, it can climb up these kinds of cliffs. Also for search and rescue applications as well. Five years ago, I actually worked at NASA JPL during the summer as a faculty fellow. And they already had a six-legged robot called LEMUR. So this is actually based on that. This robot is called MARS: Multi-Appendage Robotic System. It's a hexapod robot. We developed our adaptive gait planner. We actually have a very interesting payload on there. The students like to have fun. And here you can see that it's walking over unstructured terrain. (Motor sound) It's trying to walk on the coastal terrain, a sandy area, but depending on the moisture content or the grain size of the sand, the foot's soil sinkage model changes, so it tries to adapt its gait to successfully cross over these kind of things. It also does some fun stuff. As you can imagine, we get so many visitors visiting our lab. So when the visitors come, MARS walks up to the computer, starts typing, "Hello, my name is MARS. Welcome to RoMeLa, the Robotics Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech." (Laughter) This robot is an amoeba robot. Now, we don't have enough time to go into technical details, I'll just show you some of the experiments. These are some of the early feasibility experiments. We store potential energy to the elastic skin to make it move, or use active tension cords to make it move forward and backward. It's called ChIMERA. We also have been working with some scientists and engineers from UPenn to come up with a chemically actuated version of this amoeba robot. We do something to something, and just like magic, it moves. "The Blob." This robot is a very recent project. It's called RAPHaEL: Robotic Air-Powered Hand with Elastic Ligaments. There are a lot of really neat, very good robotic hands out there on the market. The problem is, they're just too expensive — tens of thousands of dollars. So for prosthesis applications it's probably not too practical, because it's not affordable. We wanted to tackle this problem in a very different direction. Instead of using electrical motors, electromechanical actuators, we're using compressed air. We developed these novel actuators for the joints, so it's compliant. You can actually change the force, simply just changing the air pressure. And it can actually crush an empty soda can. It can pick up very delicate objects like a raw egg, or in this case, a lightbulb. The best part: it took only 200 dollars to make the first prototype. This robot is actually a family of snake robots that we call HyDRAS, Hyper Degrees-of-freedom Robotic Articulated Serpentine. This is a robot that can climb structures. This is a HyDRAS's arm. It's a 12-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm. But the cool part is the user interface. The cable over there, that's an optical fiber. This student, it's probably her first time using it, but she can articulate it in many different ways. So, for example, in Iraq, the war zone, there are roadside bombs. Currently, you send these remotely controlled vehicles that are armed. It takes really a lot of time and it's expensive to train the operator to operate this complex arm. In this case, it's very intuitive; this student, probably his first time using it, is doing very complex manipulation tasks, picking up objects and doing manipulation, just like that. Very intuitive. Now, this robot is currently our star robot. We actually have a fan club for the robot, DARwIn: Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence. As you know, we're very interested in human walking, so we decided to build a small humanoid robot. This was in 2004; at that time, this was something really, really revolutionary. This was more of a feasibility study: What kind of motors should we use? Is it even possible? What kinds of controls should we do? This does not have any sensors, so it's an open-loop control. For those who probably know, if you don't have any sensors and there's any disturbances, you know what happens. (Laughter) Based on that success, the following year we did the proper mechanical design, starting from kinematics. And thus, DARwIn I was born in 2005. It stands up, it walks — very impressive. However, still, as you can see, it has a cord, an umbilical cord. So we're still using an external power source and external computation. So in 2006, now it's really time to have fun. Let's give it intelligence. We give it all the computing power it needs: a 1.5 gigahertz Pentium M chip, two FireWire cameras, rate gyros, accelerometers, four forced sensors on the foot, lithium polymer batteries — and now DARwIn II is completely autonomous. It is not remote controlled. There's no tethers. It looks around, searches for the ball ... looks around, searches for the ball, and it tries to play a game of soccer autonomously — artificial intelligence. Let's see how it does. This was our very first trial, and ... (Video) Spectators: Goal! Dennis Hong: There is actually a competition called RoboCup. I don't know how many of you have heard about RoboCup. It's an international autonomous robot soccer competition. And the actual goal of RoboCup is, by the year 2050, we want to have full-size, autonomous humanoid robots play soccer against the human World Cup champions and win. (Laughter) It's a true, actual goal. It's a very ambitious goal, but we truly believe we can do it. This is last year in China. We were the very first team in the United States that qualified in the humanoid RoboCup competition. This is this year in Austria. You're going to see the action is three against three, completely autonomous. (Video) (Crowd groans) DH: There you go. Yes! The robots track and they team-play amongst themselves. It's very impressive. It's really a research event, packaged in a more exciting competition event. What you see here is the beautiful Louis Vuitton Cup trophy. This is for the best humanoid. We'd like to bring this, for the first time, to the United States next year, so wish us luck. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) DARwIn also has a lot of other talents. Last year, it actually conducted the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra for the holiday concert. This is the next generation robot, DARwIn IV, much smarter, faster, stronger. And it's trying to show off its ability: "I'm macho, I'm strong." (Laughter) "I can also do some Jackie Chan-motion, martial art movements." (Laughter) And it walks away. So this is DARwIn IV. Again, you'll be able to see it in the lobby. We truly believe this will be the very first running humanoid robot in the United States. So stay tuned. All right. So I showed you some of our exciting robots at work. So, what is the secret of our success? Where do we come up with these ideas? How do we develop these kinds of ideas? We have a fully autonomous vehicle that can drive into urban environments. We won a half a million dollars in the DARPA Urban Challenge. We also have the world's very first vehicle that can be driven by the blind. We call it the Blind Driver Challenge, very exciting. And many, many other robotics projects I want to talk about. These are just the awards that we won in 2007 fall from robotics competitions and those kinds of things. So really, we have five secrets. First is: Where do we get inspiration? Where do we get this spark of imagination? This is a true story, my personal story. At night, when I go to bed, at three, four in the morning, I lie down, close my eyes, and I see these lines and circles and different shapes floating around. And they assemble, and they form these kinds of mechanisms. And I think, "Ah, this is cool." So right next to my bed I keep a notebook, a journal, with a special pen that has an LED light on it, because I don't want to turn on the light and wake up my wife. So I see this, scribble everything down, draw things, and go to bed. Every day in the morning, the first thing I do, before my first cup of coffee, before I brush my teeth, I open my notebook. Many times it's empty; sometimes I have something there. If something's there, sometimes it's junk. But most of the time, I can't read my handwriting. Four in the morning — what do you expect, right? So I need to decipher what I wrote. But sometimes I see this ingenious idea in there, and I have this eureka moment. I directly run to my home office, sit at my computer, I type in the ideas, I sketch things out and I keep a database of ideas. So when we have these calls for proposals, I try to find a match between my potential ideas and the problem. If there's a match, we write a research proposal, get the research funding in, and that's how we start our research programs. But just a spark of imagination is not good enough. How do we develop these kinds of ideas? At our lab RoMeLa, the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, we have these fantastic brainstorming sessions. So we gather around, we discuss problems and solutions and talk about it. But before we start, we set this golden rule. The rule is: nobody criticizes anybody's ideas. Nobody criticizes any opinion. This is important, because many times, students fear or feel uncomfortable about how others might think about their opinions and thoughts. So once you do this, it is amazing how the students open up. They have these wacky, cool, crazy, brilliant ideas, and the whole room is just electrified with creative energy. And this is how we develop our ideas. Well, we're running out of time. One more thing I want to talk about is, you know, just a spark of idea and development is not good enough. There was a great TED moment — I think it was Sir Ken Robinson, was it? He gave a talk about how education and school kill creativity. Well, actually, there's two sides to the story. So there is only so much one can do with just ingenious ideas and creativity and good engineering intuition. If you want to go beyond a tinkering, if you want to go beyond a hobby of robotics and really tackle the grand challenges of robotics through rigorous research, we need more than that. This is where school comes in. Batman, fighting against the bad guys, he has his utility belt, he has his grappling hook, he has all different kinds of gadgets. For us roboticists, engineers and scientists, these tools are the courses and classes you take in class. Math, differential equations. I have linear algebra, science, physics — even, nowadays, chemistry and biology, as you've seen. These are all the tools we need. So the more tools you have, for Batman, more effective at fighting the bad guys, for us, more tools to attack these kinds of big problems. So education is very important. Also — it's not only about that. You also have to work really, really hard. So I always tell my students, "Work smart, then work hard." This picture in the back — this is three in the morning. I guarantee if you come to our lab at 3, 4am, we have students working there, not because I tell them to, but because we are having too much fun. Which leads to the last topic: do not forget to have fun. That's really the secret of our success, we're having too much fun. I truly believe that highest productivity comes when you're having fun, and that's what we're doing. And there you go. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Every pollen grain has a story

{0: "Jonathan Drori commissioned the BBC's very first websites, one highlight in a long career devoted to online culture and educational media -- and understanding how we learn."}

TED2010

Thank you. I have two missions here today. The first is to tell you something about pollen, I hope, and to convince you that it's more than just something that gets up your nose. And, secondly, to convince you that every home really ought to have a scanning electron microscope. (Laughter) Pollen is a flower's way of making more flowers. It carries male sex cells from one flower to another. This gives us genetic diversity, or at least it gives the plants genetic diversity. And it's really rather better not to mate with yourself. That's probably true of humans as well, mostly. Pollen is produced by the anthers of flowers. Each anther can carry up to 100,000 grains of pollen, so, it's quite prolific stuff. And it isn't just bright flowers that have pollen; it's also trees and grasses. And remember that all our cereal crops are grasses as well. Here is a scanning electron micrograph of a grain of pollen. The little hole in the middle, we'll come to a bit later, but that's for the pollen tube to come out later on. A very tiny tube. So, that's 20 micrometers across, that pollen grain there. That's about a 50th of a millimeter. But not all pollen is quite so simple looking. This is Morina. This is a plant — which I've always thought to be rather tedious — named after Morin, who was an enterprising French gardener, who issued the first seed catalog in 1621. But anyway, take a look at its pollen. This is amazing, I think. That little hole in the middle there is for the pollen tube, and when the pollen finds its special female spot in another Morina flower, just on the right species, what happens? Like I said, pollen carries the male sex cells. If you actually didn't realize that plants have sex, they have rampant, promiscuous and really quite interesting and curious sex. Really. (Laughter) A lot. My story is actually not about plant propagation, but about pollen itself. "So, what are pollen's properties?" I hear you ask. First of all, pollen is tiny. Yes we know that. It's also very biologically active, as anyone with hay fever will understand. Now, pollen from plants, which are wind-dispersed — like trees and grasses and so on — tend to cause the most hay fever. And the reason for that is they've got to chuck out masses and masses of pollen to have any chance of the pollen reaching another plant of the same species. Here are some examples — they're very smooth if you look at them — of tree pollen that is meant to be carried by the wind. Again — this time, sycamore — wind-dispersed. So, trees: very boring flowers, not really trying to attract insects. Cool pollen, though. This one I particularly like. This is the Monterey Pine, which has little air sacks to make the pollen carry even further. Remember, that thing is just about 30 micrometers across. Now, it's much more efficient if you can get insects to do your bidding. This is a bee's leg with the pollen glommed onto it from a mallow plant. And this is the outrageous and beautiful flower of the mangrove palm. Very showy, to attract lots of insects to do its bidding. The pollen has little barbs on it, if we look. Now, those little barbs obviously stick to the insects well, but there is something else that we can tell from this photograph, and that is that you might be able to see a fracture line across what would be the equator of this, if it was the Earth. That tells me that it's actually been fossilized, this pollen. And I'm rather proud to say that this was found just near London, and that 55 million years ago London was full of mangroves. Isn't that cool? (Laughter) Okay, so this is another species evolved to be dispersed by insects. You can tell that from the little barbs on there. All these pictures were taken with a scanning electron microscope, actually in the lab at Kew Laboratories. No coincidence that these were taken by Rob Kesseler, who is an artist, and I think it's someone with a design and artistic eye like him that has managed to bring out the best in pollen. (Laughter) Now, all this diversity means that you can look at a pollen grain and tell what species it came from, and that's actually quite handy if you maybe have a sample and you want to see where it came from. So, different species of plants grow in different places, and some pollen carries further than others. So, if you have a pollen sample, then in principle, you should be able to tell where that sample came from. And this is where it gets interesting for forensics. Pollen is tiny. It gets on to things, and it sticks to them. So, not only does each type of pollen look different, but each habitat has a different combination of plants. A different pollen signature, if you like, or a different pollen fingerprint. By looking at the proportions and combinations of different kinds of pollen in a sample, you can tell very precisely where it came from. This is some pollen embedded in a cotton shirt, similar to the one that I'm wearing now. Now, much of the pollen will still be there after repeated washings. Where has it been? Four very different habitats might look similar, but they've got very different pollen signatures. Actually this one is particularly easy, these pictures were all taken in different countries. But pollen forensics can be very subtle. It's being used now to track where counterfeit drugs have been made, where banknotes have come from, to look at the provenance of antiques and see that they really did come from the place the seller said they did. And murder suspects have been tracked using their clothing, certainly in the U.K., to within an area that's small enough that you can send in tracker dogs to find the murder victim. So, you can tell from a piece of clothing to within about a kilometer or so, where that piece of clothing has been recently and then send in dogs. And finally, in a rather grizzly way, the Bosnia war crimes; some of the people brought to trial were brought to trial because of the evidence from pollen, which showed that bodies had been buried, exhumed and then reburied somewhere else. I hope I've opened your eyes, if you'll excuse the visual pun, (Laughter) to some of pollen's secrets. This is a horse chestnut. There is an invisible beauty all around us, each grain with a story to tell ... each of us, in fact, with a story to tell from the pollen fingerprint that's upon us. Thank you to the colleagues at Kew, and thank you to palynologists everywhere. (Applause)

Singing old poems to life

{0: "Natalie Merchant's career spans three decades -- as the leader of 10,000 Maniacs and in her own solo work -- of making warmly personal music."}

TED2010

(Music) ♫ My age is three hundred ♫ ♫ and seventy-two ♫ ♫ I think with the deepest regret ♫ ♫ How I used to pick up and voraciously chew ♫ ♫ the dear little boys that I met ♫ ♫ I've eaten them raw in their holiday suits, ♫ ♫ Eaten them curried with rice, ♫ ♫ I've eaten them baked in their jackets and boots, ♫ ♫ And found them exceedingly nice. ♫ ♫ But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare, ♫ ♫ I think it's increasingly rude ♫ ♫ To do such a thing when I'm quite well aware ♫ ♫ Little boys do not like being chewed. ♫ ♫ Little boys do not like being chewed. ♫ (Music) ♫ So now I contentedly live upon eels, ♫ ♫ And try to do nothing amiss ♫ ♫ And pass all the time I can spare from my meals ♫ ♫ In innocent slumber like this, ♫ ♫ Innocent slumber like this. ♫ (Applause) I suppose I owe you an explanation. I've been working on a project for the last six years adapting children's poetry to music. And that's a poem by Charles Edward Carryl, who was a stockbroker in New York City for 45 years, but in the evenings, he wrote nonsense for his children. And this book was one of the most famous books in America for about 35 years. "The Sleepy Giant," which is the song that I just sang, is one of his poems. Now, we're going to do other poems for you, and here's a preview of some of the poets. This is Rachel Field, Robert Graves — a very young Robert Graves — Christina Rossetti. Ghosts, right? Have nothing to say to us, obsolete, gone — not so. What I really enjoyed about this project is reviving these people's words. Taking them off the dead, flat pages. Bringing them to life, bringing them to light. So, what we're going to do next is a poem that was written by Nathalia Crane. Nathalia Crane was a little girl from Brooklyn. When she was 10 years old in 1927, she published her first book of poems called "The Janitor's Boy." Here she is. And here's her poem. (Music) ♫ Oh, I'm in love with the janitor's boy, ♫ ♫ And the janitor's boy is in love with me. ♫ ♫ Oh, I'm in love with the janitor's boy, ♫ ♫ And the janitor's boy is in love with me. ♫ ♫ He's going to hunt for a desert isle ♫ ♫ In our geography. ♫ ♫ A desert isle with spicy trees ♫ ♫ Somewhere in Sheepshead Bay; ♫ ♫ A right nice place, just fit for two ♫ ♫ Where we can live always. ♫ ♫ Oh, I'm in love with the janitor's boy, ♫ ♫ And the janitor's boy, ♫ he's busy as can be; ♫ ♫ Down in the cellar he's making a raft ♫ ♫ Out of an old settee. ♫ ♫ He'll carry me off, I know that he will, ♫ ♫ For his hair is exceedingly red; ♫ ♫ And the only thing that occurs to me ♫ ♫ Is to dutifully shiver in bed. ♫ ♫ And on the day that we sail, I will leave a little note ♫ ♫ For my parents I hate to annoy: ♫ ♫ "I have flown to an island in the bay ♫ ♫ With my janitor's red haired-boy." ♫ ♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ I'm going to sail away ♫ ♫ Gone to Sheepshead Bay ♫ ♫ With my janitor's red-haired boy. ♫ ♫ On an old settee ♫ ♫ My red-haired boy and me ♫ ♫ The janitor's red-haired boy. ♫ ♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫ ♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫ (Applause) The next poem is by E.E. Cummings, "Maggie and Milly and Molly and May." (Music) ♫ Maggie and Milly, Molly and May ♫ ♫ They went down to the beach one day to play ♫ ♫ And Maggie discovered a shell that sang ♫ ♫ So sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles ♫ ♫ Maggie and Milly, Molly and May ♫ ♫ Maggie and Milly, Molly and May ♫ ♫ Milly befriended a stranded star ♫ ♫ Whose rays, whose rays ♫ ♫ Five languid fingers were ♫ (Music) ♫ Maggie and Milly, Molly and May ♫ ♫ Maggie and Milly, Molly and May ♫ (Music) ♫ Molly was chased by a horrible thing ♫ ♫ Which raced sideways blowing ♫ ♫ Blowing ♫ ♫ Blowing ♫ ♫ May came home with a smooth, round stone ♫ ♫ Small as a world and as large as alone ♫ (Music) ♫ For whatever we lose like a you or a me ♫ ♫ Always ourselves that we find at the sea ♫ (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) The next poem is "If No One Ever Marries Me." It was written by Laurence Alma-Tadema. She was the daughter of a very, very famous Dutch painter who had made his fame in England. He went there after the death of his wife of smallpox and brought his two young children. One was his daughter, Laurence. She wrote this poem when she was 18 years old in 1888, and I look at it as kind of a very sweet feminist manifesto tinged with a little bit of defiance and a little bit of resignation and regret. (Music) ♫ Well, if no one ever marries me ♫ ♫ And I don't see why they should, ♫ ♫ Nurse says I'm not pretty, ♫ ♫ And you know I'm seldom good, seldom good — ♫ ♫ Well, if no one ever marries me ♫ ♫ I shan't mind very much; ♫ ♫ Buy a squirrel in a cage ♫ ♫ And a little rabbit-hutch. ♫ ♫ If no one marries me ♫ ♫ If no one marries me ♫ ♫ If no one marries me ♫ ♫ If no one marries me ♫ ♫ If no one marries me ♫ ♫ I'll have a cottage near a wood ♫ ♫ And a pony all my own ♫ ♫ A little lamb quite clean and tame ♫ ♫ That I can take to town. ♫ ♫ And when I'm really getting old — ♫ ♫ And 28 or nine — ♫ ♫ Buy myself a little orphan girl ♫ ♫ And bring her up as mine. ♫ ♫ If no one marries me ♫ ♫ If no one marries me ♫ ♫ If no one marries me ♫ ♫ If no one marries me ♫ ♫ Well, if no one marries me ♫ ♫ Marries me ♫ ♫ Well, if no one marries me ♫ ♫ Marries me ♫ ♫ Well, if no one marries me ♫ Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. I became very curious about the poets after spending six years with them, and started to research their lives, and then decided to write a book about it. And the burning question about Alma-Tadema was: Did she marry? And the answer was no, which I found in the London Times archive. She died alone in 1940 in the company of her books and her dear friends. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a saintly man. He became a Jesuit. He converted from his Anglican faith. He was moved to by the Tractarian Movement, the Oxford Movement, otherwise known as — and he became a Jesuit priest. He burned all his poetry at the age of 24 and then did not write another poem for at least seven years because he couldn't rectify the life of a poet with the life of a priest. He died typhoid fever at the age of 44, I believe, 43 or 44. At the time, he was teaching classics at Trinity College in Dublin. A few years before he died, after he had resumed writing poetry, but in secret, he confessed to a friend in a letter that I found when I was doing my research: "I've written a verse. It is to explain death to a child, and it deserves a piece of plain-song music." And my blood froze when I read that because I had written the plain-song music 130 years after he'd written the letter. And the poem is called, "Spring and Fall." ♫ Margaret, are you grieving ♫ ♫ Over Goldengrove unleaving, by and by? ♫ ♫ Leaves, like the things of man, you ♫ ♫ With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? ♫ ♫ But as the heart grows older ♫ ♫ It will come to such sights much colder ♫ ♫ By and by, nor spare a sigh ♫ ♫ Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; ♫ ♫ And yet you will weep and you'll know why. ♫ ♫ No matter child, the name: ♫ ♫ Sorrow's springs are all the same ♫ ♫ They're all the same. ♫ ♫ Nor mouth had nor no mind expressed ♫ ♫ What heart heard of, ghost had guessed: ♫ ♫ It's the blight man was born for, ♫ ♫ It is Margaret that you mourn for ♫ Thank you so much. (Applause) (Music) I'd like to thank everybody, all the scientists, the philosophers, the architects, the inventors, the biologists, the botanists, the artists ... everyone that blew my mind this week. Thank you. (Applause) ♫ Oh, a li la li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la li la la la la la la ♫ (Applause) ♫ La li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la la la la la ♫ ♫ La la la li la la la la la ♫ ♫ You've been so kind and generous ♫ ♫ I don't know how you keep on giving. ♫ ♫ And for your kindness, I'm in debt to you. ♫ ♫ And for your selflessness, my admiration. ♫ ♫ And for everything you've done, you know I'm bound; ♫ ♫ I'm bound to thank for it ♫ ♫ La li la li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la li la li la la la ♫ (Clapping) ♫ La li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la la la ♫ ♫ La li la li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la li la li la la ♫ ♫ And you ♫ ♫ Now you've been so kind and ... ♫ Curb the enthusiasm, just a little bit. Just bring it down a little. (Laughter) It's my turn. I still have two minutes. (Laughter) Okay, we're going to start that verse again. ♫ Well, you've been so ... ♫ That's innovative, don't you think? Calming the audience down; I'm supposed to be whipping you into a frenzy, and I, "That's enough. Sh." (Laughter) ♫ Now, you've been kind and ... ♫ I'm going to sing this to Bill Gates. (Laughter) I have so much admiration for him. ♫ Now, you've been so kind and generous, ♫ ♫ I don't know how you keep on giving. ♫ ♫ And for your kindness I'm in debt to you. ♫ ♫ And I never could have come this far without you. ♫ ♫ So for everything you've done, you know I'm bound ♫ ♫ I'm bound to thank you for it ♫ (Clapping) ♫ La li la la li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la li la li la la la ♫ ♫ La li la la la ♫ ♫ Oh, I want to thank you for so many gifts ♫ ♫ You gave in love with tenderness ♫ ♫ Thank you ♫ ♫ I want to thank you for your generosity ♫ ♫ the love and the honesty that you gave me ♫ ♫ I want to thank you show my gratitude, ♫ My love and my respect for you ♫ ♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ Thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ Thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ Thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ Thank you, thank you ♫ You know what? I'll show you how to clap to this song. (Laughter) (Clapping) ♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ Thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ Thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ Thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫ It works better, right? ♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫ ♫ I want to thank you ♫ ♫ Ooh hoo ♫ ♫ Ooh hoo ♫ ♫ Ooh hoo ♫ ♫ Ooh hoo ♫ Let's bring it down. Decrescendo. Gradually, bringing it down, bringing it down. ♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫ Finger popping, ain't no stopping. Thank you so much. (Applause)

The danger of science denial

{0: 'Michael Specter is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new book, <em>Denialism</em>, asks why we have increasingly begun to fear scientific advances instead of embracing them.'}

TED2010

Let's pretend right here we have a machine. A big machine, a cool, TED-ish machine, and it's a time machine. And everyone in this room has to get into it. And you can go backwards, you can go forwards; you cannot stay where you are. And I wonder what you'd choose, because I've been asking my friends this question a lot lately and they all want to go back. I don't know. They want to go back before there were automobiles or Twitter or "American Idol." I don't know. I'm convinced that there's some sort of pull to nostalgia, to wishful thinking. And I understand that. I'm not part of that crowd, I have to say. I don't want to go back, and it's not because I'm adventurous. It's because possibilities on this planet, they don't go back, they go forward. So I want to get in the machine, and I want to go forward. This is the greatest time there's ever been on this planet by any measure that you wish to choose: health, wealth, mobility, opportunity, declining rates of disease ... There's never been a time like this. My great-grandparents died, all of them, by the time they were 60. My grandparents pushed that number to 70. My parents are closing in on 80. So there better be a nine at the beginning of my death number. But it's not even about people like us, because this is a bigger deal than that. A kid born in New Delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did 100 years ago. Think about that, it's an incredible fact. And why is it true? Smallpox. Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet. It reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has. It's gone. It's vanished. We vanquished it. Puff. In the rich world, diseases that threatened millions of us just a generation ago no longer exist, hardly. Diphtheria, rubella, polio ... does anyone even know what those things are? Vaccines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of people, those are triumphs of the scientific method. And to my mind, the scientific method — trying stuff out, seeing if it works, changing it when it doesn't — is one of the great accomplishments of humanity. So that's the good news. Unfortunately, that's all the good news because there are some other problems, and they've been mentioned many times. And one of them is that despite all our accomplishments, a billion people go to bed hungry in this world every day. That number's rising, and it's rising really rapidly, and it's disgraceful. And not only that, we've used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe. Potable water, arable land, rainforests, oil, gas: they're going away, and they're going away soon, and unless we innovate our way out of this mess, we're going away too. So the question is: Can we do that? And I think we can. I think it's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that they live on. I think we can power this world with energy that doesn't also destroy it. I really do believe that, and, no, it ain't wishful thinking. But here's the thing that keeps me up at night — one of the things that keeps me up at night: We've never needed progress in science more than we need it right now. Never. And we've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today. We're on the verge of amazing, amazing events in many fields, and yet I actually think we'd have to go back hundreds, 300 years, before the Enlightenment, to find a time when we battled progress, when we fought about these things more vigorously, on more fronts, than we do now. People wrap themselves in their beliefs, and they do it so tightly that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free. And, listen, everyone's entitled to their opinion; they're even entitled to their opinion about progress. But you know what you're not entitled to? You're not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you're not. And this took me awhile to figure out. About a decade ago, I wrote a story about vaccines for The New Yorker. A little story. And I was amazed to find opposition: opposition to what is, after all, the most effective public health measure in human history. I didn't know what to do, so I just did what I do: I wrote a story and I moved on. And soon after that, I wrote a story about genetically engineered food. Same thing, only bigger. People were going crazy. So I wrote a story about that too, and I couldn't understand why people thought this was "Frankenfoods," why they thought moving molecules around in a specific, rather than a haphazard way, was trespassing on nature's ground. But, you know, I do what I do. I wrote the story, I moved on. I mean, I'm a journalist. We type, we file, we go to dinner. It's fine. (Laughter) But these stories bothered me, and I couldn't figure out why, and eventually I did. And that's because those fanatics that were driving me crazy weren't actually fanatics at all. They were thoughtful people, educated people, decent people. They were exactly like the people in this room. And it just disturbed me so much. But then I thought, you know, let's be honest. We're at a point in this world where we don't have the same relationship to progress that we used to. We talk about it ambivalently. We talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it: "progress." Okay, there are reasons for that, and I think we know what those reasons are. We've lost faith in institutions, in authority, and sometimes in science itself, and there's no reason we shouldn't have. You can just say a few names and people will understand. Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger, Vioxx, weapons of mass destruction, hanging chads. You know, you can choose your list. There are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right, so be skeptical. Ask questions, demand proof, demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof, and we're not that good at doing that. And the reason that I can say that is because we're now in an epidemic of fear like one I've never seen and hope never to see again. About 12 years ago, there was a story published, a horrible story, that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine shot. Very scary. Tons of studies were done to see if this was true. Tons of studies should have been done; it's a serious issue. The data came back. The data came back from the United States, from England, from Sweden, from Canada, and it was all the same: no correlation, no connection, none at all. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because we believe anecdotes, we believe what we see, what we think we see, what makes us feel real. We don't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data, and I do understand that, I think we all do. But you know what? The result of that has been disastrous. Disastrous because here's a fact: The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down. That is disgraceful, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. It's horrible. What kind of a thing happened that we could do that? Now, I understand it. I do understand it. Because, did anyone have measles here? Has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of measles? Doesn't happen very much. Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year. That's a lot of death of measles — 20 an hour. But since it didn't happen here, we can put it out of our minds, and people like Jenny McCarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like "Oprah" and "Larry King Live." And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation. They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same. And it's something we need to learn, and we need to learn it really soon. This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk. He took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us. No fear, no agony. Polio — puff, gone. That guy in the middle, not so much. His name is Paul Offit. He just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people. It'll save the lives of 400 to 500,000 kids in the developing world every year. Pretty good, right? Well, it's good, except that Paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people ought to just stop the whining. And he actually says it that way. So, Paul's a terrorist. When Paul speaks in a public hearing, he can't testify without armed guards. He gets called at home because people like to tell him that they remember where his kids go to school. And why? Because Paul made a vaccine. I don't need to say this, but vaccines are essential. You take them away, disease comes back, horrible diseases. And that's happening. We have measles in this country now. And it's getting worse, and pretty soon kids are going to die of it again because it's just a numbers game. And they're not just going to die of measles. What about polio? Let's have that. Why not? A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said she thought I was a little strident. No one's ever said that before. She wasn't going to vaccinate her kid against polio, no way. Fine. Why? Because we don't have polio. And you know what? We didn't have polio in this country yesterday. Today, I don't know, maybe a guy got on a plane in Lagos this morning, and he's flying to LAX, right now he's over Ohio. And he's going to land in a couple of hours, he's going to rent a car, and he's going to come to Long Beach, and he's going to attend one of these fabulous TED dinners tonight. And he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralytic disease, and we don't either because that's the way the world works. That's the planet we live on. Don't pretend it isn't. Now, we love to wrap ourselves in lies. We love to do it. Everyone take their vitamins this morning? Echinacea, a little antioxidant to get you going. I know you did because half of Americans do every day. They take the stuff, and they take alternative medicines, and it doesn't matter how often we find out that they're useless. The data says it all the time. They darken your urine. They almost never do more than that. (Laughter) It's okay, you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine? I'm totally with you. (Laughter) Dark urine. Dark. Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Well, I think I understand, we hate Big Pharma. We hate Big Government. We don't trust the Man. And we shouldn't: Our health care system sucks. It's cruel to millions of people. It's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-bending to those of us who can even afford it. So we run away from it, and where do we run? We leap into the arms of Big Placebo. (Laughter) That's fantastic. I love Big Placebo. (Applause) But, you know, it's really a serious thing because this stuff is crap, and we spend billions of dollars on it. And I have all sorts of little props here. None of it ... ginkgo, fraud; echinacea, fraud; acai — I don't even know what that is but we're spending billions of dollars on it — it's fraud. And you know what? When I say this stuff, people scream at me, and they say, "What do you care? Let people do what they want to do. It makes them feel good." And you know what? You're wrong. Because I don't care if it's the secretary of HHS who's saying, "Hmm, I'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammograms," or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas. When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don't want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot, garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease. Please, don't tell me there are no consequences to these things. There are. There always are. Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite. It's an idiotic debate. It has to stop. It's a debate about words, about metaphors. It's ideology, it's not science. Every single thing we eat, every grain of rice, every sprig of parsley, every Brussels sprout has been modified by man. You know, there weren't tangerines in the garden of Eden. There wasn't any cantaloupe. (Laughter) There weren't Christmas trees. We made it all. We made it over the last 11,000 years. And some of it worked, and some of it didn't. We got rid of the stuff that didn't. Now we can do it in a more precise way — and there are risks, absolutely — but we can put something like vitamin A into rice, and that stuff can help millions of people, millions of people, prolong their lives. You don't want to do that? I have to say, I don't understand it. We object to genetically engineered food. Why do we do that? Well, the things I constantly hear are: Too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, monoculture, we don't want giant fields of the same thing, that's wrong. We don't companies patenting life. We don't want companies owning seeds. And you know what my response to all of that is? Yes, you're right. Let's fix it. It's true, we've got a huge food problem, but this isn't science. This has nothing to do with science. It's law, it's morality, it's patent stuff. You know science isn't a company. It's not a country. It's not even an idea; it's a process. It's a process, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very deadening, and it's preventing millions of people from prospering. You know, in the next 50 years we're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we do right now, 70 percent. This investment in Africa over the last 30 years. Disgraceful. Disgraceful. They need it, and we're not giving it to them. And why? Genetically engineered food. We don't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff, like cassava for instance. Cassava's something that half a billion people eat. It's kind of like a potato. It's just a bunch of calories. It sucks. It doesn't have nutrients, it doesn't have protein, and scientists are engineering all of that into it right now. And then people would be able to eat it and they'd be able to not go blind. They wouldn't starve, and you know what? That would be nice. It wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but it would be nice. And all I can say about this is: Why are we fighting it? I mean, let's ask ourselves: Why are we fighting it? Because we don't want to move genes around? This is about moving genes around. It's not about chemicals. It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones, our insistence on having bigger food, better food, singular food. This isn't about Rice Krispies, this is about keeping people alive, and it's about time we started to understand what that meant. Because, you know something? If we don't, if we continue to act the way we're acting, we're guilty of something that I don't think we want to be guilty of: high-tech colonialism. There's no other way to describe what's going on here. It's selfish, it's ugly, it's beneath us, and we really have to stop it. So after this amazingly fun conversation, (Laughter) you might want to say, "So, you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine and go forward?" Absolutely. Absolutely, I do. It's stuck in the present right now, but we have an amazing opportunity. We can set that time machine on anything we want. We can move it where we want to move it, and we're going to move it where we want to move it. We have to have these conversations and we have to think, but when we get in the time machine and we go ahead, we're going to be happy we do. I know that we can, and as far as I'm concerned, that's something the world needs right now. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Photos that changed the world

{0: 'Jonathan Klein runs Getty Images, a stock photo agency whose vast archive of still photography and illustrations is a mainstay of the creative class.'}

TED2010

In my industry, we believe that images can change the world. Okay, we're naive, we're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The truth is that we know that the images themselves don't change the world, but we're also aware that, since the beginning of photography, images have provoked reactions in people, and those reactions have caused change to happen. So let's begin with a group of images. I'd be extremely surprised if you didn't recognize many or most of them. They're best described as iconic: so iconic, perhaps, they're cliches. In fact, they're so well-known that you might even recognize them in a slightly or somewhat different form. (Laughter) But I think we're looking for something more. We're looking for something more. We're looking for images that shine an uncompromising light on crucial issues, images that transcend borders, that transcend religions, images that provoke us to step up and do something — in other words, to act. Well, this image you've all seen. It changed our view of the physical world. We had never seen our planet from this perspective before. Many people credit a lot of the birth of the environmental movement to our seeing the planet like this for the first time — its smallness, its fragility. Forty years later, this group, more than most, are well aware of the destructive power that our species can wield over our environment. And at last, we appear to be doing something about it. This destructive power takes many different forms. For example, these images taken by Brent Stirton in the Congo. These gorillas were murdered, some would even say crucified, and unsurprisingly, they sparked international outrage. Most recently, we've been tragically reminded of the destructive power of nature itself with the recent earthquake in Haiti. Well, I think what is far worse is man's destructive power over man. Samuel Pisar, an Auschwitz survivor, said, and I'll quote him, "The Holocaust teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man, when he loses his moral compass and his reason." There's another kind of crucifixion. The horrifying images from Abu Ghraib as well as the images from Guantanamo had a profound impact. The publication of those images, as opposed to the images themselves, caused a government to change its policies. Some would argue that it is those images that did more to fuel the insurgency in Iraq than virtually any other single act. Furthermore, those images forever removed the so-called moral high ground of the occupying forces. Let's go back a little. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War was basically shown in America's living rooms day in, day out. News photos brought people face to face with the victims of the war: a little girl burned by napalm, a student killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest. In fact, these images became the voices of protest themselves. Now, images have power to shed light of understanding on suspicion, ignorance, and in particular — I've given a lot of talks on this but I'll just show one image — the issue of HIV/AIDS. In the 1980s, the stigmatization of people with the disease was an enormous barrier to even discussing or addressing it. A simple act, in 1987, of the most famous woman in the world, the Princess of Wales, touching an HIV/AIDS infected baby did a great deal, especially in Europe, to stop that. She, better than most, knew the power of an image. So when we are confronted by a powerful image, we all have a choice: We can look away, or we can address the image. Thankfully, when these photos appeared in The Guardian in 1998, they put a lot of focus and attention and, in the end, a lot of money towards the Sudan famine relief efforts. Did the images change the world? No, but they had a major impact. Images often push us to question our core beliefs and our responsibilities to each other. We all saw those images after Katrina, and I think for millions of people they had a very strong impact. And I think it's very unlikely that they were far from the minds of Americans when they went to vote in November 2008. Unfortunately, some very important images are deemed too graphic or disturbing for us to see them. I'll show you one photo here, and it's a photo by Eugene Richards of an Iraq War veteran from an extraordinary piece of work, which has never been published, called War Is Personal. But images don't need to be graphic in order to remind us of the tragedy of war. John Moore set up this photo at Arlington Cemetery. After all the tense moments of conflict in all the conflict zones of the world, there's one photograph from a much quieter place that haunts me still, much more than the others. Ansel Adams said, and I'm going to disagree with him, "You don't take a photograph, you make it." In my view, it's not the photographer who makes the photo, it's you. We bring to each image our own values, our own belief systems, and as a result of that, the image resonates with us. My company has 70 million images. I have one image in my office. Here it is. I hope that the next time you see an image that sparks something in you, you'll better understand why, and I know that speaking to this audience, you'll definitely do something about it. And thank you to all the photographers. (Applause)

The tradeoffs of building green

{0: "Catherine Mohr loves what she does -- she's just not ever sure what it will be next. "}

TED2010

First of all, I'm a geek. I'm an organic food-eating, carbon footprint-minimizing, robotic surgery geek. And I really want to build green, but I'm very suspicious of all of these well-meaning articles, people long on moral authority and short on data, telling me how to do these kinds of things. And so I have to figure this out for myself. For example: Is this evil? I have dropped a blob of organic yogurt from happy self-actualized local cows on my counter top, and I grab a paper towel and I want to wipe it up. But can I use a paper towel? (Laughter) The answer to this can be found in embodied energy. This is the amount of energy that goes into any paper towel or embodied water, and every time I use a paper towel, I am using this much virtual energy and water. Wipe it up, throw it away. Now, if I compare that to a cotton towel that I can use a thousand times, I don't have a whole lot of embodied energy until I wash that yogurty towel. This is now operating energy. So if I throw my towel in the washing machine, I've now put energy and water back into that towel ... unless I use a front-loading, high-efficiency washing machine, (Laughter) and then it looks a little bit better. But what about a recycled paper towel that comes in those little half sheets? Well, now a paper towel looks better. Screw the paper towels. Let's go to a sponge. I wipe it up with a sponge, and I put it under the running water, and I have a lot less energy and a lot more water. Unless you're like me and you leave the handle in the position of hot even when you turn it on, and then you start to use more energy. Or worse, you let it run until it's warm to rinse out your towel. And now all bets are off. (Laughter) So what this says is that sometimes the things that you least expect — the position in which you put the handle — have a bigger effect than any of those other things that you were trying to optimize. Now imagine someone as twisted as me trying to build a house. (Laughter) That's what my husband and I are doing right now. And so, we wanted to know, how green could we be? And there's a thousand and one articles out there telling us how to make all these green trade-offs. And they are just as suspect in telling us to optimize these little things around the edges and missing the elephant in the living room. Now, the average house has about 300 megawatt hours of embodied energy in it; this is the energy it takes to make it — millions and millions of paper towels. We wanted to know how much better we could do. And so, like many people, we start with a house on a lot, and I'm going to show you a typical construction on the top and what we're doing on the bottom. So first, we demolish it. It takes some energy, but if you deconstruct it — you take it all apart, you use the bits — you can get some of that energy back. We then dug a big hole to put in a rainwater catchment tank to take our yard water independent. And then we poured a big foundation for passive solar. Now, you can reduce the embodied energy by about 25 percent by using high fly ash concrete. We then put in framing. And so this is framing — lumber, composite materials — and it's kind of hard to get the embodied energy out of that, but it can be a sustainable resource if you use FSC-certified lumber. We then go on to the first thing that was very surprising. If we put aluminum windows in this house, we would double the energy use right there. Now, PVC is a little bit better, but still not as good as the wood that we chose. We then put in plumbing, electrical and HVAC, and insulate. Now, spray foam is an excellent insulator — it fills in all the cracks — but it is pretty high embodied energy, and, sprayed-in cellulose or blue jeans is a much lower energy alternative to that. We also used straw bale infill for our library, which has zero embodied energy. When it comes time to sheetrock, if you use EcoRock it's about a quarter of the embodied energy of standard sheetrock. And then you get to the finishes, the subject of all of those "go green" articles, and on the scale of a house they almost make no difference at all. And yet, all the press is focused on that. Except for flooring. If you put carpeting in your house, it's about a tenth of the embodied energy of the entire house, unless you use concrete or wood for a much lower embodied energy. So now we add in the final construction energy, we add it all up, and we've built a house for less than half of the typical embodied energy for building a house like this. But before we pat ourselves too much on the back, we have poured 151 megawatt hours of energy into constructing this house when there was a house there before. And so the question is: How could we make that back? And so if I run my new energy-efficient house forward, compared with the old, non-energy-efficient house, we make it back in about six years. Now, I probably would have upgraded the old house to be more energy-efficient, and in that case, it would take me more about 20 years to break even. Now, if I hadn't paid attention to embodied energy, it would have taken us over 50 years to break even compared to the upgraded house. So what does this mean? On the scale of my portion of the house, this is equivalent to about as much as I drive in a year, it's about five times as much as if I went entirely vegetarian. But my elephant in the living room flies. Clearly, I need to walk home from TED. But all the calculations for embodied energy are on the blog. And, remember, it's sometimes the things that you are not expecting to be the biggest changes that are. Thank you. (Applause)

How art gives shape to cultural change

{0: "Opening minds and showcasing new voices -- it's all part of the job description for Studio Museum in Harlem director and chief curator Thelma Golden. "}

TED2009

The brilliant playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, wrote a volume called "People Who Led to My Plays." And if I were to write a volume, it would be called, "Artists Who Have Led My Exhibitions" because my work, in understanding art and in understanding culture, has come by following artists, by looking at what artists mean and what they do and who they are. J.J. from "Good Times," (Applause) significant to many people of course because of "Dy-no-mite," but perhaps more significant as the first, really, black artist on primetime TV. Jean-Michel Basquiat, important to me because [he was] the first black artist in real time that showed me the possibility of who and what I was about to enter into. My overall project is about art — specifically, about black artists — very generally about the way in which art can change the way we think about culture and ourselves. My interest is in artists who understand and rewrite history, who think about themselves within the narrative of the larger world of art, but who have created new places for us to see and understand. I'm showing two artists here, Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker, two of many who really form for me the essential questions that I wanted to bring as a curator to the world. I was interested in the idea of why and how I could create a new story, a new narrative in art history and a new narrative in the world. And to do this, I knew that I had to see the way in which artists work, understand the artist's studio as a laboratory, imagine, then, reinventing the museum as a think tank and looking at the exhibition as the ultimate white paper — asking questions, providing the space to look and to think about answers. In 1994, when I was a curator at the Whitney Museum, I made an exhibition called Black Male. It looked at the intersection of race and gender in contemporary American art. It sought to express the ways in which art could provide a space for dialogue — complicated dialogue, dialogue with many, many points of entry — and how the museum could be the space for this contest of ideas. This exhibition included over 20 artists of various ages and races, but all looking at black masculinity from a very particular point of view. What was significant about this exhibition is the way in which it engaged me in my role as a curator, as a catalyst, for this dialogue. One of the things that happened very distinctly in the course of this exhibition is I was confronted with the idea of how powerful images can be in people's understanding of themselves and each other. I'm showing you two works, one on the right by Leon Golub, one on the left by Robert Colescott. And in the course of the exhibition — which was contentious, controversial and ultimately, for me, life-changing in my sense of what art could be — a woman came up to me on the gallery floor to express her concern about the nature of how powerful images could be and how we understood each other. And she pointed to the work on the left to tell me how problematic this image was, as it related, for her, to the idea of how black people had been represented. And she pointed to the image on the right as an example, to me, of the kind of dignity that needed to be portrayed to work against those images in the media. She then assigned these works racial identities, basically saying to me that the work on the right, clearly, was made by a black artist, the work on the left, clearly, by a white artist, when, in effect, that was the opposite case: Bob Colescott, African-American artist; Leon Golub, a white artist. The point of that for me was to say — in that space, in that moment — that I really, more than anything, wanted to understand how images could work, how images did work, and how artists provided a space bigger than one that we could imagine in our day-to-day lives to work through these images. Fast-forward and I end up in Harlem; home for many of black America, very much the psychic heart of the black experience, really the place where the Harlem Renaissance existed. Harlem now, sort of explaining and thinking of itself in this part of the century, looking both backwards and forwards ... I always say Harlem is an interesting community because, unlike many other places, it thinks of itself in the past, present and the future simultaneously; no one speaks of it just in the now. It's always what it was and what it can be. And, in thinking about that, then my second project, the second question I ask is: Can a museum be a catalyst in a community? Can a museum house artists and allow them to be change agents as communities rethink themselves? This is Harlem, actually, on January 20th, thinking about itself in a very wonderful way. So I work now at The Studio Museum in Harlem, thinking about exhibitions there, thinking about what it means to discover art's possibility. Now, what does this mean to some of you? In some cases, I know that many of you are involved in cross-cultural dialogues, you're involved in ideas of creativity and innovation. Think about the place that artists can play in that — that is the kind of incubation and advocacy that I work towards, in working with young, black artists. Think about artists, not as content providers, though they can be brilliant at that, but, again, as real catalysts. The Studio Museum was founded in the late 60s. And I bring this up because it's important to locate this practice in history. To look at 1968, in the incredible historic moment that it is, and think of the arc that has happened since then, to think of the possibilities that we are all privileged to stand in today and imagine that this museum that came out of a moment of great protest and one that was so much about examining the history and the legacy of important African-American artists to the history of art in this country like Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden. And then, of course, to bring us to today. In 1975, Muhammad Ali gave a lecture at Harvard University. After his lecture, a student got up and said to him, "Give us a poem." And Mohammed Ali said, "Me, we." A profound statement about the individual and the community. The space in which now, in my project of discovery, of thinking about artists, of trying to define what might be black art cultural movement of the 21st century. What that might mean for cultural movements all over this moment, the "me, we" seems incredibly prescient totally important. To this end, the specific project that has made this possible for me is a series of exhibitions, all titled with an F — Freestyle, Frequency and Flow — which have set out to discover and define the young, black artists working in this moment who I feel strongly will continue to work over the next many years. This series of exhibitions was made specifically to try and question the idea of what it would mean now, at this point in history, to see art as a catalyst; what it means now, at this point in history, as we define and redefine culture, black culture specifically in my case, but culture generally. I named this group of artists around an idea, which I put out there called post-black, really meant to define them as artists who came and start their work now, looking back at history but start in this moment, historically. It is really in this sense of discovery that I have a new set of questions that I'm asking. This new set of questions is: What does it mean, right now, to be African-American in America? What can artwork say about this? Where can a museum exist as the place for us all to have this conversation? Really, most exciting about this is thinking about the energy and the excitement that young artists can bring. Their works for me are about, not always just simply about the aesthetic innovation that their minds imagine, that their visions create and put out there in the world, but more, perhaps, importantly, through the excitement of the community that they create as important voices that would allow us right now to understand our situation, as well as in the future. I am continually amazed by the way in which the subject of race can take itself in many places that we don't imagine it should be. I am always amazed by the way in which artists are willing to do that in their work. It is why I look to art. It's why I ask questions of art. It is why I make exhibitions. Now, this exhibition, as I said, 40 young artists done over the course of eight years, and for me it's about considering the implications. It's considering the implications of what this generation has to say to the rest of us. It's considering what it means for these artists to be both out in the world as their work travels, but in their communities as people who are seeing and thinking about the issues that face us. It's also about thinking about the creative spirit and nurturing it, and imagining, particularly in urban America, about the nurturing of the spirit. Now, where, perhaps, does this end up right now? For me, it is about re-imagining this cultural discourse in an international context. So the last iteration of this project has been called Flow, with the idea now of creating a real network of artists around the world; really looking, not so much from Harlem and out, but looking across, and Flow looked at artists all born on the continent of Africa. And as many of us think about that continent and think about what if means to us all in the 21st century, I have begun that looking through artists, through artworks, and imagining what they can tell us about the future, what they tell us about our future, and what they create in their sense of offering us this great possibility of watching that continent emerge as part of our bigger dialogue. So, what do I discover when I look at artworks? What do I think about when I think about art? I feel like the privilege I've had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works, the discovery of exciting works. But, really, it has been what I've discovered about myself and what I can offer in the space of an exhibition, to talk about beauty, to talk about power, to talk about ourselves, and to talk and speak to each other. That's what makes me get up every day and want to think about this generation of black artists and artists around the world. Thank you. (Applause)

Glowing life in an underwater world

{0: 'Edith Widder combines her expertise in research and technological innovation with a commitment to stopping and reversing the degradation of our marine environment. '}

Mission Blue Voyage

In the spirit of Jacques Cousteau, who said, "People protect what they love," I want to share with you today what I love most in the ocean, and that's the incredible number and variety of animals in it that make light. My addiction began with this strange looking diving suit called Wasp; that's not an acronym — just somebody thought it looked like the insect. It was actually developed for use by the offshore oil industry for diving on oil rigs down to a depth of 2,000 feet. Right after I completed my Ph.D., I was lucky enough to be included with a group of scientists that was using it for the first time as a tool for ocean exploration. We trained in a tank in Port Hueneme, and then my first open ocean dive was in Santa Barbara Channel. It was an evening dive. I went down to a depth of 880 feet and turned out the lights. And the reason I turned out the lights is because I knew I would see this phenomenon of animals making light called bioluminescence. But I was totally unprepared for how much there was and how spectacular it was. I saw chains of jellyfish called siphonophores that were longer than this room, pumping out so much light that I could read the dials and gauges inside the suit without a flashlight; and puffs and billows of what looked like luminous blue smoke; and explosions of sparks that would swirl up out of the thrusters — just like when you throw a log on a campfire and the embers swirl up off the campfire, but these were icy, blue embers. It was breathtaking. Now, usually if people are familiar with bioluminescence at all, it's these guys; it's fireflies. And there are a few other land-dwellers that can make light — some insects, earthworms, fungi — but in general, on land, it's really rare. In the ocean, it's the rule rather than the exception. If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals — in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net — make light. This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows. Now I want to share with you a little video that I shot from a submersible. I first developed this technique working from a little single-person submersible called Deep Rover and then adapted it for use on the Johnson Sea-Link, which you see here. So, mounted in front of the observation sphere, there's a a three-foot diameter hoop with a screen stretched across it. And inside the sphere with me is an intensified camera that's about as sensitive as a fully dark-adapted human eye, albeit a little fuzzy. So you turn on the camera, turn out the lights. That sparkle you're seeing is not luminescence, that's just electronic noise on these super intensified cameras. You don't see luminescence until the submersible begins to move forward through the water, but as it does, animals bumping into the screen are stimulated to bioluminesce. Now, when I was first doing this, all I was trying to do was count the numbers of sources. I knew my forward speed, I knew the area, and so I could figure out how many hundreds of sources there were per cubic meter. But I started to realize that I could actually identify animals by the type of flashes they produced. And so, here, in the Gulf of Maine at 740 feet, I can name pretty much everything you're seeing there to the species level. Like those big explosions, sparks, are from a little comb jelly, and there's krill and other kinds of crustaceans, and jellyfish. There was another one of those comb jellies. And so I've worked with computer image analysis engineers to develop automatic recognition systems that can identify these animals and then extract the XYZ coordinate of the initial impact point. And we can then do the kinds of things that ecologists do on land, and do nearest neighbor distances. But you don't always have to go down to the depths of the ocean to see a light show like this. You can actually see it in surface waters. This is some shot, by Dr. Mike Latz at Scripps Institution, of a dolphin swimming through bioluminescent plankton. And this isn't someplace exotic like one of the bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico, this was actually shot in San Diego Harbor. And sometimes you can see it even closer than that, because the heads on ships — that's toilets, for any land lovers that are listening — are flushed with unfiltered seawater that often has bioluminescent plankton in it. So, if you stagger into the head late at night and you're so toilet-hugging sick that you forget to turn on the light, you may think that you're having a religious experience. (Laughter) So, how does a living creature make light? Well, that was the question that 19th century French physiologist Raphael Dubois, asked about this bioluminescent clam. He ground it up and he managed to get out a couple of chemicals; one, the enzyme, he called luciferase; the substrate, he called luciferin after Lucifer the Lightbearer. That terminology has stuck, but it doesn't actually refer to specific chemicals because these chemicals come in a lot of different shapes and forms. In fact, most of the people studying bioluminescence today are focused on the chemistry, because these chemicals have proved so incredibly valuable for developing antibacterial agents, cancer fighting drugs, testing for the presence of life on Mars, detecting pollutants in our waters — which is how we use it at ORCA. In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish, and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope, in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering. Another thing all these molecules are telling us that, apparently, bioluminescence has evolved at least 40 times, maybe as many as 50 separate times in evolutionary history, which is a clear indication of how spectacularly important this trait is for survival. So, what is it about bioluminescence that's so important to so many animals? Well, for animals that are trying to avoid predators by staying in the darkness, light can still be very useful for the three basic things that animals have to do to survive: and that's find food, attract a mate and avoid being eaten. So, for example, this fish has a built-in headlight behind its eye that it can use for finding food or attracting a mate. And then when it's not using it, it actually can roll it down into its head just like the headlights on your Lamborghini. This fish actually has high beams. And this fish, which is one of my favorites, has three headlights on each side of its head. Now, this one is blue, and that's the color of most bioluminescence in the ocean because evolution has selected for the color that travels farthest through seawater in order to optimize communication. So, most animals make blue light, and most animals can only see blue light, but this fish is a really fascinating exception because it has two red light organs. And I have no idea why there's two, and that's something I want to solve some day — but not only can it see blue light, but it can see red light. So it uses its red bioluminescence like a sniper's scope to be able to sneak up on animals that are blind to red light and be able to see them without being seen. It's also got a little chin barbel here with a blue luminescent lure on it that it can use to attract prey from a long way off. And a lot of animals will use their bioluminescence as a lure. This is another one of my favorite fish. This is a viperfish, and it's got a lure on the end of a long fishing rod that it arches in front of the toothy jaw that gives the viperfish its name. The teeth on this fish are so long that if they closed inside the mouth of the fish, it would actually impale its own brain. So instead, it slides in grooves on the outside of the head. This is a Christmas tree of a fish; everything on this fish lights up, it's not just that lure. It's got a built-in flashlight. It's got these jewel-like light organs on its belly that it uses for a type of camouflage that obliterates its shadow, so when it's swimming around and there's a predator looking up from below, it makes itself disappear. It's got light organs in the mouth, it's got light organs in every single scale, in the fins, in a mucus layer on the back and the belly, all used for different things — some of which we know about, some of which we don't. And we know a little bit more about bioluminescence thanks to Pixar, and I'm very grateful to Pixar for sharing my favorite topic with so many people. I do wish, with their budget, that they might have spent just a tiny bit more money to pay a consulting fee to some poor, starving graduate student, who could have told them that those are the eyes of a fish that's been preserved in formalin. These are the eyes of a living anglerfish. So, she's got a lure that she sticks out in front of this living mousetrap of needle-sharp teeth in order to attract in some unsuspecting prey. And this one has a lure with all kinds of little interesting threads coming off it. Now we used to think that the different shape of the lure was to attract different types of prey, but then stomach content analyses on these fish done by scientists, or more likely their graduate students, have revealed that they all eat pretty much the same thing. So, now we believe that the different shape of the lure is how the male recognizes the female in the anglerfish world, because many of these males are what are known as dwarf males. This little guy has no visible means of self-support. He has no lure for attracting food and no teeth for eating it when it gets there. His only hope for existence on this planet is as a gigolo. (Laughter) He's got to find himself a babe and then he's got to latch on for life. So this little guy has found himself this babe, and you will note that he's had the good sense to attach himself in a way that he doesn't actually have to look at her. (Laughter) But he still knows a good thing when he sees it, and so he seals the relationship with an eternal kiss. His flesh fuses with her flesh, her bloodstream grows into his body, and he becomes nothing more than a little sperm sac. (Laughter) Well, this is a deep-sea version of Women's Lib. She always knows where he is, and she doesn't have to be monogamous, because some of these females come up with multiple males attached. So they can use it for finding food, for attracting mates. They use it a lot for defense, many different ways. A lot of them can release their luciferin or luferase in the water just the way a squid or an octopus will release an ink cloud. This shrimp is actually spewing light out of its mouth like a fire breathing dragon in order to blind or distract this viperfish so that the shrimp can swim away into the darkness. And there are a lot of different animals that can do this: There's jellyfish, there's squid, there's a whole lot of different crustaceans, there's even fish that can do this. This fish is called the shining tubeshoulder because it actually has a tube on its shoulder that can squirt out light. And I was luck enough to capture one of these when we were on a trawling expedition off the northwest coast of Africa for "Blue Planet," for the deep portion of "Blue Planet." And we were using a special trawling net that we were able to bring these animals up alive. So we captured one of these, and I brought it into the lab. So I'm holding it, and I'm about to touch that tube on its shoulder, and when I do, you'll see bioluminescence coming out. But to me, what's shocking is not just the amount of light, but the fact that it's not just luciferin and luciferase. For this fish, it's actually whole cells with nuclei and membranes. It's energetically very costly for this fish to do this, and we have no idea why it does it — another one of these great mysteries that needs to be solved. Now, another form of defense is something called a burglar alarm — same reason you have a burglar alarm on your car; the honking horn and flashing lights are meant to attract the attention of, hopefully, the police that will come and take the burglar away — when an animal's caught in the clutches of a predator, its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of something bigger and nastier that will attack their attacker, thereby affording them a chance for escape. This jellyfish, for example, has a spectacular bioluminescent display. This is us chasing it in the submersible. That's not luminescence, that's reflected light from the gonads. We capture it in a very special device on the front of the submersible that allows us to bring it up in really pristine condition, bring it into the lab on the ship. And then to generate the display you're about to see, all I did was touch it once per second on its nerve ring with a sharp pick that's sort of like the sharp tooth of a fish. And once this display gets going, I'm not touching it anymore. This is an unbelievable light show. It's this pinwheel of light, and I've done calculations that show that this could be seen from as much as 300 feet away by a predator. And I thought, "You know, that might actually make a pretty good lure." Because one of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean. The primary way that we know about what lives in the ocean is we go out and drag nets behind ships. And I defy you to name any other branch of science that still depends on hundreds of year-old technology. The other primary way is we go down with submersibles and remote-operated vehicles. I've made hundreds of dives in submersibles. When I'm sitting in a submersible though, I know that I'm not unobtrusive at all — I've got bright lights and noisy thrusters — any animal with any sense is going to be long gone. So, I've wanted for a long time to figure out a different way to explore. And so, sometime ago, I got this idea for a camera system. It's not exactly rocket science. We call this thing Eye-in-the-Sea. And scientists have done this on land for years; we just use a color that the animals can't see and then a camera that can see that color. You can't use infrared in the sea. We use far-red light, but even that's a problem because it gets absorbed so quickly. Made an intensified camera, wanted to make this electronic jellyfish. Thing is, in science, you basically have to tell the funding agencies what you're going to discover before they'll give you the money. And I didn't know what I was going to discover, so I couldn't get the funding for this. So I kluged this together, I got the Harvey Mudd Engineering Clinic to actually do it as an undergraduate student project initially, and then I kluged funding from a whole bunch of different sources. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute gave me time with their ROV so that I could test it and we could figure out, you know, for example, which colors of red light we had to use so that we could see the animals, but they couldn't see us — get the electronic jellyfish working. And you can see just what a shoestring operation this really was, because we cast these 16 blue LEDs in epoxy and you can see in the epoxy mold that we used, the word Ziploc is still visible. Needless to say, when it's kluged together like this, there were a lot of trials and tribulations getting this working. But there came a moment when it all came together, and everything worked. And, remarkably, that moment got caught on film by photographer Mark Richards, who happened to be there at the precise moment that we discovered that it all came together. That's me on the left, my graduate student at the time, Erika Raymond, and Lee Fry, who was the engineer on the project. And we have this photograph posted in our lab in a place of honor with the caption: "Engineer satisfying two women at once." (Laughter) And we were very, very happy. So now we had a system that we could actually take to some place that was kind of like an oasis on the bottom of the ocean that might be patrolled by large predators. And so, the place that we took it to was this place called a Brine Pool, which is in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico. It's a magical place. And I know this footage isn't going to look like anything to you — we had a crummy camera at the time — but I was ecstatic. We're at the edge of the Brine Pool, there's a fish that's swimming towards the camera. It's clearly undisturbed by us. And I had my window into the deep sea. I, for the first time, could see what animals were doing down there when we weren't down there disturbing them in some way. Four hours into the deployment, we had programmed the electronic jellyfish to come on for the first time. Eighty-six seconds after it went into its pinwheel display, we recorded this: This is a squid, over six feet long, that is so new to science, it cannot be placed in any known scientific family. I could not have asked for a better proof of concept. And based on this, I went back to the National Science Foundation and said, "This is what we will discover." And they gave me enough money to do it right, which has involved developing the world's first deep-sea webcam — which has been installed in the Monterey Canyon for the past year — and now, more recently, a modular form of this system, a much more mobile form that's a lot easier to launch and recover, that I hope can be used on Sylvia's "hope spots" to help explore and protect these areas, and, for me, learn more about the bioluminescence in these "hope spots." So one of these take-home messages here is, there is still a lot to explore in the oceans. And Sylvia has said that we are destroying the oceans before we even know what's in them, and she's right. So if you ever, ever get an opportunity to take a dive in a submersible, say yes — a thousand times, yes — and please turn out the lights. I promise, you'll love it. Thank you. (Applause)

Homeopathy, quackery and fraud

{0: 'Legendary skeptic James Randi has devoted his life to debunking frauds and investigating paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.'}

TED2007

Good morning. Happy to see so many fine folks out here and so many smiling faces. I have a very peculiar background, attitude and approach to the real world because I am a conjurer. Now, I prefer that term over magician, because if I were a magician, that would mean that I use spells and incantations and weird gestures in order to accomplish real magic. No, I don't do that; I'm a conjurer, who is someone who pretends to be a real magician. (Laughter) Now, how do we go about that sort of thing? We depend on the fact that audiences, such as yourselves, will make assumptions. For example, when I walked up here and I took the microphone from the stand and switched it on, you assumed this was a microphone, which it is not. (Laughter) As a matter of fact, this is something that about half of you, more than half of you will not be familiar with. It's a beard trimmer, you see? And it makes a very bad microphone; I've tried it many times. (Laughter) The other assumption that you made — and this little lesson is to show you that you will make assumptions. Not only that you can, but that you will when they are properly suggested to you. You believe I'm looking at you. Wrong. I'm not looking at you. I can't see you. I know you're out there, they told me backstage, it's a full house and such. I know you're there because I can hear you, but I can't see you because I normally wear glasses. These are not glasses, these are empty frames. (Laughter) Quite empty frames. Now why would a grown man appear before you wearing empty frames on his face? To fool you, ladies and gentlemen, to deceive you, to show that you, too, can make assumptions. Don't you ever forget that. Now, I have to do something — first of all, switch to real glasses so I can actually see you, which would probably be a convenience. I don't know. I haven't had a good look. Well, it's not that great a convenience. (Laughter) I have to do something now, which seems a little bit strange for a magician. But I'm going to take some medication. This is a full bottle of Calms Forte. I'll explain that in just a moment. Ignore the instructions, that's what the government has to put in there to confuse you, I'm sure. I will take enough of these. Mm. Indeed, the whole container. Thirty-two tablets of Calms Forte. Now that I've done that — I'll explain it in a moment — I must tell you that I am an actor. I'm an actor who plays a specific part. I play the part of a magician, a wizard, if you will, a real wizard. If someone were to appear on this stage in front of me and actually claim to be an ancient prince of Denmark named Hamlet, you would be insulted and rightly so. Why would a man assume that you would believe something bizarre like this? But there exists out there a very large population of people who will tell you that they have psychic, magical powers that they can predict the future, that they can make contact with the deceased. Oh, they also say they will sell you astrology or other fortunetelling methods. Oh, they gladly sell you that, yes. And they also say that they can give you perpetual motion machines and free energy systems. They claim to be psychics, or sensitives, whatever they can. But the one thing that has made a big comeback just recently is this business of speaking with the dead. Now, to my innocent mind, dead implies incapable of communicating. (Laughter) You might agree with me on that. But these people, they tend to tell you that not only can they communicate with the dead — "Hi, there" — but they can hear the dead as well, and they can relay this information back to the living. I wonder if that's true. I don't think so, because this subculture of people use exactly the same gimmicks that we magicians do, exactly the same — the same physical methods, the same psychological methods — and they effectively and profoundly deceive millions of people around the earth, to their detriment. They deceive these people, costs them a lot of money, cost them a lot of emotional anguish. Billions of dollars are spent every year, all over the globe, on these charlatans. Now, I have two questions I would like to ask these people if I had the opportunity to do so. First question: If I want to ask them to call up — because they do hear them through the ear. They listen to the spirits like this — I'm going to ask you to call up the ghost of my grandmother because, when she died, she had the family will, and she secreted it someplace. We don't know where it is, so we ask Granny, "Where is the will, Granny?" What does Granny say? She says, "I'm in heaven and it's wonderful. I'm here with all my old friends, my deceased friends, and my family and all the puppy dogs and the kittens that I used to have when I was a little girl. And I love you, and I'll always be with you. Good bye." And she didn't answer the damn question! Where is the will? Now, she could easily have said, "Oh, it's in the library on the second shelf, behind the encyclopedia," but she doesn't say that. No, she doesn't. She doesn't bring any useful information to us. We paid a lot of money for that information, be we didn't get it. The second question that I'd like to ask, rather simple: Suppose I ask them to contact the spirit of my deceased father-in-law, as an example. Why do they insist on saying — remember, they speak into this ear — why do they say, "My name starts with J or M?" Is this a hunting game? Hunting and fishing? What is it? Is it 20 questions? No, it's more like 120 questions. But it is a cruel, vicious, absolutely conscienceless — I'll be all right, keep your seats (Laughter) — game that these people play. And they take advantage of the innocent, the naive, the grieving, the needy people out there. Now, this is a process that is called cold reading. There's one fellow out there, Van Praagh is his name, James Van Praagh. He's one of the big practitioners of this sort of thing. John Edward, Sylvia Browne and Rosemary Altea, they are other operators. There are hundreds of them all over the earth, but in this country, James Van Praagh is very big. And what does he do? He likes to tell you how the deceased got deceased, the people he's talking to through his ear, you see? So what he says is, very often, is like this: he says, "He tells me, he tells me, before he passed, that he had trouble breathing." Folks, that's what dying is all about! (Laughter) You stop breathing, and then you're dead. It's that simple. And that's the kind of information they're going to bring back to you? I don't think so. Now, these people will make guesses, they'll say things like, "Why am I getting electricity? He's saying to me, 'Electricity.' Was he an electrician?" "No." "Did he ever have an electric razor?" "No." It was a game of hunting questions like this. This is what they go through. Now, folks often ask us at the James Randi Educational Foundation, they call me, they say, "Why are you so concerned about this, Mr. Randi? Isn't it just a lot of fun?" No, it is not fun. It is a cruel farce. Now, it may bring a certain amount of comfort, but that comfort lasts only about 20 minutes or so. And then the people look in the mirror, and they say, I just paid a lot of money for that reading. And what did she say to me? 'I love you!'" They always say that. They don't get any information, they don't get any value for what they spend. Now, Sylvia Browne is the big operator. We call her "The Talons." Sylvia Browne — thank you — Sylvia Browne is the big operator in this field at this very moment. Now, Sylvia Browne — just to show you — she actually gets 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone, she doesn't even go there in person, and you have to wait up to two years because she's booked ahead that amount of time. You pay by credit card or whatever, and then she will call you sometime in the next two years. You can tell it's her. "Hello, this is Sylvia Browne." That's her, you can tell right away. Now, Montel Williams is an intelligent man. We all know who he is on television. He's well educated, he's smart, he knows what Sylvia Browne is doing but he doesn't give a damn. He just doesn't care. Because, the bottom line is, the sponsors love it, and he will expose her to television publicity all the time. Now, what does Sylvia Browne give you for that 700 dollars? She gives you the names of your guardian angels, that's first. Now, without that, how could we possibly function? (Laughter) She gives you the names of previous lives, who you were in previous lives. Duh. It turns out that the women that she gives readings for were all Babylonian princesses, or something like that. And the men were all Grecian warriors fighting with Agamemnon. Nothing is ever said about a 14 year-old bootblack in the streets of London who died of consumption. He isn't worth bringing back, obviously. And the strange thing — folks, you may have noticed this too. You see these folks on television — they never call anybody back from hell. (Laughter) Everyone comes back from heaven, but never from hell. If they call back any of my friends, they're not going to... Well, you see the story. (Laughter) Now, Sylvia Browne is an exception, an exception in one way, because the James Randi Educational Foundation, my foundation, offers a one million dollar prize in negotiable bonds. Very simply won. All you have to do is prove any paranormal, occult or supernatural event or power of any kind under proper observing conditions. It's very easy, win the million dollars. Sylvia Browne is an exception in that she's the only professional psychic in the whole world that has accepted our challenge. She did this on the "Larry King Live" show on CNN six and a half years ago. And we haven't heard from her since. Strange. She said that, first of all, that she didn't know how to contact me. Duh. A professional psychic who speaks to dead people, she can't reach me? (Laughter) I'm alive, you may have noticed. Well, pretty well anyway. She couldn't reach me. Now she says she doesn't want to reach me because I'm a godless person. All the more reason to take the million dollars, wouldn't you think, Sylvia? Now these people need to be stopped, seriously now. They need to be stopped because this is a cruel farce. We get people coming to the foundation all the time. They're ruined financially and emotionally because they've given their money and their faith to these people. Now, I popped some pills earlier. I have to explain that to you. Homeopathy, let's find out what that's all about. Hmm. You've heard of it. It's an alternative form of healing, right? Homeopathy actually consists — and that's what this is. This is Calms Forte, 32 caplets of sleeping pills! I forgot to tell you that. I just ingested six and a half days worth of sleeping pills. (Laughter) Six and a half days, that certainly is a fatal dose. It says right on the back here, "In case of overdose, contact your poison control center immediately," and it gives an 800 number. Keep your seats — it's going to be okay. I don't really need it because I've been doing this stunt for audiences all over the world for the last eight or 10 years, taking fatal doses of homeopathic sleeping pills. Why don't they affect me? (Laughter) (Applause) The answer may surprise you. What is homeopathy? It's taking a medicine that really works and diluting it down well beyond Avogadro's limit. Diluting it down to the point where there's none of it left. (Laughter) Now folks, this is not just a metaphor I'm going to give you now, it's true. It's exactly equivalent to taking one 325 milligram aspirin tablet, throwing it into the middle of Lake Tahoe, and then stirring it up, obviously with a very big stick, and waiting two years or so until the solution is homogeneous. Then, when you get a headache, you take a sip of this water, and — voila! — it is gone. (Laughter) Now that is true. That is what homeopathy is all about. And another claim that they make — you'll love this one — the more dilute the medicine is, they say, the more powerful it is. Now wait a minute, we heard about a guy in Florida. The poor man, he was on homeopathic medicine. He died of an overdose. He forgot to take his pill. (Laughter) Work on it. Work on it. It's a ridiculous thing. It is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know what we're doing, believing in all this nonsense over all these years. Now, let me tell you, The James Randi Educational Foundation is waving this very big carrot, but I must say, the fact that nobody has taken us up on this offer doesn't mean that the powers don't exist. They might, some place out there. Maybe these people are just independently wealthy. Well, with Sylvia Browne I would think so. You know, 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone — that's more than lawyers make! I mean that's a fabulous amount of money. These people don't need the million dollars perhaps, but wouldn't you think they'd like to take it just to make me look silly? Just to get rid of this godless person out there that Sylvia Browne talks about all the time? I think that something needs to be done about this. We really would love to have suggestions from you folks on how to contact federal, state and local authorities to get them to do something. If you find out — now I understand. We've seen people, even today, speaking to us about AIDS epidemics and starving kids around the world and impure water supplies that people have to suffer with. Those are very important, critically important to us. And we must do something about those problems. But at the same time, as Arthur C. Clarke said, The rotting of the human mind, the business of believing in the paranormal and the occult and the supernatural — all of this total nonsense, this medieval thinking — I think something should be done about that, and it all lies in education. Largely, it's the media who are to blame for this sort of thing. They shamelessly promote all kinds of nonsense of this sort because it pleases the sponsors. It's the bottom line, the dollar line. That's what they're looking at. We really must do something about this. I'm willing to take your suggestions, and I'm willing to have you tune in to our webpage. It's www.randi.org. Go in there and look at the archives, and you will begin to understand much more of what I've been talking about today. You will see the records that we have. There's nothing like sitting in that library and having a family appear there and say that Mum gave away all the family fortune. She cashed in the CDs, she gave away the stocks and the certificates. That's really sad to hear, and it hasn't helped them one bit, hasn't solved any of their problems. Yes, there could be a rotting of the American mind, and of the minds all the way around the earth, if we don't start to think sensibly about these things. Now, we've offered this carrot, as I say, we've dangled the carrot. We're waiting for the psychics to come forth and snap at it. Oh, we get lots of them, hundreds of them every year come by. These are dowsers and people who think that they can talk to the dead as well, but they're amateurs; they don't know how to evaluate their own so-called powers. The professionals never come near us, except in that case of Sylvia Browne that I told you about a moment ago. She did accept and then backed away. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm James Randi, and I'm waiting. Thank you. (Applause)

Bio-lab on a microchip

{0: 'TED Senior Fellow Frederick Balagadde invented the micro-chemostat, a first-of-its-kind, dime-sized piece of transparent plastic that can orchestrate the behavior of living cells.'}

TED2010

The greatest irony in global health is that the poorest countries carry the largest disease burden. If we resize the countries of the globe in proportion to the subject of interest, we see that Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst hit region by HIV/AIDS. This is the most devastating epidemic of our time. We also see that this region has the least capability in terms of dealing with the disease. There are very few doctors and, quite frankly, these countries do not have the resources that are needed to cope with such epidemics. So what the Western countries, developed countries, have generously done is they have proposed to provide free drugs to all people in Third World countries who actually can't afford these medications. And this has already saved millions of lives, and it has prevented entire economies from capsizing in Sub-Saharan Africa. But there is a fundamental problem that is killing the efforts in fighting this disease, because if you keep throwing drugs out at people who don't have diagnostic services, you end up creating a problem of drug resistance. This is already beginning to happen in Sub-Saharan Africa. The problem is that, what begins as a tragedy in the Third World could easily become a global problem. And the last thing we want to see is drug-resistant strains of HIV popping up all over the world, because it will make treatment more expensive and it could also restore the pre-ARV carnage of HIV/AIDS. I experienced this firsthand as a high school student in Uganda. This was in the 90s during the peak of the HIV epidemic, before there were any ARVs in Sub-Saharan Africa. And during that time, I actually lost more relatives, as well as the teachers who taught me, to HIV/AIDS. So this became one of the driving passions of my life, to help find real solutions that could address these kinds of problems. We all know about the miracle of miniaturization. Back in the day, computers used to fill this entire room, and people actually used to work inside the computers. But what electronic miniaturization has done is that it has allowed people to shrink technology into a cell phone. And I'm sure everyone here enjoys cell phones that can actually be used in the remote areas of the world, in the Third World countries. The good news is that the same technology that allowed miniaturization of electronics is now allowing us to miniaturize biological laboratories. So, right now, we can actually miniaturize biological and chemistry laboratories onto microfluidic chips. I was very lucky to come to the US right after high school, and was able to work on this technology and develop some devices. This is a microfluidic chip that I developed. A close look at how the technology works: These are channels that are about the size of a human hair — so you have integrated valves, pumps, mixers and injectors — so you can fit entire diagnostic experiments onto a microfluidic system. So what I plan to do with this technology is to actually take the current state of the technology and build an HIV kit in a microfluidic system. So, with one microfluidic chip, which is the size of an iPhone, you can actually diagnose 100 patients at the same time. For each patient, we will be able to do up to 100 different viral loads per patient. And this is only done in four hours, 50 times faster than the current state of the art, at a cost that will be five to 500 times cheaper than the current options. So this will allow us to create personalized medicines in the Third World at a cost that is actually achievable and make the world a safer place. I invite your interest as well as your involvement in driving this vision to a point of practical reality. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Build a tower, build a team

{0: "Tom Wujec studies how we share and absorb information. He's an innovative practitioner of business visualization -- using design and technology to help groups solve problems and understand ideas. He is a Fellow at Autodesk."}

TED2010

Several years ago here at TED, Peter Skillman introduced a design challenge called the marshmallow challenge. And the idea's pretty simple: Teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow. The marshmallow has to be on top. And, though it seems really simple, it's actually pretty hard because it forces people to collaborate very quickly. And so, I thought this was an interesting idea, and I incorporated it into a design workshop. And it was a huge success. And since then, I've conducted about 70 design workshops across the world with students and designers and architects, even the CTOs of the Fortune 50, and there's something about this exercise that reveals very deep lessons about the nature of collaboration, and I'd like to share some of them with you. So, normally, most people begin by orienting themselves to the task. They talk about it, they figure out what it's going to look like, they jockey for power. Then they spend some time planning, organizing, they sketch and they lay out spaghetti. They spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into ever-growing structures. And then finally, just as they're running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, and then they gingerly put it on top, and then they stand back, and — ta-da! — they admire their work. But what really happens, most of the time, is that the "ta-da" turns into an "uh-oh," because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse. So there are a number of people who have a lot more "uh-oh" moments than others, and among the worst are recent graduates of business school. (Laughter) They lie, they cheat, they get distracted and they produce really lame structures. And of course there are teams that have a lot more "ta-da" structures, and among the best are recent graduates of kindergarten. (Laughter) And it's pretty amazing. As Peter tells us, not only do they produce the tallest structures, but they're the most interesting structures of them all. So the question you want to ask is: How come? Why? What is it about them? And Peter likes to say that none of the kids spend any time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti, Inc. Right? They don't spend time jockeying for power. But there's another reason as well. And the reason is that business students are trained to find the single right plan, right? And then they execute on it. And then what happens is, when they put the marshmallow on the top, they run out of time and what happens? It's a crisis. Sound familiar? Right. What kindergarteners do differently is that they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way. Designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process. And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work. So the capacity to play in prototype is really essential, but let's look at how different teams perform. So the average for most people is around 20 inches; business schools students, about half of that; lawyers, a little better, but not much better than that, kindergarteners, better than most adults. Who does the very best? Architects and engineers, thankfully. (Laughter) Thirty-nine inches is the tallest structure I've seen. And why is it? Because they understand triangles and self-reinforcing geometrical patterns are the key to building stable structures. So CEOs, a little bit better than average, but here's where it gets interesting. If you put you put an executive admin. on the team, they get significantly better. (Laughter) It's incredible. You know, you look around, you go, "Oh, that team's going to win." You can just tell beforehand. And why is that? Because they have special skills of facilitation. They manage the process, they understand the process. And any team who manages and pays close attention to work will significantly improve the team's performance. Specialized skills and facilitation skills are the combination that leads to strong success. If you have 10 teams that typically perform, you'll get maybe six or so that have standing structures. And I tried something interesting. I thought, let's up the ante, once. So I offered a 10,000 dollar prize of software to the winning team. So what do you think happened to these design students? What was the result? Here's what happened: Not one team had a standing structure. If anyone had built, say, a one inch structure, they would have taken home the prize. So, isn't that interesting? That high stakes have a strong impact. We did the exercise again with the same students. What do you think happened then? So now they understand the value of prototyping. So the same team went from being the very worst to being among the very best. They produced the tallest structures in the least amount of time. So there's deep lessons for us about the nature of incentives and success. So, you might ask: Why would anyone actually spend time writing a marshmallow challenge? And the reason is, I help create digital tools and processes to help teams build cars and video games and visual effects. And what the marshmallow challenge does is it helps them identify the hidden assumptions. Because, frankly, every project has its own marshmallow, doesn't it? The challenge provides a shared experience, a common language, a common stance to build the right prototype. And so, this is the value of the experience, of this so simple exercise. And those of you who are interested may want to go to MarshmallowChallenge.com. It's a blog that you can look at how to build the marshmallows. There's step-by-step instructions on this. There are crazy examples from around the world of how people tweak and adjust the system. There's world records that are on this as well. And the fundamental lesson, I believe, is that design truly is a contact sport. It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand. And sometimes, a little prototype of this experience is all that it takes to turn us from an "uh-oh" moment to a "ta-da" moment. And that can make a big difference. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Political change with pen and paper

{0: 'An internet infrastructure maven and activist, Omar Ahmad was the mayor of San Carlos, California.'}

TED2010

One of the things that defines a TEDster is you've taken your passion, and you've turned it into stewardship. You actually put action to the issues you care about. But what you're going to find eventually is you may need to actually get elected officials to help you out. So, how do you do that? One of the things I should probably tell you is, I worked for the Discovery Channel early in my career, and that sort of warped my framework. So, when you start to think about politicians, you've got to realize these are strange creatures. Other than the fact that they can't tell directions, and they have very strange breeding habits, how do you actually work with these things? (Laughter) What we need to understand is: What drives the political creature? And there are two things that are primary in a politician's heart: One is reputation and influence. These are the primary tools by which a politician can do his job. The second one — unlike most animals, which is survival of the species — this is preservation of self. Now you may think it's money, but that's actually sort of a proxy to what I can do to preserve myself. Now, the challenge with you moving your issue forward is these animals are getting broadcast to all the time. So, what doesn't work, in terms of getting your issue to be important? You can send them an email. Well, unfortunately, I've got so many Viagra ads coming at me, your email is lost. It doesn't matter, it's spam. How about you get on the phone? Well, chances are I've got a droid who's picking up the phone, "Yes, they called, and they said they didn't like it." That doesn't move. Face to face would work, but it's hard to set it up. It's hard to get the context and actually get the communication to work. Yes, contributions actually do make a difference and they set a context for having a conversation, but it takes some time to build up. So what actually works? And the answer is rather strange. It's a letter. We live in a digital world, but we're fairly analog creatures. Letters actually work. Even the top dog himself takes time every day to read 10 letters that are picked out by staff. I can tell you that every official that I've ever worked with will tell you about the letters they get and what they mean. So, how are you going to write your letter? First of all, you're going to pick up an analog device: a pen. I know these are tough, and you may have a hard time getting your hand bent around it, (Laughter) but this is actually critical. And it is critical that you actually handwrite your letter. It is so novel to see this, that somebody actually picked up an analog device and has written to me. Second of all, I'm going to recommend that you get into a proactive stance and write to your elected officials at least once a month. Here's my promise to you: If you are consistent and do this, within three months the elected official will start calling you when that issue comes up and say, "What do you think?" Now, I'm going to give you a four paragraph format to work with. Now, when you approach these animals, you need to understand there's a dangerous end to them, and you also need to approach them with some level of respect and a little bit of wariness. So in paragraph number one, what I'm going to tell you to do is very simply this: You appreciate them. You may not appreciate the person, you may not appreciate anything else, but maybe you appreciate the fact that they've got a tough gig. When animals are going to make a point, they make the point. They don't spend a lot of time dicking around. So, here you go. (Laughter) Paragraph number two: You may actually have to just get very blunt and say what's really on your mind. When you do this, don't attack people; you attack tactics. Ad hominem attacks will get you nowhere. Paragraph number three: When animals are attacked or cornered, they will fight to the death, so you have to give them an exit. Most of the time, if they have an exit strategy, they should take it. "Obviously, you're intelligent. If you had the right information, you would have done the right thing." (Laughter) Lastly, you want to be the nurturing agent. You're the safe place to come in to. So, in paragraph number four, you're going to tell people, "If no one is providing you with this information, let me help." (Laughter) Animals do displays. They do two things: They warn you or they try to attract you and say, "We need to mate." You're going to do that by the way you sign your letter. You do a number of things: you're a vice president, you volunteer, you do something else. Why is is this important? Because this establishes the two primary criteria for the political creature: that you have influence in a large sphere, and that my preservation depends on you. Here is one very quick hack, especially for the feds in the audience. Here's how you mail your letter. First of all, you send the original to the district office. So, you send the copy to the main office. If they follow protocol, they'll pick up the phone and say, "Hey, do you have the original?" Then some droid in the back puts the name on a tickler and says, "Oh, this is an important letter." And you actually get into the folder that the elected official actually has to read. So, what your letter means: I've got to tell you, we are all in a party, and political officials are the pinatas. (Laughter) We are harangued, lectured to, sold, marketed, but a letter is actually one of the few times that we have honest communication. I got this letter when I was first elected, and I still carry it to every council meeting I go to. This is an opportunity at real dialogue, and if you have stewardship and want to communicate, that dialogue is incredibly powerful. So when you do that, here's what I can promise: You're going to be the 800 pound gorilla in the forest. Get writing. (Applause)

Radical women, embracing tradition

{0: "Kavita Ramdas directs the Global Fund for Women, the largest foundation in the world supporting women's human rights across all borders."}

TEDIndia 2009

Salaam. Namaskar. Good morning. Given my TED profile, you might be expecting that I'm going to speak to you about the latest philanthropic trends — the one that's currently got Wall Street and the World Bank buzzing — how to invest in women, how to empower them, how to save them. Not me. I am interested in how women are saving us. They're saving us by redefining and re-imagining a future that defies and blurs accepted polarities, polarities we've taken for granted for a long time, like the ones between modernity and tradition, First World and Third World, oppression and opportunity. In the midst of the daunting challenges we face as a global community, there's something about this third way raga that is making my heart sing. What intrigues me most is how women are doing this, despite a set of paradoxes that are both frustrating and fascinating. Why is it that women are, on the one hand, viciously oppressed by cultural practices, and yet at the same time, are the preservers of cultures in most societies? Is the hijab or the headscarf a symbol of submission or resistance? When so many women and girls are beaten, raped, maimed on a daily basis in the name of all kinds of causes — honor, religion, nationality — what allows women to replant trees, to rebuild societies, to lead radical, non-violent movements for social change? Is it different women who are doing the preserving and the radicalizing? Or are they one and the same? Are we guilty, as Chimamanda Adichie reminded us at the TED conference in Oxford, of assuming that there is a single story of women's struggles for their rights while there are, in fact, many? And what, if anything, do men have to do with it? Much of my life has been a quest to get some answers to these questions. It's taken me across the globe and introduced me to some amazing people. In the process, I've gathered a few fragments that help me shed some light on this puzzle. Among those who've helped open my eyes to a third way are: a devout Muslim in Afghanistan, a group of harmonizing lesbians in Croatia and a taboo breaker in Liberia. I'm indebted to them, as I am to my parents, who for some set of misdemeanors in their last life, were blessed with three daughters in this one. And for reasons equally unclear to me, seem to be inordinately proud of the three of us. I was born and raised here in India, and I learned from an early age to be deeply suspicious of the aunties and uncles who would bend down, pat us on the head and then say to my parents with no problem at all, "Poor things. You only have three daughters. But you're young, you could still try again." My sense of outrage about women's rights was brought to a boil when I was about 11. My aunt, an incredibly articulate and brilliant woman, was widowed early. A flock of relatives descended on her. They took off her colorful sari. They made her wear a white one. They wiped her bindi off her forehead. They broke her bangles. Her daughter, Rani, a few years older than me, sat in her lap bewildered, not knowing what had happened to the confident woman she once knew as her mother. Late that night, I heard my mother begging my father, "Please do something Ramu. Can't you intervene?" And my father, in a low voice, muttering, "I'm just the youngest brother, there's nothing I can do. This is tradition." That's the night I learned the rules about what it means to be female in this world. Women don't make those rules, but they define us, and they define our opportunities and our chances. And men are affected by those rules too. My father, who had fought in three wars, could not save his own sister from this suffering. By 18, under the excellent tutelage of my mother, I was therefore, as you might expect, defiantly feminist. On the streets chanting, "[Hindi] [Hindi] We are the women of India. We are not flowers, we are sparks of change." By the time I got to Beijing in 1995, it was clear to me, the only way to achieve gender equality was to overturn centuries of oppressive tradition. Soon after I returned from Beijing, I leapt at the chance to work for this wonderful organization, founded by women, to support women's rights organizations around the globe. But barely six months into my new job, I met a woman who forced me to challenge all my assumptions. Her name is Sakena Yacoobi. She walked into my office at a time when no one knew where Afghanistan was in the United States. She said to me, "It is not about the burka." She was the most determined advocate for women's rights I had ever heard. She told me women were running underground schools in her communities inside Afghanistan, and that her organization, the Afghan Institute of Learning, had started a school in Pakistan. She said, "The first thing anyone who is a Muslim knows is that the Koran requires and strongly supports literacy. The prophet wanted every believer to be able to read the Koran for themselves." Had I heard right? Was a women's rights advocate invoking religion? But Sakena defies labels. She always wears a headscarf, but I've walked alongside with her on a beach with her long hair flying in the breeze. She starts every lecture with a prayer, but she's a single, feisty, financially independent woman in a country where girls are married off at the age of 12. She is also immensely pragmatic. "This headscarf and these clothes," she says, "give me the freedom to do what I need to do to speak to those whose support and assistance are critical for this work. When I had to open the school in the refugee camp, I went to see the imam. I told him, 'I'm a believer, and women and children in these terrible conditions need their faith to survive.'" She smiles slyly. "He was flattered. He began to come twice a week to my center because women could not go to the mosque. And after he would leave, women and girls would stay behind. We began with a small literacy class to read the Koran, then a math class, then an English class, then computer classes. In a few weeks, everyone in the refugee camp was in our classes." Sakena is a teacher at a time when to educate women is a dangerous business in Afghanistan. She is on the Taliban's hit list. I worry about her every time she travels across that country. She shrugs when I ask her about safety. "Kavita jaan, we cannot allow ourselves to be afraid. Look at those young girls who go back to school when acid is thrown in their face." And I smile, and I nod, realizing I'm watching women and girls using their own religious traditions and practices, turning them into instruments of opposition and opportunity. Their path is their own and it looks towards an Afghanistan that will be different. Being different is something the women of Lesbor in Zagreb, Croatia know all too well. To be a lesbian, a dyke, a homosexual in most parts of the world, including right here in our country, India, is to occupy a place of immense discomfort and extreme prejudice. In post-conflict societies like Croatia, where a hyper-nationalism and religiosity have created an environment unbearable for anyone who might be considered a social outcast. So enter a group of out dykes, young women who love the old music that once spread across that region from Macedonia to Bosnia, from Serbia to Slovenia. These folk singers met at college at a gender studies program. Many are in their 20s, some are mothers. Many have struggled to come out to their communities, in families whose religious beliefs make it hard to accept that their daughters are not sick, just queer. As Leah, one of the founders of the group, says, "I like traditional music very much. I also like rock and roll. So Lesbor, we blend the two. I see traditional music like a kind of rebellion, in which people can really speak their voice, especially traditional songs from other parts of the former Yugoslav Republic. After the war, lots of these songs were lost, but they are a part of our childhood and our history, and we should not forget them." Improbably, this LGBT singing choir has demonstrated how women are investing in tradition to create change, like alchemists turning discord into harmony. Their repertoire includes the Croatian national anthem, a Bosnian love song and Serbian duets. And, Leah adds with a grin, "Kavita, we especially are proud of our Christmas music, because it shows we are open to religious practices even though Catholic Church hates us LGBT." Their concerts draw from their own communities, yes, but also from an older generation: a generation that might be suspicious of homosexuality, but is nostalgic for its own music and the past it represents. One father, who had initially balked at his daughter coming out in such a choir, now writes songs for them. In the Middle Ages, troubadours would travel across the land singing their tales and sharing their verses: Lesbor travels through the Balkans like this, singing, connecting people divided by religion, nationality and language. Bosnians, Croats and Serbs find a rare shared space of pride in their history, and Lesbor reminds them that the songs one group often claims as theirs alone really belong to them all. (Singing) Yesterday, Mallika Sarabhai showed us that music can create a world more accepting of difference than the one we have been given. The world Leymah Gbowee was given was a world at war. Liberia had been torn apart by civil strife for decades. Leymah was not an activist, she was a mother of three. But she was sick with worry: She worried her son would be abducted and taken off to be a child soldier, she worried her daughters would be raped, she worried for their lives. One night, she had a dream. She dreamt she and thousands of other women ended the bloodshed. The next morning at church, she asked others how they felt. They were all tired of the fighting. We need peace, and we need our leaders to know we will not rest until there is peace. Among Leymah's friends was a policewoman who was Muslim. She promised to raise the issue with her community. At the next Friday sermon, the women who were sitting in the side room of the mosque began to share their distress at the state of affairs. "What does it matter?" they said, "A bullet doesn't distinguish between a Muslim and a Christian." This small group of women, determined to bring an end to the war, and they chose to use their traditions to make a point: Liberian women usually wear lots of jewelry and colorful clothing. But no, for the protest, they dressed all in white, no makeup. As Leymah said, "We wore the white saying we were out for peace." They stood on the side of the road on which Charles Taylor's motorcade passed every day. They stood for weeks — first just 10, then 20, then 50, then hundreds of women — wearing white, singing, dancing, saying they were out for peace. Eventually, opposing forces in Liberia were pushed to hold peace talks in Ghana. The peace talks dragged on and on and on. Leymah and her sisters had had enough. With their remaining funds, they took a small group of women down to the venue of the peace talks and they surrounded the building. In a now famous CNN clip, you can see them sitting on the ground, their arms linked. We know this in India. It's called a [Hindi]. Then things get tense. The police are called in to physically remove the women. As the senior officer approaches with a baton, Leymah stands up with deliberation, reaches her arms up over her head, and begins, very slowly, to untie her headdress that covers her hair. You can see the policeman's face. He looks embarrassed. He backs away. And the next thing you know, the police have disappeared. Leymah said to me later, "It's a taboo, you know, in West Africa. If an older woman undresses in front of a man because she wants to, the man's family is cursed." (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "I don't know if he did it because he believed, but he knew we were not going to leave. We were not going to leave until the peace accord was signed." And the peace accord was signed. And the women of Liberia then mobilized in support of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a woman who broke a few taboos herself becoming the first elected woman head of state in Africa in years. When she made her presidential address, she acknowledged these brave women of Liberia who allowed her to win against a football star — that's soccer for you Americans — no less. Women like Sakena and Leah and Leymah have humbled me and changed me and made me realize that I should not be so quick to jump to assumptions of any kind. They've also saved me from my righteous anger by offering insights into this third way. A Filipina activist once said to me, "How do you cook a rice cake? With heat from the bottom and heat from the top." The protests, the marches, the uncompromising position that women's rights are human rights, full stop. That's the heat from the bottom. That's Malcolm X and the suffragists and gay pride parades. But we also need the heat from the top. And in most parts of the world, that top is still controlled by men. So to paraphrase Marx: Women make change, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. They have to negotiate. They have to subvert tradition that once silenced them in order to give voice to new aspirations. And they need allies from their communities. Allies like the imam, allies like the father who now writes songs for a lesbian group in Croatia, allies like the policeman who honored a taboo and backed away, allies like my father, who couldn't help his sister but has helped three daughters pursue their dreams. Maybe this is because feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor — it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers — it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves. And perhaps this is the ultimate gift of feminism, that the personal is in fact the political. So that, as Eleanor Roosevelt said once of human rights, the same is true of gender equality: that it starts in small places, close to home. On the streets, yes, but also in negotiations at the kitchen table and in the marital bed and in relationships between lovers and parents and sisters and friends. And then you realize that by integrating aspects of tradition and community into their struggles, women like Sakena and Leah and Leymah — but also women like Sonia Gandhi here in India and Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Shirin Ebadi in Iran — are doing something else. They're challenging the very notion of Western models of development. They are saying, we don't have to be like you to make change. We can wear a sari or a hijab or pants or a boubou, and we can be party leaders and presidents and human rights lawyers. We can use our tradition to navigate change. We can demilitarize societies and pour resources, instead, into reservoirs of genuine security. It is in these little stories, these individual stories, that I see a radical epic being written by women around the world. It is in these threads that are being woven into a resilient fabric that will sustain communities, that I find hope. And if my heart is singing, it's because in these little fragments, every now and again, you catch a glimpse of a whole, of a whole new world. And she is definitely on her way. Thank you. (Applause)

Computing a theory of all knowledge

{0: 'Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, the author of <em>A New Kind of Science</em>, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research.'}

TED2010

So I want to talk today about an idea. It's a big idea. Actually, I think it'll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that's emerged in the past century. It's the idea of computation. Now, of course, that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on. But there's actually a lot more to computation than that. It's really a very deep, very powerful, very fundamental idea, whose effects we've only just begun to see. Well, I myself have spent the past 30 years of my life working on three large projects that really try to take the idea of computation seriously. So I started off at a young age as a physicist using computers as tools. Then, I started drilling down, thinking about the computations I might want to do, trying to figure out what primitives they could be built up from and how they could be automated as much as possible. Eventually, I created a whole structure based on symbolic programming and so on that let me build Mathematica. And for the past 23 years, at an increasing rate, we've been pouring more and more ideas and capabilities and so on into Mathematica, and I'm happy to say that that's led to many good things in R & D and education, lots of other areas. Well, I have to admit, actually, that I also had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica: I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope 400 years ago. But I wanted to look not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe. So we normally think of programs as being complicated things that we build for very specific purposes. But what about the space of all possible programs? Here's a representation of a really simple program. So, if we run this program, this is what we get. Very simple. So let's try changing the rule for this program a little bit. Now we get another result, still very simple. Try changing it again. You get something a little bit more complicated. But if we keep running this for a while, we find out that although the pattern we get is very intricate, it has a very regular structure. So the question is: Can anything else happen? Well, we can do a little experiment. Let's just do a little mathematical experiment, try and find out. Let's just run all possible programs of the particular type that we're looking at. They're called cellular automata. You can see a lot of diversity in the behavior here. Most of them do very simple things, but if you look along all these different pictures, at rule number 30, you start to see something interesting going on. So let's take a closer look at rule number 30 here. So here it is. We're just following this very simple rule at the bottom here, but we're getting all this amazing stuff. It's not at all what we're used to, and I must say that, when I first saw this, it came as a huge shock to my intuition. And, in fact, to understand it, I eventually had to create a whole new kind of science. (Laughter) This science is different, more general, than the mathematics-based science that we've had for the past 300 or so years. You know, it's always seemed like a big mystery: how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we've found its secret: It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe and quite often getting things like Rule 30 or like this. And knowing that starts to explain a lot of long-standing mysteries in science. It also brings up new issues, though, like computational irreducibility. I mean, we're used to having science let us predict things, but something like this is fundamentally irreducible. The only way to find its outcome is, effectively, just to watch it evolve. It's connected to, what I call, the principle of computational equivalence, which tells us that even incredibly simple systems can do computations as sophisticated as anything. It doesn't take lots of technology or biological evolution to be able to do arbitrary computation; just something that happens, naturally, all over the place. Things with rules as simple as these can do it. Well, this has deep implications about the limits of science, about predictability and controllability of things like biological processes or economies, about intelligence in the universe, about questions like free will and about creating technology. You know, in working on this science for many years, I kept wondering, "What will be its first killer app?" Well, ever since I was a kid, I'd been thinking about systematizing knowledge and somehow making it computable. People like Leibniz had wondered about that too 300 years earlier. But I'd always assumed that to make progress, I'd essentially have to replicate a whole brain. Well, then I got to thinking: This scientific paradigm of mine suggests something different — and, by the way, I've now got huge computation capabilities in Mathematica, and I'm a CEO with some worldly resources to do large, seemingly crazy, projects — So I decided to just try to see how much of the systematic knowledge that's out there in the world we could make computable. So, it's been a big, very complex project, which I was not sure was going to work at all. But I'm happy to say it's actually going really well. And last year we were able to release the first website version of Wolfram Alpha. Its purpose is to be a serious knowledge engine that computes answers to questions. So let's give it a try. Let's start off with something really easy. Hope for the best. Very good. Okay. So far so good. (Laughter) Let's try something a little bit harder. Let's do some mathy thing, and with luck it'll work out the answer and try and tell us some interesting things things about related math. We could ask it something about the real world. Let's say — I don't know — what's the GDP of Spain? And it should be able to tell us that. Now we could compute something related to this, let's say ... the GDP of Spain divided by, I don't know, the — hmmm ... let's say the revenue of Microsoft. (Laughter) The idea is that we can just type this in, this kind of question in, however we think of it. So let's try asking a question, like a health related question. So let's say we have a lab finding that ... you know, we have an LDL level of 140 for a male aged 50. So let's type that in, and now Wolfram Alpha will go and use available public health data and try and figure out what part of the population that corresponds to and so on. Or let's try asking about, I don't know, the International Space Station. And what's happening here is that Wolfram Alpha is not just looking up something; it's computing, in real time, where the International Space Station is right now at this moment, how fast it's going, and so on. So Wolfram Alpha knows about lots and lots of kinds of things. It's got, by now, pretty good coverage of everything you might find in a standard reference library. But the goal is to go much further and, very broadly, to democratize all of this knowledge, and to try and be an authoritative source in all areas. To be able to compute answers to specific questions that people have, not by searching what other people may have written down before, but by using built in knowledge to compute fresh new answers to specific questions. Now, of course, Wolfram Alpha is a monumentally huge, long-term project with lots and lots of challenges. For a start, one has to curate a zillion different sources of facts and data, and we built quite a pipeline of Mathematica automation and human domain experts for doing this. But that's just the beginning. Given raw facts or data to actually answer questions, one has to compute: one has to implement all those methods and models and algorithms and so on that science and other areas have built up over the centuries. Well, even starting from Mathematica, this is still a huge amount of work. So far, there are about 8 million lines of Mathematica code in Wolfram Alpha built by experts from many, many different fields. Well, a crucial idea of Wolfram Alpha is that you can just ask it questions using ordinary human language, which means that we've got to be able to take all those strange utterances that people type into the input field and understand them. And I must say that I thought that step might just be plain impossible. Two big things happened: First, a bunch of new ideas about linguistics that came from studying the computational universe; and second, the realization that having actual computable knowledge completely changes how one can set about understanding language. And, of course, now with Wolfram Alpha actually out in the wild, we can learn from its actual usage. And, in fact, there's been an interesting coevolution that's been going on between Wolfram Alpha and its human users, and it's really encouraging. Right now, if we look at web queries, more than 80 percent of them get handled successfully the first time. And if you look at things like the iPhone app, the fraction is considerably larger. So, I'm pretty pleased with it all. But, in many ways, we're still at the very beginning with Wolfram Alpha. I mean, everything is scaling up very nicely and we're getting more confident. You can expect to see Wolfram Alpha technology showing up in more and more places, working both with this kind of public data, like on the website, and with private knowledge for people and companies and so on. You know, I've realized that Wolfram Alpha actually gives one a whole new kind of computing that one can call knowledge-based computing, in which one's starting not just from raw computation, but from a vast amount of built-in knowledge. And when one does that, one really changes the economics of delivering computational things, whether it's on the web or elsewhere. You know, we have a fairly interesting situation right now. On the one hand, we have Mathematica, with its sort of precise, formal language and a huge network of carefully designed capabilities able to get a lot done in just a few lines. Let me show you a couple of examples here. So here's a trivial piece of Mathematica programming. Here's something where we're sort of integrating a bunch of different capabilities here. Here we'll just create, in this line, a little user interface that allows us to do something fun there. If you go on, that's a slightly more complicated program that's now doing all sorts of algorithmic things and creating user interface and so on. But it's something that is very precise stuff. It's a precise specification with a precise formal language that causes Mathematica to know what to do here. Then on the other hand, we have Wolfram Alpha, with all the messiness of the world and human language and so on built into it. So what happens when you put these things together? I think it's actually rather wonderful. With Wolfram Alpha inside Mathematica, you can, for example, make precise programs that call on real world data. Here's a real simple example. You can also just sort of give vague input and then try and have Wolfram Alpha figure out what you're talking about. Let's try this here. But actually I think the most exciting thing about this is that it really gives one the chance to democratize programming. I mean, anyone will be able to say what they want in plain language. Then, the idea is that Wolfram Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they're asking for and then show them examples that will let them pick what they need to build up bigger and bigger, precise programs. So, sometimes, Wolfram Alpha will be able to do the whole thing immediately and just give back a whole big program that you can then compute with. Here's a big website where we've been collecting lots of educational and other demonstrations about lots of kinds of things. I'll show you one example here. This is just an example of one of these computable documents. This is probably a fairly small piece of Mathematica code that's able to be run here. Okay. Let's zoom out again. So, given our new kind of science, is there a general way to use it to make technology? So, with physical materials, we're used to going around the world and discovering that particular materials are useful for particular technological purposes. Well, it turns out we can do very much the same kind of thing in the computational universe. There's an inexhaustible supply of programs out there. The challenge is to see how to harness them for human purposes. Something like Rule 30, for example, turns out to be a really good randomness generator. Other simple programs are good models for processes in the natural or social world. And, for example, Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica are actually now full of algorithms that we discovered by searching the computational universe. And, for example, this — if we go back here — this has become surprisingly popular among composers finding musical forms by searching the computational universe. In a sense, we can use the computational universe to get mass customized creativity. I'm hoping we can, for example, use that even to get Wolfram Alpha to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly, and to find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer and no process of incremental evolution would ever come up with. Well, so, that leads to kind of an ultimate question: Could it be that someplace out there in the computational universe we might find our physical universe? Perhaps there's even some quite simple rule, some simple program for our universe. Well, the history of physics would have us believe that the rule for the universe must be pretty complicated. But in the computational universe, we've now seen how rules that are incredibly simple can produce incredibly rich and complex behavior. So could that be what's going on with our whole universe? If the rules for the universe are simple, it's kind of inevitable that they have to be very abstract and very low level; operating, for example, far below the level of space or time, which makes it hard to represent things. But in at least a large class of cases, one can think of the universe as being like some kind of network, which, when it gets big enough, behaves like continuous space in much the same way as having lots of molecules can behave like a continuous fluid. Well, then the universe has to evolve by applying little rules that progressively update this network. And each possible rule, in a sense, corresponds to a candidate universe. Actually, I haven't shown these before, but here are a few of the candidate universes that I've looked at. Some of these are hopeless universes, completely sterile, with other kinds of pathologies like no notion of space, no notion of time, no matter, other problems like that. But the exciting thing that I've found in the last few years is that you actually don't have to go very far in the computational universe before you start finding candidate universes that aren't obviously not our universe. Here's the problem: Any serious candidate for our universe is inevitably full of computational irreducibility. Which means that it is irreducibly difficult to find out how it will really behave, and whether it matches our physical universe. A few years ago, I was pretty excited to discover that there are candidate universes with incredibly simple rules that successfully reproduce special relativity, and even general relativity and gravitation, and at least give hints of quantum mechanics. So, will we find the whole of physics? I don't know for sure, but I think at this point it's sort of almost embarrassing not to at least try. Not an easy project. One's got to build a lot of technology. One's got to build a structure that's probably at least as deep as existing physics. And I'm not sure what the best way to organize the whole thing is. Build a team, open it up, offer prizes and so on. But I'll tell you, here today, that I'm committed to seeing this project done, to see if, within this decade, we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes ... and be able to type into Wolfram Alpha, "the theory of the universe," and have it tell us. (Laughter) So I've been working on the idea of computation now for more than 30 years, building tools and methods and turning intellectual ideas into millions of lines of code and grist for server farms and so on. With every passing year, I realize how much more powerful the idea of computation really is. It's taken us a long way already, but there's so much more to come. From the foundations of science to the limits of technology to the very definition of the human condition, I think computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was astonishing. Stay here. I've got a question. (Applause) So, that was, fair to say, an astonishing talk. Are you able to say in a sentence or two how this type of thinking could integrate at some point to things like string theory or the kind of things that people think of as the fundamental explanations of the universe? Stephen Wolfram: Well, the parts of physics that we kind of know to be true, things like the standard model of physics: what I'm trying to do better reproduce the standard model of physics or it's simply wrong. The things that people have tried to do in the last 25 years or so with string theory and so on have been an interesting exploration that has tried to get back to the standard model, but hasn't quite gotten there. My guess is that some great simplifications of what I'm doing may actually have considerable resonance with what's been done in string theory, but that's a complicated math thing that I don't yet know how it's going to work out. CA: Benoit Mandelbrot is in the audience. He also has shown how complexity can arise out of a simple start. Does your work relate to his? SW: I think so. I view Benoit Mandelbrot's work as one of the founding contributions to this kind of area. Benoit has been particularly interested in nested patterns, in fractals and so on, where the structure is something that's kind of tree-like, and where there's sort of a big branch that makes little branches and even smaller branches and so on. That's one of the ways that you get towards true complexity. I think things like the Rule 30 cellular automaton get us to a different level. In fact, in a very precise way, they get us to a different level because they seem to be things that are capable of complexity that's sort of as great as complexity can ever get ... I could go on about this at great length, but I won't. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: Stephen Wolfram, thank you. (Applause)

Toward a science of simplicity

{0: "In his legendary career in chemistry, George Whitesides has been a pioneer in microfabrication and nanoscale self-assembly. Now, he's fabbing a diagnostic lab on a chip."}

TED2010

Most of the talks that you've heard in the last several fabulous days have been from people who have the characteristic that they have thought about something, they are experts, they know what's going on. All of you know about the topic that I'm supposed to talk about. That is, you know what simplicity is, you know what complexity is. The trouble is, I don't. And what I'm going to do is share with you my ignorance on this subject. I want you to read this, because we're going to come back to it in a moment. The quote is from the fabled Potter Stewart opinion on pornography. And let me just read it, the important details here: "Shorthand description, ['hardcore pornography']; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly defining it. But I know it when I see it." I'm going to come back to that in a moment. So, what is simplicity? It's good to start with some examples. A coffee cup — we don't think about coffee cups, but it's much more interesting than one might think — a coffee cup is a device, which has a container and a handle. The handle enables you to hold it when the container is filled with hot liquid. Why is that important? Well, it enables you to drink coffee. But also, by the way, the coffee is hot, the liquid is sterile; you're not likely to get cholera that way. So the coffee cup, or the cup with a handle, is one of the tools used by society to maintain public health. Scissors are your clothes, glasses enable you to see things and keep you from being eaten by cheetahs or run down by automobiles, and books are, after all, your education. But there's another class of simple things, which are also very important. Simple in function, but not at all simple in how they're constructed. And the two here are just examples. One is the cellphone, which we use every day. And it rests on a complexity, which has some characteristics very different from those that my friend Benoit Mandelbrot discussed, but are very interesting. And the other, of course, is a birth control pill, which, in a very simple way, fundamentally changed the structure of society by changing the role of women in it by providing to them the opportunity to make reproductive choices. So, there are two ways of thinking about this word, I think. And here I've corrupted the Potter Stewart quotation by saying that we can think about something — which spans all the way from scissors to the cell phone, Internet and birth control pills — by saying that they're simple, the functions are simple, and we recognize what that simplicity is when we see it. Or there may be another way of doing it, which is to think about the problem in terms of what — if you associate with moral philosophers — is called the teapot problem. The teapot problem I'll pose this way. Suppose you see a teapot, and the teapot is filled with hot water. And you then ask the question: Why is the water hot? And that's a simple question. It's like, what is simplicity? One answer would be: because the kinetic energy of the water molecules is high and they bounce against things rapidly — that's a kind of physical science argument. A second argument would be: because it was sitting on a stove with the flame on — that's an historical argument. A third is that I wanted hot water for tea — that's an intentional argument. And, since this is coming from a moral philosopher, the fourth would be that it's part of God's plan for the universe. All of these are possibilities. The point is that you get into trouble when you ask a single question with a single box for an answer, in which that single question actually is many questions with quite different meanings, but with the same words. Asking, "What is simplicity?" I think falls in that category. What is the state of science? And, interestingly, complexity is very highly evolved. We have a lot of interesting information about what complexity is. Simplicity, for reasons that are a little bit obscure, is almost not pursued, at least in the academic world. We academics — I am an academic — we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes. (Laughter) Simplicity — all of you really would like your Waring Blender in the morning to make whatever a Waring Blender does, but not explode or play Beethoven. You're not interested in the limits of these things. So what one is interested in has a lot to do with the rewards of the system. And there's a lot of rewards in thinking about complexity and emergence, not so much in thinking about simplicity. One of the things I want to do is to help you with a very important task — which you may not know that you have very often — which is to understand how to sit next to a physicist at a dinner party and have a conversation. (Laughter) And the words that I would like you to focus on are complexity and emergence, because these will enable you to start the conversation and then daydream about other things. (Laughter) All right, what is complexity in this view of things, and what is emergence? We have, actually, a pretty good working definition of complexity. It is a system, like traffic, which has components. The components interact with one another. These are cars and drivers. They dissipate energy. It turns out that, whenever you have that system, weird stuff happens, and you in Los Angeles probably know this better than anyone. Here's another example, which I put up because it's an example of really important current science. You can't possibly read that. It's not intended that you read it, but that's a tiny part of the chemical reactions going on in each of your cells at any given moment. And it's like the traffic that you see. The amazing thing about the cell is that it actually does maintain a fairly stable working relationship with other cells, but we don't know why. Anyone who tells you that we understand life, walk away. And let me reduce this to the simplest level. We've heard from Bill Gates recently. All of us, to some extent, study this thing called a Bill Gates. Terrific. You learn everything you can about that. And then there's another kind of thing that you might study, and you study that hard. That's a Bono, this is a Bono. But then, if you know everything you can know about those two things, and you put them together, what can you say about this combination? The answer is, not a lot. And that's complexity. Now, imagine building that up to a city, or to a society, and you've got, obviously, an interesting problem. All right, so let me give you an example of simplicity of a particular kind. And I want to introduce a word that I think is very useful, which is stacking. And I'm going to use stacking for a kind of simplicity that has the characteristic that it is so simple and so reliable that I can build things with it. Or I'm going to use simple to mean reliable, predictable, repeatable. And I'm going to use as an example the Internet, because it's a particularly good example of stacked simplicity. We call it a complex system, which it is, but it's also something else. The Internet starts with mathematics, it starts with binary. And if you look at the list of things on the bottom, we are familiar with the Arabic numbers one to 10 and so on. In binary, one is 0001, seven is 0111. The question is: Why is binary simpler than Arabic? And the answer is, simply, that if I hold up three fingers, you can count that easily, but if I hold up this, it's sort of hard to say that I just did seven. The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it. Now, if you like to represent this zero and one of binary, you need a device. And think of things in your life that are binary, one of them is light switches. They can be on and off. That's binary. Now wall switches, we all know, fail. But our friends who are condensed matter physicists managed to come up, some 50 years ago, with a very nice device, shown under that bell jar, which is a transistor. A transistor is nothing more than a wall switch. It turns things on and off, but it does so without moving parts and it doesn't fail, basically, for a very long period of time. So the second layer of simplicity was the transistor in the Internet. So, since the transistor is so simple, you can put lots of them together. And you put lots of them together and you come with something called integrated circuits. And a current integrated circuit might have in each one of these chips something like a billion transistors, all of which have to work perfectly every time. So that's the next layer of simplicity, and, in fact, integrated circuits are really simple in the sense that they, in general, work really well. With integrated circuits, you can build cellphones. You all are accustomed to having your cellphones work the large majority of the time. In Boston ... Boston is a little bit like Namibia in its cell phone coverage, (Laughter) so that we're not accustomed to that all the time, but some of the time. But, in fact, if you have cell phones, you can now go to this nice lady who's somewhere like Namibia, and who is extremely happy with the fact that although she does not have an master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT, she's nonetheless able to hack her cell phone to get power in some funny way. And from that comes the Internet. And this is a map of bitflows across the continent. The two blobs that are light in the middle there are the United States and Europe. And then back to simplicity again. So here we have what I think is one of the great ideas, which is Google. Which, in this simple portal makes the claim that it makes accessible all of the world's information. But the point is that that extraordinary simple idea rests on layers of simplicity each compounded into a complexity that is itself simple, in the sense that it is completely reliable. All right, let me then finish off with four general statements, an example and two aphorisms. The characteristics, which I think are useful to think about for simple things: First, they are predictable. Their behavior is predictable. Now, one of the nice characteristics of simple things is you know what it's going to do, in general. So simplicity and predictability are characteristics of simple things. The second is, and this is a real world statement, they're cheap. If you have things that are cheap enough, people will find uses for them, even if they seem very primitive. So, for example, stones. You can build cathedrals out of stones, you just have to know what it does. You carve them in blocks and then you pile them on top of one another, and they support weight. So there has to be function, the function has to be predictable and the cost has to be low. What that means is that you have to have a high performance or value for cost. And then I would propose as this last component that they serve, or have the potential to serve, as building blocks. That is, you can stack them. And stack can mean this way, or it can mean this way, or it can mean in some arbitrary n-dimensional space. But if you have something that has a function, and it's really cheap, people will find new ways of putting it together to make new things. Cheap, functional, reliable things unleash the creativity of people who then build stuff that you could not imagine. There's no way of predicting the Internet based on the first transistor. It just is not possible. So these are the components. Now, the example is something that I want to give you from the work that we ourselves do. We are very interested in delivering health care in the developing world, and one of the things that we wish to do in this particular business is to find a way of doing medical diagnosis at as close to zero cost as we can manage. So, how does one do that? This is a world in which there's no electricity, there's no money, there's no medical competence. And I don't want to spend your time in going through the details, but in the lower right-hand corner, you see an example of the kind of thing that we have. It's a little paper chip. It has a few things printed on it using the same technology that you use for making comic books, which was the inspiration for this particular idea. And you put a drop, in this case, of urine at the bottom. It wicks its way up into these little branches. You know, no power required. It turns colors. In this particular case, you're reading kidney function. And, since the health care worker of much of this part of the world is an 18 year-old with an AK-47, who happens to be out of work and is willing to go around and do this sort of thing, he can take a picture of it with his cellphone, send the picture back to where there is a doctor, and the doctor can look at it. So what you've done is to take a technology, which is available everywhere, make a device, which is extremely cheap, and make it in such a fashion that it is very, very reliable. If we can pull this off, if we can build more function, it will be stackable. That is to say, if we can make the basic technology of one or two things work, it will be applicable to a very, very large variety of human conditions, and hence, extendable in both vertical and horizontal directions. Part of my interest in this, I have to say, is that I would like to — how do I put this politely? — change the way, or maybe eviscerate, the capital structure of the U.S. health care system, which I think is fundamentally broken. So, let me close — (Applause) Let me close with my two aphorisms. One of them is from Mr. Einstein, and he says, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." And I think that's a very good way of thinking about the problem. If you take too much out of something that's simple, you lose function. You have to have low cost, but you also have to have a function. So you can't make it too simple. And the second is a design issue, and it's not directly relevant, but it's a nice statement. This is by de Saint-Exupery. And he says, "You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away." And that certainly is going in the right direction. So, what I think one can begin to do with this kind of cut at the word simplicity, which doesn't cover Brancusi, it doesn't answer the question of why Mondrian is better or worse or simpler or less simpler than Van Gogh, and certainly doesn't address the question of whether Mozart is simpler than Bach. But it does make a point — which is one which, in a sense, differentiates the real world of people who make things, and the world of people who think about things, which is, there is an intellectual merit to asking: How do we make things as simple as we can, as cheap as we can, as functional as we can and as freely interconnectable as we can? If we make that kind of simplicity in our technology and then give it to you guys, you can go off and do all kinds of fabulous things with it. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question. So can you picture that a science of simplicity might get to the point where you could look out at various systems — say a financial system or a legal system, health system — and say, "That has got to the point of danger or dysfunctionality for the following reasons, and this is how we might simplify it"? George Whitesides: Yes, I think you could. Because if you look at the components from which the system is made and examine their fragility, or their stability, you can probably build a kind of risk assessment based on that basis. CA: Have you started to do that? I mean, with the health system, you got a sort of radical solution on the cost side, but in terms of the system itself? GW: Well, no. How do I put that simply? No. CA: That was a simple, powerful answer. GW: Yes. CA: So, in terms of that diagnostic technology that you've got, where is that, and when do you see that maybe getting rolled out to scale. GW: That's coming out soon. I mean, the systems work, and we have to find out how to manufacture them and do things of this kind, but the basic technology works. CA: You've got a company set up to ... GW: A foundation, a foundation. Not-for-profit. CA: All right. Well, thank you so much for your talk. Thank you. (Applause)

Why I'm rowing across the Pacific

{0: 'Roz Savage gave up her life as a management consultant to row across the Atlantic in 2005. Her mission now is to row across the Pacific, from the West Coast to Australia, raising awareness along the way of plastic pollution, climate change and eco-heroism.'}

Mission Blue Voyage

Hi, my name is Roz Savage and I row across oceans. Four years ago, I rowed solo across the Atlantic, and since then, I've done two out of three stages across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Hawaii and from Hawaii to Kiribati. And tomorrow, I'll be leaving this boat to fly back to Kiribati to continue with the third and final stage of my row across the Pacific. Cumulatively, I will have rowed over 8,000 miles, taken over three million oar strokes and spent more than 312 days alone on the ocean on a 23 foot rowboat. This has given me a very special relationship with the ocean. We have a bit of a love/hate thing going on. I feel a bit about it like I did about a very strict math teacher that I once had at school. I didn't always like her, but I did respect her, and she taught me a heck of a lot. So today I'd like to share with you some of my ocean adventures and tell you a little bit about what they've taught me, and how I think we can maybe take some of those lessons and apply them to this environmental challenge that we face right now. Now, some of you might be thinking, "Hold on a minute. She doesn't look very much like an ocean rower. Isn't she meant to be about this tall and about this wide and maybe look a bit more like these guys?" You'll notice, they've all got something that I don't. Well, I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm talking about the beards. (Laughter) And no matter how long I've spent on the ocean, I haven't yet managed to muster a decent beard, and I hope that it remains that way. For a long time, I didn't believe that I could have a big adventure. The story that I told myself was that adventurers looked like this. I didn't look the part. I thought there were them and there were us, and I was not one of them. So for 11 years, I conformed. I did what people from my kind of background were supposed to do. I was working in an office in London as a management consultant. And I think I knew from day one that it wasn't the right job for me. But that kind of conditioning just kept me there for so many years, until I reached my mid-30s and I thought, "You know, I'm not getting any younger. I feel like I've got a purpose in this life, and I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty certain that management consultancy is not it. So, fast forward a few years. I'd gone through some changes. To try and answer that question of, "What am I supposed to be doing with my life?" I sat down one day and wrote two versions of my own obituary, the one that I wanted, a life of adventure, and the one that I was actually heading for which was a nice, normal, pleasant life, but it wasn't where I wanted to be by the end of my life. I wanted to live a life that I could be proud of. And I remember looking at these two versions of my obituary and thinking, "Oh boy, I'm on totally the wrong track here. If I carry on living as I am now, I'm just not going to end up where I want to be in five years, or 10 years, or at the end of my life." I made a few changes, let go of some loose trappings of my old life, and through a bit of a leap of logic, decided to row across the Atlantic Ocean. (Laughter) The Atlantic Rowing Race runs from the Canaries to Antigua, it's about 3,000 miles, and it turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done. Sure, I had wanted to get outside of my comfort zone, but what I'd sort of failed to notice was that getting out of your comfort zone is, by definition, extremely uncomfortable. And my timing was not great either: 2005, when I did the Atlantic, was the year of Hurricane Katrina. There were more tropical storms in the North Atlantic than ever before, since records began. And pretty early on, those storms started making their presence known. All four of my oars broke before I reached halfway across. Oars are not supposed to look like this. But what can you do? You're in the middle of the ocean. Oars are your only means of propulsion. So I just had to look around the boat and figure out what I was going to use to fix up these oars so that I could carry on. So I found a boat hook and my trusty duct tape and splintered the boat hook to the oars to reinforce it. Then, when that gave out, I sawed the wheel axles off my spare rowing seat and used those. And then when those gave out, I cannibalized one of the broken oars. I'd never been very good at fixing stuff when I was living my old life, but it's amazing how resourceful you can become when you're in the middle of the ocean and there's only one way to get to the other side. And the oars kind of became a symbol of just in how many ways I went beyond what I thought were my limits. I suffered from tendinitis on my shoulders and saltwater sores on my bottom. I really struggled psychologically, totally overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, realizing that, if I carried on moving at two miles an hour, 3,000 miles was going to take me a very, very long time. There were so many times when I thought I'd hit that limit, but had no choice but to just carry on and try and figure out how I was going to get to the other side without driving myself crazy. And eventually after 103 days at sea, I arrived in Antigua. I don't think I've ever felt so happy in my entire life. It was a bit like finishing a marathon and getting out of solitary confinement and winning an Oscar all rolled into one. I was euphoric. And to see all the people coming out to greet me and standing along the cliff tops and clapping and cheering, I just felt like a movie star. It was absolutely wonderful. And I really learned then that, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the sense of achievement when you get to the end of it. So this might be a good moment to take a quick time-out to answer a few FAQs about ocean rowing that might be going through your mind. Number one that I get asked: What do you eat? A few freeze-dried meals, but mostly I try and eat much more unprocessed foods. So I grow my own beansprouts. I eat fruits and nut bars, a lot of nuts. And generally arrive about 30 pounds lighter at the other end. Question number two: How do you sleep? With my eyes shut. Ha-ha. I suppose what you mean is: What happens to the boat while I'm sleeping? Well, I plan my route so that I'm drifting with the winds and the currents while I'm sleeping. On a good night, I think my best ever was 11 miles in the right direction. Worst ever, 13 miles in the wrong direction. That's a bad day at the office. What do I wear? Mostly, a baseball cap, rowing gloves and a smile — or a frown, depending on whether I went backwards overnight — and lots of sun lotion. Do I have a chase boat? No I don't. I'm totally self-supporting out there. I don't see anybody for the whole time that I'm at sea, generally. And finally: Am I crazy? Well, I leave that one up to you to judge. So, how do you top rowing across the Atlantic? Well, naturally, you decide to row across the Pacific. Well, I thought the Atlantic was big, but the Pacific is really, really big. I think we tend to do it a little bit of a disservice in our usual maps. I don't know for sure that the Brits invented this particular view of the world, but I suspect we might have done so: we are right in the middle, and we've cut the Pacific in half and flung it to the far corners of the world. Whereas if you look in Google Earth, this is how the Pacific looks. It pretty much covers half the planet. You can just see a little bit of North America up here and a sliver of Australia down there. It is really big — 65 million square miles — and to row in a straight line across it would be about 8,000 miles. Unfortunately, ocean rowboats very rarely go in a straight line. By the time I get to Australia, if I get to Australia, I will have rowed probably nine or 10,000 miles in all. So, because nobody in their straight mind would row straight past Hawaii without dropping in, I decided to cut this very big undertaking into three segments. The first attempt didn't go so well. In 2007, I did a rather involuntary capsize drill three times in 24 hours. A bit like being in a washing machine. Boat got a bit dinged up, so did I. I blogged about it. Unfortunately, somebody with a bit of a hero complex decided that this damsel was in distress and needed saving. The first I knew about this was when the Coast Guard plane turned up overhead. I tried to tell them to go away. We had a bit of a battle of wills. I lost and got airlifted. Awful, really awful. It was one of the worst feelings of my life, as I was lifted up on that winch line into the helicopter and looked down at my trusty little boat rolling around in the 20 foot waves and wondering if I would ever see her again. So I had to launch a very expensive salvage operation and then wait another nine months before I could get back out onto the ocean again. But what do you do? Fall down nine times, get up 10. So, the following year, I set out and, fortunately, this time made it safely across to Hawaii. But it was not without misadventure. My watermaker broke, only the most important piece of kit that I have on the boat. Powered by my solar panels, it sucks in saltwater and turns it into freshwater. But it doesn't react very well to being immersed in ocean, which is what happened to it. Fortunately, help was at hand. There was another unusual boat out there at the same time, doing as I was doing, bringing awareness to the North Pacific Garbage Patch, that area in the North Pacific about twice the size of Texas, with an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash in it, circulating at the center of that North Pacific Gyre. So, to make the point, these guys had actually built their boat out of plastic trash, 15,000 empty water bottles latched together into two pontoons. They were going very slowly. Partly, they'd had a bit of a delay. They'd had to pull in at Catalina Island shortly after they left Long Beach because the lids of all the water bottles were coming undone, and they were starting to sink. So they'd had to pull in and do all the lids up. But, as I was approaching the end of my water reserves, luckily, our courses were converging. They were running out of food; I was running out of water. So we liaised by satellite phone and arranged to meet up. And it took about a week for us to actually gradually converge. I was doing a pathetically slow speed of about 1.3 knots, and they were doing only marginally less pathetic speed of about 1.4: it was like two snails in a mating dance. But, eventually, we did manage to meet up and Joel hopped overboard, caught us a beautiful, big mahi-mahi, which was the best food I'd had in, ooh, at least three months. Fortunately, the one that he caught that day was better than this one they caught a few weeks earlier. When they opened this one up, they found its stomach was full of plastic. And this is really bad news because plastic is not an inert substance. It leaches out chemicals into the flesh of the poor critter that ate it, and then we come along and eat that poor critter, and we get some of the toxins accumulating in our bodies as well. So there are very real implications for human health. I eventually made it to Hawaii still alive. And, the following year, set out on the second stage of the Pacific, from Hawaii down to Tarawa. And you'll notice something about Tarawa; it is very low-lying. It's that little green sliver on the horizon, which makes them very nervous about rising oceans. This is big trouble for these guys. They've got no points of land more than about six feet above sea level. And also, as an increase in extreme weather events due to climate change, they're expecting more waves to come in over the fringing reef, which will contaminate their fresh water supply. I had a meeting with the president there, who told me about his exit strategy for his country. He expects that within the next 50 years, the 100,000 people that live there will have to relocate to New Zealand or Australia. And that made me think about how would I feel if Britain was going to disappear under the waves; if the places where I'd been born and gone to school and got married, if all those places were just going to disappear forever. How, literally, ungrounded that would make me feel. Very shortly, I'll be setting out to try and get to Australia, and if I'm successful, I'll be the first woman ever to row solo all the way across the Pacific. And I try to use this to bring awareness to these environmental issues, to bring a human face to the ocean. If the Atlantic was about my inner journey, discovering my own capabilities, maybe the Pacific has been about my outer journey, figuring out how I can use my interesting career choice to be of service to the world, and to take some of those things that I've learned out there and apply them to the situation that humankind now finds itself in. I think there are probably three key points here. The first one is about the stories that we tell ourselves. For so long, I told myself that I couldn't have an adventure because I wasn't six foot tall and athletic and bearded. And then that story changed. I found out that people had rowed across oceans. I even met one of them and she was just about my size. So even though I didn't grow any taller, I didn't sprout a beard, something had changed: My interior dialogue had changed. At the moment, the story that we collectively tell ourselves is that we need all this stuff, that we need oil. But what about if we just change that story? We do have alternatives, and we have the power of free will to choose those alternatives, those sustainable ones, to create a greener future. The second point is about the accumulation of tiny actions. We might think that anything that we do as an individual is just a drop in the ocean, that it can't really make a difference. But it does. Generally, we haven't got ourselves into this mess through big disasters. Yes, there have been the Exxon Valdezes and the Chernobyls, but mostly it's been an accumulation of bad decisions by billions of individuals, day after day and year after year. And, by the same token, we can turn that tide. We can start making better, wiser, more sustainable decisions. And when we do that, we're not just one person. Anything that we do spreads ripples. Other people will see if you're in the supermarket line and you pull out your reusable grocery bag. Maybe if we all start doing this, we can make it socially unacceptable to say yes to plastic in the checkout line. That's just one example. This is a world-wide community. The other point: It's about taking responsibility. For so much of my life, I wanted something else to make me happy. I thought if I had the right house or the right car or the right man in my life, then I could be happy. But when I wrote that obituary exercise, I actually grew up a little bit in that moment and realized that I needed to create my own future. I couldn't just wait passively for happiness to come and find me. And I suppose I'm a selfish environmentalist. I plan on being around for a long time, and when I'm 90 years old, I want to be happy and healthy. And it's very difficult to be happy on a planet that's racked with famine and drought. It's very difficult to be healthy on a planet where we've poisoned the earth and the sea and the air. So, shortly, I'm going to be launching a new initiative called Eco-Heroes. And the idea here is that all our Eco-Heroes will log at least one green deed every day. It's meant to be a bit of a game. We're going to make an iPhone app out of it. We just want to try and create that awareness because, sure, changing a light bulb isn't going to change the world, but that attitude, that awareness that leads you to change the light bulb or take your reusable coffee mug, that is what could change the world. I really believe that we stand at a very important point in history. We have a choice. We've been blessed, or cursed, with free will. We can choose a greener future, and we can get there if we all pull together to take it one stroke at a time. Thank you. (Applause)

Lies, damned lies and statistics (about TEDTalks)

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

TED2010

If you go on the TED website, you can currently find there over a full week of TEDTalk videos, over 1.3 million words of transcripts and millions of user ratings. And that's a huge amount of data. And it got me wondering: If you took all this data and put it through statistical analysis, could you reverse engineer a TEDTalk? Could you create the ultimate TEDTalk? (Laughter) (Applause) And also, could you create the worst possible TEDTalk that they would still let you get away with? To find this out, I looked at three things: I looked at the topic that you should choose, I looked at how you should deliver it and the visuals onstage. Now, with the topic: There's a whole range of topics you can choose, but you should choose wisely, because your topic strongly correlates with how users will react to your talk. Now, to make this more concrete, let's look at the list of top 10 words that statistically stick out in the most favorite TEDTalks and in the least favorite TEDTalks. So if you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains, that's a go. (Laughter) (Applause) Whereas, if you wanted to talk about your project involving oxygen, girls, aircraft — actually, I would like to hear that talk, (Laughter) but statistics say it's not so good. Oh, well. If you generalize this, the most favorite TEDTalks are those that feature topics we can connect with, both easily and deeply, such as happiness, our own body, food, emotions. And the more technical topics, such as architecture, materials and, strangely enough, men, those are not good topics to talk about. How should you deliver your talk? TED is famous for keeping a very sharp eye on the clock, so they're going to hate me for revealing this, because, actually, you should talk as long as they will let you. (Laughter) Because the most favorite TEDTalks are, on average, over 50 percent longer than the least favorite ones. And this holds true for all ranking lists on TED.com except if you want to have a talk that's beautiful, inspiring or funny. Then, you should be brief. (Laughter) But other than that, talk until they drag you off the stage. (Laughter) Now, while ... (Applause) While you're pushing the clock, there's a few rules to obey. I found these rules out by comparing the statistics of four-word phrases that appear more often in the most favorite TEDTalks as opposed to the least favorite TEDTalks. I'll give you three examples. First of all, I must, as a speaker, provide a service to the audience and talk about what I will give you, instead of saying what I can't have. Secondly, it's imperative that you do not cite The New York Times. (Laughter) And finally, it's okay for the speaker — that's the good news — to fake intellectual capacity. If I don't understand something, I can just say, "etc., etc." You'll all stay with me. It's perfectly fine. (Applause) Now, let's go to the visuals. The most obvious visual thing on stage is the speaker. And analysis shows if you want to be among the most favorite TED speakers, you should let your hair grow a little bit longer than average, make sure you wear your glasses and be slightly more dressed-up than the average TED speaker. Slides are okay, though you might consider going for props. And now the most important thing, that is the mood onstage. Color plays a very important role. Color closely correlates with the ratings that talks get on the website. (Applause) For example, fascinating talks contain a statistically high amount of exactly this blue color, (Laughter) much more than the average TEDTalk. Ingenious TEDTalks, much more this green color, etc., et. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, personally, I think I'm not the first one who has done this analysis, but I'll leave this to your good judgment. So, now it's time to put it all together and design the ultimate TEDTalk. Now, since this is TEDActive, and I learned from my analysis that I should actually give you something, I will not impose the ultimate or worst TEDTalk on you, but rather give you a tool to create your own. And I call this tool the TEDPad. (Laughter) And the TEDPad is a matrix of 100 specifically selected, highly curated sentences that you can easily piece together to get your own TEDTalk. You only have to make one decision, and that is: Are you going to use the white version for very good TEDTalks, about creativity, human genius? Or are you going to go with a black version, which will allow you to create really bad TEDTalks, mostly about blogs, politics and stuff? So, download it and have fun with it. Now I hope you enjoy the session. I hope you enjoy designing your own ultimate and worst possible TEDTalks. And I hope some of you will be inspired for next year to create this, which I really want to see. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thanks.

Social experiments to fight poverty

{0: 'Esther Duflo takes economics out of the lab and into the field to discover the causes of poverty and means to eradicate it.'}

TED2010

So here it is. You can check: I am short, I'm French, I have a pretty strong French accent, so that's going to be clear in a moment. Maybe a sobering thought and something you all know about. And I suspect many of you gave something to the people of Haiti this year. And there is something else I believe in the back of your mind you also know. That is, every day, 25,000 children die of entirely preventable causes. That's a Haiti earthquake every eight days. And I suspect many of you probably gave something towards that problem as well, but somehow it doesn't happen with the same intensity. So why is that? Well, here is a thought experiment for you. Imagine you have a few million dollars that you've raised — maybe you're a politician in a developing country and you have a budget to spend. You want to spend it on the poor: How do you go about it? Do you believe the people who tell you that all we need to do is to spend money? That we know how to eradicate poverty, we just need to do more? Or do you believe the people who tell you that aid is not going to help, on the contrary it might hurt, it might exacerbate corruption, dependence, etc.? Or maybe you turn to the past. After all, we have spent billions of dollars on aid. Maybe you look at the past and see. Has it done any good? And, sadly, we don't know. And worst of all, we will never know. And the reason is that — take Africa for example. Africans have already got a lot of aid. These are the blue bars. And the GDP in Africa is not making much progress. Okay, fine. How do you know what would have happened without the aid? Maybe it would have been much worse, or maybe it would have been better. We have no idea. We don't know what the counterfactual is. There's only one Africa. So what do you do? To give the aid, and hope and pray that something comes out of it? Or do you focus on your everyday life and let the earthquake every eight days continue to happen? The thing is, if we don't know whether we are doing any good, we are not any better than the Medieval doctors and their leeches. Sometimes the patient gets better, sometimes the patient dies. Is it the leeches? Is it something else? We don't know. So here are some other questions. They're smaller questions, but they are not that small. Immunization, that's the cheapest way to save a child's life. And the world has spent a lot of money on it: The GAVI and the Gates Foundations are each pledging a lot of money towards it, and developing countries themselves have been doing a lot of effort. And yet, every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get. So this is what you call a "last mile problem." The technology is there, the infrastructure is there, and yet it doesn't happen. So you have your million. How do you use your million to solve this last mile problem? And here's another question: Malaria. Malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them under five. In fact, that is the leading cause of under-five mortality. We already know how to kill malaria, but some people come to you and say, "You have your millions. How about bed nets?" Bed nets are very cheap. For 10 dollars, you can manufacture and ship an insecticide treated bed net and you can teach someone to use them. And, not only do they protect the people who sleep under them, but they have these great contagion benefits. If half of a community sleeps under a net, the other half also benefits because the contagion of the disease spread. And yet, only a quarter of kids at risk sleep under a net. Societies should be willing to go out and subsidize the net, give them for free, or, for that matter, pay people to use them because of those contagion benefits. "Not so fast," say other people. "If you give the nets for free, people are not going to value them. They're not going to use them, or at least they're not going to use them as bed nets, maybe as fishing nets." So, what do you do? Do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage, or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them? How do you know? And a third question: Education. Maybe that's the solution, maybe we should send kids to school. But how do you do that? Do you hire teachers? Do you build more schools? Do you provide school lunch? How do you know? So here is the thing. I cannot answer the big question, whether aid did any good or not. But these three questions, I can answer them. It's not the Middle Ages anymore, it's the 21st century. And in the 20th century, randomized, controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don't work. And you can do the same randomized, controlled trial for social policy. You can put social innovation to the same rigorous, scientific tests that we use for drugs. And in this way, you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works, what doesn't work and why. And I'll give you some examples with those three questions. So I start with immunization. Here's Udaipur District, Rajasthan. Beautiful. Well, when I started working there, about one percent of children were fully immunized. That's bad, but there are places like that. Now, it's not because the vaccines are not there — they are there and they are free — and it's not because parents do not care about their kids. The same child that is not immunized against measles, if they do get measles, parents will spend thousands of rupees to help them. So you get these empty village subcenters and crowded hospitals. So what is the problem? Well, part of the problem, surely, is people do not fully understand. After all, in this country as well, all sorts of myths and misconceptions go around immunization. So if that's the case, that's difficult, because persuasion is really difficult. But maybe there is another problem as well. It's going from intention to action. Imagine you are a mother in Udaipur District, Rajasthan. You have to walk a few kilometers to get your kids immunized. And maybe when you get there, what you find is this: The subcenter is closed. Ao you have to come back, and you are so busy and you have so many other things to do, you will always tend to postpone and postpone, and eventually it gets too late. Well, if that's the problem, then that's much easier. Because A, we can make it easy, and B, we can maybe give people a reason to act today, rather than wait till tomorrow. So these are simple ideas, but we didn't know. So let's try them. So what we did is we did a randomized, controlled trial in 134 villages in Udaipur Districts. So the blue dots are selected randomly. We made it easy — I'll tell you how in a moment. In the red dots, we made it easy and gave people a reason to act now. The white dots are comparisons, nothing changed. So we make it easy by organizing this monthly camp where people can get their kids immunized. And then you make it easy and give a reason to act now by adding a kilo of lentils for each immunization. Now, a kilo of lentils is tiny. It's never going to convince anybody to do something that they don't want to do. On the other hand, if your problem is you tend to postpone, then it might give you a reason to act today rather than later. So what do we find? Well, beforehand, everything is the same. That's the beauty of randomization. Afterwards, the camp — just having the camp — increases immunization from six percent to 17 percent. That's full immunization. That's not bad, that's a good improvement. Add the lentils and you reach to 38 percent. So here you've got your answer. Make it easy and give a kilo of lentils, you multiply immunization rate by six. Now, you might say, "Well, but it's not sustainable. We cannot keep giving lentils to people." Well, it turns out it's wrong economics, because it is cheaper to give lentils than not to give them. Since you have to pay for the nurse anyway, the cost per immunization ends up being cheaper if you give incentives than if you don't. How about bed nets? Should you give them for free, or should you ask people to pay for them? So the answer hinges on the answer to three simple questions. One is: If people must pay for a bed net, are they going to purchase them? The second one is: If I give bed nets for free, are people going to use them? And the third one is: Do free bed nets discourage future purchase? The third one is important because if we think people get used to handouts, it might destroy markets to distribute free bed nets. Now this is a debate that has generated a lot of emotion and angry rhetoric. It's more ideological than practical, but it turns out it's an easy question. We can know the answer to this question. We can just run an experiment. And many experiments have been run, and they all have the same results, so I'm just going to talk to you about one. And this one that was in Kenya, they went around and distributed to people vouchers, discount vouchers. So people with their voucher could get the bed net in the local pharmacy. And some people get 100 percent discount, and some people get 20 percent discounts, and some people get 50 percent discount, etc. And now we can see what happens. So, how about the purchasing? Well, what you can see is that when people have to pay for their bed nets, the coverage rate really falls down a lot. So even with partial subsidy, three dollars is still not the full cost of a bed net, and now you only have 20 percent of the people with the bed nets, you lose the health immunity, that's not great. Second thing is, how about the use? Well, the good news is, people, if they have the bed nets, will use the bed nets regardless of how they got it. If they get it for free, they use it. If they have to pay for it, they use it. How about the long term? In the long term, people who got the free bed nets, one year later, were offered the option to purchase a bed net at two dollars. And people who got the free one were actually more likely to purchase the second one than people who didn't get a free one. So people do not get used to handouts; they get used to nets. Maybe we need to give them a little bit more credit. So, that's for bed nets. So you will think, "That's great. You know how to immunize kids, you know how to give bed nets." But what politicians need is a range of options. They need to know: Out of all the things I could do, what is the best way to achieve my goals? So suppose your goal is to get kids into school. There are so many things you could do. You could pay for uniforms, you could eliminate fees, you could build latrines, you could give girls sanitary pads, etc., etc. So what's the best? Well, at some level, we think all of these things should work. So, is that sufficient? If we think they should work intuitively, should we go for them? Well, in business, that's certainly not the way we would go about it. Consider for example transporting goods. Before the canals were invented in Britain before the Industrial Revolution, goods used to go on horse carts. And then canals were built, and with the same horseman and the same horse, you could carry ten times as much cargo. So should they have continued to carry the goods on the horse carts, on the ground, that they would eventually get there? Well, if that had been the case, there would have been no Industrial Revolution. So why shouldn't we do the same with social policy? In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something, so why aren't we doing that with social policy? Well, with experiments, what you can do is answer a simple question. Suppose you have 100 dollars to spend on various interventions. How many extra years of education do you get for your hundred dollars? Now I'm going to show you what we get with various education interventions. So the first ones are if you want the usual suspects, hire teachers, school meals, school uniforms, scholarships. And that's not bad. For your hundred dollars, you get between one and three extra years of education. Things that don't work so well is bribing parents, just because so many kids are already going to school that you end up spending a lot of money. And here are the most surprising results. Tell people the benefits of education, that's very cheap to do. So for every hundred dollars you spend doing that, you get 40 extra years of education. And, in places where there are worms, intestinal worms, cure the kids of their worms. And for every hundred dollars, you get almost 30 extra years of education. So this is not your intuition, this is not what people would have gone for, and yet, these are the programs that work. We need that kind of information, we need more of it, and then we need to guide policy. So now, I started from the big problem, and I couldn't answer it. And I cut it into smaller questions, and I have the answer to these smaller questions. And they are good, scientific, robust answers. So let's go back to Haiti for a moment. In Haiti, about 200,000 people died — actually, a bit more by the latest estimate. And the response of the world was great: Two billion dollars got pledged just last month, so that's about 10,000 dollars per death. That doesn't sound like that much when you think about it. But if we were willing to spend 10,000 dollars for every child under five who dies, that would be 90 billion per year just for that problem. And yet it doesn't happen. So, why is that? Well, I think what part of the problem is that, in Haiti, although the problem is huge, somehow we understand it, it's localized. You give your money to Doctors Without Borders, you give your money to Partners In Health, and they'll send in the doctors, and they'll send in the lumber, and they'll helicopter things out and in. And the problem of poverty is not like that. So, first, it's mostly invisible; second, it's huge; and third, we don't know whether we are doing the right thing. There's no silver bullet. You cannot helicopter people out of poverty. And that's very frustrating. But look what we just did today. I gave you three simple answers to three questions: Give lentils to immunize people, provide free bed nets, deworm children. With immunization or bed nets, you can save a life for 300 dollars per life saved. With deworming, you can get an extra year of education for three dollars. So we cannot eradicate poverty just yet, but we can get started. And maybe we can get started small with things that we know are effective. Here's an example of how this can be powerful. Deworming. Worms have a little bit of a problem grabbing the headlines. They are not beautiful and don't kill anybody. And yet, when the young global leader in Davos showed the numbers I gave you, they started Deworm the World. And thanks to Deworm the World, and the effort of many country governments and foundations, 20 million school-aged children got dewormed in 2009. So this evidence is powerful. It can prompt action. So we should get started now. It's not going to be easy. It's a very slow process. You have to keep experimenting, and sometimes ideology has to be trumped by practicality. And sometimes what works somewhere doesn't work elsewhere. So it's a slow process, but there is no other way. These economics I'm proposing, it's like 20th century medicine. It's a slow, deliberative process of discovery. There is no miracle cure, but modern medicine is saving millions of lives every year, and we can do the same thing. And now, maybe, we can go back to the bigger question that I started with at the beginning. I cannot tell you whether the aid we have spent in the past has made a difference, but can we come back here in 30 years and say, "What we have done, it really prompted a change for the better." I believe we can and I hope we will. Thank you. (Applause)

How great leaders inspire action

{0: 'Simon Sinek explores how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust and change. He\'s the author of the classic "Start With Why"; his latest book is "Leaders Eat Last."'}

TEDxPuget Sound

How do you explain when things don't go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? For example: Why is Apple so innovative? Year after year, after year, they're more innovative than all their competition. And yet, they're just a computer company. They're just like everyone else. They have the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. Then why is it that they seem to have something different? Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement? He wasn't the only man who suffered in pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn't the only great orator of the day. Why him? And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified, better funded — and they didn't achieve powered man flight, and the Wright brothers beat them to it. There's something else at play here. About three and a half years ago, I made a discovery. And this discovery profoundly changed my view on how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. As it turns out, there's a pattern. As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it, and it's probably the world's simplest idea. I call it the golden circle. Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren't. Let me define the terms really quickly. Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by "why" I don't mean "to make a profit." That's a result. It's always a result. By "why," I mean: What's your purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? As a result, the way we think, we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in, it's obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations — regardless of their size, regardless of their industry — all think, act and communicate from the inside out. Let me give you an example. I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody gets it. If Apple were like everyone else, a marketing message from them might sound like this: "We make great computers. They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?" "Meh." That's how most of us communicate. That's how most marketing and sales are done, that's how we communicate interpersonally. We say what we do, we say how we're different or better and we expect some sort of a behavior, a purchase, a vote, something like that. Here's our new law firm: We have the best lawyers with the biggest clients, we always perform for our clients. Here's our new car: It gets great gas mileage, it has leather seats. Buy our car. But it's uninspiring. Here's how Apple actually communicates. "Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?" Totally different, right? You're ready to buy a computer from me. I just reversed the order of the information. What it proves to us is that people don't buy what you do; people buy why you do it. This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple. But we're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple, or a phone from Apple, or a DVR from Apple. As I said before, Apple's just a computer company. Nothing distinguishes them structurally from any of their competitors. Their competitors are equally qualified to make all of these products. In fact, they tried. A few years ago, Gateway came out with flat-screen TVs. They're eminently qualified to make flat-screen TVs. They've been making flat-screen monitors for years. Nobody bought one. Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs, and they make great quality products, and they can make perfectly well-designed products — and nobody bought one. In fact, talking about it now, we can't even imagine buying an MP3 player from Dell. Why would you buy one from a computer company? But we do it every day. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe. Here's the best part: None of what I'm telling you is my opinion. It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. Not psychology, biology. If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, from the top down, the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the "what" level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language. In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't drive behavior. When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from. Sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, "I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right." Why would we use that verb, it doesn't "feel" right? Because the part of the brain that controls decision-making doesn't control language. The best we can muster up is, "I don't know. It just doesn't feel right." Or sometimes you say you're leading with your heart or soul. I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language. But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do. The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it's to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. Nowhere else is there a better example than with the Wright brothers. Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. And back in the early 20th century, the pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. Everybody was trying it. And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success. Even now, you ask people, "Why did your product or why did your company fail?" and people always give you the same permutation of the same three things: under-capitalized, the wrong people, bad market conditions. It's always the same three things, so let's explore that. Samuel Pierpont Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. Money was no problem. He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic. The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley? A few hundred miles away in Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, they had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success. They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop. Not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur. And The New York Times followed them around nowhere. The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world. Samuel Pierpont Langley was different. He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. He was in pursuit of the result. He was in pursuit of the riches. And lo and behold, look what happened. The people who believed in the Wright brothers' dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears. The others just worked for the paycheck. They tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crash before supper. And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even experience it. We found out about it a few days later. And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing: the day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit. He could have said, "That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology," but he didn't. He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe. But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? Something called the law of diffusion of innovation, if you don't know the law, you know the terminology. The first 2.5% of our population are our innovators. The next 13.5% of our population are our early adopters. The next 34% are your early majority, your late majority and your laggards. The only reason these people buy touch-tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore. (Laughter) We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips. I love asking businesses, "What's your conversion on new business?" They love to tell you, "It's about 10 percent," proudly. Well, you can trip over 10% of the customers. We all have about 10% who just "get it." That's how we describe them, right? That's like that gut feeling, "Oh, they just get it." The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before doing business versus the ones who don't get it? So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, "Crossing the Chasm" — because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available. These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when you could have bought one off the shelf the next week. These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat-screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. And, by the way, they didn't do it because the technology was so great; they did it for themselves. It's because they wanted to be first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe. The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what they believed about the world, and how they wanted everybody to see them: they were first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. So let me give you a famous example, a famous failure and a famous success of the law of diffusion of innovation. First, the famous failure. It's a commercial example. As we said before, the recipe for success is money and the right people and the right market conditions. You should have success then. Look at TiVo. From the time TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this current day, they are the single highest-quality product on the market, hands down, there is no dispute. They were extremely well-funded. Market conditions were fantastic. I mean, we use TiVo as verb. I TiVo stuff on my piece-of-junk Time Warner DVR all the time. (Laughter) But TiVo's a commercial failure. They've never made money. And when they went IPO, their stock was at about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted, and it's never traded above 10. In fact, I don't think it's even traded above six, except for a couple of little spikes. Because you see, when TiVo launched their product, they told us all what they had. They said, "We have a product that pauses live TV, skips commercials, rewinds live TV and memorizes your viewing habits without you even asking." And the cynical majority said, "We don't believe you. We don't need it. We don't like it. You're scaring us." What if they had said, "If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every aspect of your life, boy, do we have a product for you. It pauses live TV, skips commercials, memorizes your viewing habits, etc., etc." People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe. Now let me give you a successful example of the law of diffusion of innovation. In the summer of 1963, 250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak. They sent out no invitations, and there was no website to check the date. How do you do that? Well, Dr. King wasn't the only man in America who was a great orator. He wasn't the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn't go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. "I believe, I believe, I believe," he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak. How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. It's what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August. It's what they believed, and it wasn't about black versus white: 25% of the audience was white. Dr. King believed that there are two types of laws in this world: those that are made by a higher authority and those that are made by men. And not until all the laws that are made by men are consistent with the laws made by the higher authority will we live in a just world. It just so happened that the Civil Rights Movement was the perfect thing to help him bring his cause to life. We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. By the way, he gave the "I have a dream" speech, not the "I have a plan" speech. (Laughter) Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12-point plans. They're not inspiring anybody. Because there are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us. Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves. And it's those who start with "why" that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them. Thank you very much. (Applause)

How we wrecked the ocean

{0: 'A leader in the study of the ecology and evolution of marine organisms, Jeremy Jackson is known for his deep understanding of geological time.'}

Mission Blue Voyage

I'm an ecologist, mostly a coral reef ecologist. I started out in Chesapeake Bay and went diving in the winter and became a tropical ecologist overnight. And it was really a lot of fun for about 10 years. I mean, somebody pays you to go around and travel and look at some of the most beautiful places on the planet. And that was what I did. And I ended up in Jamaica, in the West Indies, where the coral reefs were really among the most extraordinary, structurally, that I ever saw in my life. And this picture here, it's really interesting, it shows two things: First of all, it's in black and white because the water was so clear and you could see so far, and film was so slow in the 1960s and early 70s, you took pictures in black and white. The other thing it shows you is that, although there's this beautiful forest of coral, there are no fish in that picture. Those reefs at Discovery Bay, Jamaica were the most studied coral reefs in the world for 20 years. We were the best and the brightest. People came to study our reefs from Australia, which is sort of funny because now we go to theirs. And the view of scientists about how coral reefs work, how they ought to be, was based on these reefs without any fish. Then, in 1980, there was a hurricane, Hurricane Allen. I put half the lab up in my house. The wind blew very strong. The waves were 25 to 50 feet high. And the reefs disappeared, and new islands formed, and we thought, "Well, we're real smart. We know that hurricanes have always happened in the past." And we published a paper in Science, the first time that anybody ever described the destruction on a coral reef by a major hurricane. And we predicted what would happen, and we got it all wrong. And the reason was because of overfishing, and the fact that a last common grazer, a sea urchin, died. And within a few months after that sea urchin dying, the seaweed started to grow. And that is the same reef; that's the same reef 15 years ago; that's the same reef today. The coral reefs of the north coast of Jamaica have a few percent live coral cover and a lot of seaweed and slime. And that's more or less the story of the coral reefs of the Caribbean, and increasingly, tragically, the coral reefs worldwide. Now, that's my little, depressing story. All of us in our 60s and 70s have comparable depressing stories. There are tens of thousands of those stories out there, and it's really hard to conjure up much of a sense of well-being, because it just keeps getting worse. And the reason it keeps getting worse is that after a natural catastrophe, like a hurricane, it used to be that there was some kind of successional sequence of recovery, but what's going on now is that overfishing and pollution and climate change are all interacting in a way that prevents that. And so I'm going to sort of go through and talk about those three kinds of things. We hear a lot about the collapse of cod. It's difficult to imagine that two, or some historians would say three world wars were fought during the colonial era for the control of cod. Cod fed most of the people of Western Europe. It fed the slaves brought to the Antilles, the song "Jamaica Farewell" — "Ackee rice salt fish are nice" — is an emblem of the importance of salt cod from northeastern Canada. It all collapsed in the 80s and the 90s: 35,000 people lost their jobs. And that was the beginning of a kind of serial depletion from bigger and tastier species to smaller and not-so-tasty species, from species that were near to home to species that were all around the world, and what have you. It's a little hard to understand that, because you can go to a Costco in the United States and buy cheap fish. You ought to read the label to find out where it came from, but it's still cheap, and everybody thinks it's okay. It's hard to communicate this, and one way that I think is really interesting is to talk about sport fish, because people like to go out and catch fish. It's one of those things. This picture here shows the trophy fish, the biggest fish caught by people who pay a lot of money to get on a boat, go to a place off of Key West in Florida, drink a lot of beer, throw a lot of hooks and lines into the water, come back with the biggest and the best fish, and the champion trophy fish are put on this board, where people take a picture, and this guy is obviously really excited about that fish. Well, that's what it's like now, but this is what it was like in the 1950s from the same boat in the same place on the same board on the same dock. The trophy fish were so big that you couldn't put any of those small fish up on it. And the average size trophy fish weighed 250 to 300 pounds, goliath grouper, and if you wanted to go out and kill something, you could pretty much count on being able to catch one of those fish. And they tasted really good. And people paid less in 1950 dollars to catch that than what people pay now to catch those little, tiny fish. And that's everywhere. It's not just the fish, though, that are disappearing. Industrial fishing uses big stuff, big machinery. We use nets that are 20 miles long. We use longlines that have one million or two million hooks. And we trawl, which means to take something the size of a tractor trailer truck that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds, put it on a big chain, and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish. Think of it as being kind of the bulldozing of a city or of a forest, because it clears it away. And the habitat destruction is unbelievable. This is a photograph, a typical photograph, of what the continental shelves of the world look like. You can see the rows in the bottom, the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been plowed to plant corn. What that was, was a forest of sponges and coral, which is a critical habitat for the development of fish. What it is now is mud, and the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud, to parking lot, is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down on all of the earth in the history of humanity. We've managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years. We tend to think of oil spills and mercury and we hear a lot about plastic these days. And all of that stuff is really disgusting, but what's really insidious is the biological pollution that happens because of the magnitude of the shifts that it causes to entire ecosystems. And I'm going to just talk very briefly about two kinds of biological pollution: one is introduced species and the other is what comes from nutrients. So this is the infamous Caulerpa taxifolia, the so-called killer algae. A book was written about it. It's a bit of an embarrassment. It was accidentally released from the aquarium in Monaco, it was bred to be cold tolerant to have in peoples aquaria. It's very pretty, and it has rapidly started to overgrow the once very rich biodiversity of the northwestern Mediterranean. I don't know how many of you remember the movie "The Little Shop of Horrors," but this is the plant of "The Little Shop of Horrors." But, instead of devouring the people in the shop, what it's doing is overgrowing and smothering virtually all of the bottom-dwelling life of the entire northwestern Mediterranean Sea. We don't know anything that eats it, we're trying to do all sorts of genetics and figure out something that could be done, but, as it stands, it's the monster from hell, about which nobody knows what to do. Now another form of pollution that's biological pollution is what happens from excess nutrients. The green revolution, all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we use too much of it. It's subsidized, which is one of the reasons we used too much of it. It runs down the rivers, and it feeds the plankton, the little microscopic plant cells in the coastal water. But since we ate all the oysters and we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton, there's nothing to eat the plankton and there's more and more of it, so it dies of old age, which is unheard of for plankton. And when it dies, it falls to the bottom and then it rots, which means that bacteria break it down. And in the process they use up all the oxygen, and in using up all the oxygen they make the environment utterly lethal for anything that can't swim away. So, what we end up with is a microbial zoo dominated by bacteria and jellyfish, as you see on the left in front of you. And the only fishery left — and it is a commercial fishery — is the jellyfish fishery you see on the right, where there used to be prawns. Even in Newfoundland where we used to catch cod, we now have a jellyfish fishery. And another version of this sort of thing is what is often called red tides or toxic blooms. That picture on the left is just staggering to me. I have talked about it a million times, but it's unbelievable. In the upper right of that picture on the left is almost the Mississippi Delta, and the lower left of that picture is the Texas-Mexico border. You're looking at the entire northwestern Gulf of Mexico; you're looking at one toxic dinoflagellate bloom that can kill fish, made by that beautiful little creature on the lower right. And in the upper right you see this black sort of cloud moving ashore. That's the same species. And as it comes to shore and the wind blows, and little droplets of the water get into the air, the emergency rooms of all the hospitals fill up with people with acute respiratory distress. And that's retirement homes on the west coast of Florida. A friend and I did this thing in Hollywood we called Hollywood ocean night, and I was trying to figure out how to explain to actors what's going on. And I said, "So, imagine you're in a movie called 'Escape from Malibu' because all the beautiful people have moved to North Dakota, where it's clean and safe. And the only people who are left there are the people who can't afford to move away from the coast, because the coast, instead of being paradise, is harmful to your health." And then this is amazing. It was when I was on holiday last early autumn in France. This is from the coast of Brittany, which is being enveloped in this green, algal slime. The reason that it attracted so much attention, besides the fact that it's disgusting, is that sea birds flying over it are asphyxiated by the smell and die, and a farmer died of it, and you can imagine the scandal that happened. And so there's this war between the farmers and the fishermen about it all, and the net result is that the beaches of Brittany have to be bulldozed of this stuff on a regular basis. And then, of course, there's climate change, and we all know about climate change. I guess the iconic figure of it is the melting of the ice in the Arctic Sea. Think about the thousands and thousands of people who died trying to find the Northwest Passage. Well, the Northwest Passage is already there. I think it's sort of funny; it's on the Siberian coast, maybe the Russians will charge tolls. The governments of the world are taking this really seriously. The military of the Arctic nations is taking it really seriously. For all the denial of climate change by government leaders, the CIA and the navies of Norway and the U.S. and Canada, whatever are busily thinking about how they will secure their territory in this inevitability from their point of view. And, of course, Arctic communities are toast. The other kinds of effects of climate change — this is coral bleaching. It's a beautiful picture, right? All that white coral. Except it's supposed to be brown. What happens is that the corals are a symbiosis, and they have these little algal cells that live inside them. And the algae give the corals sugar, and the corals give the algae nutrients and protection. But when it gets too hot, the algae can't make the sugar. The corals say, "You cheated. You didn't pay your rent." They kick them out, and then they die. Not all of them die; some of them survive, some more are surviving, but it's really bad news. To try and give you a sense of this, imagine you go camping in July somewhere in Europe or in North America, and you wake up the next morning, and you look around you, and you see that 80 percent of the trees, as far as you can see, have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked. And you come home, and you discover that 80 percent of all the trees in North America and in Europe have dropped their leaves. And then you read in the paper a few weeks later, "Oh, by the way, a quarter of those died." Well, that's what happened in the Indian Ocean during the 1998 El Nino, an area vastly greater than the size of North America and Europe, when 80 percent of all the corals bleached and a quarter of them died. And then the really scary thing about all of this — the overfishing, the pollution and the climate change — is that each thing doesn't happen in a vacuum. But there are these, what we call, positive feedbacks, the synergies among them that make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts. And the great scientific challenge for people like me in thinking about all this, is do we know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? I mean, because we, at this point, we can protect it. But what does that mean? We really don't know. So what are the oceans going to be like in 20 or 50 years? Well, there won't be any fish except for minnows, and the water will be pretty dirty, and all those kinds of things and full of mercury, etc., etc. And dead zones will get bigger and bigger and they'll start to merge, and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global, coastal ocean. Then you sure won't want to eat fish that were raised in it, because it would be a kind of gastronomic Russian roulette. Sometimes you have a toxic bloom; sometimes you don't. That doesn't sell. The really scary things though are the physical, chemical, oceanographic things that are happening. As the surface of the ocean gets warmer, the water is lighter when it's warmer, it becomes harder and harder to turn the ocean over. We say it becomes more strongly stratified. The consequence of that is that all those nutrients that fuel the great anchoveta fisheries, of the sardines of California or in Peru or whatever, those slow down and those fisheries collapse. And, at the same time, water from the surface, which is rich in oxygen, doesn't make it down and the ocean turns into a desert. So the question is: How are we all going to respond to this? And we can do all sorts of things to fix it, but in the final analysis, the thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today. So the question is: Will we respond to this or not? I would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that. Thank you. (Applause)

India's hidden hotbeds of invention

{0: 'Anil Gupta created the Honey Bee Network to support grassroots innovators who are rich in knowledge, but not in resources.'}

TEDIndia 2009

I bring to you a message from tens of thousands of people — in the villages, in the slums, in the hinterland of the country — who have solved problems through their own genius, without any outside help. When our home minister announces a few weeks ago a war on one third of India, about 200 districts that he mentioned were ungovernable, he missed the point. The point that we have been stressing for the last 21 years, the point that people may be economically poor, but they're not poor in the mind. In other words, the minds on the margin are not the marginal minds. That is the message, which we started 31 years ago. And what did it start? Let me just tell you, briefly, my personal journey, which led me to come to this point. In '85, '86, I was in Bangladesh advising the government and the research council there how to help scientists work on the lands, on the fields of the poor people, and how to develop research technologies, which are based on the knowledge of the people. I came back in '86. I had been tremendously invigorated by the knowledge and creativity that I found in that country, which had 60 percent landlessness but amazing creativity. I started looking at my own work: The work that I had done for the previous 10 years, almost every time, had instances of knowledge that people had shared. Now, I was paid in dollars as a consultant, and I looked at my income tax return and tried to ask myself: "Is there a line in my return, which shows how much of this income has gone to the people whose knowledge has made it possible? Was it because I'm brilliant that I'm getting this reward, or because of the revolution? Is it that I write very well? Is it that I articulate very well? Is it that I analyze the data very well? Is it because I'm a professor, and, therefore, I must be entitled to this reward from society?" I tried to convince myself that, "No, no, I have worked for the policy changes. You know, the public policy will become more responsive to the needs of the poor, and, therefore I think it's okay." But it appeared to me that all these years that I'd been working on exploitation — exploitation by landlords, by moneylenders, by traders — gave me an insight that probably I was also an exploiter, because there was no line in my income tax return which showed this income accrued because of the brilliance of the people — those people who have shared their knowledge and good faith and trust with me — and nothing ever went back to them. So much so, that much of my work till that time was in the English language. The majority of the people from whom I learned didn't know English. So what kind of a contributor was I? I was talking about social justice, and here I was, a professional who was pursuing the most unjust act — of taking knowledge from the people, making them anonymous, getting rent from that knowledge by sharing it and doing consultancy, writing papers and publishing them in the papers, getting invited to the conferences, getting consultancies and whatever have you. So then, a dilemma rose in the mind that, if I'm also an exploiter, then this is not right; life cannot go on like that. And this was a moment of great pain and trauma because I couldn't live with it any longer. So I did a review of ethical dilemma and value conflicts and management research, wrote, read about 100 papers. And I came to the conclusion that while dilemma is unique, dilemma is not unique; the solution had to be unique. And one day — I don't know what happened — while coming back from the office towards home, maybe I saw a honey bee or it occurred to my mind that if I only could be like the honey bee, life would be wonderful. What the honey bee does: it pollinates, takes nectar from the flower, pollinates another flower, cross-pollinates. And when it takes the nectar, the flowers don't feel shortchanged. In fact, they invite the honey bees through their colors, and the bees don't keep all the honey for themselves. These are the three guiding principles of the Honey Bee Network: that whenever we learn something from people it must be shared with them in their language. They must not remain anonymous. And I must tell you that after 20 years, I have not made one percent of change in the professional practice of this art. That is a great tragedy — which I'm carrying still with me and I hope that all of you will carry this with you — that the profession still legitimizes publication of knowledge of people without attributing them by making them anonymous. The research guidelines of U.S. National Academy of Sciences or Research Councils of the U.K. or of Indian Councils of Science Research do not require that whatever you learn from people, you must share back with them. We are talking about an accountable society, a society that is fair and just, and we don't even do justice in the knowledge market. And India wants to be a knowledge society. How will it be a knowledge society? So, obviously, you cannot have two principles of justice, one for yourself and one for others. It must be the same. You cannot discriminate. You cannot be in favor of your own values, which are at a distance from the values that you espouse. So, fairness to one and to the other is not divisible. Look at this picture. Can you tell me where has it been taken from, and what is it meant for? Anybody? I'm a professor; I must quiz you. (Laughter) Anybody? Any guess at all? Pardon? (Audience Member: Rajasthan.) Anil Gupta: But what has it been used for? What has it been used for? (Murmuring) Pardon? You know, you're so right. We must give him a hand, because this man knows how insensitive our government is. Look at this. This is the site of the government of India. It invites tourists to see the shame of our country. I'm so sorry to say that. Is this a beautiful picture or is it a terrible picture? It depends upon how you look at the life of the people. If this woman has to carry water on her head for miles and miles and miles, you cannot be celebrating that. We should be doing something about it. And let me tell you, with all the science and technology at our command, millions of women still carry water on their heads. And we do not ask this question. You must have taken tea in the morning. Think for a minute. The leaves of the tea, plucked from the bushes; you know what the action is? The action is: The lady picks up a few leaves, puts them in the basket on the backside. Just do it 10 times; you will realize the pain in this shoulder. And she does it a few thousand times every day. The rice that you ate in the lunch, and you will eat today, is transplanted by women bending in a very awkward posture, millions of them, every season, in the paddy season, when they transplant paddy with their feet in the water. And feet in the water will develop fungus, infections, and that infection pains because then other insects bite that point. And every year, 99.9 percent of the paddy is transplanted manually. No machines have been developed. So the silence of scientists, of technologists, of public policy makers, of the change agent, drew our attention that this is not on, this is not on; this is not the way society will work. This is not what our parliament would do. You know, we have a program for employment: One hundred, 250 million people have to be given jobs for 100 days by this great country. Doing what? Breaking stones, digging earth. So we asked a question to the parliament: Do poor have heads? Do poor have legs, mouth and hands, but no head? So Honey Bee Network builds upon the resource in which poor people are rich. And what has happened? An anonymous, faceless, nameless person gets in contact with the network, and then gets an identity. This is what Honey Bee Network is about. And this network grew voluntarily, continues to be voluntary, and has tried to map the minds of millions of people of our country and other parts of the world who are creative. They could be creative in terms of education, they may be creative in terms of culture, they may be creative in terms of institutions; but a lot of our work is in the field of technological creativity, the innovations, either in terms of contemporary innovations, or in terms of traditional knowledge. And it all begins with curiosity. It all begins with curiosity. This person, whom we met — and you will see it on the website, www.sristi.org — this tribal person, he had a wish. And he said, "If my wish gets fulfilled" — somebody was sick and he had to monitor — "God, please cure him. And if you cure him, I will get my wall painted." And this is what he got painted. Somebody was talking yesterday about Maslowian hierarchy. There could be nothing more wrong than the Maslowian model of hierarchy of needs because the poorest people in this country can get enlightenment. Kabir, Rahim, all the great Sufi saints, they were all poor people, and they had a great reason. (Applause) Please do not ever think that only after meeting your physiological needs and other needs can you be thinking about your spiritual needs or your enlightenment. Any person anywhere is capable of rising to that highest point of attainment, only by the resolve that they have in their mind that they must achieve something. Look at this. We saw it in Shodh Yatra. Every six months we walk in different parts of the country. I've walked about 4,000 kilometers in the last 12 years. So on the wayside we found these dung cakes, which are used as a fuel. Now, this lady, on the wall of the dung cake heap, has made a painting. That's the only space she could express her creativity. And she's so marvelous. Look at this lady, Ram Timari Devi, on a grain bin. In Champaran, we had a Shodh Yatra and we were walking in the land where Gandhiji went to hear about the tragedy, pain of indigo growers. Bhabi Mahato in Purulia and Bankura. Look at what she has done. The whole wall is her canvas. She's sitting there with a broom. Is she an artisan or an artist? Obviously she's an artist; she's a creative person. If we can create markets for these artists, we will not have to employ them for digging earth and breaking stones. They will be paid for what they are good at, not what they're bad at. (Applause) Look at what Rojadeen has done. In Motihari in Champaran, there are a lot of people who sell tea on the shack and, obviously, there's a limited market for tea. Every morning you have tea, as well as coffee. So he thought, why don't I convert a pressure cooker into a coffee machine? So this is a coffee machine. Just takes a few hundred rupees. People bring their own cooker, he attaches a valve and a steam pipe, and now he gives you espresso coffee. (Laughter) Now, this is a real, affordable coffee percolator that works on gas. (Applause) Look at what Sheikh Jahangir has done. A lot of poor people do not have enough grains to get ground. So this fellow is bringing a flour-grinding machine on a two-wheeler. If you have 500 grams, 1000, one kilogram, he will grind it for it for you; the flourmill will not grind such a small quantity. Please understand the problem of poor people. They have needs which have to be met efficiently in terms of energy, in terms of cost, in terms of quality. They don't want second-standard, second-quality outputs. But to be able to give them high-quality output you need to adapt technology to their needs. And that is what Sheikh Jahangir did. But that's not enough, what he did. Look at what he did here. If you have clothes, and you don't have enough time to wash them, he brought a washing machine to your doorstep, mounted on a two-wheeler. So here's a model where a two-wheeler washing machine ... He is washing your clothes and drying them at your doorstep. (Applause) You bring your water, you bring your soap, I wash the clothes for you. Charge 50 paisa, one rupee for you per lot, and a new business model can emerge. Now, what we need is, we need people who will be able to scale them up. Look at this. It looks like a beautiful photograph. But you know what it is? Can anybody guess what it is? Somebody from India would know, of course. It's a tawa. It's a hot plate made of clay. Now, what is the beauty in it? When you have a non-stick pan, it costs about, maybe, 250 rupees, five dollars, six dollars. This is less than a dollar and this is non-stick; it is coated with one of these food-grade materials. And the best part is that, while you use a costly non-stick pan, you eat the so-called Teflon or Teflon-like material because after some time the stuff disappears. Where has it gone? It has gone in your stomach. It was not meant for that. (Laughter) You know? But here in this clay hot plate, it will never go into your stomach. So it is better, it is safer; it is affordable, it is energy-efficient. In other words, solutions by the poor people need not be cheaper, need not be, so-called, jugaad, need not be some kind of makeshift arrangement. They have to be better, they have to be more efficient, they have to be affordable. And that is what Mansukh Bhai Prajapati has done. He has designed this plate with a handle. And now with one dollar, you can afford a better alternative than the people market is offering you. This lady, she developed a herbal pesticide formulation. We filed the patent for her, the National Innovation Foundation. And who knows? Somebody will license this technology and develop marketable products, and she would get revenue. Now, let me mention one thing: I think we need a polycentric model of development, where a large number of initiatives in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world, would solve the needs of locality in a very efficient and adaptive manner. Higher the local fit, greater is the chance of scaling up. In the scaling up, there's an inherent inadequacy to match the needs of the local people, point by point, with the supply that you're making. So why are people willing to adjust with that mismatch? Things can scale up, and they have scaled up. For example, cell phones: We have 400 million cellphones in this country. Now, it is possible that I use only two buttons on the cellphone, only three options on the cellphone. It has 300 options, I'm paying for 300; I'm using only three but I'm willing to live with it, therefore it is scaling up. But if I had to get a match to match, obviously, I would need a different design of a cellphone. So what we're saying is that scalability should not become an enemy of sustainability. There must be a place in the world for solutions that are only relevant for a locality, and yet, one can be able to fund them. One of the greatest studies that we've been finding is that many times investors would ask this question — "What is a scalable model?" — as if the need of a community, which is only located in a space and time and has those needs only located in those places, has no legitimate right to get them for free because it's not part of a larger scale. So either you sub-optimize your needs to a larger scale or else you remain out. Now, the eminent model, the long-tail model tells you that small sales of a large number of books, for example, having only a few copies sold can still be a viable model. And we must find a mechanism where people will pool in the portfolio, will invest in the portfolio, where different innovations will go to a small number of people in their localities, and yet, the overall platform of the model will become viable. Look at what he is doing. Saidullah Sahib is an amazing man. At the age of 70, he is linking up something very creative. (Music) Saidullah Sahib: I couldn't wait for the boat. I had to meet my love. My desperation made me an innovator. Even love needs help from technology. Innovation is the light of my wife, Noor. New inventions are the passion of my life. My technology. (Applause) AG: Saidulluh Sahib is in Motihari, again in Champaran. Wonderful human being, but he stills sells, at this age, honey on a cycle to earn his livelihood, because we haven't been able to convince the water park people, the lake people, in [unclear] operations. And we have not been able to convince the fire brigade people in Mumbai — where there was a flood a few years ago and people had to walk 20 kilometers, wading in the water — that, look, you should have this cycle in your fire brigade office because you can then go to those lanes where your buses will not go, where your transport will not go. So we have not yet cracked the problem of making it available as a rescue device, as a vending device during the floods in eastern India, when you have to deliver things to people in different islands where they're marooned. But the idea has a merit. The idea has a merit. What has Appachan done? Appachan, unfortunately, is no more, but he has left behind a message. A very powerful message Appachan: I watch the world wake up every day. (Music) It's not that a coconut fell on my head, and I came upon this idea. With no money to fund my studies, I scaled new heights. Now, they call me the local Spiderman. My technology. (Applause) AG: Many of you might not realize and believe that we have sold this product internationally — what I call a G2G model, grassroots to global. And a professor in the University of Massachusetts, in the zoology department, bought this climber because she wanted to study the insect diversity of the top of the tree canopy. And this device makes it possible for her to take samples from a larger number of palms, rather than only a few, because otherwise she had to make a big platform and then climb her [unclear] would climb on that. So, you know, we are advancing the frontiers of science. Remya Jose has developed ... you can go to the YouTube and find India Innovates and then you will find these videos. Innovation by her when she was in class 10th: a washing machine-cum-exercising machine. Mr. Kharai who is a physically challenged person, one and a half foot height, only. But he has modified a two-wheeler so that he can get autonomy and freedom and flexibility. This innovation is from the slums of Rio. And this person, Mr. Ubirajara. We were talking about, my friends in Brazil, how we scale up this model in China and Brazil. And we have a very vibrant network in China, particularly, but also emerging in Brazil and other parts of the world. This stand on the front wheel, you will not find on any cycle. India and China have the largest number of cycles. But this innovation emerged in Brazil. The point is, none of us should be parochial, none of us should be so nationalistic to believe that all good ideas will come only from our country. No, we have to have the humility to learn from knowledge of economically poor people, wherever they are. And look at this whole range of cycle-based innovations: cycle that's a sprayer, cycle that generates energy from the shocks on the road. I can't change the condition of the road, but I can make the cycle run faster. That is what Kanak Das has done. And in South Africa, we had taken our innovators, and many of us had gone there share with the colleagues in South Africa as to how innovation can become a means of liberation from the drudgery that people have. And this is a donkey cart which they modified. There's an axle here, of 30, 40 kg, serving no purpose. Remove it, the cart needs one donkey less. This is in China. This girl needed a breathing apparatus. These three people in the village sat down and decided to think, "How do we elongate the life of this girl of our village?" They were not related to her, but they tried to find out, "How can we use ... " They used a cycle, they put together a breathing apparatus. And this breathing apparatus now saved the life, and she's very welcome. There's a whole range of innovations that we have. A car, which runs on compressed air with six paisa per kilometer. Assam, Kanak Gogoi. And you would not find this car in U.S. or Europe, but this is available in India. Now, this lady, she used to do the winding of the yarn for Pochampally Saree. In one day, 18,000 times, she had to do this winding to generate two sarees. This is what her son has done after seven years of struggle. She said, "Change your profession." He said, "I can't. This is the only thing I know, but I'll invent a machine, which will solve your problem." And this is what he did, a sewing machine in Uttar Pradesh. So, this is what SRISTI is saying: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world." I will just tell you that we are also doing a competition among children for creativity, a whole range of things. We have sold things all over the world, from Ethiopia to Turkey to U.S. to wherever. Products have gone to the market, a few. These are the people whose knowledge made this Herbavate cream for eczema possible. And here, a company which licensed this herbal pesticide put a photograph of the innovator on the packing so that every time a user uses it, it asks the user, "You can also be an innovator. If you have an idea, send it back to us." So, creativity counts, knowledge matters, innovations transform, incentives inspire. And incentives: not just material, but also non-material incentives. Thank you. (Applause)

"Love Is a Loaded Pistol"

{0: 'Thomas Dolby has spent his career at the intersection of music and technology. He was an early star on MTV, then moved to Silicon Valley, then went back on the road with his album, "A Map of the Floating City."', 1: 'Ethel is, perhaps, the first 21st-century realization of the classical string quartet. '}

TED2010

I've been playing TED for nearly a decade, and I've very rarely played any new songs of my own. And that was largely because there weren't any. (Laughter) So I've been busy with a couple of projects, and one of them was this: The Nutmeg. A 1930s ship's lifeboat, which I've been restoring in the garden of my beach house in England. And, so now, when the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel. During the day, the Nutmeg collects energy from solar panels on the roof of the wheelhouse, and from a 450 watt turbine up the mast. So that when it gets dark, I've got plenty of power. And I can light up the Nutmeg like a beacon. And so I go in there until the early hours of the morning, and I work on new songs. I'd like to play to you guys, if you're willing to be the first audience to hear it. (Applause) It's about Billie Holiday. And it appears that, some night in 1947 she left her physical space and was missing all night, until she reappeared in the morning. But I know where she was. She was with me on my lifeboat. And she was hot. (Music) ♫ Billie crept softly ♫ ♫ into my waking arms ♫ ♫ warm like a sip of sour mash ♫ ♫ Strange fruit for ♫ ♫ a sweet hunk of trash ♫ ♫ Panic at the stage door ♫ ♫ of Carnegie Hall ♫ ♫ "Famous Jazz Singer Gone AWOL" ♫ ♫ Must have left the building ♫ ♫ body and soul ♫ ♫ On a creaky ♫ ♫ piano stool tonight ♫ ♫ as the moon is my ♫ ♫ only witness ♫ ♫ She was breathing ♫ ♫ in my ear ♫ ♫ "This time it's love" ♫ ♫ But love is a loaded pistol ♫ ♫ By daybreak she's gone ♫ ♫ Over the frozen river, home ♫ ♫ Me and Johnny Walker ♫ ♫ See in the new age ♫ ♫ alone ♫ ♫ Stay with me ♫ ♫ again tonight ♫ ♫ Billie, time, ♫ ♫ time is a wily trickster ♫ ♫ Still an echo ♫ ♫ in my heart says, ♫ ♫ "This time it's love" ♫ (Applause)

The hidden influence of social networks

{0: 'Nicholas Christakis explores how the large-scale, face-to-face social networks in which we are embedded affect our lives, and what we can do to take advantage of this fact.'}

TED2010

For me, this story begins about 15 years ago, when I was a hospice doctor at the University of Chicago. And I was taking care of people who were dying and their families in the South Side of Chicago. And I was observing what happened to people and their families over the course of their terminal illness. And in my lab, I was studying the widower effect, which is a very old idea in the social sciences, going back 150 years, known as "dying of a broken heart." So, when I die, my wife's risk of death can double, for instance, in the first year. And I had gone to take care of one particular patient, a woman who was dying of dementia. And in this case, unlike this couple, she was being cared for by her daughter. And the daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother. And the daughter's husband, he also was sick from his wife's exhaustion. And I was driving home one day, and I get a phone call from the husband's friend, calling me because he was depressed about what was happening to his friend. So here I get this call from this random guy that's having an experience that's being influenced by people at some social distance. And so I suddenly realized two very simple things: First, the widowhood effect was not restricted to husbands and wives. And second, it was not restricted to pairs of people. And I started to see the world in a whole new way, like pairs of people connected to each other. And then I realized that these individuals would be connected into foursomes with other pairs of people nearby. And then, in fact, these people were embedded in other sorts of relationships: marriage and spousal and friendship and other sorts of ties. And that, in fact, these connections were vast and that we were all embedded in this broad set of connections with each other. So I started to see the world in a completely new way and I became obsessed with this. I became obsessed with how it might be that we're embedded in these social networks, and how they affect our lives. So, social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous, in fact, that one has to ask what purpose they serve. Why are we embedded in social networks? I mean, how do they form? How do they operate? And how do they effect us? So my first topic with respect to this, was not death, but obesity. It had become trendy to speak about the "obesity epidemic." And, along with my collaborator, James Fowler, we began to wonder whether obesity really was epidemic and could it spread from person to person like the four people I discussed earlier. So this is a slide of some of our initial results. It's 2,200 people in the year 2000. Every dot is a person. We make the dot size proportional to people's body size; so bigger dots are bigger people. In addition, if your body size, if your BMI, your body mass index, is above 30 — if you're clinically obese — we also colored the dots yellow. So, if you look at this image, right away you might be able to see that there are clusters of obese and non-obese people in the image. But the visual complexity is still very high. It's not obvious exactly what's going on. In addition, some questions are immediately raised: How much clustering is there? Is there more clustering than would be due to chance alone? How big are the clusters? How far do they reach? And, most importantly, what causes the clusters? So we did some mathematics to study the size of these clusters. This here shows, on the Y-axis, the increase in the probability that a person is obese given that a social contact of theirs is obese and, on the X-axis, the degrees of separation between the two people. On the far left, you see the purple line. It says that, if your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher. And the next bar over, the [red] line, says if your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher. And then the next line over says if your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. And it's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends that there's no longer a relationship between that person's body size and your own body size. Well, what might be causing this clustering? There are at least three possibilities: One possibility is that, as I gain weight, it causes you to gain weight. A kind of induction, a kind of spread from person to person. Another possibility, very obvious, is homophily, or, birds of a feather flock together; here, I form my tie to you because you and I share a similar body size. And the last possibility is what is known as confounding, because it confounds our ability to figure out what's going on. And here, the idea is not that my weight gain is causing your weight gain, nor that I preferentially form a tie with you because you and I share the same body size, but rather that we share a common exposure to something, like a health club that makes us both lose weight at the same time. When we studied these data, we found evidence for all of these things, including for induction. And we found that if your friend becomes obese, it increases your risk of obesity by about 57 percent in the same given time period. There can be many mechanisms for this effect: One possibility is that your friends say to you something like — you know, they adopt a behavior that spreads to you — like, they say, "Let's go have muffins and beer," which is a terrible combination. (Laughter) But you adopt that combination, and then you start gaining weight like them. Another more subtle possibility is that they start gaining weight, and it changes your ideas of what an acceptable body size is. Here, what's spreading from person to person is not a behavior, but rather a norm: An idea is spreading. Now, headline writers had a field day with our studies. I think the headline in The New York Times was, "Are you packing it on? Blame your fat friends." (Laughter) What was interesting to us is that the European headline writers had a different take: They said, "Are your friends gaining weight? Perhaps you are to blame." (Laughter) And we thought this was a very interesting comment on America, and a kind of self-serving, "not my responsibility" kind of phenomenon. Now, I want to be very clear: We do not think our work should or could justify prejudice against people of one or another body size at all. Our next questions was: Could we actually visualize this spread? Was weight gain in one person actually spreading to weight gain in another person? And this was complicated because we needed to take into account the fact that the network structure, the architecture of the ties, was changing across time. In addition, because obesity is not a unicentric epidemic, there's not a Patient Zero of the obesity epidemic — if we find that guy, there was a spread of obesity out from him — it's a multicentric epidemic. Lots of people are doing things at the same time. And I'm about to show you a 30 second video animation that took me and James five years of our lives to do. So, again, every dot is a person. Every tie between them is a relationship. We're going to put this into motion now, taking daily cuts through the network for about 30 years. The dot sizes are going to grow, you're going to see a sea of yellow take over. You're going to see people be born and die — dots will appear and disappear — ties will form and break, marriages and divorces, friendings and defriendings. A lot of complexity, a lot is happening just in this 30-year period that includes the obesity epidemic. And, by the end, you're going to see clusters of obese and non-obese individuals within the network. Now, when looked at this, it changed the way I see things, because this thing, this network that's changing across time, it has a memory, it moves, things flow within it, it has a kind of consistency — people can die, but it doesn't die; it still persists — and it has a kind of resilience that allows it to persist across time. And so, I came to see these kinds of social networks as living things, as living things that we could put under a kind of microscope to study and analyze and understand. And we used a variety of techniques to do this. And we started exploring all kinds of other phenomena. We looked at smoking and drinking behavior, and voting behavior, and divorce — which can spread — and altruism. And, eventually, we became interested in emotions. Now, when we have emotions, we show them. Why do we show our emotions? I mean, there would be an advantage to experiencing our emotions inside, you know, anger or happiness. But we don't just experience them, we show them. And not only do we show them, but others can read them. And, not only can they read them, but they copy them. There's emotional contagion that takes place in human populations. And so this function of emotions suggests that, in addition to any other purpose they serve, they're a kind of primitive form of communication. And that, in fact, if we really want to understand human emotions, we need to think about them in this way. Now, we're accustomed to thinking about emotions in this way, in simple, sort of, brief periods of time. So, for example, I was giving this talk recently in New York City, and I said, "You know when you're on the subway and the other person across the subway car smiles at you, and you just instinctively smile back?" And they looked at me and said, "We don't do that in New York City." (Laughter) And I said, "Everywhere else in the world, that's normal human behavior." And so there's a very instinctive way in which we briefly transmit emotions to each other. And, in fact, emotional contagion can be broader still. Like we could have punctuated expressions of anger, as in riots. The question that we wanted to ask was: Could emotion spread, in a more sustained way than riots, across time and involve large numbers of people, not just this pair of individuals smiling at each other in the subway car? Maybe there's a kind of below the surface, quiet riot that animates us all the time. Maybe there are emotional stampedes that ripple through social networks. Maybe, in fact, emotions have a collective existence, not just an individual existence. And this is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon. Again, a social network, but now we color the people yellow if they're happy and blue if they're sad and green in between. And if you look at this image, you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people, again, spreading to three degrees of separation. And you might form the intuition that the unhappy people occupy a different structural location within the network. There's a middle and an edge to this network, and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges. So to invoke another metaphor, if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity — I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance — this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned American quilt, and it has patches on it: happy and unhappy patches. And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch. (Laughter) So, this work with emotions, which are so fundamental, then got us to thinking about: Maybe the fundamental causes of human social networks are somehow encoded in our genes. Because human social networks, whenever they are mapped, always kind of look like this: the picture of the network. But they never look like this. Why do they not look like this? Why don't we form human social networks that look like a regular lattice? Well, the striking patterns of human social networks, their ubiquity and their apparent purpose beg questions about whether we evolved to have human social networks in the first place, and whether we evolved to form networks with a particular structure. And notice first of all — so, to understand this, though, we need to dissect network structure a little bit first — and notice that every person in this network has exactly the same structural location as every other person. But that's not the case with real networks. So, for example, here is a real network of college students at an elite northeastern university. And now I'm highlighting a few dots. If you look here at the dots, compare node B in the upper left to node D in the far right; B has four friends coming out from him and D has six friends coming out from him. And so, those two individuals have different numbers of friends. That's very obvious, we all know that. But certain other aspects of social network structure are not so obvious. Compare node B in the upper left to node A in the lower left. Now, those people both have four friends, but A's friends all know each other, and B's friends do not. So the friend of a friend of A's is, back again, a friend of A's, whereas the friend of a friend of B's is not a friend of B's, but is farther away in the network. This is known as transitivity in networks. And, finally, compare nodes C and D: C and D both have six friends. If you talk to them, and you said, "What is your social life like?" they would say, "I've got six friends. That's my social experience." But now we, with a bird's eye view looking at this network, can see that they occupy very different social worlds. And I can cultivate that intuition in you by just asking you: Who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network? Would you rather be C or D? You'd rather be D, on the edge of the network. And now who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip — not about you — was spreading through the network? (Laughter) Now, you would rather be C. So different structural locations have different implications for your life. And, in fact, when we did some experiments looking at this, what we found is that 46 percent of the variation in how many friends you have is explained by your genes. And this is not surprising. We know that some people are born shy and some are born gregarious. That's obvious. But we also found some non-obvious things. For instance, 47 percent in the variation in whether your friends know each other is attributable to your genes. Whether your friends know each other has not just to do with their genes, but with yours. And we think the reason for this is that some people like to introduce their friends to each other — you know who you are — and others of you keep them apart and don't introduce your friends to each other. And so some people knit together the networks around them, creating a kind of dense web of ties in which they're comfortably embedded. And finally, we even found that 30 percent of the variation in whether or not people are in the middle or on the edge of the network can also be attributed to their genes. So whether you find yourself in the middle or on the edge is also partially heritable. Now, what is the point of this? How does this help us understand? How does this help us figure out some of the problems that are affecting us these days? Well, the argument I'd like to make is that networks have value. They are a kind of social capital. New properties emerge because of our embeddedness in social networks, and these properties inhere in the structure of the networks, not just in the individuals within them. So think about these two common objects. They're both made of carbon, and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way — on the left — and you get graphite, which is soft and dark. But if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way, you get diamond, which is clear and hard. And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms, or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms. So, similarly, the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties. It is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And so it is not just what's happening to these people — whether they're losing weight or gaining weight, or becoming rich or becoming poor, or becoming happy or not becoming happy — that affects us; it's also the actual architecture of the ties around us. Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we're residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network. Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism. Now, a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and that must be understood by reference to, and by studying, the collective. Like, for example, a hive of bees that's finding a new nesting site, or a flock of birds that's evading a predator, or a flock of birds that's able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific, or a pack of wolves that's able to bring down larger prey. Superorganisms have properties that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals. I think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena — like crime, and warfare, and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption. Now, look at this. I think we form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. If I was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we'd spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections. Thank you. (Applause)

Could this laser zap malaria?

{0: "Nathan Myhrvold is a professional jack-of-all-trades. After leaving Microsoft in 1999, he's been a world barbecue champion, a wildlife photographer, a chef, a contributor to SETI, and a volcano explorer."}

TED2010

We invent. My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun — invention is a lot of fun to do — and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it. So we do this fun and profit-oriented inventing for most of what we do, but we also have a program where we invent for humanity — where we take some of our best inventors, and we say, "Are there problems where we have a good idea for solving a problem the world has?" — and to solve it in the way we try to solve problems, which is with dramatic, crazy, out-of-the-box solutions. Bill Gates is one of those smartest guys of ours that work on these problems and he also funds this work, so thank you. So I'm going to briefly discuss a couple of problems that we have and a couple of problems where we've got some solutions underway. Vaccination is one of the key techniques in public health, a fantastic thing. But in the developing world a lot of vaccines spoil before they're administered, and that's because they need to be kept cold. Almost all vaccines need to be kept at refrigerator temperatures. They go bad very quickly if you don't, and if you don't have stable power grid, this doesn't happen, so kids die. It's not just the loss of the vaccine that matters; it's the fact that those kids don't get vaccinated. This is one of the ways that vaccines are carried: These are Styrofoam chests. These are being carried by people, but they're also put on the backs of pickup trucks. We've got a different solution. Now, one of these Styrofoam chests will last for about four hours with ice in it. And we thought, well, that's not really good enough. So we made this thing. This lasts six months with no power; absolutely zero power, because it loses less than a half a watt. Now, this is our second generations prototype. The third generation prototype is, right now, in Uganda being tested. Now, the reason we were able to come up with this is two key ideas: One is that this is similar to a cryogenic Dewar, something you'd keep liquid nitrogen or liquid helium in. They have incredible insulation, so let's put some incredible insulation here. The other idea is kind of interesting, which is, you can't reach inside anymore. Because if you open it up and reach inside, you'd let the heat in, the game would be over. So the inside of this thing actually looks like a Coke machine. It vends out little individual vials. So a simple idea, which we hope is going to change the way vaccines are distributed in Africa and around the world. We'll move on to malaria. Malaria is one of the great public health problems. Esther Duflo talked a little bit about this. Two hundred million people a year. Every 43 seconds a child in Africa dies; 27 will die during my talk. And there's no way for us here in this country to grasp really what that means to the people involved. Another comment of Esther's was that we react when there's a tragedy like Haiti, but that tragedy is ongoing. So what can we do about it? Well, there are a lot of things people have tried for many years for solving malaria. You can spray; the problem is there are environmental issues. You can try to treat people and create awareness. That's great, except the places that have malaria really bad, they don't have health care systems. A vaccine would be a terrific thing, only they don't work yet. People have tried for a long time. There are a couple of interesting candidates. It's a very difficult thing to make a vaccine for. You can distribute bed nets, and bed nets are very effective if you use them. You don't always use them for that. People fish with them. They don't always get to everyone. And bed nets have an effect on the epidemic, but you're never going to make it extinct with bed nets. Now, malaria is an incredibly complicated disease. We could spend hours going over this. It's got this sort of soap opera-like lifestyle; they have sex, they burrow into your liver, they tunnel into your blood cells ... it's an incredibly complicated disease, but that's actually one of the things we find interesting about it and why we work on malaria: There's a lot of potential ways in. One of those ways might be better diagnosis. So we hope this year to prototype each of these devices. One does an automatic malaria diagnosis in the same way that a diabetic's glucose meter works: You take a drop of blood, you put it in there and it automatically tells you. Today, you need to do a complicated laboratory procedure, create a bunch of microscope slides and have a trained person examine it. The other thing is, you know, it would be even better if you didn't have to draw the blood. And if you look through the eye, or you look at the vessels on the white of the eye, in fact, you may be able to do this directly, without drawing any blood at all, or through your nail beds. Because if you actually look through your fingernails, you can see blood vessels, and once you see blood vessels, we think we can see the malaria. We can see it because of this molecule called hemozoin. It's produced by the malaria parasite and it's a very interesting crystalline substance. Interesting, anyway, if you're a solid-state physicist. There's a lot of cool stuff we can do with it. This is our femtosecond laser lab. So this creates pulses of light that last a femtosecond. That's really, really, really short. This is a pulse of light that's only about one wavelength of light long, so it's a whole bunch of photons all coming and hitting simultaneously. It creates a very high peak power and it lets you do all kinds of interesting things; in particular, it lets you find hemozoin. So here's an image of red blood cells, and now we can actually map where the hemozoin and where the malaria parasites are inside those red blood cells. And using both this technique and other optical techniques, we think we can make those diagnostics. We also have another hemozoin-oriented therapy for malaria: a way, in acute cases, to actually take the malaria parasite and filter it out of the blood system. Sort of like doing dialysis, but for relieving the parasite load. This is our thousand-core supercomputer. We're kind of software guys, and so nearly any problem that you pose, we like to try to solve with some software. One of the problems that you have if you're trying to eradicate malaria or reduce it is you don't know what's the most effective thing to do. Okay, we heard about bed nets earlier. You spend a certain amount per bed net. Or you could spray. You can give drug administration. There's all these different interventions but they have different kinds of effectiveness. How can you tell? So we've created, using our supercomputer, the world's best computer model of malaria, which we'll show you now. We picked Madagascar. We have every road, every village, every, almost, square inch of Madagascar. We have all of the precipitation data and the temperature data. That's very important because the humidity and precipitation tell you whether you've got standing pools of water for the mosquitoes to breed. So that sets the stage on which you do this. You then have to introduce the mosquitoes, and you have to model that and how they come and go. Ultimately, it gives you this. This is malaria spreading across Madagascar. And this is this latter part of the rainy season. We're going to the dry season now. It nearly goes away in the dry season, because there's no place for the mosquitoes to breed. And then, of course, the next year it comes roaring back. By doing these kinds of simulations, we want to eradicate or control malaria thousands of times in software before we actually have to do it in real life; to be able to simulate both the economic trade-offs — how many bed nets versus how much spraying? — or the social trade-offs — what happens if unrest breaks out? We also try to study our foe. This is a high-speed camera view of a mosquito. And, in a moment, we're going to see a view of the airflow. Here, we're trying to visualize the airflow around the wings of the mosquito with little particles we're illuminating with a laser. By understanding how mosquitoes fly, we hope to understand how to make them not fly. Now, one of the ways you can make them not fly is with DDT. This is a real ad. This is one of those things you just can't make up. Once upon a time, this was the primary technique, and, in fact, many countries got rid of malaria through DDT. The United States did. In 1935, there were 150,000 cases a year of malaria in the United States, but DDT and a massive public health effort managed to squelch it. So we thought, "Well, we've done all these things that are focused on the Plasmodium, the parasite involved. What can we do to the mosquito? Well, let's try to kill it with consumer electronics." Now, that sounds silly, but each of these devices has something interesting in it that maybe you could use. Your Blu-ray player has a very cheap blue laser. Your laser printer has a mirror galvanometer that's used to steer a laser beam very accurately; that's what makes those little dots on the page. And, of course, there's signal processing and digital cameras. So what if we could put all that together to shoot them out of the sky with lasers? (Laughter) (Applause) Now, in our company, this is what we call "the pinky-suck moment." (Laughter) What if we could do that? Now, just suspend disbelief for a moment, and let's think of what could happen if we could do that. Well, we could protect very high-value targets like clinics. Clinics are full of people that have malaria. They're sick, and so they're less able to defend themselves from the mosquitoes. You really want to protect them. Of course, if you do that, you could also protect your backyard. And farmers could protect their crops that they want to sell to Whole Foods because our photons are 100 percent organic. (Laughter) They're completely natural. Now, it actually gets better than this. You could, if you're really smart, you could shine a nonlethal laser on the bug before you zap it, and you could listen to the wing beat frequency and you could measure the size. And then you could decide: "Is this an insect I want to kill, or an insect I don't want to kill?" Moore's law made computing cheap; so cheap we can weigh the life of an individual insect and decide thumbs up or thumbs down. (Laughter) Now, it turns out we only kill the female mosquitoes. They're the only ones that are dangerous. Mosquitoes only drink blood to lay eggs. Mosquitoes actually live ... their day-to-day nutrition comes from nectar, from flowers — in fact, in the lab, we feed ours raisins — but the female needs the blood meal. So, this sounds really crazy, right? Would you like to see it? Audience: Yeah! Nathan Myhrvold: Okay, so our legal department prepared a disclaimer, and here it is. (Laughter) Now, after thinking about this a little bit we thought, you know, it probably would be simpler to do this with a nonlethal laser. So, Eric Johanson, who built the device, actually, with parts from eBay; and Pablos Holman over here, he's got mosquitoes in the tank. We have the device over here. And we're going to show you, instead of the kill laser, which will be a very brief, instantaneous pulse, we're going to have a green laser pointer that's going to stay on the mosquito for, actually, quite a long period of time; otherwise, you can't see it very well. Take it away Eric. Eric Johanson: What we have here is a tank on the other side of the stage. And we have ... this computer screen can actually see the mosquitoes as they fly around. And Pablos, if he stirs up our mosquitoes a little bit we can see them flying around. Now, that's a fairly straightforward image processing routine, and let me show you how it works. Here you can see that the insects are being tracked as they're flying around, which is kind of fun. Next we can actually light them up with a laser. (Laughter) Now, this is a low powered laser, and we can actually pick up a wing-beat frequency. So you may be able to hear some mosquitoes flying around. NM: That's a mosquito wing beat you're hearing. EJ: Finally, let's see what this looks like. There you can see mosquitoes as they fly around, being lit up. This is slowed way down so that you have an opportunity to see what's happening. Here we have it running at high-speed mode. So this system that was built for TED is here to illustrate that it is technically possible to actually deploy a system like this, and we're looking very hard at how to make it highly cost-effective to use in places like Africa and other parts of the world. (Applause) NM: So it wouldn't be any fun to show you that without showing you what actually happens when we hit 'em. (Laughter) (Laughter) This is very satisfying. (Laughter) This is one of the first ones we did. The energy's a little bit high here. (Laughter) We'll loop around here in just a second, and you'll see another one. Here's another one. Bang. An interesting thing is, we kill them all the time; we've never actually gotten the wings to shut off in midair. The wing motor is very resilient. I mean, here we're blowing wings off but the wing motor keeps all the way down. So, that's what I have. Thanks very much. (Applause)

Glimpses of a pristine ocean

{0: 'Dr. Enric Sala is a former university professor who saw himself writing the obituary of ocean life and quit academia to become a full-time conservationist as a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.'}

Mission Blue Voyage

I'm going to tell you two things today: One is what we have lost, and two, a way to bring it back. And let me start with this. This is my baseline: This is the Mediterranean coast with no fish, bare rock and lots of sea urchins that like to eat the algae. Something like this is what I first saw when I jumped in the water for the first time in the Mediterranean coast off Spain. Now, if an alien came to earth — let's call him Joe — what would Joe see? If Joe jumped in a coral reef, there are many things the alien could see. Very unlikely, Joe would jump on a pristine coral reef, a virgin coral reef with lots of coral, sharks, crocodiles, manatees, groupers, turtles, etc. So, probably, what Joe would see would be in this part, in the greenish part of the picture. Here we have the extreme with dead corals, microbial soup and jellyfish. And where the diver is, this is probably where most of the reefs of the world are now, with very few corals, algae overgrowing the corals, lots of bacteria, and where the large animals are gone. And this is what most marine scientists have seen too. This is their baseline. This is what they think is natural because we started modern science with scuba diving long after we started degrading marine ecosystems. So I'm going to get us all on a time machine, and we're going to the left; we're going to go back to the past to see what the ocean was like. And let's start with this time machine, the Line Islands, where we have conducted a series of National Geographic expeditions. This sea is an archipelago belonging to Kiribati that spans across the equator and it has several uninhabited, unfished, pristine islands and a few inhabited islands. So let's start with the first one: Christmas Island, over 5,000 people. Most of the reefs are dead, most of the corals are dead — overgrown by algae — and most of the fish are smaller than the pencils we use to count them. We did 250 hours of diving here in 2005. We didn't see a single shark. This is the place that Captain Cook discovered in 1777 and he described a huge abundance of sharks biting the rudders and the oars of their small boats while they were going ashore. Let's move the dial a little bit to the past. Fanning Island, 2,500 people. The corals are doing better here. Lots of small fish. This is what many divers would consider paradise. This is where you can see most of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. And many people think this is really, really beautiful, if this is your baseline. If we go back to a place like Palmyra Atoll, where I was with Jeremy Jackson a few years ago, the corals are doing better and there are sharks. You can see sharks in every single dive. And this is something that is very unusual in today's coral reefs. But then, if we shift the dial 200, 500 years back, then we get to the places where the corals are absolutely healthy and gorgeous, forming spectacular structures, and where the predators are the most conspicuous thing, where you see between 25 and 50 sharks per dive. What have we learned from these places? This is what we thought was natural. This is what we call the biomass pyramid. If we get all of the fish of a coral reef together and weigh them, this is what we would expect. Most of the biomass is low on the food chain, the herbivores, the parrotfish, the surgeonfish that eat the algae. Then the plankton feeders, these little damselfish, the little animals floating in the water. And then we have a lower biomass of carnivores, and a lower biomass of top head, or the sharks, the large snappers, the large groupers. But this is a consequence. This view of the world is a consequence of having studied degraded reefs. When we went to pristine reefs, we realized that the natural world was upside down; this pyramid was inverted. The top head does account for most of the biomass, in some places up to 85 percent, like Kingman Reef, which is now protected. The good news is that, in addition to having more predators, there's more of everything. The size of these boxes is bigger. We have more sharks, more biomass of snappers, more biomass of herbivores, too, like these parrot fish that are like marine goats. They clean the reef; everything that grows enough to be seen, they eat, and they keep the reef clean and allow the corals to replenish. Not only do these places — these ancient, pristine places — have lots of fish, but they also have other important components of the ecosystem like the giant clams; pavements of giant clams in the lagoons, up to 20, 25 per square meter. These have disappeared from every inhabited reef in the world, and they filter the water; they keep the water clean from microbes and pathogens. But still, now we have global warming. If we don't have fishing because these reefs are protected by law or their remoteness, this is great. But the water gets warmer for too long and the corals die. So how are these fish, these predators going to help? Well, what we have seen is that in this particular area during El Nino, year '97, '98, the water was too warm for too long, and many corals bleached and many died. In Christmas, where the food web is really trimmed down, where the large animals are gone, the corals have not recovered. In Fanning Island, the corals are not recovered. But you see here a big table coral that died and collapsed. And the fish have grazed the algae, so the turf of algae is a little lower. Then you go to Palmyra Atoll that has more biomass of herbivores, and the dead corals are clean, and the corals are coming back. And when you go to the pristine side, did this ever bleach? These places bleached too, but they recovered faster. The more intact, the more complete, [and] the more complex your food web, the higher the resilience, [and] the more likely that the system is going to recover from the short-term impacts of warming events. And that's good news, so we need to recover that structure. We need to make sure that all of the pieces of the ecosystem are there so the ecosystem can adapt to the effects of global warming. So if we have to reset the baseline, if we have to push the ecosystem back to the left, how can we do it? Well, there are several ways. One very clear way is the marine protected areas, especially no-take reserves that we set aside to allow for the recovery for marine life. And let me go back to that image of the Mediterranean. This was my baseline. This is what I saw when I was a kid. And at the same time I was watching Jacques Cousteau's shows on TV, with all this richness and abundance and diversity. And I thought that this richness belonged to tropical seas, and that the Mediterranean was a naturally poor sea. But, little did I know, until I jumped for the first time in a marine reserve. And this is what I saw, lots of fish. After a few years, between five and seven years, fish come back, they eat the urchins, and then the algae grow again. So you have this little algal forest, and in the size of a laptop you can find more than 100 species of algae, mostly microscopic fit hundreds of species of little animals that then feed the fish, so that the system recovers. And this particular place, the Medes Islands Marine Reserve, is only 94 hectares, and it brings 6 million euros to the local economy, 20 times more than fishing, and it represents 88 percent of all the tourist revenue. So these places not only help the ecosystem but also help the people who can benefit from the ecosystem. So let me just give you a summary of what no-take reserves do. These places, when we protect them, if we compare them to unprotected areas nearby, this is what happens. The number of species increases 21 percent; so if you have 1,000 species you would expect 200 more in a marine reserve. This is very substantial. The size of organisms increases a third, so your fish are now this big. The abundance, how many fish you have per square meter, increases almost 170 percent. And the biomass — this is the most spectacular change — 4.5 times greater biomass on average, just after five to seven years. In some places up to 10 times larger biomass inside the reserves. So we have all these things inside the reserve that grow, and what do they do? They reproduce. That's population biology 101. If you don't kill the fish, they take a longer time to die, they grow larger and they reproduce a lot. And same thing for invertebrates. This is the example. These are egg cases laid by a snail off the coast of Chile, and this is how many eggs they lay on the bottom. Outside the reserve, you cannot even detect this. One point three million eggs per square meter inside the marine reserve where these snails are very abundant. So these organisms reproduce, the little larvae juveniles spill over, they all spill over, and then people can benefit from them outside too. This is in the Bahamas: Nassau grouper. Huge abundance of groupers inside the reserve, and the closer you get to the reserve, the more fish you have. So the fishermen are catching more. You can see where the limits of the reserve are because you see the boats lined up. So there is spill over; there are benefits beyond the boundaries of these reserves that help people around them, while at the same time the reserve is protecting the entire habitat. It is building resilience. So what we have now — or a world without reserves — is like a debit account where we withdraw all the time and we never make any deposit. Reserves are like savings accounts. We have this principal that we don't touch; that produces returns, social, economic and ecological. And if we think about the increase of biomass inside the reserves, this is like compound interest. Two examples, again, of how these reserves can benefit people. This is how much fishermen get everyday in Kenya, fishing over a series of years, in a place where there is no protection; it's a free-for-all. Once the most degrading fishing gear, seine nets, were removed, the fishermen were catching more. If you fish less, you're actually catching more. But if we add the no-take reserve on top of that, the fishermen are still making more money by fishing less around an area that is protected. Another example: Nassau groupers in Belize in the Mesoamerican Reef. This is grouper sex, and the groupers aggregate around the full moons of December and January for a week. They used to aggregate up to the tens of thousands, 30,000 groupers about this big in one hectare, in one aggregation. Fishermen knew about these things; they caught them, and they depleted them. When I went there for the first time in 2000, there were only 3,000 groupers left. And the fishermen were authorized to catch 30 percent of the entire spawning population every year. So we did a simple analysis, and it doesn't take rocket science to figure out that, if you take 30 percent every year, your fishery is going to collapse very quickly. And with the fishery, the entire reproductive ability of the species goes extinct. It happened in many places around the Caribbean. And they would make 4,000 dollars per year, total, for the entire fishery, several fishing boats. Now, if you do an economic analysis and project what would happen if the fish were not cut, if we brought just 20 divers one month per year, the revenue would be more than 20 times higher and that would be sustainable over time. So how much of this do we have? If this is so good, if this is such a no-brainer, how much of this do we have? And you already heard that less than one percent of the ocean's protected. We're getting closer to one percent now, thanks to the protections of the Chagos Archipelago, and only a fraction of this is fully protected from fishing. Scientific studies recommend that at least 20 percent of the ocean should be protected. The estimated range is between 20 and 50 percent for a series of goals of biodiversity and fishery enhancement and resilience. Now, is this possible? People would ask: How much would that cost? Well, let's think about how much we are paying now to subsidize fishing: 35 billion dollars per year. Many of these subsidies go to destructive fishing practices. Well, there are a couple estimates of how much it would cost to create a network of protected areas covering 20 percent of the ocean that would be only a fraction of what we are now paying; the government hands out to a fishery that is collapsing. People are losing their jobs because the fisheries are collapsing. A creation of a network of reserves would provide direct employment for more than a million people plus all the secondary jobs and all the secondary benefits. So how can we do that? If it's so clear that these savings accounts are good for the environment and for people, why don't we have 20, 50 percent of the ocean? And how can we reach that goal? Well, there are two ways of getting there. The trivial solution is to create really large protected areas like the Chagos Archipelago. The problem is that we can create these large reserves only in places where there are no people, where there is no social conflict, where the political cost is really low and the economic cost is also low. And a few of us, a few organizations in this room and elsewhere are working on this. But what about the rest of the coast of the world, where people live and make a living out of fishing? Well, there are three main reasons why we don't have tens of thousands of small reserves: The first one is that people have no idea what marine reserves do, and fishermen tend to be really, really defensive when it comes to regulating or closing an area, even if it's small. Second, the governance is not right because most coastal communities around the world don't have the authority to monitor the resources to create the reserve and enforce it. It's a top down hierarchical structure where people wait for government agents to come and this is not effective. And the government doesn't have enough resources. Which takes us to the third reason, why we don't have many more reserves, is that the funding models have been wrong. NGOs and governments spend a lot of time and energy and resources in a few small areas, usually. So marine conservation and coastal protection has become a sink for government or philanthropic money, and this is not sustainable. So the solutions are just fixing these three issues. First, we need to develop a global awareness campaign to inspire local communities and governments to create no-take reserves that are better than what we have now. It's the savings accounts versus the debit accounts with no deposits. Second, we need to redesign our governance so conservation efforts can be decentralized, so conservation efforts don't depend on work from NGOs or from government agencies and can be created by the local communities, like it happens in the Philippines and a few other places. And third, and very important, we need to develop new business models. The philanthropy sink as the only way to create reserves is not sustainable. We really need to develop models, business models, where coastal conservation is an investment, because we already know that these marine reserves provide social, ecological and economic benefits. And I'd like to finish with one thought, which is that no one organization alone is going to save the ocean. There has been a lot of competition in the past, and we need to develop a new model of partnership, truly collaborative, where we are looking for complementing, not substituting. The stakes are just too high to continue the way we are going. So let's do that. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you Enric. Enric Sala: Thank you. CA: That was a masterful job of pulling things together. First of all, your pyramid, your inverted pyramid, showing 85 percent biomass in the predators, that seems impossible. How could 85 percent survive on 15 percent? ES: Well, imagine that you have two gears of a watch, a big one and a small one. The big one is moving very slowly, and the small one is moving fast. That's basically it. The animals at the lower parts of the food chain, they reproduce very fast; they grow really fast; they produce millions of eggs. Up there, you have sharks and large fish that live 25, 30 years. They reproduce very slowly; they have a slow metabolism; and, basically, they just maintain their biomass. So, basically, the production surplus of these guys down there is enough to maintain this biomass that is not moving. They are like capacitors of the system. CA: That's very fascinating. So, really, our picture of a food pyramid is just — we have to change that completely. ES: At least in the seas. What we found in coral reefs is that the inverted pyramid is the equivalent of the Serengeti, with five lions per wildebeest. And on land, this cannot work. But at least on coral reefs are systems where there is a bottom component with structure. We think this is universal. But we have started studying pristine reefs only very recently. CA: So the numbers you presented really are astonishing. You're saying we're spending 35 billion dollars now on subsidies. It would only cost 16 billion to set up 20 percent of the ocean as marine protected areas that actually give new living choices to the fishermen as well. If the world was a smarter place, we could solve this problem for negative 19 billion dollars. We've got 19 billion to spend on health care or something. ES: And then we have the under-performance of fisheries that is 50 billion dollars. So again, one of the big solutions is have the World Trade Organization shifting the subsidies to sustainable practices. CA: Okay, so there's a lot of examples that I'm hearing out there about ending this subsidies madness. So thank you for those numbers. The last one's a personal question. A lot of the experience of people here who've been in the oceans for a long time has just been seeing this degradation, the places they saw that were beautiful getting worse, depressing. Talk to me about the feeling that you must have experienced of going to these pristine areas and seeing things coming back. ES: It is a spiritual experience. We go there to try to understand the ecosystems, to try to measure or count fish and sharks and see how these places are different from the places we know. But the best feeling is this biophilia that E.O. Wilson talks about, where humans have this sense of awe and wonder in front of untamed nature, of raw nature. And there, only there, you really feel that you are part of a larger thing or of a larger global ecosystem. And if it were not for these places that show hope, I don't think I could continue doing this job. It would be just too depressing. CA: Well, Enric, thank you so much for sharing some of that spiritual experience with us all. Thank you. ES: Thank you very much.

Math class needs a makeover

{0: 'Dan Meyer is exploring the way we teach teachers to teach kids.'}

TEDxNYED

Can I ask you to please recall a time when you really loved something — a movie, an album, a song or a book — and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you also really liked, and you anticipated that reaction, you waited for it, and it came back, and the person hated it? So, by way of introduction, that is the exact same state in which I spent every working day of the last six years. (Laughter) I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it. I mean, it's just a losing proposition. So there's a useful stereotype about students that I see, a useful stereotype about you all. I could give you guys an algebra-two final exam, and I would expect no higher than a 25 percent pass rate. And both of these facts say less about you or my students than they do about what we call math education in the U.S. today. To start with, I'd like to break math down into two categories. One is computation; this is the stuff you've forgotten. For example, factoring quadratics with leading coefficients greater than one. This stuff is also really easy to relearn, provided you have a really strong grounding in reasoning. Math reasoning — we'll call it the application of math processes to the world around us — this is hard to teach. This is what we would love students to retain, even if they don't go into mathematical fields. This is also something that, the way we teach it in the U.S. all but ensures they won't retain it. So, I'd like to talk about why that is, why that's such a calamity for society, what we can do about it and, to close with, why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher. So first, five symptoms that you're doing math reasoning wrong in your classroom. One is a lack of initiative; your students don't self-start. You finish your lecture block and immediately you have five hands going up asking you to re-explain the entire thing at their desks. Students lack perseverance. They lack retention; you find yourself re-explaining concepts three months later, wholesale. There's an aversion to word problems, which describes 99 percent of my students. And then the other one percent is eagerly looking for the formula to apply in that situation. This is really destructive. David Milch, creator of "Deadwood" and other amazing TV shows, has a really good description for this. He swore off creating contemporary drama, shows set in the present day, because he saw that when people fill their mind with four hours a day of, for example, "Two and a Half Men," no disrespect, it shapes the neural pathways, he said, in such a way that they expect simple problems. He called it, "an impatience with irresolution." You're impatient with things that don't resolve quickly. You expect sitcom-sized problems that wrap up in 22 minutes, three commercial breaks and a laugh track. And I'll put it to all of you, what you already know, that no problem worth solving is that simple. I am very concerned about this because I'm going to retire in a world that my students will run. I'm doing bad things to my own future and well-being when I teach this way. I'm here to tell you that the way our textbooks — particularly mass-adopted textbooks — teach math reasoning and patient problem solving, it's functionally equivalent to turning on "Two and a Half Men" and calling it a day. (Laughter) In all seriousness. Here's an example from a physics textbook. It applies equally to math. Notice, first of all here, that you have exactly three pieces of information there, each of which will figure into a formula somewhere, eventually, which the student will then compute. I believe in real life. And ask yourself, what problem have you solved, ever, that was worth solving where you knew all of the given information in advance; where you didn't have a surplus of information and you had to filter it out, or you didn't have sufficient information and had to go find some. I'm sure we all agree that no problem worth solving is like that. And the textbook, I think, knows how it's hamstringing students because, watch this, this is the practice problem set. When it comes time to do the actual problem set, we have problems like this right here where we're just swapping out numbers and tweaking the context a little bit. And if the student still doesn't recognize the stamp this was molded from, it helpfully explains to you what sample problem you can return to to find the formula. You could literally, I mean this, pass this particular unit without knowing any physics, just knowing how to decode a textbook. That's a shame. So I can diagnose the problem a little more specifically in math. Here's a really cool problem. I like this. It's about defining steepness and slope using a ski lift. But what you have here is actually four separate layers, and I'm curious which of you can see the four separate layers and, particularly, how when they're compressed together and presented to the student all at once, how that creates this impatient problem solving. I'll define them here: You have the visual. You also have the mathematical structure, talking about grids, measurements, labels, points, axes, that sort of thing. You have substeps, which all lead to what we really want to talk about: which section is the steepest. So I hope you can see. I really hope you can see how what we're doing here is taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but we're paving a smooth, straight path from one to the other and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way. That's all we're doing here. So I want to put to you that if we can separate these in a different way and build them up with students, we can have everything we're looking for in terms of patient problem solving. So right here I start with the visual, and I immediately ask the question: Which section is the steepest? And this starts conversation because the visual is created in such a way where you can defend two answers. So you get people arguing against each other, friend versus friend, in pairs, journaling, whatever. And then eventually we realize it's getting annoying to talk about the skier in the lower left-hand side of the screen or the skier just above the mid line. And we realize how great would it be if we just had some A, B, C and D labels to talk about them more easily. And then as we start to define what does steepness mean, we realize it would be nice to have some measurements to really narrow it down, specifically what that means. And then and only then, we throw down that mathematical structure. The math serves the conversation, the conversation doesn't serve the math. And at that point, I'll put it to you that nine out of 10 classes are good to go on the whole slope, steepness thing. But if you need to, your students can then develop those substeps together. Do you guys see how this, right here, compared to that — which one creates that patient problem solving, that math reasoning? It's been obvious in my practice, to me. And I'll yield the floor here for a second to Einstein, who, I believe, has paid his dues. He talked about the formulation of a problem being so incredibly important, and yet in my practice, in the U.S. here, we just give problems to students; we don't involve them in the formulation of the problem. So 90 percent of what I do with my five hours of prep time per week is to take fairly compelling elements of problems like this from my textbook and rebuild them in a way that supports math reasoning and patient problem solving. And here's how it works. I like this question. It's about a water tank. The question is: How long will it take you to fill it up? First things first, we eliminate all the substeps. Students have to develop those, they have to formulate those. And then notice that all the information written on there is stuff you'll need. None of it's a distractor, so we lose that. Students need to decide, "All right, well, does the height matter? Does the side of it matter? Does the color of the valve matter? What matters here?" Such an underrepresented question in math curriculum. So now we have a water tank. How long will it take you to fill it up? And that's it. And because this is the 21st century and we would love to talk about the real world on its own terms, not in terms of line art or clip art that you so often see in textbooks, we go out and we take a picture of it. So now we have the real deal. How long will it take it to fill it up? And then even better is we take a video, a video of someone filling it up. And it's filling up slowly, agonizingly slowly. It's tedious. Students are looking at their watches, rolling their eyes, and they're all wondering at some point or another, "Man, how long is it going to take to fill up?" (Laughter) That's how you know you've baited the hook, right? And that question, off this right here, is really fun for me because, like the intro, I teach kids — because of my inexperience — I teach the kids that are the most remedial, all right? And I've got kids who will not join a conversation about math because someone else has the formula; someone else knows how to work the formula better than me, so I won't talk about it. But here, every student is on a level playing field of intuition. Everyone's filled something up with water before, so I get kids answering the question, "How long will it take?" I've got kids who are mathematically and conversationally intimidated joining the conversation. We put names on the board, attach them to guesses, and kids have bought in here. And then we follow the process I've described. And the best part here, or one of the better parts is that we don't get our answer from the answer key in the back of the teacher's edition. We, instead, just watch the end of the movie. (Laughter) And that's terrifying, because the theoretical models that always work out in the answer key in the back of a teacher's edition, that's great, but it's scary to talk about sources of error when the theoretical does not match up with the practical. But those conversations have been so valuable, among the most valuable. So I'm here to report some really fun games with students who come pre-installed with these viruses day one of the class. These are the kids who now, one semester in, I can put something on the board, totally new, totally foreign, and they'll have a conversation about it for three or four minutes more than they would have at the start of the year, which is just so fun. We're no longer averse to word problems, because we've redefined what a word problem is. We're no longer intimidated by math, because we're slowly redefining what math is. This has been a lot of fun. I encourage math teachers I talk to to use multimedia, because it brings the real world into your classroom in high resolution and full color; to encourage student intuition for that level playing field; to ask the shortest question you possibly can and let those more specific questions come out in conversation; to let students build the problem, because Einstein said so; and to finally, in total, just be less helpful, because the textbook is helping you in all the wrong ways: It's buying you out of your obligation, for patient problem solving and math reasoning, to be less helpful. And why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher right now is because we have the tools to create this high-quality curriculum in our front pocket. It's ubiquitous and fairly cheap, and the tools to distribute it freely under open licenses has also never been cheaper or more ubiquitous. I put a video series on my blog not so long ago and it got 6,000 views in two weeks. I get emails still from teachers in countries I've never visited saying, "Wow, yeah. We had a good conversation about that. Oh, and by the way, here's how I made your stuff better," which, wow. I put this problem on my blog recently: In a grocery store, which line do you get into, the one that has one cart and 19 items or the line with four carts and three, five, two and one items. And the linear modeling involved in that was some good stuff for my classroom, but it eventually got me on "Good Morning America" a few weeks later, which is just bizarre, right? And from all of this, I can only conclude that people, not just students, are really hungry for this. Math makes sense of the world. Math is the vocabulary for your own intuition. So I just really encourage you, whatever your stake is in education — whether you're a student, parent, teacher, policy maker, whatever — insist on better math curriculum. We need more patient problem solvers. Thank you. (Applause)

It's time for "The Talk"

{0: 'Julia Sweeney creates comedic works that tackle deep issues like cancer, family and faith.'}

TED2010

I have a daughter, Mulan. And when she was eight, last year, she was doing a report for school or she had some homework about frogs. And we were at this restaurant, and she said, "So, basically, frogs lay eggs and the eggs turn into tadpoles, and tadpoles turn into frogs." And I said, "Yeah. You know, I'm not really up on my frog reproduction that much. It's the females, I think, that lay the eggs, and then the males fertilize them. And then they become tadpoles and frogs." And she says, "What? Only the females have eggs?" And I said, "Yeah." And she goes, "And what's this fertilizing?" So I kind of said, "Oh, it's this extra ingredient, you know, that you need to create a new frog from the mom and dad frog." (Laughter) And she said, "Oh, so is that true for humans too?" And I thought, "Okay, here we go." I didn't know it would happen so quick, at eight. I was trying to remember all the guidebooks, and all I could remember was, "Only answer the question they're asking. Don't give any more information." (Laughter) So I said, "Yes." And she said, "And where do, um, where do human women, like, where do women lay their eggs?" And I said, "Well, funny you should ask. (Laughter) We have evolved to have our own pond. We have our very own pond inside our bodies. And we lay our eggs there, we don't have to worry about other eggs or anything like that. It's our own pond. And that's how it happens." And she goes, "Then how do they get fertilized?" And I said, "Well, Men, through their penis, they fertilize the eggs by the sperm coming out. And you go through the woman's vagina." And so we're just eating, and her jaw just drops, and she goes, "Mom! Like, where you go to the bathroom?" And I said, "I know. I know." (Laughter) That's how we evolved. It does seem odd. It is a little bit like having a waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park ... Bad zoning, but ..." (Laughter) She's like, "What?" And she goes, "But Mom, but men and women can't ever see each other naked, Mom. So how could that ever happen?" And then I go, "Well," and then I put my Margaret Mead hat on. "Human males and females develop a special bond, and when they're much older, much, much older than you, and they have a very special feeling, then they can be naked together." And she said, "Mom, have you done this before?" And I said, "Yes." And she said, "But Mom, you can't have kids." Because she knows that I adopted her and that I can't have kids. And I said, "Yes." And she said, "Well, you don't have to do that again." And I said, "..." And then she said, "But how does it happen when a man and woman are together? Like, how do they know that's the time? Mom, does the man just say, 'Is now the time to take off my pants?'" (Laughter) And I said, "Yes." (Laughter) "That is exactly right. That's exactly how it happens." So we're driving home and she's looking out the window, and she goes, "Mom. What if two just people saw each other on the street, like a man and a woman, they just started doing it. Would that ever happen?" And I said, "Oh, no. Humans are so private. Oh ..." And then she goes, "What if there was like a party, and there was just like a whole bunch of girls and a whole bunch of boys, and there was a bunch of men and women and they just started doing it, Mom? Would that ever happen?" And I said, "Oh, no, no. That's not how we do it." Then we got home and we see the cat. And she goes, "Mom, how do cats do it?" And I go, "Oh, it's the same. It's basically the same." And then she got all caught up in the legs. "But how would the legs go, Mom? I don't understand the legs." She goes, "Mom, everyone can't do the splits." And I go, "I know, but the legs ..." and I'm probably like, "The legs get worked out." And she goes, "But I just can't understand it." So I go, "You know, why don't we go on the Internet, and maybe we can see ... like on Wikipedia." (Laughter) So we go online, and we put in "cats mating." And, unfortunately, on YouTube, there's many cats mating videos. And we watched them and I'm so thankful, because she's just like, "Wow! This is so amazing." She goes, "What about dogs?" So we put in dogs mating, and, you know, we're watching it, and she's totally absorbed. And then she goes, "Mom, do you think they would have, on the Internet, any humans mating?" (Laughter) And then I realized that I had taken my little eight year old's hand, and taken her right into Internet porn. (Laughter) And I looked into this trusting, loving face, and I said, "Oh, no. That would never happen." Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

Can we eat to starve cancer?

{0: 'William Li heads the Angiogenesis Foundation, a nonprofit that is re-conceptualizing global disease fighting.'}

TED2010

Good afternoon. There's a medical revolution happening all around us, and it's one that's going to help us conquer some of society's most dreaded conditions, including cancer. The revolution is called angiogenesis, and it's based on the process that our bodies use to grow blood vessels. So why should we care about blood vessels? Well, the human body is literally packed with them — 60,000 miles worth in a typical adult. End to end, that would form a line that would circle the earth twice. The smallest blood vessels are called capillaries. We've got 19 billion of them in our bodies. And these are the vessels of life, and as I'll show you, they can also be the vessels of death. Now, the remarkable thing about blood vessels is that they have this ability to adapt to whatever environment they're growing in. For example, in the liver, they form channels to detoxify the blood; in the lungs, they line air sacs for gas exchange. In muscle, they corkscrew, so that muscles can contract without cutting off circulation. And in nerves, they course along like power lines, keeping those nerves alive. We get most of these blood vessels when we're actually still in the womb. And what that means is that as adults, blood vessels don't normally grow. Except in a few special circumstances. In women, blood vessels grow every month, to build the lining of the uterus. During pregnancy, they form the placenta, which connects mom and baby. And after injury, blood vessels actually have to grow under the scab in order to heal a wound. And this is actually what it looks like, hundreds of blood vessels, all growing toward the center of the wound. So the body has the ability to regulate the amount of blood vessels that are present at any given time. It does this through an elaborate and elegant system of checks and balances, stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis, such that, when we need a brief burst of blood vessels, the body can do this by releasing stimulators, proteins called angiogenic factors, that act as natural fertilizer, and stimulate new blood vessels to sprout. When those excess vessels are no longer needed, the body prunes them back to baseline, using naturally-occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis. There are other situations where we start beneath the baseline, and we need to grow more blood vessels, just to get back to normal levels — for example, after an injury — and the body can do that too, but only to that normal level, that set point. But what we now know, is that for a number of diseases, there are defects in the system, where the body can't prune back extra blood vessels, or can't grow enough new ones in the right place at the right time. And in these situations, angiogenesis is out of balance. And when angiogenesis is out of balance, a myriad of diseases result. For example, insufficient angiogenesis — not enough blood vessels — leads to wounds that don't heal, heart attacks, legs without circulation, death from stroke, nerve damage. And on the other end, excessive angiogenesis — too many blood vessels — drives disease, and we see this in cancer, blindness, arthritis, obesity, Alzheimer's disease. In total, there are more than 70 major diseases affecting more than a billion people worldwide, that all look on the surface to be different from one another, but all actually share abnormal angiogenesis as their common denominator. And this realization is allowing us to re-conceptualize the way that we actually approach these diseases, by controlling angiogenesis. Now, I'm going to focus on cancer, because angiogenesis is a hallmark of cancer — every type of cancer. So here we go. This is a tumor: dark, gray, ominous mass growing inside a brain. And under the microscope, you can see hundreds of these brown-stained blood vessels, capillaries that are feeding cancer cells, bringing oxygen and nutrients. But cancers don't start out like this, and in fact, cancers don't start out with a blood supply. They start out as small, microscopic nests of cells, that can only grow to one half a cubic millimeter in size. That's the tip of a ballpoint pen. Then they can't get any larger because they don't have a blood supply, so they don't have enough oxygen or nutrients. In fact, we're probably forming these microscopic cancers all the time in our body. Autopsy studies from people who died in car accidents have shown that about 40 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 50 actually have microscopic cancers in their breasts. About 50 percent of men in their 50s and 60s have microscopic prostate cancers, and virtually 100 percent of us, by the time we reach our 70s, will have microscopic cancers growing in our thyroid. Yet, without a blood supply, most of these cancers will never become dangerous. Dr. Judah Folkman, who was my mentor and who was the pioneer of the angiogenesis field, once called this "cancer without disease." So the body's ability to balance angiogenesis, when it's working properly, prevents blood vessels from feeding cancers. And this turns out to be one of our most important defense mechanisms against cancer. In fact, if you actually block angiogenesis and prevent blood vessels from ever reaching cancer cells, tumors simply can't grow up. But once angiogenesis occurs, cancers can grow exponentially. And this is actually how a cancer goes from being harmless, to being deadly. Cancer cells mutate, and they gain the ability to release lots of those angiogenic factors, natural fertilizer, that tip the balance in favor of blood vessels invading the cancer. And once those vessels invade the cancer, it can expand, it can invade local tissues, and the same vessels that are feeding tumors allow cancer cells to exit into the circulation as metastases. And unfortunately, this late stage of cancer is the one at which it's most likely to be diagnosed, when angiogenesis is already turned on, and cancer cells are growing like wild. So, if angiogenesis is a tipping point between a harmless cancer and a harmful one, then one major part of the angiogenesis revolution is a new approach to treating cancer by cutting off the blood supply. We call this antiangiogenic therapy, and it's completely different from chemotherapy, because it selectively aims at the blood vessels that are feeding the cancers. We can do this because tumor blood vessels are unlike normal, healthy vessels we see in other places of the body — they're abnormal, they're very poorly constructed, and because of that, they're highly vulnerable to treatments that target them. In effect, when we give cancer patients antiangiogenic therapy — here, an experimental drug for a glioma, which is a type of brain tumor — you can see that there are dramatic changes that occur when the tumor is being starved. Here's a woman with a breast cancer, being treated with the antiangiogenic drug called Avastin, which is FDA approved. And you can see that the halo of blood flow disappears after treatment. Well, I've just shown you two very different types of cancer that both responded to antiangiogenic therapy. So a few years ago, I asked myself, "Can we take this one step further and treat other cancers, even in other species?" So here is a nine year-old boxer named Milo, who had a very aggressive tumor called a malignant neurofibroma growing on his shoulder. It invaded into his lungs. His veterinarian only gave him three months to live. So we created a cocktail of antiangiogenic drugs that could be mixed into his dog food, as well as an antiangiogenic cream, that could be applied on the surface of the tumor. And within a few weeks of treatment, we were able to slow down that cancer's growth, such that we were ultimately able to extend Milo’s survival to six times what the veterinarian had initially predicted, all with a very good quality of life. And we've subsequently treated more than 600 dogs. We have about a 60 percent response rate, and improved survival for these pets that were about to be euthanized. So let me show you a couple of even more interesting examples. This is 20-year-old dolphin living in Florida, and she had these lesions in her mouth that, over the course of three years, developed into invasive squamous cell cancers. So we created an antiangiogenic paste. We had it painted on top of the cancer three times a week. And over the course of seven months, the cancers completely disappeared, and the biopsies came back as normal. Here's a cancer growing on the lip of a Quarter Horse named Guinness. It's a very, very deadly type of cancer called an angiosarcoma. It had already spread to his lymph nodes, so we used an antiangiogenic skin cream for the lip, and the oral cocktail, so we could treat from the inside as well as the outside. And over the course of six months, he experienced a complete remission. And here he is six years later, Guinness, with his very happy owner. (Applause) Now obviously, antiangiogenic therapy could be used for a wide range of cancers. And in fact, the first pioneering treatments for people as well as dogs, are already becoming available. There are 12 different drugs, 11 different cancer types. But the real question is: How well do these work in practice? So here's actually the patient survival data from eight different types of cancer. The bars represent survival time taken from the era in which there was only chemotherapy, or surgery, or radiation available. But starting in 2004, when antiangiogenic therapies first became available, you can see that there has been a 70 to 100 percent improvement in survival for people with kidney cancer, multiple myeloma, colorectal cancer, and gastrointestinal stromal tumors. That's impressive. But for other tumors and cancer types, the improvements have only been modest. So I started asking myself, "Why haven't we been able to do better?" And the answer, to me, is obvious: we're treating cancer too late in the game, when it's already established, and oftentimes, it's already spread or metastasized. And as a doctor, I know that once a disease progresses to an advanced stage, achieving a cure can be difficult, if not impossible. So I went back to the biology of angiogenesis, and started thinking: Could the answer to cancer be preventing angiogenesis, beating cancer at its own game, so the cancers could never become dangerous? This could help healthy people, as well as people who've already beaten cancer once or twice, and want to find a way to keep it from coming back. So to look for a way to prevent angiogenesis in cancer, I went back to look at cancer's causes. And what really intrigued me, was when I saw that diet accounts for 30 to 35 percent of environmentally-caused cancers. Now the obvious thing is to think about what we could remove from our diet, what to strip out, take away. But I actually took a completely opposite approach, and began asking: What could we be adding to our diet that's naturally antiangiogenic, and that could boost the body's defense system, and beat back those blood vessels that are feeding cancers? In other words, can we eat to starve cancer? (Laughter) Well, the answer is yes, and I'm going to show you how. And our search for this has taken us to the market, the farm and to the spice cabinet, because what we've discovered is that Mother Nature has laced a large number of foods and beverages and herbs with naturally-occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis. Here's a test system we developed. At the center is a ring from which hundreds of blood vessels are growing out in a starburst fashion. And we can use this system to test dietary factors at concentrations that are obtainable by eating. Let me show you what happens when we put in an extract from red grapes. The active ingredient is resveratrol, it's also found in red wine. This inhibits abnormal angiogenesis, by 60 percent. Here's what happens when we added an extract from strawberries. It potently inhibits angiogenesis. And extract from soybeans. And here is a growing list of antiangiogenic foods and beverages that we're interested in studying. For each food type, we believe that there are different potencies within different strains and varietals. And we want to measure this because, well, while you're eating a strawberry or drinking tea, why not select the one that's most potent for preventing cancer? So here are four different teas that we've tested. They're all common ones: Chinese jasmine, Japanese sencha, Earl Grey and a special blend that we prepared, and you can see clearly that the teas vary in their potency, from less potent to more potent. But what's very cool is when we combine the two less potent teas together, the combination, the blend, is more potent than either one alone. This means there's food synergy. Here's some more data from our testing. Now in the lab, we can simulate tumor angiogenesis, represented here in a black bar. And using this system, we can test the potency of cancer drugs. So the shorter the bar, the less angiogenesis — that's good. And here are some common drugs that have been associated with reducing the risk of cancer in people. Statins, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and a few others — they inhibit angiogenesis, too. And here are the dietary factors going head-to-head against these drugs. You can see they clearly hold their own, and in some cases, they're more potent than the actual drugs. Soy, parsley, garlic, grapes, berries. I could go home and cook a tasty meal using these ingredients. Imagine if we could create the world's first rating system, in which we could score foods according to their antiangiogenic, cancer-preventative properties. And that's what we're doing right now. Now, I've shown you a bunch of lab data, and so the real question is: What is the evidence in people that eating certain foods can reduce angiogenesis in cancer? Well, the best example I know is a study of 79,000 men followed over 20 years, in which it was found that men who consumed cooked tomatoes two to three times a week, had up to a 50 percent reduction in their risk of developing prostate cancer. Now, we know that tomatoes are a good source of lycopene, and lycopene is antiangiogenic. But what's even more interesting from this study, is that in those men who did develop prostate cancer, those who ate more servings of tomato sauce, actually had fewer blood vessels feeding their cancer. So this human study is a prime example of how antiangiogenic substances present in food and consumed at practical levels, can have an impact on cancer. And we're now studying the role of a healthy diet — with Dean Ornish at UCSF and Tufts University — the role of this healthy diet on markers of angiogenesis that we can find in the bloodstream. Obviously, what I've shared with you has some far-ranging implications, even beyond cancer research. Because if we're right, it could impact consumer education, food services, public health and even the insurance industry. And in fact, some insurance companies are already beginning to think along these lines. Check out this ad from BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota. For many people around the world, dietary cancer prevention may be the only practical solution, because not everybody can afford expensive end-stage cancer treatments, but everybody could benefit from a healthy diet based on local, sustainable, antiangiogenic crops. Now, finally, I've talked to you about food, and I've talked to you about cancer, so there's just one more disease that I have to tell you about, and that's obesity. Because it turns out that adipose tissue — fat — is highly angiogenesis-dependent. And like a tumor, fat grows when blood vessels grow. So the question is: Can we shrink fat by cutting off its blood supply? The top curve shows the body weight of a genetically obese mouse that eats nonstop until it turns fat, like this furry tennis ball. (Laughter) And the bottom curve is the weight of a normal mouse. If you take the obese mouse and give it an angiogenesis inhibitor, it loses weight. Stop the treatment, gains the weight back. Restart the treatment, loses the weight. Stop the treatment, it gains the weight back. And, in fact, you can cycle the weight up and down simply by inhibiting angiogenesis. So this approach that we're taking for cancer prevention may also have an application for obesity. The truly interesting thing about this is that we can't take these obese mice and make them lose more weight than what the normal mouse's weight is supposed to be. In other words, we can't create supermodel mice. (Laughter) And this speaks to the role of angiogenesis in regulating healthy set points. Albert Szent-Györgi once said, "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought." I hope I've convinced you that for diseases like cancer, obesity and other conditions, there may be a great power in attacking their common denominator: angiogenesis. And that's what I think the world needs now. Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: I have a quick question for you. JC: So these drugs aren't exactly in mainstream cancer treatments right now. For anyone out here who has cancer, what would you recommend? Do you recommend pursuing these treatments now, for most cancer patients? William Li: There are antiangiogenic treatments that are FDA approved, and if you're a cancer patient, or working for one or advocating for one, you should ask about them. And there are many clinical trials. The Angiogenesis Foundation is following almost 300 companies, and there are about 100 more drugs in that pipeline. So, consider the approved ones, look for clinical trials, but then between what the doctor can do for you, we need to start asking what can we do for ourselves. This is one of the themes I'm talking about: We can empower ourselves to do the things that doctors can't do for us, which is to use knowledge and take action. And if Mother Nature has given us some clues, we think there might be a new future in the value of how we eat, and what we eat is really our chemotherapy three times a day. JC: Right. And along those lines, for people who might have risk factors for cancer, would you recommend pursuing any treatments prophylactically, or simply pursuing the right diet, with lots of tomato sauce? WL: Well, you know, there's abundant epidemiological evidence, and I think in the information age, it doesn't take long to go to a credible source like PubMed, the National Library of Medicine, to look for epidemiological studies for cancer risk reduction based on diet and based on common medications. And that's certainly something that anybody can look into. JC: Okay. Well, thank you so much. (Applause)

Why I'm a weekday vegetarian

{0: 'Graham Hill is the founder of TreeHugger.com and LifeEdited; he travels the world to tell stories of sustainability and minimalism. He tweets at @GHill.'}

TED2010

About a year ago, I asked myself a question: "Knowing what I know, why am I not a vegetarian?" After all, I'm one of the green guys: I grew up with hippie parents in a log cabin. I started a site called TreeHugger — I care about this stuff. I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day can increase my risk of dying by a third. Cruelty: I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat are raised in factory farm conditions that we, hypocritically, wouldn't even consider for our own cats, dogs and other pets. Environmentally, meat, amazingly, causes more emissions than all of transportation combined: cars, trains, planes, buses, boats, all of it. And beef production uses 100 times the water that most vegetables do. I also knew that I'm not alone. We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. So what was once the special little side treat now is the main, much more regular. So really, any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian. Yet, there I was — chk, chk, chk — tucking into a big old steak. So why was I stalling? I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution. It was either you're a meat eater or you're a vegetarian, and I guess I just wasn't quite ready. Imagine your last hamburger. (Laughter) So my common sense, my good intentions, were in conflict with my taste buds. And I'd commit to doing it later, and not surprisingly, later never came. Sound familiar? So I wondered, might there be a third solution? And I thought about it, and I came up with one. I've been doing it for the last year, and it's great. It's called weekday veg. The name says it all: Nothing with a face Monday through Friday. On the weekend, your choice. Simple. If you want to take it to the next level, remember, the major culprits in terms of environmental damage and health are red and processed meats. So you want to swap those out with some good, sustainably harvested fish. It's structured, so it ends up being simple to remember, and it's okay to break it here and there. After all, cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake. The program has been great, weekday veg. My footprint's smaller, I'm lessening pollution, I feel better about the animals, I'm even saving money. Best of all, I'm healthier, I know that I'm going to live longer, and I've even lost a little weight. So, please ask yourselves, for your health, for your pocketbook, for the environment, for the animals: What's stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot? After all, if all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarians. Thank you. (Applause)

Pay attention to penguins

{0: 'Dee Boersma considers penguins ocean sentinels, helping us understand the effects of pollution, overfishing and climate change on the marine environment. '}

Mission Blue Voyage

I want to talk about penguins today. But first, I want to start by saying that we need a new operating system, for the oceans and for the Earth. When I came to the Galapagos 40 years ago, there were 3,000 people that lived in the Galapagos. Now there are over 30,000. There were two Jeeps on Santa Cruz. Now, there are around a thousand trucks and buses and cars there. So the fundamental problems that we face are overconsumption and too many people. It's the same problems in the Galapagos, except, obviously, it's worse here, in some ways, than other places. Because we've only doubled the population of the Earth since the 1960s — a little more than doubled — but we have 6.7 billion people in the world, and we all like to consume. And one of the major problems that we have is our operating system is not giving us the proper feedback. We're not paying the true environmental costs of our actions. And when I came at age 22 to live on Fernandina, let me just say, that I had never camped before. I had never lived alone for any period of time, and I'd never slept with sea lions snoring next to me all night. But moreover, I'd never lived on an uninhabited island. Punta Espinosa is where I lived for over a year, and we call it uninhabited because there are no people there. But it's alive with life; it's hardly uninhabited. So a lot has happened in the last 40 years, and what I learned when I came to the Galapagos is the importance of wild places, wild things, certainly wildlife, and the amazing qualities that penguins have. Penguins are real athletes: They can swim 173 kilometers in a day. They can swim at the same speed day and night — that's faster than any Olympic swimmer. I mean, they can do like seven kilometers an hour and sustain it. But what is really amazing, because of this deepness here, Emperor penguins can go down more than 500 meters and they can hold their breath for 23 minutes. Magellanic penguins, the ones that I work on, they can dive to about 90 meters and they can stay down for about 4.6 minutes. Humans, without fins: 90 meters, 3.5 minutes. And I doubt anybody in this room could really hold their breath for 3.5 minutes. You have to train to be able to do that. So penguins are amazing athletes. The other thing is, I've never met anybody that really doesn't say that they like penguins. They're comical, they walk upright, and, of course, they're diligent. And, more importantly, they're well-dressed. So they have all the criteria that people normally like. But scientifically, they're amazing because they're sentinels. They tell us about our world in a lot of different ways, and particularly the ocean. This is a picture of a Galapagos penguin that's on the front of a little zodiac here in the Galapagos. And that's what I came to study. I thought I was going to study the social behavior of Galapagos penguins, but you already know penguins are rare. These are the rarest penguins in the world. Why I thought I was going to be able to do that, I don't know. But the population has changed dramatically since I was first here. When I counted penguins for the first time and tried to do a census, we just counted all the individual beaks that we could around all these islands. We counted around 2,000, so I don't know how many penguins there really are, but I know I can count 2,000. If you go and do it now, the national parks count about 500. So we have a quarter of the penguins that we did 40 years ago. And this is true of most of our living systems. We have less than we had before, and most of them are in fairly steep decline. And I want to just show you a little bit about why. (Braying) That's a penguin braying to tell you that it's important to pay attention to penguins. Most important of all, I didn't know what that was the first time I heard it. And you can imagine sleeping on Fernandina your first night there and you hear this lonesome, plaintful call. I fell in love with penguins, and it certainly has changed the rest of my life. What I found out I was studying is really the difference in how the Galapagos changes, the most extreme variation. You've heard about these El Ninos, but this is the extreme that penguins all over the world have to adapt to. This is a cold-water event called La Nina. Where it's blue and it's green, it means the water is really cold. And so you can see this current coming up — in this case, the Humboldt Current — that comes all the way out to the Galapagos Islands, and this deep undersea current, the Cromwell Current, that upwells around the Galapagos. That brings all the nutrients: When this is cold in the Galapagos, it's rich, and there's plenty of food for everyone. When we have extreme El Nino events, you see all this red, and you see no green out here around the Galapagos. That means that there's no upwelling, and there's basically no food. So it's a real desert for not only for the penguins and the sea lions and the marine iguanas ... things die when there's no food. But we didn't even know that that affected the Galapagos when I went to study penguins. And you can imagine being on an island hoping you're going to see penguins, and you're in the middle of an El Nino event and there are no penguins. They're not breeding; they're not even around. I studied marine iguanas at that point. But this is a global phenomenon, we know that. And if you look along the coast of Argentina, where I work now, at a place called Punta Tombo — the largest Magellanic penguin colony in the world down here about 44 degrees south latitude — you see that there's great variation here. Some years, the cold water goes all the way up to Brazil, and other years, in these La Nina years, it doesn't. So the oceans don't always act together; they act differently, but that is the kind of variation that penguins have to live with, and it's not easy. So when I went to study the Magellanic penguins, I didn't have any problems. There were plenty of them. This is a picture at Punta Tombo in February showing all the penguins along the beach. I went there because the Japanese wanted to start harvesting them and turning them into high fashion golf gloves, protein and oil. Fortunately, nobody has harvested any penguins and we're getting over 100,000 tourists a year to see them. But the population is declining and it's declined fairly substantially, about 21 percent since 1987, when I started these surveys, in terms of number of active nests. Here, you can see where Punta Tombo is, and they breed in incredibly dense colonies. We know this because of long-term science, because we have long-term studies there. And science is important in informing decision makers, and also in changing how we do and knowing the direction of change that we're going in. And so we have this penguin project. The Wildlife Conservation Society has funded me along with a lot of individuals over the last 27 years to be able to produce these kinds of maps. And also, we know that it's not only Galapagos penguins that are in trouble, but Magellanics and many other species of penguins. And so we have started a global penguin society to try to focus on the real plight of penguins. This is one of the plights of penguins: oil pollution. Penguins don't like oil and they don't like to swim through oil. The nice thing is, if you look down here in Argentina, there's no surface oil pollution from this composite map. But, in fact, when we went to Argentina, penguins were often found totally covered in oil. So they were just minding their own business. They ended up swimming through ballast water that had oil in it. Because when tankers carry oil they have to have ballast at some point, so when they're empty, they have the ballast water in there. When they come back, they actually dump this oily ballast water into the ocean. Why do they do that? Because it's cheaper, because they don't pay the real environmental costs. We usually don't, and we want to start getting the accounting system right so we can pay the real cost. At first, the Argentine government said, "No, there's no way. You can't find oiled penguins in Argentina. We have laws, and we can't have illegal dumping; it's against the law." So we ended up spending nine years convincing the government that there were lots of oiled penguins. In some years, like this year, we found more than 80 percent of the adult penguins dead on the beach were covered in oil. These little blue dots are the fledglings — we do this survey every March — which means that they're only in the environment from January until March, so maybe three months at the most that they could get covered in oil. And you can see, in some years over 60 percent of the fledglings were oiled. Eventually, the government listened and, amazingly, they changed their laws. They moved the tanker lanes 40 kilometers farther off shore, and people are not doing as much illegal dumping. So what we're seeing now is very few penguins are oiled. Why are there even these penguins oiled? Because we've solved the problem in Chubut province, which is like a state in Argentina where Punta Tombo is — so that's about 1,000 kilometers of coastline — but we haven't solved the problem in northern Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. So now I want to show you that penguins are affected. I'm just going to talk about two things. This is climate change. Now this has really been a fun study because I put satellite tags on the back of these Magellanic penguins. Try to convince donors to give you a couple thousand dollars to glue a satellite tag on the back of penguins. But we've been doing this now for more than a decade to learn where they go. We thought we needed a marine protected area of about 30 kilometers, and then we put a satellite tag on the back of a penguin. And what the penguins show us — and these are all the little dots from where the penguins' positions were for penguins in incubation in 2003 — and what you see is some of these individuals are going 800 kilometers away from their nests. So that means as their mate is sitting on the nest incubating the eggs, the other one is out there foraging, and the longer they have to stay gone, the worse condition the mate is in when the mate comes back. And, of course, all of this then leads to a vicious cycle and you can't raise a lot of chicks. Here you see in 2003 — these are all the dots of where the penguins are — they were raising a little over a half of a chick. Here, you can see in 2006, they raised almost three quarters of a chick per nest, and you can see that they're closer to Punta Tombo; they're not going as far away. This past year, in 2009, you can see that they're now raising about a fourth of a chick, and some of these individuals are going more than 900 kilometers away from their nests. So it's kind of like you having a job in Chicago, and then you get transferred to St. Louis, and your mate is not happy about this because you've got to pay airfare, because you're gone longer. The same thing's true for penguins as well. And they're going about, on average now, 40 kilometers farther than they did a decade ago. We need to be able to get information out to the general public. And so we started a publication with the Society for Conservation that we think presents cutting-edge science in a new, novel way, because we have reporters that are good writers that actually can distill the information and make it accessible to the general public. So if you're interested in cutting-edge science and smarter conservation, you should join with our 11 partners — some of them here in this room, like the Nature Conservancy — and look at this magazine because we need to get information out about conservation to the general public. Lastly I want to say that all of you, probably, have had some relationship at some time in your life with a dog, a cat, some sort of pet, and you recognized that those are individuals. And some of you consider them almost part of your family. If you had a relationship with a penguin, you'd see it in the same sort of way. They're amazing creatures that really change how you view the world because they're not that different from us: They're trying to make a living, they're trying to raise their offspring, they're trying to get on and survive in the world. This is Turbo the Penguin. Turbo's never been fed. He met us and got his name because he started standing under my diesel truck: a turbo truck, so we named him Turbo. Turbo has taken to knocking on the door with his beak, we let him in and he comes in here. And I just wanted to show you what happened one day when Turbo brought in a friend. So this is Turbo. He's coming up to one of my graduate students and flipper patting, which he would do to a female penguin. And you can see, he's not trying to bite. This guy has never been in before and he's trying to figure out, "What is going on? What is this guy doing? This is really pretty weird." And you'll see soon that my graduate student ... and you see, Turbo's pretty intent on his flipper patting. And now he's looking at the other guy, saying, "You are really weird." And now look at this: not friendly. So penguins really differ in their personalities just like our dogs and our cats. We're also trying to collect our information and become more technologically literate. So we're trying to put that in computers in the field. And penguins are always involved in helping us or not helping us in one way or another. This is a radio frequency ID system. You put a little piece of rice in the foot of a penguin that has a barcode, so it tells you who it is. It walks over the pad, and you know who it is. Okay, so here are a few penguins coming in. See, this one's coming back to its nest. They're all coming in at this time, walking across there, just kind of leisurely coming in. Here's a female that's in a hurry. She's got food. She's really rushing back, because it's hot, to try to feed her chicks. And then there's another fellow that will leisurely come by. Look how fat he is. He's walking back to feed his chicks. Then I realize that they're playing king of the box. This is my box up here, and this is the system that works. You can see this penguin, he goes over, he looks at those wires, does not like that wire. He unplugs the wire; we have no data. (Laughter) So, they really are pretty amazing creatures. OK. Most important thing is: Only you can change yourself, and only you can change the world and make it better, for people as well as penguins. So, thank you very much. (Applause)

Planning for the end of oil

{0: "Richard Sears thinks hard about the post-oil world. He's a visiting scientist at MIT, after a long career as a VP at Shell."}

TED2010

For the next few minutes we're going to talk about energy, and it's going to be a bit of a varied talk. I'll try to spin a story about energy, and oil's a convenient starting place. The talk will be broadly about energy, but oil's a good place to start. And one of the reasons is this is remarkable stuff. You take about eight or so carbon atoms, about 20 hydrogen atoms, you put them together in exactly the right way and you get this marvelous liquid: very energy-dense and very easy to refine into a number of very useful products and fuels. It's great stuff. Now, as far as it goes, there's a lot of oil out there in the world. Here's my little pocket map of where it's all located. A bigger one for you to look at. But this is it, this is the oil in the world. Geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is. This is about 100 trillion gallons of crude oil still to be developed and produced in the world today. Now, that's just one story about oil, and we could end it there and say, "Well, oil's going to last forever because, well, there's just a lot of it." But there's actually more to the story than that. Oh, by the way, if you think you're very far from some of this oil, 1000 meters below where you're all sitting is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world. Come talk to me about it, I'll fill in some of the details if you want. So, that's one of the stories of oil; there's just a lot of it. But what about oil? Where is it in the energy system? Here's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil, and it's been a dominant part of our energy system for most of those 150 years. Now, here's another little secret I'm going to tell you about: For the last 25 years, oil has been playing less and less of a role in global energy systems. There was one kind of peak oil in 1985, when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply. Now, it's about 35 percent. It's been declining and I believe it will continue to decline. Gasoline consumption in the U.S. probably peaked in 2007 and is declining. So oil is playing a less significant role every year. And so, 25 years ago, there was a peak oil; just like, in the 1920s, there was a peak coal; and a hundred years before that, there was a peak wood. This is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems. And what's been taking up the slack in the last few decades? Well, a lot of natural gas and a little bit of nuclear, for starters. And what goes on in the future? Well, I think out ahead of us a few decades is peak gas, and beyond that, peak renewables. Now, I'll tell you another little, very important story about this picture. Now, I'm not pretending that energy use in total isn't increasing, it is — that's another part of the story. Come talk to me about it, we'll fill in some of the details — but there's a very important message here: This is 200 years of history, and for 200 years we've been systematically decarbonizing our energy system. Energy systems of the world becoming progressively — year on year, decade on decade, century on century — becoming less carbon intense. And that continues into the future with the renewables that we're developing today, reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy by mid century. Now that might be the end of the story — Okay, we just replace it all with conventional renewables — but I think, actually, there's more to the story than that. And to tell the next part of the story — and this is looking out say 2100 and beyond. What is the future of truly sustainable, carbon-free energy? Well, we have to take a little excursion, and we'll start in central Texas. Here's a piece of limestone. I picked it up outside of Marble Falls, Texas. It's about 400 million years old. And it's just limestone, nothing really special about it. Now, here's a piece of chalk. I picked this up at MIT. It's a little younger. And it's different than this limestone, you can see that. You wouldn't build a building out of this stuff, and you wouldn't try to give a lecture and write on the chalkboard with this. Yeah, it's very different — no, it's not different. It's not different, it's the same stuff: calcium carbonate, calcium carbonate. What's different is how the molecules are put together. Now, if you think that's kind of neat, the story gets really neat right now. Off the coast of California comes this: It's an abalone shell. Now, millions of abalone every year make this shell. Oh, by the way, just in case you weren't already guessing, it's calcium carbonate. It's the same stuff as this and the same stuff as this. But it's not the same stuff; it's different. It's thousands of times, maybe 3,000 times tougher than this. And why? Because the lowly abalone is able to lay down the calcium carbonate crystals in layers, making this beautiful, iridescent mother of pearl. Very specialized material that the abalone self-assembles, millions of abalone, all the time, every day, every year. This is pretty incredible stuff. All the same, what's different? How the molecules are put together. Now, what does this have to do with energy? Here's a piece of coal. And I'll suggest that this coal is about as exciting as this chalk. Now, whether we're talking about fuels or energy carriers, or perhaps novel materials for batteries or fuel cells, nature hasn't ever built those perfect materials yet because nature didn't need to. Nature didn't need to because, unlike the abalone shell, the survival of a species didn't depend on building those materials, until maybe now when it might just matter. So, when we think about the future of energy, imagine what would it be like if instead of this, we could build the energy equivalent of this just by rearranging the molecules differently. And so that is my story. The oil will never run out. It's not because we have a lot of it. It's not because we're going to build a bajillion windmills. It's because, well, thousands of years ago, people invented ideas — they had ideas, innovations, technology — and the Stone Age ended, not because we ran out of stones. (Laughter) It's ideas, it's innovation, it's technology that will end the age of oil, long before we run out of oil. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Watch me unveil "synthetic life"

{0: "In 2001, Craig Venter made headlines for sequencing the human genome. In 2003, he started mapping the ocean's biodiversity. And now he's created the first synthetic lifeforms -- microorganisms that can produce alternative fuels."}

TED in the Field

We're here today to announce the first synthetic cell, a cell made by starting with the digital code in the computer, building the chromosome from four bottles of chemicals, assembling that chromosome in yeast, transplanting it into a recipient bacterial cell and transforming that cell into a new bacterial species. So this is the first self-replicating species that we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer. It also is the first species to have its own website encoded in its genetic code. But we'll talk more about the watermarks in a minute. This is a project that had its inception 15 years ago when our team then — we called the institute TIGR — was involved in sequencing the first two genomes in history. We did Haemophilus influenzae and then the smallest genome of a self-replicating organism, that of Mycoplasma genitalium. And as soon as we had these two sequences we thought, if this is supposed to be the smallest genome of a self-replicating species, could there be even a smaller genome? Could we understand the basis of cellular life at the genetic level? It's been a 15-year quest just to get to the starting point now to be able to answer those questions, because it's very difficult to eliminate multiple genes from a cell. You can only do them one at a time. We decided early on that we had to take a synthetic route, even though nobody had been there before, to see if we could synthesize a bacterial chromosome so we could actually vary the gene content to understand the essential genes for life. That started our 15-year quest to get here. But before we did the first experiments, we actually asked Art Caplan's team at the University of Pennsylvania to undertake a review of what the risks, the challenges, the ethics around creating new species in the laboratory were because it hadn't been done before. They spent about two years reviewing that independently and published their results in Science in 1999. Ham and I took two years off as a side project to sequence the human genome, but as soon as that was done we got back to the task at hand. In 2002, we started a new institute, the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, where we set out two goals: One, to understand the impact of our technology on the environment, and how to understand the environment better, and two, to start down this process of making synthetic life to understand basic life. In 2003, we published our first success. So Ham Smith and Clyde Hutchison developed some new methods for making error-free DNA at a small level. Our first task was a 5,000-letter code bacteriophage, a virus that attacks only E. coli. So that was the phage phi X 174, which was chosen for historical reasons. It was the first DNA phage, DNA virus, DNA genome that was actually sequenced. So once we realized that we could make 5,000-base pair viral-sized pieces, we thought, we at least have the means then to try and make serially lots of these pieces to be able to eventually assemble them together to make this mega base chromosome. So, substantially larger than we even thought we would go initially. There were several steps to this. There were two sides: We had to solve the chemistry for making large DNA molecules, and we had to solve the biological side of how, if we had this new chemical entity, how would we boot it up, activate it in a recipient cell. We had two teams working in parallel: one team on the chemistry, and the other on trying to be able to transplant entire chromosomes to get new cells. When we started this out, we thought the synthesis would be the biggest problem, which is why we chose the smallest genome. And some of you have noticed that we switched from the smallest genome to a much larger one. And we can walk through the reasons for that, but basically the small cell took on the order of one to two months to get results from, whereas the larger, faster-growing cell takes only two days. So there's only so many cycles we could go through in a year at six weeks per cycle. And you should know that basically 99, probably 99 percent plus of our experiments failed. So this was a debugging, problem-solving scenario from the beginning because there was no recipe of how to get there. So, one of the most important publications we had was in 2007. Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another. I think philosophically, that was one of the most important papers that we've ever done because it showed how dynamic life was. And we knew, once that worked, that we actually had a chance if we could make the synthetic chromosomes to do the same with those. We didn't know that it was going to take us several years more to get there. In 2008, we reported the complete synthesis of the Mycoplasma genitalium genome, a little over 500,000 letters of genetic code, but we have not yet succeeded in booting up that chromosome. We think in part, because of its slow growth and, in part, cells have all kinds of unique defense mechanisms to keep these events from happening. It turned out the cell that we were trying to transplant into had a nuclease, an enzyme that chews up DNA on its surface, and was happy to eat the synthetic DNA that we gave it and never got transplantations. But at the time, that was the largest molecule of a defined structure that had been made. And so both sides were progressing, but part of the synthesis had to be accomplished or was able to be accomplished using yeast, putting the fragments in yeast and yeast would assemble these for us. It's an amazing step forward, but we had a problem because now we had the bacterial chromosomes growing in yeast. So in addition to doing the transplant, we had to find out how to get a bacterial chromosome out of the eukaryotic yeast into a form where we could transplant it into a recipient cell. So our team developed new techniques for actually growing, cloning entire bacterial chromosomes in yeast. So we took the same mycoides genome that Carole had initially transplanted, and we grew that in yeast as an artificial chromosome. And we thought this would be a great test bed for learning how to get chromosomes out of yeast and transplant them. When we did these experiments, though, we could get the chromosome out of yeast but it wouldn't transplant and boot up a cell. That little issue took the team two years to solve. It turns out, the DNA in the bacterial cell was actually methylated, and the methylation protects it from the restriction enzyme, from digesting the DNA. So what we found is if we took the chromosome out of yeast and methylated it, we could then transplant it. Further advances came when the team removed the restriction enzyme genes from the recipient capricolum cell. And once we had done that, now we can take naked DNA out of yeast and transplant it. So last fall when we published the results of that work in Science, we all became overconfident and were sure we were only a few weeks away from being able to now boot up a chromosome out of yeast. Because of the problems with Mycoplasma genitalium and its slow growth about a year and a half ago, we decided to synthesize the much larger chromosome, the mycoides chromosome, knowing that we had the biology worked out on that for transplantation. And Dan led the team for the synthesis of this over one-million-base pair chromosome. But it turned out it wasn't going to be as simple in the end, and it set us back three months because we had one error out of over a million base pairs in that sequence. So the team developed new debugging software, where we could test each synthetic fragment to see if it would grow in a background of wild type DNA. And we found that 10 out of the 11 100,000-base pair pieces we synthesized were completely accurate and compatible with a life-forming sequence. We narrowed it down to one fragment; we sequenced it and found just one base pair had been deleted in an essential gene. So accuracy is essential. There's parts of the genome where it cannot tolerate even a single error, and then there's parts of the genome where we can put in large blocks of DNA, as we did with the watermarks, and it can tolerate all kinds of errors. So it took about three months to find that error and repair it. And then early one morning, at 6 a.m. we got a text from Dan saying that, now, the first blue colonies existed. So, it's been a long route to get here: 15 years from the beginning. We felt one of the tenets of this field was to make absolutely certain we could distinguish synthetic DNA from natural DNA. Early on, when you're working in a new area of science, you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you hadn't, and, even worse, leading others to believe it. So, we thought the worst problem would be a single molecule contamination of the native chromosome, leading us to believe that we actually had created a synthetic cell, when it would have been just a contaminant. So early on, we developed the notion of putting in watermarks in the DNA to absolutely make clear that the DNA was synthetic. And the first chromosome we built in 2008 — the 500,000-base pair one — we simply assigned the names of the authors of the chromosome into the genetic code, but it was using just amino acid single letter translations, which leaves out certain letters of the alphabet. So the team actually developed a new code within the code within the code. So it's a new code for interpreting and writing messages in DNA. Now, mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions. So the code that Mike Montague and the team developed actually puts frequent stop codons, so it's a different alphabet but allows us to use the entire English alphabet with punctuation and numbers. So, there are four major watermarks all over 1,000 base pairs of genetic code. The first one actually contains within it this code for interpreting the rest of the genetic code. So in the remaining information, in the watermarks, contain the names of, I think it's 46 different authors and key contributors to getting the project to this stage. And we also built in a website address so that if somebody decodes the code within the code within the code, they can send an email to that address. So it's clearly distinguishable from any other species, having 46 names in it, its own web address. And we added three quotations, because with the first genome we were criticized for not trying to say something more profound than just signing the work. So we won't give the rest of the code, but we will give the three quotations. The first is, "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph and to recreate life out of life." It's a James Joyce quote. The second quotation is, "See things not as they are, but as they might be." It's a quote from the "American Prometheus" book on Robert Oppenheimer. And the last one is a Richard Feynman quote: "What I cannot build, I cannot understand." So, because this is as much a philosophical advance as a technical advance in science, we tried to deal with both the philosophical and the technical side. The last thing I want to say before turning it over to questions is that the extensive work that we've done — asking for ethical review, pushing the envelope on that side as well as the technical side — this has been broadly discussed in the scientific community, in the policy community and at the highest levels of the federal government. Even with this announcement, as we did in 2003 — that work was funded by the Department of Energy, so the work was reviewed at the level of the White House, trying to decide whether to classify the work or publish it. And they came down on the side of open publication, which is the right approach — we've briefed the White House, we've briefed members of Congress, we've tried to take and push the policy issues in parallel with the scientific advances. So with that, I would like to open it first to the floor for questions. Yes, in the back. Reporter: Could you explain, in layman's terms, how significant a breakthrough this is please? Craig Venter: Can we explain how significant this is? I'm not sure we're the ones that should be explaining how significant it is. It's significant to us. Perhaps it's a giant philosophical change in how we view life. We actually view it as a baby step in terms of, it's taken us 15 years to be able to do the experiment we wanted to do 15 years ago on understanding life at its basic level. But we actually believe this is going to be a very powerful set of tools and we're already starting in numerous avenues to use this tool. We have, at the Institute, ongoing funding now from NIH in a program with Novartis to try and use these new synthetic DNA tools to perhaps make the flu vaccine that you might get next year. Because instead of taking weeks to months to make these, Dan's team can now make these in less than 24 hours. So when you see how long it took to get an H1N1 vaccine out, we think we can shorten that process quite substantially. In the vaccine area, Synthetic Genomics and the Institute are forming a new vaccine company because we think these tools can affect vaccines to diseases that haven't been possible to date, things where the viruses rapidly evolve, such with rhinovirus. Wouldn't it be nice to have something that actually blocked common colds? Or, more importantly, HIV, where the virus evolves so quickly the vaccines that are made today can't keep up with those evolutionary changes. Also, at Synthetic Genomics, we've been working on major environmental issues. I think this latest oil spill in the Gulf is a reminder. We can't see CO2 — we depend on scientific measurements for it and we see the beginning results of having too much of it — but we can see pre-CO2 now floating on the waters and contaminating the beaches in the Gulf. We need some alternatives for oil. We have a program with Exxon Mobile to try and develop new strains of algae that can efficiently capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or from concentrated sources, make new hydrocarbons that can go into their refineries to make normal gasoline and diesel fuel out of CO2. Those are just a couple of the approaches and directions that we're taking. (Applause)

Bring on the learning revolution!

{0: "Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. "}

TED2010

I was here four years ago, and I remember, at the time, that the talks weren't put online. I think they were given to TEDsters in a box, a box set of DVDs, which they put on their shelves, where they are now. (Laughter) And actually, Chris called me a week after I'd given my talk, and said, "We're going to start putting them online. Can we put yours online?" And I said, "Sure." And four years later, it's been downloaded four million times. So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something to get the number of people who've seen it. And, as Chris says, there is a hunger for videos of me. (Laughter) (Applause) Don't you feel? (Laughter) So, this whole event has been an elaborate build-up to me doing another one for you, so here it is. (Laughter) Al Gore spoke at the TED conference I spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis. And I referenced that at the end of my last talk. So I want to pick up from there because I only had 18 minutes, frankly. (Laughter) So, as I was saying — (Laughter) You see, he's right. I mean, there is a major climate crisis, obviously, and I think if people don't believe it, they should get out more. (Laughter) But I believe there is a second climate crisis, which is as severe, which has the same origins, and that we have to deal with with the same urgency. And you may say, by the way, "Look, I'm good. I have one climate crisis, I don't really need the second one." (Laughter) But this is a crisis of, not natural resources — though I believe that's true — but a crisis of human resources. I believe fundamentally, as many speakers have said during the past few days, that we make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. I meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything. Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now. Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, "There are two types of people in this world: those who divide the world into two types and those who do not." (Laughter) Well, I do. (Laughter) I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you're talking about. It isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people. And I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often, it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need — and the word's been used many times in the past few days — is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else. (Applause) One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard, because it means doing something that people don't find very easy, for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense. Things that people think, "It can't be done differently, that's how it's done." I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln, who I thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point. (Laughter) He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress. I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time. We don't teach American history in Britain. (Laughter) We suppress it. You know, this is our policy. (Laughter) No doubt, something fascinating was happening then, which the Americans among us will be aware of. But he said this: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion." I love that. Not rise to it, rise with it. "As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." I love that word, "disenthrall." You know what it means? That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to, which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things, the way things are. And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them. Now, doing this is easier said than done. It's very hard to know, by the way, what it is you take for granted. And the reason is that you take it for granted. (Laughter) Let me ask you something you may take for granted. How many of you here are over the age of 25? That's not what you take for granted, I'm sure you're familiar with that. Are there any people here under the age of 25? Great. Now, those over 25, could you put your hands up if you're wearing your wristwatch? Now that's a great deal of us, isn't it? Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing. Teenagers do not wear wristwatches. I don't mean they can't, they just often choose not to. And the reason is we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us over 25. And so for us, if you want to know the time, you have to wear something to tell it. Kids now live in a world which is digitized, and the time, for them, is everywhere. They see no reason to do this. And by the way, you don't need either; it's just that you've always done it and you carry on doing it. My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who's 20. She doesn't see the point. As she says, "It's a single-function device." (Laughter) "Like, how lame is that?" And I say, "No, no, it tells the date as well." (Laughter) "It has multiple functions." (Laughter) But, you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education. A couple of examples. One of them is the idea of linearity: that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who's spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story: that life is not linear; it's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But, you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college. Certain sorts of college. I don't mean you shouldn't go, but not everybody needs to go, or go now. Maybe they go later, not right away. And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing. There was this guy buying a book, he was in his 30s. I said, "What do you do?" And he said, "I'm a fireman." I asked, "How long have you been a fireman?" "Always. I've always been a fireman." "Well, when did you decide?" He said, "As a kid. Actually, it was a problem for me at school, because at school, everybody wanted to be a fireman." (Laughter) He said, "But I wanted to be a fireman." And he said, "When I got to the senior year of school, my teachers didn't take it seriously. This one teacher didn't take it seriously. He said I was throwing my life away if that's all I chose to do with it; that I should go to college, I should become a professional person, that I had great potential and I was wasting my talent to do that." He said, "It was humiliating. It was in front of the whole class and I felt dreadful. But it's what I wanted, and as soon as I left school, I applied to the fire service and I was accepted. You know, I was thinking about that guy recently, just a few minutes ago when you were speaking, about this teacher, because six months ago, I saved his life." (Laughter) He said, "He was in a car wreck, and I pulled him out, gave him CPR, and I saved his wife's life as well." He said, "I think he thinks better of me now." (Laughter) (Applause) You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. And at the heart of our challenges — (Applause) At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. This linearity thing is a problem. When I arrived in L.A. about nine years ago, I came across a policy statement — very well-intentioned — which said, "College begins in kindergarten." No, it doesn't. (Laughter) It doesn't. If we had time, I could go into this, but we don't. (Laughter) Kindergarten begins in kindergarten. (Laughter) A friend of mine once said, "A three year-old is not half a six year-old." (Laughter) (Applause) They're three. But as we just heard in this last session, there's such competition now to get into kindergarten — to get to the right kindergarten — that people are being interviewed for it at three. Kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels, you know, with their resumes — (Laughter) Flicking through and saying, "What, this is it?" (Laughter) (Applause) "You've been around for 36 months, and this is it?" (Laughter) "You've achieved nothing — commit. (Laughter) Spent the first six months breastfeeding, I can see." (Laughter) See, it's outrageous as a conception. The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. There are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other is like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. (Applause) We have to recognize a couple of things here. One is that human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes. I worked out recently that I was given a guitar as a kid at about the same time that Eric Clapton got his first guitar. (Laughter) It worked out for Eric, that's all I'm saying. (Laughter) In a way — it did not for me. I could not get this thing to work no matter how often or how hard I blew into it. It just wouldn't work. (Laughter) But it's not only about that. It's about passion. Often, people are good at things they don't really care for. It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. And if you're doing the thing that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes a different course entirely. My wife's just finished writing a novel, and I think it's a great book, but she disappears for hours on end. You know this, if you're doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour. And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion. So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish. So when we look at reforming education and transforming it, it isn't like cloning a system. There are great ones, like KIPP's; it's a great system. There are many great models. It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching. And doing that, I think, is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum. Now in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the Internet. These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. And I urge you to get involved in it because it's vital, not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. But we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. That's where children experience life. Or at home, if that's what they choose, to be educated with their families or friends. There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of these few days. And I wanted to just very quickly — I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems. I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W. B. Yeats, who some of you may know. He wrote this to his love, Maud Gonne, and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him. And he says, "I've got something else, but it may not be for you." He says this: "Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Lessons from fashion's free culture

{0: 'Johanna Blakley studies the impact of mass media and entertainment on our world.'}

TEDxUSC

I heard this amazing story about Miuccia Prada. She's an Italian fashion designer. She goes to this vintage store in Paris with a friend of hers. She's rooting around, she finds this one jacket by Balenciaga — she loves it. She's turning it inside out. She's looking at the seams. She's looking at the construction. Her friend says, "Buy it already." She said, "I'll buy it, but I'm also going to replicate it." Now, the academics in this audience may think, "Well, that sounds like plagiarism." But to a fashionista, what it really is is a sign of Prada's genius: that she can root through the history of fashion and pick the one jacket that doesn't need to be changed by one iota, and to be current and to be now. You might also be asking whether it's possible that this is illegal for her to do this. Well, it turns out that it's actually not illegal. In the fashion industry, there's very little intellectual property protection. They have trademark protection, but no copyright protection and no patent protection to speak of. All they have, really, is trademark protection, and so it means that anybody could copy any garment on any person in this room and sell it as their own design. The only thing that they can't copy is the actual trademark label within that piece of apparel. That's one reason that you see logos splattered all over these products. It's because it's a lot harder for knock-off artists to knock off these designs because they can't knock off the logo. But if you go to Santee Alley, yeah. (Laughter) Well, yeah. Canal Street, I know. And sometimes these are fun, right? Now, the reason for this, the reason that the fashion industry doesn't have any copyright protection is because the courts decided long ago that apparel is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection. They didn't want a handful of designers owning the seminal building blocks of our clothing. And then everybody else would have to license this cuff or this sleeve because Joe Blow owns it. But too utilitarian? I mean is that the way you think of fashion? This is Vivienne Westwood. No! We think of it as maybe too silly, too unnecessary. Now, those of you who are familiar with the logic behind copyright protection — which is that without ownership, there is no incentive to innovate — might be really surprised by both the critical success of the fashion industry and the economic success of this industry. What I'm going to argue today is that because there's no copyright protection in the fashion industry, fashion designers have actually been able to elevate utilitarian design, things to cover our naked bodies, into something that we consider art. Because there's no copyright protection in this industry, there's a very open and creative ecology of creativity. Unlike their creative brothers and sisters, who are sculptors or photographers or filmmakers or musicians, fashion designers can sample from all their peers' designs. They can take any element from any garment from the history of fashion and incorporate it into their own design. They're also notorious for riffing off of the zeitgeist. And here, I suspect, they were influenced by the costumes in Avatar. Maybe just a little. Can't copyright a costume either. Now, fashion designers have the broadest palette imaginable in this creative industry. This wedding dress here is actually made of sporks, and this dress is actually made of aluminum. I've heard this dress actually sort of sounds like wind chimes as they walk through. So, one of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying, which is really what it is, is the establishment of trends. People think this is a magical thing. How does it happen? Well, it's because it's legal for people to copy one another. Some people believe that there are a few people at the top of the fashion food chain who sort of dictate to us what we're all going to wear, but if you talk to any designer at any level, including these high-end designers, they always say their main inspiration comes from the street: where people like you and me remix and match our own fashion looks. And that's where they really get a lot of their creative inspiration, so it's both a top-down and a bottom-up kind of industry. Now, the fast fashion giants have probably benefited the most from the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry. They are notorious for knocking off high-end designs and selling them at very low prices. And they've been faced with a lot of lawsuits, but those lawsuits are usually not won by fashion designers. The courts have said over and over again, "You don't need any more intellectual property protection." When you look at copies like this, you wonder: How do the luxury high-end brands remain in business? If you can get it for 200 bucks, why pay a thousand? Well, that's one reason we had a conference here at USC a few years ago. We invited Tom Ford to come — the conference was called, "Ready to Share: Fashion and the Ownership of Creativity" — and we asked him exactly this question. Here's what he had to say. He had just come off a successful stint as the lead designer at Gucci, in case you didn't know. Tom Ford: And we found after much research that — actually not much research, quite simple research — that the counterfeit customer was not our customer. Johanna Blakley: Imagine that. The people on Santee Alley are not the ones who shop at Gucci. (Laughter) This is a very different demographic. And, you know, a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design, at least in terms of the materials; they're always made of cheaper materials. But even sometimes a cheaper version can actually have some charming aspects, can breathe a little extra life into a dying trend. There's lots of virtues of copying. One that a lot of cultural critics have pointed to is that we now have a much broader palette of design choices to choose from than we ever have before, and this is mainly because of the fast fashion industry, actually. And this is a good thing. We need lots of options. Fashion, whether you like it or not, helps you project who you are to the world. Because of fast fashion, global trends actually get established much more quickly than they used to. And this, actually, is good news to trendsetters; they want trends to be set so that they can move product. For fashionistas, they want to stay ahead of the curve. They don't want to be wearing what everybody else is wearing. And so, they want to move on to the next trend as soon as possible. I tell you, there is no rest for the fashionable. Every season, these designers have to struggle to come up with the new fabulous idea that everybody's going to love. And this, let me tell you, is very good for the bottom line. Now of course, there's a bunch of effects that this culture of copying has on the creative process. And Stuart Weitzman is a very successful shoe designer. He has complained a lot about people copying him, but in one interview I read, he said it has really forced him to up his game. He had to come up with new ideas, new things that would be hard to copy. He came up with this Bowden-wedge heel that has to be made out of steel or titanium; if you make it from some sort of cheaper material, it'll actually crack in two. It forced him to be a little more innovative. (Music) And that actually reminded me of jazz great, Charlie Parker. I don't know if you've heard this anecdote, but I have. He said that one of the reasons he invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians wouldn't be able to replicate the sound. (Laughter) He wanted to make it too difficult to copy, and that's what fashion designers are doing all the time. They're trying to put together a signature look, an aesthetic that reflects who they are. When people knock it off, everybody knows because they've put that look out on the runway, and it's a coherent aesthetic. I love these Gallianos. Okay, we'll move on. (Laughter) This is not unlike the world of comedy. I don't know if you know that jokes also can't be copyright protected. So when one-liners were really popular, everybody stole them from one another. But now, we have a different kind of comic. They develop a persona, a signature style, much like fashion designers. And their jokes, much like the fashion designs by a fashion designer, really only work within that aesthetic. If somebody steals a joke from Larry David, for instance, it's not as funny. Now, the other thing that fashion designers have done to survive in this culture of copying is they've learned how to copy themselves. They knock themselves off. They make deals with the fast fashion giants and they come up with a way to sell their product to a whole new demographic: the Santee Alley demographic. Now, some fashion designers will say, "It's only in the United States that we don't have any respect. In other countries there is protection for our artful designs." But if you take a look at the two other biggest markets in the world, it turns out that the protection that's offered is really ineffectual. In Japan, for instance, which I think is the third largest market, they have a design law; it protects apparel, but the novelty standard is so high, you have to prove that your garment has never existed before, it's totally unique. And that's sort of like the novelty standard for a U.S. patent, which fashion designers never get — rarely get here in the states. In the European Union, they went in the other direction. Very low novelty standard, anybody can register anything. But even though it's the home of the fast fashion industry and you have a lot of luxury designers there, they don't register their garments, generally, and there's not a lot of litigation. It turns out it's because the novelty standard is too low. A person can come in and take somebody else's gown, cut off three inches from the bottom, go to the E.U. and register it as a new, original design. So, that does not stop the knock-off artists. If you look at the registry, actually, a lot of the registered things in the E.U. are Nike T-shirts that are almost identical to one another. But this has not stopped Diane von Furstenberg. She is the head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and she has told her constituency that she is going to get copyright protection for fashion designs. The retailers have kind of quashed this notion though. I don't think the legislation is going anywhere, because they realized it is so hard to tell the difference between a pirated design and something that's just part of a global trend. Who owns a look? That is a very difficult question to answer. It takes lots of lawyers and lots of court time, and the retailers decided that would be way too expensive. You know, it's not just the fashion industry that doesn't have copyright protection. There's a bunch of other industries that don't have copyright protection, including the food industry. You cannot copyright a recipe because it's a set of instructions, it's fact, and you cannot copyright the look and feel of even the most unique dish. Same with automobiles. It doesn't matter how wacky they look or how cool they look, you cannot copyright the sculptural design. It's a utilitarian article, that's why. Same with furniture, it's too utilitarian. Magic tricks, I think they're instructions, sort of like recipes: no copyright protection. Hairdos, no copyright protection. Open source software, these guys decided they didn't want copyright protection. They thought it'd be more innovative without it. It's really hard to get copyright for databases. Tattoo artists, they don't want it; it's not cool. They share their designs. Jokes, no copyright protection. Fireworks displays, the rules of games, the smell of perfume: no. And some of these industries may seem sort of marginal to you, but these are the gross sales for low I.P. industries, industries with very little copyright protection, and there's the gross sales of films and books. (Applause) It ain't pretty. (Applause) So you talk to people in the fashion industry and they're like, "Shhh! Don't tell anybody we can actually steal from each other's designs. It's embarrassing." But you know what? It's revolutionary, and it's a model that a lot of other industries — like the ones we just saw with the really small bars — they might have to think about this. Because right now, those industries with a lot of copyright protection are operating in an atmosphere where it's as if they don't have any protection, and they don't know what to do. When I found out that there are a whole bunch of industries that didn't have copyright protection, I thought, "What exactly is the underlying logic? I want a picture." And the lawyers do not provide a picture, so I made one. These are the two main sort of binary oppositions within the logic of copyright law. It is more complex than this, but this will do. First: Is something an artistic object? Then it deserves protection. Is it a utilitarian object? Then no, it does not deserve protection. This is a difficult, unstable binary. The other one is: Is it an idea? Is it something that needs to freely circulate in a free society? No protection. Or is it a physically fixed expression of an idea: something that somebody made and they deserve to own it for a while and make money from it? The problem is that digital technology has completely subverted the logic of this physically fixed, expression versus idea concept. Nowadays, we don't really recognize a book as something that sits on our shelf or music as something that is a physical object that we can hold. It's a digital file. It is barely tethered to any sort of physical reality in our minds. And these things, because we can copy and transmit them so easily, actually circulate within our culture a lot more like ideas than like physically instantiated objects. Now, the conceptual issues are truly profound when you talk about creativity and ownership and, let me tell you, we don't want to leave this just to lawyers to figure out. They're smart. I'm with one. He's my boyfriend, he's okay. He's smart, he's smart. But you want an interdisciplinary team of people hashing this out, trying to figure out: What is the kind of ownership model, in a digital world, that's going to lead to the most innovation? And my suggestion is that fashion might be a really good place to start looking for a model for creative industries in the future. If you want more information about this research project, please visit our website: it's ReadyToShare.org. And I really want to thank Veronica Jauriqui for making this very fashionable presentation. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Inside a school for suicide bombers

{0: 'TED Fellow Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy seeks to push people to have difficult conversations about inequality and injustice.'}

TED2010

Today, I want you to look at children who become suicide bombers through a completely different lens. In 2009, there were 500 bomb blasts across Pakistan. I spent the year working with children who were training to become suicide bombers and with Taliban recruiters, trying to understand how the Taliban were converting these children into live ammunition and why these children were actively signing up to their cause. I want you to watch a short video from my latest documentary film, "Children of the Taliban." (Singing) The Taliban now run their own schools. They target poor families and convince the parents to send their children. In return, they provide free food and shelter and sometimes pay the families a monthly stipend. We've obtained a propaganda video made by the Taliban. Young boys are taught justifications for suicide attacks and the execution of spies. I made contact with a child from Swat who studied in a madrassa like this. Hazrat Ali is from a poor farming family in Swat. He joined the Taliban a year ago when he was 13. How do the Taliban in your area get people to join them? Hazrat Ali: They first call us to the mosque and preach to us. Then they take us to a madrassa and teach us things from the Koran. Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: He tells me that children are then given months of military training. HA: They teach us to use machine guns, Kalashnikov, rocket launchers, grenades, bombs. They ask us to use them only against the infidels. Then they teach us to do a suicide attack. SOC: Would you like to carry out a suicide attack? HA: If God gives me strength. SOC: I, in my research, have seen that the Taliban have perfected the way in which they recruit and train children, and I think it's a five-step process. Step one is that the Taliban prey on families that are large, that are poor, that live in rural areas. They separate the parents from the children by promising to provide food, clothing, shelter to these children. Then they ship them off, hundreds of miles away to hard-line schools that run along the Taliban agenda. Step two: They teach the children the Koran, which is Islam's holiest book, in Arabic, a language these children do not understand and cannot speak. They rely very heavily on teachers, who I have personally seen distort the message to these children as and when it suits their purpose to. These children are explicitly forbidden from reading newspapers, listening to radio, reading any books that the teachers do not prescribe them. If any child is found violating these rules, he is severely reprimanded. Effectively, the Taliban create a complete blackout of any other source of information for these children. Step three: The Taliban want these children to hate the world that they currently live in. So they beat these children — I have seen it; they feed them twice a day dried bread and water; they rarely allow them to play games; they tell them that, for eight hours at a time, all they have to do is read the Koran. The children are virtual prisoners; they cannot leave, they cannot go home. Their parents are so poor, they have no resources to get them back. Step four: The older members of the Taliban, the fighters, start talking to the younger boys about the glories of martyrdom. They talk to them about how when they die, they will be received up with lakes of honey and milk, how there will be 72 virgins waiting for them in paradise, how there will be unlimited food, and how this glory is going to propel them to become heroes in their neighborhoods. Effectively, this is the brainwashing process that has begun. Step five: I believe the Taliban have one of the most effective means of propaganda. Their videos that they use are intercut with photographs of men and women and children dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Pakistan. And the basic message is that the Western powers do not care about civilian deaths, so those people who live in areas and support governments that work with Western powers are fair game. That's why Pakistani civilians, over 6,000 of whom have been killed in the last two years alone, are fair game. Now these children are primed to become suicide bombers. They're ready to go out and fight because they've been told that this is effectively their only way to glorify Islam. I want you to watch another excerpt from the film. This boy is called Zenola. He blew himself up, killing six. This boy is called Sadik. He killed 22. This boy is called Messoud. He killed 28. The Taliban are running suicide schools, preparing a generation of boys for atrocities against civilians. Do you want to carry out a suicide attack? Boy: I would love to. But only if I get permission from my dad. When I look at suicide bombers younger than me, or my age, I get so inspired by their terrific attacks. SOC: What blessing would you get from carrying out a suicide attack? Boy: On the day of judgment, God will ask me, "Why did you do that?" I will answer, "My Lord! Only to make you happy! I have laid down my life fighting the infidels." Then God will look at my intention. If my intention was to eradicate evil for Islam, then I will be rewarded with paradise. Singer: ♫ On the day of judgment ♫ ♫ My God will call me ♫ ♫ My body will be put back together ♫ ♫ And God will ask me why I did this ♫ SOC: I leave you all with this thought: If you grew up in these circumstances, faced with these choices, would you choose to live in this world or in the glorious afterlife? As one Taliban recruiter told me, "There will always be sacrificial lambs in this war." Thank you. (Applause)

HIV and flu -- the vaccine strategy

{0: 'Epidemiologist Seth Berkley is leading the charge to make sure vaccines are available to everyone, including those living in the developing world.'}

TED2010

Do you worry about what is going to kill you? Heart disease, cancer, a car accident? Most of us worry about things we can't control, like war, terrorism, the tragic earthquake that just occurred in Haiti. But what really threatens humanity? A few years ago, Professor Vaclav Smil tried to calculate the probability of sudden disasters large enough to change history. He called these, "massively fatal discontinuities," meaning that they could kill up to 100 million people in the next 50 years. He looked at the odds of another world war, of a massive volcanic eruption, even of an asteroid hitting the Earth. But he placed the likelihood of one such event above all others at close to 100 percent, and that is a severe flu pandemic. Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier but the death toll is almost certainly higher. You know, the problem is if this virus occasionally mutates so dramatically, it essentially is a new virus and then we get a pandemic. In 1918, a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people. It spread like wildfire and some died within hours of developing symptoms. Are we safer today? Well, we seem to have dodged the deadly pandemic this year that most of us feared, but this threat could reappear at any time. The good news is that we're at a moment in time when science, technology, globalization is converging to create an unprecedented possibility: the possibility to make history by preventing infectious diseases that still account for one-fifth of all deaths and countless misery on Earth. We can do this. We're already preventing millions of deaths with existing vaccines, and if we get these to more people, we can certainly save more lives. But with new or better vaccines for malaria, TB, HIV, pneumonia, diarrhea, flu, we could end suffering that has been on the Earth since the beginning of time. So, I'm here to trumpet vaccines for you. But first, I have to explain why they're important because vaccines, the power of them, is really like a whisper. When they work, they can make history, but after a while you can barely hear them. Now, some of us are old enough to have a small, circular scar on our arms from an inoculation we received as children. But when was the last time you worried about smallpox, a disease that killed half a billion people last century and no longer is with us? Or polio? How many of you remember the iron lung? We don't see scenes like this anymore because of vaccines. Now, it's interesting because there are 30-odd diseases that can be treated with vaccines now, but we're still threatened by things like HIV and flu. Why is that? Well, here's the dirty little secret. Until recently, we haven't had to know exactly how a vaccine worked. We knew they worked through old-fashioned trial and error. You took a pathogen, you modified it, you injected it into a person or an animal and you saw what happened. This worked well for most pathogens, somewhat well for crafty bugs like flu, but not at all for HIV, for which humans have no natural immunity. So let's explore how vaccines work. They basically create a cache of weapons for your immune system which you can deploy when needed. Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work. Now, let's take a look at a video that we're debuting at TED, for the first time, on how an effective HIV vaccine might work. (Music) Narrator: A vaccine trains the body in advance how to recognize and neutralize a specific invader. After HIV penetrates the body's mucosal barriers, it infects immune cells to replicate. The invader draws the attention of the immune system's front-line troops. Dendritic cells, or macrophages, capture the virus and display pieces of it. Memory cells generated by the HIV vaccine are activated when they learn HIV is present from the front-line troops. These memory cells immediately deploy the exact weapons needed. Memory B cells turn into plasma cells, which produce wave after wave of the specific antibodies that latch onto HIV to prevent it from infecting cells, while squadrons of killer T cells seek out and destroy cells that are already HIV infected. The virus is defeated. Without a vaccine, these responses would have taken more than a week. By that time, the battle against HIV would already have been lost. Seth Berkley: Really cool video, isn't it? The antibodies you just saw in this video, in action, are the ones that make most vaccines work. So the real question then is: How do we ensure that your body makes the exact ones that we need to protect against flu and HIV? The principal challenge for both of these viruses is that they're always changing. So let's take a look at the flu virus. In this rendering of the flu virus, these different colored spikes are what it uses to infect you. And also, what the antibodies use is a handle to essentially grab and neutralize the virus. When these mutate, they change their shape, and the antibodies don't know what they're looking at anymore. So that's why every year you can catch a slightly different strain of flu. It's also why in the spring, we have to make a best guess at which three strains are going to prevail the next year, put those into a single vaccine and rush those into production for the fall. Even worse, the most common influenza — influenza A — also infects animals that live in close proximity to humans, and they can recombine in those particular animals. In addition, wild aquatic birds carry all known strains of influenza. So, you've got this situation: In 2003, we had an H5N1 virus that jumped from birds into humans in a few isolated cases with an apparent mortality rate of 70 percent. Now luckily, that particular virus, although very scary at the time, did not transmit from person to person very easily. This year's H1N1 threat was actually a human, avian, swine mixture that arose in Mexico. It was easily transmitted, but, luckily, was pretty mild. And so, in a sense, our luck is holding out, but you know, another wild bird could fly over at anytime. Now let's take a look at HIV. As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it and it quickly hides itself in your genome. Here's a slide looking at the genetic variation of flu and comparing that to HIV, a much wilder target. In the video a moment ago, you saw fleets of new viruses launching from infected cells. Now realize that in a recently infected person, there are millions of these ships; each one is just slightly different. Finding a weapon that recognizes and sinks all of them makes the job that much harder. Now, in the 27 years since HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, we've developed more drugs to treat HIV than all other viruses put together. These drugs aren't cures, but they represent a huge triumph of science because they take away the automatic death sentence from a diagnosis of HIV, at least for those who can access them. The vaccine effort though is really quite different. Large companies moved away from it because they thought the science was so difficult and vaccines were seen as poor business. Many thought that it was just impossible to make an AIDS vaccine, but today, evidence tells us otherwise. In September, we had surprising but exciting findings from a clinical trial that took place in Thailand. For the first time, we saw an AIDS vaccine work in humans — albeit, quite modestly — and that particular vaccine was made almost a decade ago. Newer concepts and early testing now show even greater promise in the best of our animal models. But in the past few months, researchers have also isolated several new broadly neutralizing antibodies from the blood of an HIV infected individual. Now, what does this mean? We saw earlier that HIV is highly variable, that a broad neutralizing antibody latches on and disables multiple variations of the virus. If you take these and you put them in the best of our monkey models, they provide full protection from infection. In addition, these researchers found a new site on HIV where the antibodies can grab onto, and what's so special about this spot is that it changes very little as the virus mutates. It's like, as many times as the virus changes its clothes, it's still wearing the same socks, and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks. So what we've got is a situation. The Thai results tell us we can make an AIDS vaccine, and the antibody findings tell us how we might do that. This strategy, working backwards from an antibody to create a vaccine candidate, has never been done before in vaccine research. It's called retro-vaccinology, and its implications extend way beyond that of just HIV. So think of it this way. We've got these new antibodies we've identified, and we know that they latch onto many, many variations of the virus. We know that they have to latch onto a specific part, so if we can figure out the precise structure of that part, present that through a vaccine, what we hope is we can prompt your immune system to make these matching antibodies. And that would create a universal HIV vaccine. Now, it sounds easier than it is because the structure actually looks more like this blue antibody diagram attached to its yellow binding site, and as you can imagine, these three-dimensional structures are much harder to work on. And if you guys have ideas to help us solve this, we'd love to hear about it. But, you know, the research that has occurred from HIV now has really helped with innovation with other diseases. So for instance, a biotechnology company has now found broadly neutralizing antibodies to influenza, as well as a new antibody target on the flu virus. They're currently making a cocktail — an antibody cocktail — that can be used to treat severe, overwhelming cases of flu. In the longer term, what they can do is use these tools of retro-vaccinology to make a preventive flu vaccine. Now, retro-vaccinology is just one technique within the ambit of so-called rational vaccine design. Let me give you another example. We talked about before the H and N spikes on the surface of the flu virus. Notice these other, smaller protuberances. These are largely hidden from the immune system. Now it turns out that these spots also don't change much when the virus mutates. If you can cripple these with specific antibodies, you could cripple all versions of the flu. So far, animal tests indicate that such a vaccine could prevent severe disease, although you might get a mild case. So if this works in humans, what we're talking about is a universal flu vaccine, one that doesn't need to change every year and would remove the threat of death. We really could think of flu, then, as just a bad cold. Of course, the best vaccine imaginable is only valuable to the extent we get it to everyone who needs it. So to do that, we have to combine smart vaccine design with smart production methods and, of course, smart delivery methods. So I want you to think back a few months ago. In June, the World Health Organization declared the first global flu pandemic in 41 years. The U.S. government promised 150 million doses of vaccine by October 15th for the flu peak. Vaccines were promised to developing countries. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and flowed to accelerating vaccine manufacturing. So what happened? Well, we first figured out how to make flu vaccines, how to produce them, in the early 1940s. It was a slow, cumbersome process that depended on chicken eggs, millions of living chicken eggs. Viruses only grow in living things, and so it turned out that, for flu, chicken eggs worked really well. For most strains, you could get one to two doses of vaccine per egg. Luckily for us, we live in an era of breathtaking biomedical advances. So today, we get our flu vaccines from ... chicken eggs, (Laughter) hundreds of millions of chicken eggs. Almost nothing has changed. The system is reliable but the problem is you never know how well a strain is going to grow. This year's swine flu strain grew very poorly in early production: basically .6 doses per egg. So, here's an alarming thought. What if that wild bird flies by again? You could see an avian strain that would infect the poultry flocks, and then we would have no eggs for our vaccines. So, Dan [Barber], if you want billions of chicken pellets for your fish farm, I know where to get them. So right now, the world can produce about 350 million doses of flu vaccine for the three strains, and we can up that to about 1.2 billion doses if we want to target a single variant like swine flu. But this assumes that our factories are humming because, in 2004, the U.S. supply was cut in half by contamination at one single plant. And the process still takes more than half a year. So are we better prepared than we were in 1918? Well, with the new technologies emerging now, I hope we can say definitively, "Yes." Imagine we could produce enough flu vaccine for everyone in the entire world for less than half of what we're currently spending now in the United States. With a range of new technologies, we could. Here's an example: A company I'm engaged with has found a specific piece of the H spike of flu that sparks the immune system. If you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium, which creates a vigorous immune response, they've created a very powerful flu fighter. This vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria, E. coli. Now, as you know, bacteria reproduce quickly — it's like making yogurt — and so we could produce enough swine origin flu for the entire world in a few factories, in a few weeks, with no eggs, for a fraction of the cost of current methods. (Applause) So here's a comparison of several of these new vaccine technologies. And, aside from the radically increased production and huge cost savings — for example, the E. coli method I just talked about — look at the time saved: this would be lives saved. The developing world, mostly left out of the current response, sees the potential of these alternate technologies and they're leapfrogging the West. India, Mexico and others are already making experimental flu vaccines, and they may be the first place we see these vaccines in use. Because these technologies are so efficient and relatively cheap, billions of people can have access to lifesaving vaccines if we can figure out how to deliver them. Now think of where this leads us. New infectious diseases appear or reappear every few years. Some day, perhaps soon, we'll have a virus that is going to threaten all of us. Will we be quick enough to react before millions die? Luckily, this year's flu was relatively mild. I say, "luckily" in part because virtually no one in the developing world was vaccinated. So if we have the political and financial foresight to sustain our investments, we will master these and new tools of vaccinology, and with these tools we can produce enough vaccine for everyone at low cost and ensure healthy productive lives. No longer must flu have to kill half a million people a year. No longer does AIDS need to kill two million a year. No longer do the poor and vulnerable need to be threatened by infectious diseases, or indeed, anybody. Instead of having Vaclav Smil's "massively fatal discontinuity" of life, we can ensure the continuity of life. What the world needs now are these new vaccines, and we can make it happen. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So, the science is changing. In your mind, Seth — I mean, you must dream about this — what is the kind of time scale on, let's start with HIV, for a game-changing vaccine that's actually out there and usable? SB: The game change can come at any time, because the problem we have now is we've shown we can get a vaccine to work in humans; we just need a better one. And with these types of antibodies, we know humans can make them. So, if we can figure out how to do that, then we have the vaccine, and what's interesting is there already is some evidence that we're beginning to crack that problem. So, the challenge is full speed ahead. CA: In your gut, do you think it's probably going to be at least another five years? SB: You know, everybody says it's 10 years, but it's been 10 years every 10 years. So I hate to put a timeline on scientific innovation, but the investments that have occurred are now paying dividends. CA: And that's the same with universal flu vaccine, the same kind of thing? SB: I think flu is different. I think what happened with flu is we've got a bunch — I just showed some of this — a bunch of really cool and useful technologies that are ready to go now. They look good. The problem has been that, what we did is we invested in traditional technologies because that's what we were comfortable with. You also can use adjuvants, which are chemicals you mix. That's what Europe is doing, so we could have diluted out our supply of flu and made more available, but, going back to what Michael Specter said, the anti-vaccine crowd didn't really want that to happen. CA: And malaria's even further behind? SB: No, malaria, there is a candidate that actually showed efficacy in an earlier trial and is currently in phase three trials now. It probably isn't the perfect vaccine, but it's moving along. CA: Seth, most of us do work where every month, we produce something; we get that kind of gratification. You've been slaving away at this for more than a decade, and I salute you and your colleagues for what you do. The world needs people like you. Thank you. SB: Thank you. (Applause)

Re-examining the remix

{0: "Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system."}

TEDxNYED

I want to talk about what we learn from conservatives. And I'm at a stage in life where I'm yearning for my old days, so I want to confess to you that when I was a kid, indeed, I was a conservative. I was a Young Republican, a Teenage Republican, a leader in the Teenage Republicans. Indeed, I was the youngest member of any delegation in the 1980 convention that elected Ronald Reagan to be the Republican nominee for president. Now, I know what you're thinking. (Laughter) You're thinking, "That's not what the Internets say." You're thinking, "Wikipedia doesn't say this fact." And indeed, this is just one of the examples of the junk that flows across the tubes in these Internets here. Wikipedia reports that this guy, this former congressman from Erie, Pennsylvania was, at the age of 20, one of the youngest people at the Republican National Convention, but it's just not true. (Laughter) Indeed, it drives me so nuts, let me just change this little fact here. (Laughter) (Applause) All right. Okay, so ... perfect. Perfect. (Laughter) Okay, speaker Lawrence Lessig, right. Okay. Finally, truth will be brought here. Okay, see? It's done. It's almost done. Here we go. "... Youngest Republican," okay, we're finished. That's it. Please save this. Great, here we go. And ... Wikipedia is fixed, finally. Okay, but no, this is really besides the point. (Applause) But the thing I want you to think about when we think about conservatives — not so much this issue of the 1980 convention — the thing to think about is this: They go to church. Now, you know, I mean, a lot of people go to church. I'm not talking about that only conservatives go to church. And I'm not talking about the God thing. I don't want to get into that, you know; that's not my point. They go to church, by which I mean, they do lots of things for free for each other. They hold potluck dinners. Indeed, they sell books about potluck dinners. They serve food to poor people. They share, they give, they give away for free. And it's the very same people leading Wall Street firms who, on Sundays, show up and share. And not only food, right. These very same people are strong believers, in lots of contexts, in the limits on the markets. They are in many important places against markets. Indeed, they, like all of us, celebrate this kind of relationship. But they're very keen that we don't let money drop into that relationship, else it turns into something like this. They want to regulate us, those conservatives, to stop us from allowing the market to spread in those places. Because they understand: There are places for the market and places where the market should not exist, where we should be free to enjoy the fellowship of others. They recognize: Both of these things have to live together. And the second great thing about conservatives: they get ecology. Right, it was the first great Republican president of the 20th century who taught us about environmental thinking — Teddy Roosevelt. They first taught us about ecology in the context of natural resources. And then they began to teach us in the context of innovation, economics. They understand, in that context, "free." They understand "free" is an important essential part of the cultural ecology as well. That's the thing I want you to think about them. Now, I know you don't believe me, really, here. So here's exhibit number one. I want to share with you my latest hero, Julian Sanchez, a libertarian who works at the, for many people, "evil" Cato Institute. Okay, so Julian made this video. He's a terrible producer of videos, but it's great content, so I'm going to give you a little bit of it. So here he is beginning. Julian Sanchez: I'm going to make an observation about the way remix culture seems to be evolving ... Larry Lessig: So what he does is he begins to tell us about these three videos. This is this fantastic Brat Pack remix set to Lisztomania. Which, of course, spread virally. Hugely successful. (Music) And then some people from Brooklyn saw it. They decided they wanted to do the same. (Music) And then, of course, people from San Fransisco saw it. And San Franciscans thought they had to do the same as well. (Music) And so they're beautiful, but this libertarian has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this. Here's lesson number one. JS: There's obviously also something really deeply great about this. They are acting in the sense that they're emulating the original mashup. And the guy who shot it obviously has a strong eye and some experience with video editing. But this is also basically just a group of friends having an authentic social moment and screwing around together. It should feel familiar and kind of resonate for anyone who's had a sing-a-long or a dance party with a group of good friends. LL: Or ... JS: So that's importantly different from the earlier videos we looked at because here, remix isn't just about an individual doing something alone in his basement; it becomes an act of social creativity. And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art. LL: And so then, what this libertarian draws from these two points ... JS: One remix is about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience. Stage two, social remix, is really about using it to mediate people's relationships to each other. First, within each video, the Brat Pack characters are used as a kind of template for performing the social reality of each group. But there's also a dialogue between the videos, where, once the basic structure is established, it becomes a kind of platform for articulating the similarities and differences between the groups' social and physical worlds. LL: And then, here's for me, the critical key to what Julian has to say ... JS: Copyright policy isn't just about how to incentivize the production of a certain kind of artistic commodity; it's about what level of control we're going to permit to be exercised over our social realities — social realities that are now inevitably permeated by pop culture. I think it's important that we keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind. If we're only focused on how to maximize the supply of one, I think we risk suppressing this different and richer and, in some ways, maybe even more important one. LL: Right. Bingo. Point. Freedom needs this opportunity to both have the commercial success of the great commercial works and the opportunity to build this different kind of culture. And for that to happen, you need ideas like fair use to be central and protected, to enable this kind of innovation, as this libertarian tells us, between these two creative cultures, a commercial and a sharing culture. The point is they, he, here, gets that culture. Now, my concern is, we Dems, too often, not so much. All right, take for example this great company. In the good old days when this Republican ran that company, their greatest work was work that built on the past, right. All of the great Disney works were works that took works that were in the public domain and remixed them, or waited until they entered the public domain to remix them, to celebrate this add-on remix creativity. Indeed, Mickey Mouse himself, of course, as "Steamboat Willie," is a remix of the then, very dominant, very popular "Steamboat Bill" by Buster Keaton. This man was a remixer extraordinaire. He is the celebration and ideal of exactly this kind of creativity. But then the company passes through this dark stage to this Democrat. Wildly different. This is the mastermind behind the eventual passage of what we call the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extending the term of existing copyrights by 20 years, so that no one could do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. Now, when we tried to challenge this, going to the Supreme Court, getting the Supreme Court, the bunch of conservatives there — if we could get them to wake up to this — to strike it down, we had the assistance of Nobel Prize winners including this right-wing Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, who said he would join our brief only if the word "no brainer" was in the brief somewhere. (Laughter) But apparently, no brains existed in this place when Democrats passed and signed this bill into law. Now, tiny little quibble of a footnote: Sonny Bono, you might say, was a Republican, but I don't buy it. This guy is no Republican. Okay, for a second example, think about this cultural hero, icon on the Left, creator of this character. Look at the site that he built: "Star Wars" MashUps, inviting people to come and use their creative energy to produce a new generation of attention towards this extraordinarily important cultural icon. Read the license. The license for these remixers assigns all of the rights to the remix back to Lucas. The mashup is owned by Lucas. Indeed, anything you add to the mashup, music you might add, Lucas has a worldwide perpetual right to exploit that for free. There is no creator here to be recognized. The creator doesn't have any rights. The creator is a sharecropper in this story. And we should remember who employed the sharecroppers: the Democrats, right? So the point is the Republicans here recognize that there's a certain need of ownership, a respect for ownership, the respect we should give the creator, the remixer, the owner, the property owner, the copyright owner of this extraordinarily powerful stuff, and not a generation of sharecroppers. Now, I think there are lessons we should learn here, lessons about openness. Our lives are sharing activities, at least in part. Even for the head of Goldman Sachs, at least in part. And for that sharing activity to happen, we have to have well-protected spaces of fair use. That's number one. Number two: This ecology of sharing needs freedom within which to create. Freedom, which means without permission from anyone, the ability to create. And number three: We need to respect the creator, the creator of these remixes through rights that are directly tied to them. Now, this explains the right-wing nonprofit Creative Commons. Actually, it's not a right-wing nonprofit, but of course — let me just tie it here — the Creative Commons, which is offering authors this simple way to mark their content with the freedoms they intended to carry. So that we go from a "all rights reserved" world to a "some rights reserved" world so that people can know the freedoms they have attached to the content, building and creating on the basis of this creative copyrighted work. These tools that we built enable this sharing in parts through licenses that make it clear and a freedom to create without requiring permission first because the permission has already been granted and a respect for the creator because it builds upon a copyright the creator has licensed freely. And it explains the vast right-wing conspiracy that's obviously developed around these licenses, as now more than 350 million digital objects are out there, licensed freely in this way. Now that picture of an ecology of creativity, the picture of an ecology of balanced creativity, is that the ecology of creativity we have right now? Well, as you all know, not many of us believe we do. I tripped on the reality of this ecology of creativity just last week. I created a video which was based on a Wireside Chat that I'd given, and I uploaded it to YouTube. I then got this email from YouTube weirdly notifying me that there was content in that owned by the mysterious WMG that matched their content ID. So I didn't think much about it. And then on Twitter, somebody said to me, "Your talk on YouTube was DMCA'd. Was that your purpose?" imagining that I had this deep conspiracy to reveal the obvious flaws in the DMCA. I answered, "No." I didn't even think about it. But then I went to the site and all of the audio in my site had been silenced. My whole 45-minute video had been silenced because there were snippets in that video, a video about fair use, that included Warner Music Group music. Now, interestingly, they still sold ads for that music, if you played the silent video. You could still buy the music, but you couldn't hear anything because it had been silenced. So I did what the current regime says I must do to be free to use YouTube to talk about fair use. I went to this site, and I had to answer these questions. And then in an extraordinarily Bart Simpson-like, juvenile way you've actually got to type out these words and get them right to reassert your freedom to speak. And I felt like I was in third grade again. "I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair. I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair." This is absurd. It is outrageous. It is an extraordinary perversion of the system of freedom we should be encouraging. And the question I ask you is: Who's fighting it? Well, interestingly, in the last presidential election, who was the number one, active opponent of this system of regulation in online speech? John McCain. Letter after letter attacking YouTube's refusal to be more respectful of fair use with their extraordinary notice and take down system, that led his campaign so many times to be thrown off the Internet. Now, that was the story of me then, my good old days of right-wing lunacy. Let me come back to now, now when I'm a little leftist — I'm certainly left-handed, so at least a lefty — And I wonder, can we on the Left expect to build this ecology of freedom, now, in a world where we know the extraordinarily powerful influences against it, where even icons of the Left like this entertain and push bills that would effectively ban the requirement of open access for government-funded research? The president, who has supported a process that secretly negotiates agreements, which effectively lock us into the insane system of DMCA that we have adopted and likely lock us down a path of three strikes, you're out that, of course, the rest of the world are increasingly adopting. Not a single example of reform has been produced yet. And we're not going to see this change in this system anytime soon. So here's the lessons of openness that I think we need to learn. Openness is a commitment to a certain set of values. We need to speak of those values. The value of freedom. It's a value of community. It's a value of the limits in regulation. It's a value respecting the creator. Now, if we can learn those values from at least some influences on the Right, if we can take them and incorporate them, maybe we could do a little trade. We learn those values on the Left, and maybe they'll do health care or global warming legislation or something in the Right. Anyway, please join me in teaching these values. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Pointing to the future of UI

{0: "Remember the data interface from Minority Report? Well, it's real, John Underkoffler invented it -- as a point-and-touch interface called g-speak -- and it's about to change the way we interact with data."}

TED2010

We're 25, 26 years after the advent of the Macintosh, which was an astoundingly seminal event in the history of human-machine interface and in computation in general. It fundamentally changed the way that people thought about computation, thought about computers, how they used them and who and how many people were able to use them. It was such a radical change, in fact, that the early Macintosh development team in '82, '83, '84 had to write an entirely new operating system from the ground up. Now, this is an interesting little message, and it's a lesson that has since, I think, been forgotten or lost or something, and that is, namely, that the OS is the interface. The interface is the OS. It's like the land and the king (i.e. Arthur) they're inseparable, they are one. And to write a new operating system was not a capricious matter. It wasn't just a matter of tuning up some graphics routines. There were no graphics routines. There were no mouse drivers. So it was a necessity. But in the quarter-century since then, we've seen all of the fundamental supporting technologies go berserk. So memory capacity and disk capacity have been multiplied by something between 10,000 and a million. Same thing for processor speeds. Networks, we didn't have networks at all at the time of the Macintosh's introduction, and that has become the single most salient aspect of how we live with computers. And, of course, graphics: Today 84 dollars and 97 cents at Best Buy buys you more graphics power than you could have gotten for a million bucks from SGI only a decade ago. So we've got that incredible ramp-up. Then, on the side, we've got the Web and, increasingly, the cloud, which is fantastic, but also — in the regard in which an interface is fundamental — kind of a distraction. So we've forgotten to invent new interfaces. Certainly we've seen in recent years a lot of change in that regard, and people are starting to wake up about that. So what happens next? Where do we go from there? The problem, as we see it, has to do with a single, simple word: "space," or a single, simple phrase: "real world geometry." Computers and the programming languages that we talk to them in, that we teach them in, are hideously insensate when it comes to space. They don't understand real world space. It's a funny thing because the rest of us occupy it quite frequently and quite well. They also don't understand time, but that's a matter for a separate talk. So what happens if you start to explain space to them? One thing you might get is something like the Luminous Room. The Luminous Room is a system in which it's considered that input and output spaces are co-located. That's a strangely simple, and yet unexplored idea, right? When you use a mouse, your hand is down here on the mouse pad. It's not even on the same plane as what you're talking about: The pixels are up on the display. So here was a room in which all the walls, floors, ceilings, pets, potted plants, whatever was in there, were capable, not only of display but of sensing as well. And that means input and output are in the same space enabling stuff like this. That's a digital storage in a physical container. The contract is the same as with real word objects in real world containers. Has to come back out, whatever you put in. This little design experiment that was a small office here knew a few other tricks as well. If you presented it with a chess board, it tried to figure out what you might mean by that. And if there was nothing for them to do, the chess pieces eventually got bored and hopped away. The academics who were overseeing this work thought that that was too frivolous, so we built deadly serious applications like this optics prototyping workbench in which a toothpaste cap on a cardboard box becomes a laser. The beam splitters and lenses are represented by physical objects, and the system projects down the laser beam path. So you've got an interface that has no interface. You operate the world as you operate the real world, which is to say, with your hands. Similarly, a digital wind tunnel with digital wind flowing from right to left — not that remarkable in a sense; we didn't invent the mathematics. But if you displayed that on a CRT or flat panel display, it would be meaningless to hold up an arbitrary object, a real world object in that. Here, the real world merges with the simulation. And finally, to pull out all the stops, this is a system called Urp, for urban planners, in which we give architects and urban planners back the models that we confiscated when we insisted that they use CAD systems. And we make the machine meet them half way. It projects down digital shadows, as you see here. And if you introduce tools like this inverse clock, then you can control the sun's position in the sky. That's 8 a.m. shadows. They get a little shorter at 9 a.m. There you are, swinging the sun around. Short shadows at noon and so forth. And we built up a series of tools like this. There are inter-shadowing studies that children can operate, even though they don't know anything about urban planning: To move a building, you simply reach out your hand and you move the building. A material wand makes the building into a sort of Frank Gehry thing that reflects light in all directions. Are you blinding passers by and motorists on the freeways? A zoning tool connects distant structures, a building and a roadway. Are you going to get sued by the zoning commission? And so forth. Now, if these ideas seem familiar or perhaps even a little dated, that's great; they should seem familiar. This work is 15 years old. This stuff was undertaken at MIT and the Media Lab under the incredible direction of Professor Hiroshi Ishii, director of the Tangible Media Group. But it was that work that was seen by Alex McDowell, one of the world's legendary production designers. But Alex was preparing a little, sort of obscure, indie, arthouse film called "Minority Report" for Steven Spielberg, and invited us to come out from MIT and design the interfaces that would appear in that film. And the great thing about it was that Alex was so dedicated to the idea of verisimilitude, the idea that the putative 2054 that we were painting in the film be believable, that he allowed us to take on that design work as if it were an R&D effort. And the result is sort of gratifyingly perpetual. People still reference those sequences in "Minority Report" when they talk about new UI design. So this led full circle, in a strange way, to build these ideas into what we believe is the necessary future of human machine interface: the Spatial Operating Environment, we call it. So here we have a bunch of stuff, some images. And, using a hand, we can actually exercise six degrees of freedom, six degrees of navigational control. And it's fun to fly through Mr. Beckett's eye. And you can come back out through the scary orangutan. And that's all well and good. Let's do something a little more difficult. Here, we have a whole bunch of disparate images. We can fly around them. So navigation is a fundamental issue. You have to be able to navigate in 3D. Much of what we want computers to help us with in the first place is inherently spatial. And the part that isn't spatial can often be spatialized to allow our wetware to make greater sense of it. Now we can distribute this stuff in many different ways. So we can throw it out like that. Let's reset it. We can organize it this way. And, of course, it's not just about navigation, but about manipulation as well. So if we don't like stuff, or we're intensely curious about Ernst Haeckel's scientific falsifications, we can pull them out like that. And then if it's time for analysis, we can pull back a little bit and ask for a different distribution. Let's just come down a bit and fly around. So that's a different way to look at stuff. If you're of a more analytical nature then you might want, actually, to look at this as a color histogram. So now we've got the stuff color-sorted, angle maps onto color. And now, if we want to select stuff, 3D, space, the idea that we're tracking hands in real space becomes really important because we can reach in, not in 2D, not in fake 2D, but in actual 3D. Here are some selection planes. And we'll perform this Boolean operation because we really love yellow and tapirs on green grass. So, from there to the world of real work. Here's a logistics system, a small piece of one that we're currently building. There're a lot of elements. And one thing that's very important is to combine traditional tabular data with three-dimensional and geospatial information. So here's a familiar place. And we'll bring this back here for a second. Maybe select a little bit of that. And bring out this graph. And we should, now, be able to fly in here and have a closer look. These are logistics elements that are scattered across the United States. One thing that three-dimensional interactions and the general idea of imbuing computation with space affords you is a final destruction of that unfortunate one-to-one pairing between human beings and computers. That's the old way, that's the old mantra: one machine, one human, one mouse, one screen. Well, that doesn't really cut it anymore. In the real world, we have people who collaborate; we have people who have to work together, and we have many different displays. And we might want to look at these various images. We might want to ask for some help. The author of this new pointing device is sitting over there, so I can pull this from there to there. These are unrelated machines, right? So the computation is space soluble and network soluble. So I'm going to leave that over there because I have a question for Paul. Paul is the designer of this wand, and maybe its easiest for him to come over here and tell me in person what's going on. So let me get some of these out of the way. Let's pull this apart: I'll go ahead and explode it. Kevin, can you help? Let me see if I can help us find the circuit board. Mind you, it's a sort of gratuitous field-stripping exercise, but we do it in the lab all the time. All right. So collaborative work, whether it's immediately co-located or distant and distinct, is always important. And again, that stuff needs to be undertaken in the context of space. And finally, I'd like to leave you with a glimpse that takes us back to the world of imagery. This is a system called TAMPER, which is a slightly whimsical look at what the future of editing and media manipulation systems might be. We at Oblong believe that media should be accessible in much more fine-grained form. So we have a large number of movies stuck inside here. And let's just pick out a few elements. We can zip through them as a possibility. We can grab elements off the front, where upon they reanimate, come to life, and drag them down onto the table here. We'll go over to Jacques Tati here and grab our blue friend and put him down on the table as well. We may need more than one. And we probably need, well, we probably need a cowboy to be quite honest. (Laughter) Yeah, let's take that one. (Laughter) You see, cowboys and French farce people don't go well together, and the system knows that. Let me leave with one final thought, and that is that one of the greatest English language writers of the last three decades suggested that great art is always a gift. And he wasn't talking about whether the novel costs 24.95 [dollars], or whether you have to spring 70 million bucks to buy the stolen Vermeer; he was talking about the circumstances of its creation and of its existence. And I think that it's time that we asked for the same from technology. Technology is capable of expressing and being imbued with a certain generosity, and we need to demand that, in fact. For some of this kind of technology, ground center is a combination of design, which is crucially important. We can't have advances in technology any longer unless design is integrated from the very start. And, as well, as of efficacy, agency. We're, as human beings, the creatures that create, and we should make sure that our machines aid us in that task and are built in that same image. So I will leave you with that. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So to ask the obvious question — actually this is from Bill Gates — when? (John Underkoffler: When?) CA: When real? When for us, not just in a lab and on a stage? Can it be for every man, or is this just for corporations and movie producers? JU: No, it has to be for every human being. That's our goal entirely. We won't have succeeded unless we take that next big step. I mean it's been 25 years. Can there really be only one interface? There can't. CA: But does that mean that, at your desk or in your home, you need projectors, cameras? You know, how can it work? JU: No, this stuff will be built into the bezel of every display. It'll be built into architecture. The gloves go away in a matter of months or years. So this is the inevitability about it. CA: So, in your mind, five years time, someone can buy this as part of a standard computer interface? JU: I think in five years time when you buy a computer, you'll get this. CA: Well that's cool. (Applause) The world has a habit of surprising us as to how these things are actually used. What do you think, what in your mind is the first killer app for this? JU: That's a good question, and we ask ourselves that every day. At the moment, our early-adopter customers — and these systems are deployed out in the real world — do all the big data intensive, data heavy problems with it. So, whether it's logistics and supply chain management or natural gas and resource extraction, financial services, pharmaceuticals, bioinformatics, those are the topics right now, but that's not a killer app. And I understand what you're asking. CA: C'mon, c'mon. Martial arts, games. C'mon. (Laughter) John, thank you for making science-fiction real. JU: It's been a great pleasure. Thank you to you all. (Applause)

The ocean's glory -- and horror

{0: 'Brian Skerry is a photojournalist who captures images that not only celebrate the mystery and beauty of the sea but also bring attention to the pressing issue which endanger our oceans.'}

Mission Blue Voyage

I would like to share with you this morning some stories about the ocean through my work as a still photographer for National Geographic magazine. I guess I became an underwater photographer and a photojournalist because I fell in love with the sea as a child. And I wanted to tell stories about all the amazing things I was seeing underwater, incredible wildlife and interesting behaviors. And after even 30 years of doing this, after 30 years of exploring the ocean, I never cease to be amazed at the extraordinary encounters that I have while I'm at sea. But more and more frequently these days I'm seeing terrible things underwater as well, things that I don't think most people realize. And I've been compelled to turn my camera towards these issues to tell a more complete story. I want people to see what's happening underwater, both the horror and the magic. The first story that I did for National Geographic, where I recognized the ability to include environmental issues within a natural history coverage, was a story I proposed on harp seals. The story I wanted to do initially was just a small focus to look at the few weeks each year where these animals migrate down from the Canadian arctic to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada to engage in courtship, mating and to have their pups. And all of this is played out against the backdrop of transient pack ice that moves with wind and tide. And because I'm an underwater photographer, I wanted to do this story from both above and below, to make pictures like this that show one of these little pups making its very first swim in the icy 29-degree water. But as I got more involved in the story, I realized that there were two big environmental issues I couldn't ignore. The first was that these animals continue to be hunted, killed with hakapiks at about eight, 15 days old. It actually is the largest marine mammal slaughter on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of these seals being killed every year. But as disturbing as that is, I think the bigger problem for harp seals is the loss of sea ice due to global warming. This is an aerial picture that I made that shows the Gulf of St. Lawrence during harp seal season. And even though we see a lot of ice in this picture, there's a lot of water as well, which wasn't there historically. And the ice that is there is quite thin. The problem is that these pups need a stable platform of solid ice in order to nurse from their moms. They only need 12 days from the moment they're born until they're on their own. But if they don't get 12 days, they can fall into the ocean and die. This is a photo that I made showing one of these pups that's only about five or seven days old — still has a little bit of the umbilical cord on its belly — that has fallen in because of the thin ice, and the mother is frantically trying to push it up to breathe and to get it back to stable purchase. This problem has continued to grow each year since I was there. I read that last year the pup mortality rate was 100 percent in parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So, clearly, this species has a lot of problems going forward. This ended up becoming a cover story at National Geographic. And it received quite a bit of attention. And with that, I saw the potential to begin doing other stories about ocean problems. So I proposed a story on the global fish crisis, in part because I had personally witnessed a lot of degradation in the ocean over the last 30 years, but also because I read a scientific paper that stated that 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean have disappeared in the last 50 or 60 years. These are the tuna, the billfish and the sharks. When I read that, I was blown away by those numbers. I thought this was going to be headline news in every media outlet, but it really wasn't, so I wanted to do a story that was a very different kind of underwater story. I wanted it to be more like war photography, where I was making harder-hitting pictures that showed readers what was happening to marine wildlife around the planet. The first component of the story that I thought was essential, however, was to give readers a sense of appreciation for the ocean animals that they were eating. You know, I think people go into a restaurant, and somebody orders a steak, and we all know where steak comes from, and somebody orders a chicken, and we know what a chicken is, but when they're eating bluefin sushi, do they have any sense of the magnificent animal that they're consuming? These are the lions and tigers of the sea. In reality, these animals have no terrestrial counterpart; they're unique in the world. These are animals that can practically swim from the equator to the poles and can crisscross entire oceans in the course of a year. If we weren't so efficient at catching them, because they grow their entire life, would have 30-year-old bluefin out there that weigh a ton. But the truth is we're way too efficient at catching them, and their stocks have collapsed worldwide. This is the daily auction at the Tsukiji Fish Market that I photographed a couple years ago. And every single day these tuna, bluefin like this, are stacked up like cordwood, just warehouse after warehouse. As I wandered around and made these pictures, it sort of occurred to me that the ocean's not a grocery store, you know. We can't keep taking without expecting serious consequences as a result. I also, with the story, wanted to show readers how fish are caught, some of the methods that are used to catch fish, like a bottom trawler, which is one of the most common methods in the world. This was a small net that was being used in Mexico to catch shrimp, but the way it works is essentially the same everywhere in the world. You have a large net in the middle with two steel doors on either end. And as this assembly is towed through the water, the doors meet resistance with the ocean, and it opens the mouth of the net, and they place floats at the top and a lead line on the bottom. And this just drags over the bottom, in this case to catch shrimp. But as you can imagine, it's catching everything else in its path as well. And it's destroying that precious benthic community on the bottom, things like sponges and corals, that critical habitat for other animals. This photograph I made of the fisherman holding the shrimp that he caught after towing his nets for one hour. So he had a handful of shrimp, maybe seven or eight shrimp, and all those other animals on the deck of the boat are bycatch. These are animals that died in the process, but have no commercial value. So this is the true cost of a shrimp dinner, maybe seven or eight shrimp and 10 pounds of other animals that had to die in the process. And to make that point even more visual, I swam under the shrimp boat and made this picture of the guy shoveling this bycatch into the sea as trash and photographed this cascade of death, you know, animals like guitarfish, bat rays, flounder, pufferfish, that only an hour before, were on the bottom of the ocean, alive, but now being thrown back as trash. I also wanted to focus on the shark fishing industry because, currently on planet Earth, we're killing over 100 million sharks every single year. But before I went out to photograph this component, I sort of wrestled with the notion of how do you make a picture of a dead shark that will resonate with readers You know, I think there's still a lot of people out there who think the only good shark is a dead shark. But this one morning I jumped in and found this thresher that had just recently died in the gill net. And with its huge pectoral fins and eyes still very visible, it struck me as sort of a crucifixion, if you will. This ended up being the lead picture in the global fishery story in National Geographic. And I hope that it helped readers to take notice of this problem of 100 million sharks. And because I love sharks — I'm somewhat obsessed with sharks — I wanted to do another, more celebratory, story about sharks, as a way of talking about the need for shark conservation. So I went to the Bahamas because there're very few places in the world where sharks are doing well these days, but the Bahamas seem to be a place where stocks were reasonably healthy, largely due to the fact that the government there had outlawed longlining several years ago. And I wanted to show several species that we hadn't shown much in the magazine and worked in a number of locations. One of the locations was this place called Tiger Beach, in the northern Bahamas where tiger sharks aggregate in shallow water. This is a low-altitude photograph that I made showing our dive boat with about a dozen of these big old tiger sharks sort of just swimming around behind. But the one thing I definitely didn't want to do with this coverage was to continue to portray sharks as something like monsters. I didn't want them to be overly threatening or scary. And with this photograph of a beautiful 15-feet, probably 14-feet, I guess, female tiger shark, I sort of think I got to that goal, where she was swimming with these little barjacks off her nose, and my strobe created a shadow on her face. And I think it's a gentler picture, a little less threatening, a little more respectful of the species. I also searched on this story for the elusive great hammerhead, an animal that really hadn't been photographed much until maybe about seven or 10 years ago. It's a very solitary creature. But this is an animal that's considered data deficient by science in both Florida and in the Bahamas. You know, we know almost nothing about them. We don't know where they migrate to or from, where they mate, where they have their pups, and yet, hammerhead populations in the Atlantic have declined about 80 percent in the last 20 to 30 years. You know, we're losing them faster than we can possibly find them. This is the oceanic whitetip shark, an animal that is considered the fourth most dangerous species, if you pay attention to such lists. But it's an animal that's about 98 percent in decline throughout most of its range. Because this is a pelagic animal and it lives out in the deeper water, and because we weren't working on the bottom, I brought along a shark cage here, and my friend, shark biologist Wes Pratt is inside the cage. You'll see that the photographer, of course, was not inside the cage here, so clearly the biologist is a little smarter than the photographer I guess. And lastly with this story, I also wanted to focus on baby sharks, shark nurseries. And I went to the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas, to work with lemon shark pups. This is a photo of a lemon shark pup, and it shows these animals where they live for the first two to three years of their lives in these protective mangroves. This is a very sort of un-shark-like photograph. It's not what you typically might think of as a shark picture. But, you know, here we see a shark that's maybe 10 or 11 inches long swimming in about a foot of water. But this is crucial habitat and it's where they spend the first two, three years of their lives, until they're big enough to go out on the rest of the reef. After I left Bimini, I actually learned that this habitat was being bulldozed to create a new golf course and resort. And other recent stories have looked at single, flagship species, if you will, that are at risk in the ocean as a way of talking about other threats. One such story I did documented the leatherback sea turtle. This is the largest, widest-ranging, deepest-diving and oldest of all turtle species. Here we see a female crawling out of the ocean under moonlight on the island of Trinidad. These are animals whose lineage dates back about 100 million years. And there was a time in their lifespan where they were coming out of the water to nest and saw Tyrannosaurus rex running by. And today, they crawl out and see condominiums. But despite this amazing longevity, they're now considered critically endangered. In the Pacific, where I made this photograph, their stocks have declined about 90 percent in the last 15 years. This is a photograph that shows a hatchling about to taste saltwater for the very first time beginning this long and perilous journey. Only one in a thousand leatherback hatchlings will reach maturity. But that's due to natural predators like vultures that pick them off on a beach or predatory fish that are waiting offshore. Nature has learned to compensate with that, and females have multiple clutches of eggs to overcome those odds. But what they can't deal with is anthropogenic stresses, human things, like this picture that shows a leatherback caught at night in a gill net. I actually jumped in and photographed this, and with the fisherman's permission, I cut the turtle out, and it was able to swim free. But, you know, thousands of other leatherbacks each year are not so fortunate, and the species' future is in great danger. Another charismatic megafauna species that I worked with is the story I did on the right whale. And essentially, the story is this with right whales, that about a million years ago, there was one species of right whale on the planet, but as land masses moved around and oceans became isolated, the species sort of separated, and today we have essentially two distinct stocks. We have the Southern right whale that we see here and the North Atlantic right whale that we see here with a mom and calf off the coast of Florida. Now, both species were hunted to the brink of extinction by the early whalers, but the Southern right whales have rebounded a lot better because they're located in places farther away from human activity. The North Atlantic right whale is listed as the most endangered species on the planet today because they are urban whales; they live along the east coast of North America, United States and Canada, and they have to deal with all these urban ills. This photo shows an animal popping its head out at sunset off the coast of Florida. You can see the coal burning plant in the background. They have to deal with things like toxins and pharmaceuticals that are flushed out into the ocean, and maybe even affecting their reproduction. They also get entangled in fishing gear. This is a picture that shows the tail of a right whale. And those white markings are not natural markings. These are entanglement scars. 72 percent of the population has such scars, but most don't shed the gear, things like lobster traps and crab pots. They hold on to them, and it eventually kills them. And the other problem is they get hit by ships. And this was an animal that was struck by a ship in Nova Scotia, Canada being towed in, where they did a necropsy to confirm the cause of death, which was indeed a ship strike. So all of these ills are stacking up against these animals and keeping their numbers very low. And to draw a contrast with that beleaguered North Atlantic population, I went to a new pristine population of Southern right whales that had only been discovered about 10 years ago in the sub-Antarctic of New Zealand, a place called the Auckland Islands. I went down there in the winter time. And these are animals that had never seen humans before, and I was one of the first people they probably had ever seen. And I got in the water with them, and I was amazed at how curious they were. This photograph shows my assistant standing on the bottom at about 70 feet and one of these amazingly beautiful, 45-foot, 70-ton whales, like a city bus just swimming up, you know. They were in perfect condition, very fat and healthy, robust, no entanglement scars, the way they're supposed to look. You know, I read that the pilgrims, when they landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620, wrote that you could walk across Cape Cod Bay on the backs of right whales. And we can't go back and see that today, but maybe we can preserve what we have left. And I wanted to close this program with a story of hope, a story I did on marine reserves as sort of a solution to the problem of overfishing, the global fish crisis story. I settled on working in the country of New Zealand because New Zealand was rather progressive, and is rather progressive in terms of protecting their ocean. And I really wanted this story to be about three things: I wanted it to be about abundance, about diversity and about resilience. And one of the first places I worked was a reserve called Goat Island in Leigh of New Zealand. What the scientists there told me was that when protected this first marine reserve in 1975, they hoped and expected that certain things might happen. For example, they hoped that certain species of fish like the New Zealand snapper would return because they had been fished to the brink of commercial extinction. And they did come back. What they couldn't predict was that other things would happen. For example, these fish predate on sea urchins, and when the fish were all gone, all anyone ever saw underwater was just acres and acres of sea urchins. But when the fish came back and began predating and controlling the urchin population, low and behold, kelp forests emerged in shallow water. And that's because the urchins eat kelp. So when the fish control the urchin population, the ocean was restored to its natural equilibrium. You know, this is probably how the ocean looked here one or 200 years ago, but nobody was around to tell us. I worked in other parts of New Zealand as well, in beautiful, fragile, protected areas like in Fiordland, where this sea pen colony was found. Little blue cod swimming in for a dash of color. In the northern part of New Zealand, I dove in the blue water, where the water's a little warmer, and photographed animals like this giant sting ray swimming through an underwater canyon. Every part of the ecosystem in this place seems very healthy, from tiny, little animals like a nudibrank crawling over encrusting sponge or a leatherjacket that is a very important animal in this ecosystem because it grazes on the bottom and allows new life to take hold. And I wanted to finish with this photograph, a picture I made on a very stormy day in New Zealand when I just laid on the bottom amidst a school of fish swirling around me. And I was in a place that had only been protected about 20 years ago. And I talked to divers that had been diving there for many years, and they said that the marine life was better here today than it was in the 1960s. And that's because it's been protected, that it has come back. So I think the message is clear. The ocean is, indeed, resilient and tolerant to a point, but we must be good custodians. I became an underwater photographer because I fell in love with the sea, and I make pictures of it today because I want to protect it, and I don't think it's too late. Thank you very much.

The case for anonymity online

{0: 'Christopher "moot" Poole is founder of 4chan, an online imageboard whose anonymous denizens have spawned the web\'s most bewildering -- and influential -- subculture.'}

TED2010

Tom Green: That's a 4chan thing. These kids on the Internet, they have this group of kids and they like to say funny words like "barrel roll." It's a video game move from "Star Fox." "Star Fox 20"? (Assistant: "Star Fox 64.") Tom Green: Yeah. And they've been dogging me for a year. I got to tell you, it's driving me nuts, actually. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I scream, "4chan!" Christopher Poole: When I was 15, I found this website called Futaba Channel. And it was a Japanese forum and imageboard. That format of forum, at that time, was not well-known outside of Japan. And so what I did is I took it, I translated it into English, and I stuck it up for my friends to use. Now, six and a half years later, over seven million people are using it, contributing over 700,000 posts per day. And we've gone from one board to 48 boards. This is what it looks like. So, what's unique about the site is that it's anonymous, and it has no memory. There's no archive, there are no barriers, there's no registration. These things that we're used to with forums don't exist on 4chan. And that's led to this discussion that's completely raw, completely unfiltered. What the site's known for, because it has this environment, is it's fostered the creation of a lot of Internet phenomena, viral videos and whatnot, known as "memes." Two of the largest memes that have come out of this site some of you might be familiar with are these LOLcats — just silly pictures of cats with text. And this resonates with millions of people, apparently, because there are tens of thousands of these, and there is a whole blogging empire now dedicated to pictures like these. And Rick Astley's kind of rebirth these past two years ... Rickroll was this bait and switch, really simple, classic bait and switch. Somebody says they're linking to something interesting, and you get an '80s pop song. That's all it was. And it got big enough to the point where there was a float last year at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, and Rick Astley pops out, and rickrolls millions of people on television. (Laughter) There are thousands of memes that come out of the site. There are a handful that have escaped into the mainstream, the ones I've just shown you, but every day, every month, people are producing thousands of these. So does a site like this have rules? We do; they're the codified rules that I've come up with, which are more-or-less ignored by the community. And so they've come up with their own set of rules, the "Rules of the Internet." And so there are three that I want to show you specifically. Rule one is you don't talk about /b/. Two is you do not talk about /b/. And this one's kind of interesting: "If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions." (Laughter) And I will spare you that slide. I assure you, it is very true. /b/ is the first board we started with, and it is, in many ways, the beating heart of the website. It is where a third of all the traffic is going. And /b/ is known for, more than anything, not just the memes they've created, but the exploits. And Chris just touched on one of those a second ago, and that was the Time 100 poll. So somebody at Time, at the magazine, thought it would be fun to nominate me for this thing they did last year. And so they placed me on it, and the Internet got wind of it. My community decided they wanted me to win it. I didn't instruct them to do it; they just decided that that's what they wanted. And so, you know, 390 percent approval rating ain't so bad. (Laughter) So they broke that poll. And I ended up on top. I ended up at this really fancy party. But that's not what's interesting about this. It's that they weren't putting me at the top of this list; they were actually — it got so sophisticated to the point where they gamed all of the top 21 places to spell "mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME." (Laughter) The amount of time and effort that went into that is absolutely incredible. And "marble cake" is significant because it is the channel that this group called Anonymous organized. Anonymous is this group of people that protested, very famously, Scientology. The story is, Scientology had this embarrassing video of Tom Cruise. It went up online. They got it taken offline and managed to piss off part of the Internet. And so these people, over 7,000 people, less than one month later, organized in a hundred cities around the globe and — this is L.A. — protested the Church of Scientology, and they have continued to do so, now, two full years after the fact. They are still protesting. (Laughter) So we've got this activist group that's this grassroots group that's come out of the site. And last, I'm going to show you the example, the story of Dusty the cat. Dusty is the name that we've given to this cat. This young man posted a video of him abusing his cat on YouTube. And, you know, this didn't sit well with people, and so there was this outpouring of support for people to do something about this. So what they did is they — I mean, they put CSI to shame here — the Internet detectives came out. They matched, they found his MySpace. They took the YouTube video and they mashed everything in the video. Within 24 hours, they had his name, and within 48 hours, he was arrested. (Applause) And so, what I think is really intriguing about a community like 4chan is just that it's this open place. As I said, it's raw, it's unfiltered. And sites like it are kind of going the way of the dinosaur right now. They're endangered because we're moving towards social networking. We're moving towards persistent identity. We're moving towards, you know, a lack of privacy, really. We're sacrificing a lot of that, and I think in doing so, moving towards those things, we're losing something valuable. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Got a couple questions for you. But if I ask them, is the TED website going to go down? CP: You're lucky that this is not being streamed to them live right now. CA: Well, you never know. Some of them — we've got people in 75 countries out there watching. Don't tell. But seriously, this issue on anonymity is — I mean, you made the case there. But anonymity basically allows people to say anything, all the rules gone. You've had to wrestle with issues like child pornography. And I'm just curious whether you sometimes lie awake in the night worrying that you've opened Pandora's box. CP: Yes and no. I mean, for as much good that kind of comes out of this environment, there is plenty of bad. There are plenty of downsides. But I think that the greater good is being served here by just allowing people — there are very few places, now, where you can go and not have identity, to be completely anonymous and say whatever you'd like. And saying whatever you like, I think, is powerful. Doing whatever you like is now crossing a line. But I think it's important to have these places. When I get emails, people say, "Thank you for giving me this place, this outlet, where I can come after work and be myself." CA: But words, saying things, you know, can be constructive; it can be really damaging. And if you cut the link between what is said and any attribution back to you, I mean, surely there are huge risks with that. CP: There are, certainly. But — CA: Tell me about what — I mean, I think you asked the board what you might say at TED, right? CP: Yeah, I posted a thread on Sunday. And within 24 hours, it had over 12,000 responses. And the thing is, I didn't make it into that presentation because I can't read to you anything that they said, more or less. (Laughter) 99 percent of it is just, would have been, you know, bleeped out. But there were some good things that came out of that too. (Laughter) Love and peace were mentioned. CA: Love and peace were mentioned, kind of with quote marks around them, right? CP: Cats and dogs were mentioned too. CA: And that content is all off the board now. Right, it's gone? Or is it still up there? CP: I stuck that thread so it lasted a few days. It went up to about 16,000 posts, and now it has been taken off. CA: Okay, well. Now, I'm not sure I would have necessarily recommended everyone at TED to go and check it out anyway. Chris, you yourself? I mean, you're a figure of some intrigue. You've got this surprising semi-underground influence, but it's not making you a lot of money, yet. What's the commercial picture here? CP: The commercial picture is that there really isn't much of one, I guess. The site has adult content on it. I mean, obviously, it's got some very offensive, obscene content on it, just in terms of language alone. And when you've got that, you've pretty much sacrificed any hope of making lots of money. CA: But you still live at home, right? CP: I actually moved out recently. CA: That's very cool. (Applause) CP: I got out of Mom's, and I'm back in school right now. CA: But what conversations did you or do you have with your mother about 4chan? CP: At first, very kind of pained, awkward conversations. The content is not dinner table conversation in the least. But my parents — I think part of why they kind of are able to appreciate it is because they don't understand it. (Laughter) CA: And they were probably pleased to see you on top of the Time poll. CP: Yeah. They still didn't know what to think of that though. (Laughter) CA: And so, in 10 years' time, what do you picture yourself doing? CP: That's a good question. As I said, I just went back to school, and I am considering majoring in urban studies and then going on to urban planning, kind of taking whatever I've learned from online communities and trying to adapt that to a physical community. CA: Chris, thank you. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you for coming to TED.

Why we need the explorers

{0: "Physicist Brian Cox has two jobs: working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and explaining big science to the general public. He's a professor at the University of Manchester."}

TEDSalon London 2010

We live in difficult and challenging economic times, of course. And one of the first victims of difficult economic times, I think, is public spending of any kind, but certainly in the firing line at the moment is public spending for science, and particularly curiosity-led science and exploration. So I want to try and convince you in about 15 minutes that that's a ridiculous and ludicrous thing to do. But I think to set the scene, I want to show — the next slide is not my attempt to show the worst TED slide in the history of TED, but it is a bit of a mess. (Laughter) But actually, it's not my fault; it's from the Guardian newspaper. And it's actually a beautiful demonstration of how much science costs. Because, if I'm going to make the case for continuing to spend on curiosity-driven science and exploration, I should tell you how much it costs. So this is a game called "spot the science budgets." This is the U.K. government spend. You see there, it's about 620 billion a year. The science budget is actually — if you look to your left, there's a purple set of blobs and then yellow set of blobs. And it's one of the yellow set of blobs around the big yellow blob. It's about 3.3 billion pounds per year out of 620 billion. That funds everything in the U.K. from medical research, space exploration, where I work, at CERN in Geneva, particle physics, engineering, even arts and humanities, funded from the science budget, which is that 3.3 billion, that little, tiny yellow blob around the orange blob at the top left of the screen. So that's what we're arguing about. That percentage, by the way, is about the same in the U.S. and Germany and France. R&D in total in the economy, publicly funded, is about 0.6 percent of GDP. So that's what we're arguing about. The first thing I want to say, and this is straight from "Wonders of the Solar System," is that our exploration of the solar system and the universe has shown us that it is indescribably beautiful. This is a picture that actually was sent back by the Cassini space probe around Saturn, after we'd finished filming "Wonders of the Solar System." So it isn't in the series. It's of the moon Enceladus. So that big sweeping, white sphere in the corner is Saturn, which is actually in the background of the picture. And that crescent there is the moon Enceladus, which is about as big as the British Isles. It's about 500 kilometers in diameter. So, tiny moon. What's fascinating and beautiful ... this an unprocessed picture, by the way, I should say, it's black and white, straight from Saturnian orbit. What's beautiful is, you can probably see on the limb there some faint, sort of, wisps of almost smoke rising up from the limb. This is how we visualize that in "Wonders of the Solar System." It's a beautiful graphic. What we found out were that those faint wisps are actually fountains of ice rising up from the surface of this tiny moon. That's fascinating and beautiful in itself, but we think that the mechanism for powering those fountains requires there to be lakes of liquid water beneath the surface of this moon. And what's important about that is that, on our planet, on Earth, wherever we find liquid water, we find life. So, to find strong evidence of liquid, pools of liquid, beneath the surface of a moon 750 million miles away from the Earth is really quite astounding. So what we're saying, essentially, is maybe that's a habitat for life in the solar system. Well, let me just say, that was a graphic. I just want to show this picture. That's one more picture of Enceladus. This is when Cassini flew beneath Enceladus. So it made a very low pass, just a few hundred kilometers above the surface. And so this, again, a real picture of the ice fountains rising up into space, absolutely beautiful. But that's not the prime candidate for life in the solar system. That's probably this place, which is a moon of Jupiter, Europa. And again, we had to fly to the Jovian system to get any sense that this moon, as most moons, was anything other than a dead ball of rock. It's actually an ice moon. So what you're looking at is the surface of the moon Europa, which is a thick sheet of ice, probably a hundred kilometers thick. But by measuring the way that Europa interacts with the magnetic field of Jupiter, and looking at how those cracks in the ice that you can see there on that graphic move around, we've inferred very strongly that there's an ocean of liquid surrounding the entire surface of Europa. So below the ice, there's an ocean of liquid around the whole moon. It could be hundreds of kilometers deep, we think. We think it's saltwater, and that would mean that there's more water on that moon of Jupiter than there is in all the oceans of the Earth combined. So that place, a little moon around Jupiter, is probably the prime candidate for finding life on a moon or a body outside the Earth, that we know of. Tremendous and beautiful discovery. Our exploration of the solar system has taught us that the solar system is beautiful. It may also have pointed the way to answering one of the most profound questions that you can possibly ask, which is: "Are we alone in the universe?" Is there any other use to exploration and science, other than just a sense of wonder? Well, there is. This is a very famous picture taken, actually, on my first Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1968, when I was about eight months old. It was taken by Apollo 8 as it went around the back of the moon. Earthrise from Apollo 8. A famous picture; many people have said that it's the picture that saved 1968, which was a turbulent year — the student riots in Paris, the height of the Vietnam War. The reason many people think that about this picture, and Al Gore has said it many times, actually, on the stage at TED, is that this picture, arguably, was the beginning of the environmental movement. Because, for the first time, we saw our world, not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space. What's also not often said about the space exploration, about the Apollo program, is the economic contribution it made. I mean while you can make arguments that it was wonderful and a tremendous achievement and delivered pictures like this, it cost a lot, didn't it? Well, actually, many studies have been done about the economic effectiveness, the economic impact of Apollo. The biggest one was in 1975 by Chase Econometrics. And it showed that for every $1 spent on Apollo, 14 came back into the U.S. economy. So the Apollo program paid for itself in inspiration, in engineering, achievement and, I think, in inspiring young scientists and engineers 14 times over. So exploration can pay for itself. What about scientific discovery? What about driving innovation? Well, this looks like a picture of virtually nothing. What it is, is a picture of the spectrum of hydrogen. See, back in the 1880s, 1890s, many scientists, many observers, looked at the light given off from atoms. And they saw strange pictures like this. What you're seeing when you put it through a prism is that you heat hydrogen up and it doesn't just glow like a white light, it just emits light at particular colors, a red one, a light blue one, some dark blue ones. Now that led to an understanding of atomic structure because the way that's explained is atoms are a single nucleus with electrons going around them. And the electrons can only be in particular places. And when they jump up to the next place they can be, and fall back down again, they emit light at particular colors. And so the fact that atoms, when you heat them up, only emit light at very specific colors, was one of the key drivers that led to the development of the quantum theory, the theory of the structure of atoms. I just wanted to show this picture because this is remarkable. This is actually a picture of the spectrum of the Sun. And now, this is a picture of atoms in the Sun's atmosphere absorbing light. And again, they only absorb light at particular colors when electrons jump up and fall down, jump up and fall down. But look at the number of black lines in that spectrum. And the element helium was discovered just by staring at the light from the Sun because some of those black lines were found that corresponded to no known element. And that's why helium's called helium. It's called "helios" — helios from the Sun. Now, that sounds esoteric, and indeed it was an esoteric pursuit, but the quantum theory quickly led to an understanding of the behaviors of electrons in materials like silicon, for example. The way that silicon behaves, the fact that you can build transistors, is a purely quantum phenomenon. So without that curiosity-driven understanding of the structure of atoms, which led to this rather esoteric theory, quantum mechanics, then we wouldn't have transistors, we wouldn't have silicon chips, we wouldn't have pretty much the basis of our modern economy. There's one more, I think, wonderful twist to that tale. In "Wonders of the Solar System," we kept emphasizing the laws of physics are universal. It's one of the most incredible things about the physics and the understanding of nature that you get on Earth, is you can transport it, not only to the planets, but to the most distant stars and galaxies. And one of the astonishing predictions of quantum mechanics, just by looking at the structure of atoms — the same theory that describes transistors — is that there can be no stars in the universe that have reached the end of their life that are bigger than, quite specifically, 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. That's a limit imposed on the mass of stars. You can work it out on a piece of paper in a laboratory, get a telescope, swing it to the sky, and you find that there are no dead stars bigger than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. That's quite an incredible prediction. What happens when you have a star that's right on the edge of that mass? Well, this is a picture of it. This is the picture of a galaxy, a common "our garden" galaxy with, what, 100 billion stars like our Sun in it. It's just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. There are a billion stars in the galactic core, which is why it's shining out so brightly. This is about 50 million light years away, so one of our neighboring galaxies. But that bright star there is actually one of the stars in the galaxy. So that star is also 50 million light years away. It's part of that galaxy, and it's shining as brightly as the center of the galaxy with a billion suns in it. That's a Type Ia supernova explosion. Now that's an incredible phenomena, because it's a star that sits there. It's called a carbon-oxygen dwarf. It sits there about, say, 1.3 times the mass of the Sun. And it has a binary companion that goes around it, so a big star, a big ball of gas. And what it does is it sucks gas off its companion star, until it gets to this limit called the Chandrasekhar limit, and then it explodes. And it explodes, and it shines as brightly as a billion suns for about two weeks, and releases, not only energy, but a huge amount of chemical elements into the universe. In fact, that one is a carbon-oxygen dwarf. Now, there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe at the Big Bang. And there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe throughout the first generation of stars. It was made in stars like that, locked away and then returned to the universe in explosions like that in order to recondense into planets, stars, new solar systems and, indeed, people like us. I think that's a remarkable demonstration of the power and beauty and universality of the laws of physics, because we understand that process, because we understand the structure of atoms here on Earth. This is a beautiful quote that I found — we're talking about serendipity there — from Alexander Fleming: "When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic." Now, the explorers of the world of the atom did not intend to invent the transistor. And they certainly didn't intend to describe the mechanics of supernova explosions, which eventually told us where the building blocks of life were synthesized in the universe. So, I think science can be — serendipity is important. It can be beautiful. It can reveal quite astonishing things. It can also, I think, finally reveal the most profound ideas to us about our place in the universe and really the value of our home planet. This is a spectacular picture of our home planet. Now, it doesn't look like our home planet. It looks like Saturn because, of course, it is. It was taken by the Cassini space probe. But it's a famous picture, not because of the beauty and majesty of Saturn's rings, but actually because of a tiny, faint blob just hanging underneath one of the rings. And if I blow it up there, you see it. It looks like a moon, but in fact, it's a picture of Earth. It was a picture of Earth captured in that frame of Saturn. That's our planet from 750 million miles away. I think the Earth has got a strange property that the farther away you get from it, the more beautiful it seems. But that is not the most distant or most famous picture of our planet. It was taken by this thing, which is called the Voyager spacecraft. And that's a picture of me in front of it for scale. The Voyager is a tiny machine. It's currently 10 billion miles away from Earth, transmitting with that dish, with the power of 20 watts, and we're still in contact with it. But it visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And after it visited all four of those planets, Carl Sagan, who's one of my great heroes, had the wonderful idea of turning Voyager around and taking a picture of every planet it had visited. And it took this picture of Earth. Now it's very hard to see the Earth there, it's called the "Pale Blue Dot" picture, but Earth is suspended in that red shaft of light. That's Earth from four billion miles away. And I'd like to read you what Sagan wrote about it, just to finish, because I cannot say words as beautiful as this to describe what he saw in that picture that he had taken. He said, "Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregates of joy and suffering thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there, on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. It's been said that astronomy's a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." Beautiful words about the power of science and exploration. The argument has always been made, and it will always be made, that we know enough about the universe. You could have made it in the 1920s; you wouldn't have had penicillin. You could have made it in the 1890s; you wouldn't have the transistor. And it's made today in these difficult economic times. Surely, we know enough. We don't need to discover anything else about our universe. Let me leave the last words to someone who's rapidly becoming a hero of mine, Humphrey Davy, who did his science at the turn of the 19th century. He was clearly under assault all the time. "We know enough at the turn of the 19th century. Just exploit it; just build things." He said this, he said, "Nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate, that our triumphs are complete, that there are no mysteries in nature, and that there are no new worlds to conquer." Thank you. (Applause)

How to engineer a viral music video

{0: 'As the president of Syyn Labs, Adam Sadowsky merges art and technology to create interactive projects big and small. '}

TEDxUSC

Hi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted. Now, when we first started talking to OK Go — the name of the song is "This Too Shall Pass" — we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, "Here It Goes Again." 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine. Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters, because, you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open. And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the "10 commandments," and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is "No magic." Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is, the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000-square-foot warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot. (Laughter) (Applause) Okay. So, just some statistics about what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe — after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build — and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, "Well, that would be a really good thing to use" and ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine. So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right? What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." I think our enemy was physics — (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing. Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, "This Too Shall Pass." Thank you very much. (Applause) And now to introduce their music video, we have OK Go. OK Go: An introduction. Hello TEDxUSC. We are OK Go. What are we doing? Oh, just hanging out with our Grammy. What what! It think we can do better than this. Hello TEDxUSC. We are OK Go. Have you read the "Natural Curiosity Cabinet?" I mean, "Curiosity" — excuse me. Let me start again. We need some more ridiculous things besides "The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities." Tim's sundial hat. Have you seen the new work they've done to the Waltz Towers? Sorry, start again. (Barking) Dogs. Hello, TEDxUSC. We are OK Go, and this our new video, "This Too Shall Pass." [unclear] Kay, we can still do one better I think, yeah. That one's pretty good. It's getting better. (Music) ♫ You know you can't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ And you can't keep dragging that dead weight around ♫ ♫ If there ain't all that much to lug around ♫ ♫ Better run like hell when you hit the ground ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ You can't stop these kids from dancing ♫ ♫ Why would you want to? ♫ ♫ Especially when you're already getting yours ♫ ♫ Cuz if your mind don't move and your knees don't bend ♫ ♫ Well don't go blaming the kids again ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ Let it go ♫ ♫ This too shall pass ♫ ♫ Let it go ♫ ♫ This too shall pass ♫ ♫ You know you can't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ No, you can't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ Let it go ♫ ♫ This too shall pass ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ (Cheering)

The lost art of democratic debate

{0: 'Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard, exploring some of the most hotly contested moral and political issues of our time.'}

TED2010

One thing the world needs, one thing this country desperately needs is a better way of conducting our political debates. We need to rediscover the lost art of democratic argument. (Applause) If you think about the arguments we have, most of the time it's shouting matches on cable television, ideological food fights on the floor of Congress. I have a suggestion. Look at all the arguments we have these days over health care, over bonuses and bailouts on Wall Street, over the gap between rich and poor, over affirmative action and same-sex marriage. Lying just beneath the surface of those arguments, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics. So what I would like to do today is have something of a discussion. First, let me take a famous philosopher who wrote about those questions of justice and morality, give you a very short lecture on Aristotle of ancient Athens, Aristotle's theory of justice, and then have a discussion here to see whether Aristotle's ideas actually inform the way we think and argue about questions today. So, are you ready for the lecture? According to Aristotle, justice means giving people what they deserve. That's it; that's the lecture. (Laughter) Now, you may say, well, that's obvious enough. The real questions begin when it comes to arguing about who deserves what and why. Take the example of flutes. Suppose we're distributing flutes. Who should get the best ones? Let's see what people — What would you say? Who should get the best flute? You can just call it out. (Audience: Random.) Michael Sandel: At random. You would do it by lottery. Or by the first person to rush into the hall to get them. Who else? (Audience: The best flute players.) MS: The best flute players. (Audience: The worst flute players.) MS: The worst flute players. How many say the best flute players? Why? Actually, that was Aristotle's answer too. (Laughter) But here's a harder question. Why do you think, those of you who voted this way, that the best flutes should go to the best flute players? Peter: The greatest benefit to all. MS: The greatest benefit to all. We'll hear better music if the best flutes should go to the best flute players. That's Peter? (Audience: Peter.) MS: All right. Well, it's a good reason. We'll all be better off if good music is played rather than terrible music. But Peter, Aristotle doesn't agree with you that that's the reason. That's all right. Aristotle had a different reason for saying the best flutes should go to the best flute players. He said, that's what flutes are for — to be played well. He says that to reason about just distribution of a thing, we have to reason about, and sometimes argue about, the purpose of the thing, or the social activity — in this case, musical performance. And the point, the essential nature, of musical performance is to produce excellent music. It'll be a happy byproduct that we'll all benefit. But when we think about justice, Aristotle says, what we really need to think about is the essential nature of the activity in question and the qualities that are worth honoring and admiring and recognizing. One of the reasons that the best flute players should get the best flutes is that musical performance is not only to make the rest of us happy, but to honor and recognize the excellence of the best musicians. Now, flutes may seem ... the distribution of flutes may seem a trivial case. Let's take a contemporary example of the dispute about justice. It had to do with golf. Casey Martin — a few years ago, Casey Martin — did any of you hear about him? He was a very good golfer, but he had a disability. He had a bad leg, a circulatory problem, that made it very painful for him to walk the course. In fact, it carried risk of injury. He asked the PGA, the Professional Golfers' Association, for permission to use a golf cart in the PGA tournaments. They said, "No. Now that would give you an unfair advantage." He sued, and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, believe it or not, the case over the golf cart, because the law says that the disabled must be accommodated, provided the accommodation does not change the essential nature of the activity. He says, "I'm a great golfer. I want to compete. But I need a golf cart to get from one hole to the next." Suppose you were on the Supreme Court. Suppose you were deciding the justice of this case. How many here would say that Casey Martin does have a right to use a golf cart? And how many say, no, he doesn't? All right, let's take a poll, show of hands. How many would rule in favor of Casey Martin? And how many would not? How many would say he doesn't? All right, we have a good division of opinion here. Someone who would not grant Casey Martin the right to a golf cart, what would be your reason? Raise your hand, and we'll try to get you a microphone. What would be your reason? (Audience: It'd be an unfair advantage.) MS: It would be an unfair advantage if he gets to ride in a golf cart. All right, those of you, I imagine most of you who would not give him the golf cart worry about an unfair advantage. What about those of you who say he should be given a golf cart? How would you answer the objection? Yes, all right. Audience: The cart's not part of the game. MS: What's your name? (Audience: Charlie.) MS: Charlie says — We'll get Charlie a microphone in case someone wants to reply. Tell us, Charlie, why would you say he should be able to use a golf cart? Charlie: The cart's not part of the game. MS: But what about walking from hole to hole? Charlie: It doesn't matter; it's not part of the game. MS: Walking the course is not part of the game of golf? Charlie: Not in my book, it isn't. MS: All right. Stay there, Charlie. (Laughter) Who has an answer for Charlie? All right, who has an answer for Charlie? What would you say? Audience: The endurance element is a very important part of the game, walking all those holes. MS: Walking all those holes? That's part of the game of golf? (Audience: Absolutely.) MS: What's your name? (Audience: Warren.) MS: Warren. Charlie, what do you say to Warren? Charley: I'll stick to my original thesis. (Laughter) MS: Warren, are you a golfer? Warren: I am not a golfer. Charley: And I am. (MS: Okay.) (Laughter) (Applause) You know, it's interesting. In the case, in the lower court, they brought in golfing greats to testify on this very issue. Is walking the course essential to the game? And they brought in Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. And what do you suppose they all said? Yes. They agreed with Warren. They said, yes, walking the course is strenuous physical exercise. The fatigue factor is an important part of golf. And so it would change the fundamental nature of the game to give him the golf cart. Now, notice, something interesting — Well, I should tell you about the Supreme Court first. The Supreme Court decided. What do you suppose they said? They said yes, that Casey Martin must be provided a golf cart. Seven to two, they ruled. What was interesting about their ruling and about the discussion we've just had is that the discussion about the right, the justice, of the matter depended on figuring out what is the essential nature of golf. And the Supreme Court justices wrestled with that question. And Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, said he had read all about the history of golf, and the essential point of the game is to get very small ball from one place into a hole in as few strokes as possible, and that walking was not essential, but incidental. Now, there were two dissenters, one of whom was Justice Scalia. He wouldn't have granted the cart, and he had a very interesting dissent. It's interesting because he rejected the Aristotelian premise underlying the majority's opinion. He said it's not possible to determine the essential nature of a game like golf. Here's how he put it. "To say that something is essential is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object. But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement, (Laughter) that is, what distinguishes games from productive activity, (Laughter) it is quite impossible to say that any of a game's arbitrary rules is essential." So there you have Justice Scalia taking on the Aristotelian premise of the majority's opinion. Justice Scalia's opinion is questionable for two reasons. First, no real sports fan would talk that way. (Laughter) If we had thought that the rules of the sports we care about are merely arbitrary, rather than designed to call forth the virtues and the excellences that we think are worthy of admiring, we wouldn't care about the outcome of the game. It's also objectionable on a second ground. On the face of it, it seemed to be — this debate about the golf cart — an argument about fairness, what's an unfair advantage. But if fairness were the only thing at stake, there would have been an easy and obvious solution. What would it be? (Audience: Let everyone use the cart.) Let everyone ride in a golf cart if they want to. Then the fairness objection goes away. But letting everyone ride in a cart would have been, I suspect, more anathema to the golfing greats and to the PGA, even than making an exception for Casey Martin. Why? Because what was at stake in the dispute over the golf cart was not only the essential nature of golf, but, relatedly, the question: What abilities are worthy of honor and recognition as athletic talents? Let me put the point as delicately as possible: Golfers are a little sensitive about the athletic status of their game. (Laughter) After all, there's no running or jumping, and the ball stands still. (Laughter) So if golfing is the kind of game that can be played while riding around in a golf cart, it would be hard to confer on the golfing greats the status that we confer, the honor and recognition that goes to truly great athletes. That illustrates that with golf, as with flutes, it's hard to decide the question of what justice requires, without grappling with the question, "What is the essential nature of the activity in question, and what qualities, what excellences connected with that activity, are worthy of honor and recognition?" Let's take a final example that's prominent in contemporary political debate: same-sex marriage. There are those who favor state recognition only of traditional marriage between one man and one woman, and there are those who favor state recognition of same-sex marriage. How many here favor the first policy: the state should recognize traditional marriage only? And how many favor the second, same-sex marriage? Now, put it this way: What ways of thinking about justice and morality underlie the arguments we have over marriage? The opponents of same-sex marriage say that the purpose of marriage, fundamentally, is procreation, and that's what's worthy of honoring and recognizing and encouraging. And the defenders of same-sex marriage say no, procreation is not the only purpose of marriage; what about a lifelong, mutual, loving commitment? That's really what marriage is about. So with flutes, with golf carts, and even with a fiercely contested question like same-sex marriage, Aristotle has a point. Very hard to argue about justice without first arguing about the purpose of social institutions and about what qualities are worthy of honor and recognition. So let's step back from these cases and see how they shed light on the way we might improve, elevate, the terms of political discourse in the United States, and for that matter, around the world. There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion. So better to shy away from, to ignore, the moral and the religious convictions that people bring to civic life. It seems to me that our discussion reflects the opposite, that a better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter. That, it seems to me, is a way to begin to restore the art of democratic argument. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. Chris. Thanks, Chris. Chris Anderson: From flutes to golf courses to same-sex marriage — that was a genius link. Now look, you're a pioneer of open education. Your lecture series was one of the first to do it big. What's your vision for the next phase of this? MS: Well, I think that it is possible. In the classroom, we have arguments on some of the most fiercely held moral convictions that students have about big public questions. And I think we can do that in public life more generally. And so my real dream would be to take the public television series that we've created of the course — it's available now, online, free for everyone anywhere in the world — and to see whether we can partner with institutions, at universities in China, in India, in Africa, around the world, to try to promote civic education and also a richer kind of democratic debate. CA: So you picture, at some point, live, in real time, you could have this kind of conversation, inviting questions, but with people from China and India joining in? MS: Right. We did a little bit of it here with 1,500 people in Long Beach, and we do it in a classroom at Harvard with about 1,000 students. Wouldn't it be interesting to take this way of thinking and arguing, engaging seriously with big moral questions, exploring cultural differences and connect through a live video hookup, students in Beijing and Mumbai and in Cambridge, Massachusetts and create a global classroom. That's what I would love to do. (Applause) CA: So, I would imagine that there are a lot of people who would love to join you in that endeavor. Michael Sandel. Thank you so much. (MS: Thanks so much.)

How poachers became caretakers

{0: 'John Kasaona is a pioneer of community-based conservation -- working with the people who use and live on fragile land to enlist them in protecting it.'}

TED2010

In Africa we say, "God gave the white man a watch and gave the black man time." (Laughter) I think, how is it possible for a man with so much time to tell his story in 18 minutes? I think it will be quite a challenge for me. Most African stories these days, they talk about famine, HIV and AIDS, poverty or war. But my story that I would like to share with you today is the one about success. It is about a country in the southwest of Africa called Namibia. Namibia has got 2.1 million people, but it is only twice the size of California. I come from a region in the remote northwest part of the country. It's called Kunene region. And in the center of Kunene region is the village of Sesfontein. This is where I was born. This is where I'm coming from. Most people that are following the story of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt will know where Namibia is. They love Namibia for its beautiful dunes, that are even taller than the Empire State Building. Wind and time have twisted our landscape into very strange shapes, and these shapes are speckled with wildlife that has become so adapted to this harsh and strange land. I'm a Himba. You might wonder, why are you wearing these Western clothes? I'm a Himba and Namibian. A Himba is one of the 29 ethnic groups in Namibia. We live a very traditional lifestyle. I grew up herding, looking after our livestock — goats, sheep and cattle. And one day, my father actually took me into the bush. He said, "John, I want you to become a good herder. Boy, if you are looking after our livestock and you see a cheetah eating our goat — cheetah is very nervous — just walk up to it. Walk up to it and smack it on the backside." (Laughter) "And he will let go of the goat and run off." But then he said, "Boy, if you run into a lion, don't move. Don't move. Stand your ground. Puff up and just look it in the eye and it may not want to fight you." (Laughter) But then, he said, "If you see a leopard, boy, you better run like hell." (Laughter) "Imagine you run faster than those goats you are looking after." In this way — (Laughter) In this way, I actually started to learn about nature. In addition to being an ordinary Namibian and in addition to being a Himba I'm also a trained conservationist. And it is very important if you are in the field to know what to confront and what to run from. I was born in 1971. We lived under apartheid regime. The whites could farm, graze and hunt as they wished, but we black, we were not regarded as responsible to use wildlife. Whenever we tried to hunt, we were called poachers. And as a result, we were fined and locked up in jail. Between 1966 and 1990, the U.S. and Soviet interests fought for control over my country. And you know, during war time, there are militaries, armies, that are moving around. And the army hunted for valuable rhino horns and tusks. They could sell these things for anything between $5,000 a kilo. During the same year almost every Himba had a rifle. Because it was wartime, the British .303 rifle was just all over the whole country. Then in the same time, around 1980, we had a very big drought. It killed almost everything that was left. Our livestock was almost at the brink of extinction, protected as well. We were hungry. I remember a night when a hungry leopard went into the house of one of our neighbors and took a sleeping child out of the bed. It's a very sad story. But even today, that memory is still in people's minds. They can pinpoint the exact location where this all happened. And then, in the same year, we almost lost everything. And my father said, "Why don't you just go to school?" And they sent me off to school, just to get busy somewhere there. And the year I went to school, my father actually got a job with a non-governmental organization called IRDNC, Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation. They actually spend a lot of time a year in the communities. They were trusted by the local communities like our leader, Joshua Kangombe. Joshua Kangombe saw what was happening: wildlife disappearing, poaching was skyrocketing, and the situation seemed very hopeless. Death and despair surrounded Joshua and our entire communities. But then, the people from IRDNC proposed to Joshua: What if we pay people that you trust to look after wildlife? Do you have anybody in your communities, or people, that know the bush very well and that know wildlife very well? The headman said: "Yes. Our poachers." "Eh? The poachers?" "Yes. Our poachers." And that was my father. My father has been a poacher for quite a long time. Instead of shooting poachers dead like they were doing elsewhere in Africa, IRDNC has helped men reclaim their abilities to manage their peoples and their rights to own and manage wildlife. And thus, as people started feeling ownership over wildlife, wildlife numbers started coming back, and that's actually becoming a foundation for conservation in Namibia. With independence, the whole approach of community getting involved was embraced by our new government. Three things that actually help to build on this foundation: The very first one is honoring of tradition and being open to new ideas. Here is our tradition: At every Himba village, there is a sacred fire. And at this sacred fire, the spirit of our ancestors speak through the headman and advise us where to get water, where to get grazings, and where to go and hunt. And I think this is the best way of regulating ourselves on the environment. And here are the new ideas. Transporting rhinos using helicopters I think is much easier than talking through a spirit that you can't see, isn't it? And these things we were taught by outsiders. We learned these things from outsiders. We needed new boundaries to describe our traditional lands; we needed to learn more things like GPS just to see whether — can GPS really reflect the true reflection of the land or is this just a thing made somewhere in the West? And we then wanted to see whether we can match our ancestral maps with digital maps made somewhere in the world. And through this, we actually started realizing our dreams, and we maintained honoring our traditions but we were still open to new ideas. The second element is that we wanted to have a life, a better life where we can benefit through many things. Most poachers, like my father, were people from our own community. They were not people from outside. These were our own people. And sometimes, once they were caught, they were treated with respect, brought back into the communities and they were made part of the bigger dreams. The best one, like my father — I'm not campaigning for my father — (Laughter) they were put in charge to stop others from poaching. And when this thing started going on, we started becoming one community, renewing our connection to nature. And that was a very strong thing in Namibia. The last element that actually helped develop these things was the partnerships. Our government has given legal status over our traditional lands. The other partners that we have got is business communities. Business communities helped bring Namibia onto the world map and they have also helped make wildlife a very valuable land use like any other land uses such as agriculture. And most of my conservation colleagues today that you find in Namibia have been trained through the initiative, through the involvement of World Wildlife Fund in the most up-to-date conservation practices. They have also given funding for two decades to this whole program. And so far, with the support of World Wildlife Fund, we've been able to scale up the very small programs to national programs today. Namibia ... or Sesfontein was no more an isolated village somewhere, hidden away in Namibia. With these assets we are now part of the global village. Thirty years have passed since my father's first job as a community game guard. It's very unfortunate that he passed away and he cannot see the success as I and my children see it today. When I finished school in 1995, there were only 20 lions in the entire Northwest — in our area. But today, there are more than 130 lions. (Applause) So please, if you go to Namibia, make sure that you stay in the tents. Don't walk out at night! (Laughter) The black rhino — they were almost extinct in 1982. But today, Kunene has the largest concentration of black rhino — free-roaming black rhinos — in the world. This is outside the protected area. (Applause) The leopard — they are now in big numbers but they are now far away from our village, because the natural plain has multiplied, like zebras, springboks and everything. They stay very much far away because this other thing has multiplied from less than a thousand to tens of thousands of animals. What started as very small, community rangers getting community involved, has now grown into something that we call conservancies. Conservancies are legally instituted institutions by the government, and these are run by the communities themselves, for their benefit. Today, we have got 60 conservancies that manage and protect over 13 million hectares of land in Namibia. We have already reshaped conservation in the entire country. Nowhere else in the world has community-adopted conservation at this scale. (Applause) In 2008, conservancy generated 5.7 million dollars. This is our new economy — an economy based on the respect of our natural resources. And we are able to use this money for many things: Very importantly, we put it in education. Secondly, we put it for infrastructure. Food. Very important as well — we invest this money in AIDS and HIV education. You know that Africa is being affected by these viruses. And this is the good news from Africa that we have to shout from the rooftops. (Applause) And now, what the world really needs is for you to help me and our partners take some of what we have learned in Namibia to other places with similar problems: places like Mongolia, or even in your own backyards, the Northern Great Plains, where buffalo and other animals have suffered and many communities are in decline. I like that one: Namibia serving as a model to Africa, and Africa serving as a model to the United States. (Applause) We were successful in Namibia because we dreamed of a future that was much more than just a healthy wildlife. We knew conservation would fail if it doesn't work to improve the lives of the local communities. So, come and talk to me about Namibia, and better yet, come to Namibia and see for yourself how we have done it. And please, do visit our website to learn more and see how you can help CBNRM in Africa and across the world. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Sweat the small stuff

{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.'}

TEDSalon London 2010

Those of you who may remember me from TEDGlobal remember me asking a few questions which still preoccupy me. One of them was: Why is it necessary to spend six billion pounds speeding up the Eurostar train when, for about 10 percent of that money, you could have top supermodels, male and female, serving free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers for the entire duration of the journey? You'd still have five billion left in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down. Now, you may remember me asking the question as well, a very interesting observation, that actually those strange little signs that actually flash "35" at you, occasionally accompanying a little smiley face or a frown, according to whether you're within or outside the speed limit — those are actually more effective at preventing road accidents than speed cameras, which come with the actual threat of real punishment. So there seems to be a strange disproportionality at work, I think, in many areas of human problem solving, particularly those which involve human psychology, which is: The tendency of the organization or the institution is to deploy as much force as possible, as much compulsion as possible, whereas actually, the tendency of the person is to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied. So there seems to be a complete disconnect here. So what I'm asking for is the creation of a new job title — I'll come to this a little later — and perhaps the addition of a new word into the English language. Because it does seem to me that large organizations including government, which is, of course, the largest organization of all, have actually become completely disconnected with what actually matters to people. Let me give you one example of this. You may remember this as the AOL-Time Warner merger, okay, heralded at the time as the largest single deal of all time. It may still be, for all I know. Now, all of you in this room, in one form or other, are probably customers of one or both of those organizations that merged. Just interested, did anybody notice anything different as a result of this at all? So unless you happened to be a shareholder of one or the other organizations or one of the dealmakers or lawyers involved in the no-doubt lucrative activity, you're actually engaging in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger-all to anybody, okay? By contrast, years of marketing have taught me that if you actually want people to remember you and to appreciate what you do, the most potent things are actually very, very small. This is from Virgin Atlantic upper-class, it's the cruet salt and pepper set. Quite nice in itself, they're little, sort of, airplane things. What's really, really sweet is every single person looking at these things has exactly the same mischievous thought, which is, "I reckon I can heist these." However, you pick them up and underneath, actually engraved in the metal, are the words, "Stolen from Virgin Atlantic Airways upper-class." (Laughter) Now, years after you remember the strategic question of whether you're flying in a 777 or an Airbus, you remember those words and that experience. Similarly, this is from a hotel in Stockholm, the Lydmar. Has anybody stayed there? It's the lift, it's a series of buttons in the lift. Nothing unusual about that at all, except that these are actually not the buttons that take you to an individual floor. It starts with garage at the bottom, I suppose, appropriately, but it doesn't go up garage, grand floor, mezzanine, one, two, three, four. It actually says garage, funk, rhythm and blues. You have a series of buttons. You actually choose your lift music. My guess is that the cost of installing this in the lift in the Lydmar Hotel in Stockholm is probably 500 to 1,000 pounds max. It's frankly more memorable than all those millions of hotels we've all stayed at that tell you that your room has actually been recently renovated at a cost of 500,000 dollars, in order to make it resemble every other hotel room you've ever stayed in in the entire course of your life. Now, these are trivial marketing examples, I accept. But I was at a TED event recently and Esther Duflo, probably one of the leading experts in, effectively, the eradication of poverty in the developing world, actually spoke. And she came across a similar example of something that fascinated me as being something which, in a business context or a government context, would simply be so trivial a solution as to seem embarrassing. It was simply to encourage the inoculation of children by, not only making it a social event — I think good use of behavioral economics in that, if you turn up with several other mothers to have your child inoculated, your sense of confidence is much greater than if you turn up alone. But secondly, to incentivize that inoculation by giving a kilo of lentils to everybody who participated. It's a tiny, tiny thing. If you're a senior person at UNESCO and someone says, "So what are you doing to eradicate world poverty?" you're not really confident standing up there saying, "I've got it cracked; it's the lentils," are you? Our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big important problems need to have big important, and most of all, expensive solutions attached to them. And yet, what behavioral economics shows time after time after time is in human behavioral and behavioral change there's a very, very strong disproportionality at work, that actually what changes our behavior and what changes our attitude to things is not actually proportionate to the degree of expense entailed, or the degree of force that's applied. But everything about institutions makes them uncomfortable with that disproportionality. So what happens in an institution is the very person who has the power to solve the problem also has a very, very large budget. And once you have a very, very large budget, you actually look for expensive things to spend it on. What is completely lacking is a class of people who have immense amounts of power, but no money at all. (Laughter) It's those people I'd quite like to create in the world going forward. Now, here's another thing that happens, which is what I call sometimes "Terminal 5 syndrome," which is that big, expensive things get big, highly-intelligent attention, and they're great, and Terminal 5 is absolutely magnificent, until you get down to the small detail, the usability, which is the signage, which is catastrophic. You come out of "Arrive" at the airport, and you follow a big yellow sign that says "Trains" and it's in front of you. So you walk for another hundred yards, expecting perhaps another sign, that might courteously be yellow, in front of you and saying "Trains." No, no, no, the next one is actually blue, to your left, and says "Heathrow Express." I mean, it could almost be rather like that scene from the film "Airplane." A yellow sign? That's exactly what they'll be expecting. Actually, what happens in the world increasingly — now, all credit to the British Airport Authority. I spoke about this before, and a brilliant person got in touch with me and said, "Okay, what can you do?" So I did come up with five suggestions, which they are actually actioning. One of them also being, although logically it's quite a good idea to have a lift with no up and down button in it, if it only serves two floors, it's actually bloody terrifying, okay? Because when the door closes and there's nothing for you to do, you've actually just stepped into a Hammer film. (Laughter) So these questions ... what is happening in the world is the big stuff, actually, is done magnificently well. But the small stuff, what you might call the user interface, is done spectacularly badly. But also, there seems to be a complete sort of gridlock in terms of solving these small solutions. Because the people who can actually solve them actually are too powerful and too preoccupied with something they think of as "strategy" to actually solve them. I tried this exercise recently, talking about banking. They said, "Can we do an advertising campaign? What can we do and encourage more online banking?" I said, "It's really, really easy." I said, "When people login to their online bank there are lots and lots of things they'd probably quite like to look at. The last thing in the world you ever want to see is your balance." I've got friends who actually never use their own bank cash machines because there's the risk that it might display their balance on the screen. Why would you willingly expose yourself to bad news? Okay, you simply wouldn't. I said, "If you make, actually, 'Tell me my balance.' If you make that an option rather than the default, you'll find twice as many people log on to online banking, and they do it three times as often." Let's face it, most of us — how many of you actually check your balance before you remove cash from a cash machine? And you're pretty rich by the standards of the world at large. Now, interesting that no single person does that, or at least can admit to being so anal as to do it. But what's interesting about that suggestion was that, to implement that suggestion wouldn't cost 10 million pounds; it wouldn't involve large amounts of expenditure; it would actually cost about 50 quid. And yet, it never happens. Because there's a fundamental disconnect, as I said, that actually, the people with the power want to do big expensive things. And there's to some extent a big strategy myth that's prevalent in business now. And if you think about it, it's very, very important that the strategy myth is maintained. Because, if the board of directors convince everybody that the success of any organization is almost entirely dependent on the decisions made by the board of directors, it makes the disparity in salaries slightly more justifiable than if you actually acknowledge that quite a lot of the credit for a company's success might actually lie somewhere else, in small pieces of tactical activity. But what is happening is that effectively — and the invention of the spreadsheet hasn't helped this; lots of things haven't helped this — business and government suffers from a kind of physics envy. It wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate. It's a kind of mechanistic world that we'd all love to live in where, effectively, it sits very nicely on spreadsheets, everything is numerically expressible, and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success. That's the world people actually want. In truth, we do live in a world that science can understand. Unfortunately, the science is probably closer to being climatology in that in many cases, very, very small changes can have disproportionately huge effects, and equally, vast areas of activity, enormous mergers, can actually accomplish absolutely bugger-all. But it's very, very uncomfortable for us to actually acknowledge that we're living in such a world. But what I'm saying is we could just make things a little bit better for ourselves if we looked at it in this very simple four-way approach. That is actually strategy, and I'm not denying that strategy has a role. You know, there are cases where you spend quite a lot of money and you accomplish quite a lot. And I'd be wrong to dis that completely. Moving over, we come, of course, to consultancy. (Laughter) I thought it was very indecent of Accenture to ditch Tiger Woods in such a sort of hurried and hasty way. I mean, Tiger surely was actually obeying the Accenture model. He developed an interesting outsourcing model for sexual services, (Laughter) no longer tied to a single monopoly provider, in many cases, sourcing things locally, and of course, the ability to have between one and three girls delivered at any time led for better load-balancing. So what Accenture suddenly found so unattractive about that, I'm not sure. Then there are other things that don't cost much and achieve absolutely nothing. That's called trivia. But there's a fourth thing. And the fundamental problem is we don't actually have a word for this stuff. We don't know what to call it. And actually we don't spend nearly enough money looking for those things, looking for those tiny things that may or may not work, but which, if they do work, can have a success absolutely out of proportion to their expense, their efforts and the disruption they cause. So the first thing I'd like is a competition — to anybody watching this as a film — is to come up with a name for that stuff on the bottom right. And the second thing, I think, is that the world needs to have people in charge of that. That's why I call for the "Chief Detail Officer." Every corporation should have one, and every government should have a Ministry of Detail. The people who actually have no money, who have no extravagant budget, but who realize that actually you might achieve greater success in uptake of a government program by actually doubling the level of benefits you pay, but you'll probably achieve exactly that same effect simply by redesigning the form and writing it in comprehensible English. And if actually we created a Ministry of Detail and business actually had Chief Detail Officers, then that fourth quadrant, which is so woefully neglected at the moment, might finally get the attention it deserves. Thank you very much.

Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy?

{0: "Since the counterculture '60s, Stewart Brand has been creating our internet-worked world. Now, with biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, Stewart Brand has a bold new plan ...", 1: 'At Stanford, Mark Z. Jacobson uses numerical models to study the effects of energy systems and vehicles on climate and air pollution, and to analyze renewable energy resources.'}

TED2010

Chris Anderson: We're having a debate. The debate is over the proposition: "What the world needs now is nuclear energy." True or false? And before we have the debate, I'd like to actually take a show of hands — on balance, right now, are you for or against this? So those who are "yes," raise your hand. "For." Okay, hands down. Those who are against, raise your hands. Okay, I'm reading that at about 75 to 25 in favor at the start. Which means we're going to take a vote at the end and see how that shifts, if at all. So here's the format: They're going to have six minutes each, and then after one little, quick exchange between them, I want two people on each side of this debate in the audience to have 30 seconds to make one short, crisp, pungent, powerful point. So, in favor of the proposition, possibly shockingly, is one of, truly, the founders of the environmental movement, a long-standing TEDster, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, someone we all know and love, Stewart Brand. Stewart Brand: Whoa. (Applause) The saying is that with climate, those who know the most are the most worried. With nuclear, those who know the most are the least worried. A classic example is James Hansen, a NASA climatologist pushing for 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He came out with a wonderful book recently called "Storms of My Grandchildren." And Hansen is hard over for nuclear power, as are most climatologists who are engaging this issue seriously. This is the design situation: a planet that is facing climate change and is now half urban. Look at the client base for this. Five out of six of us live in the developing world. We are moving to cities. We are moving up in the world. And we are educating our kids, having fewer kids, basically good news all around. But we move to cities, toward the bright lights, and one of the things that is there that we want, besides jobs, is electricity. And if it isn't easily gotten, we'll go ahead and steal it. This is one of the most desired things by poor people all over the world, in the cities and in the countryside. Electricity for cities, at its best, is what's called baseload electricity. That's where it is on all the time. And so far there are only three major sources of that — coal and gas, hydro-electric, which in most places is maxed-out — and nuclear. I would love to have something in the fourth place here, but in terms of constant, clean, scalable energy, [solar] and wind and the other renewables aren't there yet because they're inconstant. Nuclear is and has been for 40 years. Now, from an environmental standpoint, the main thing you want to look at is what happens to the waste from nuclear and from coal, the two major sources of electricity. If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear, the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can — a pretty heavy Coke can, about two pounds. But one day of coal adds up to one hell of a lot of carbon dioxide in a normal one-gigawatt coal-fired plant. Then what happens to the waste? The nuclear waste typically goes into a dry cask storage out back of the parking lot at the reactor site because most places don't have underground storage yet. It's just as well, because it can stay where it is. While the carbon dioxide, vast quantities of it, gigatons, goes into the atmosphere where we can't get it back — yet — and where it is causing the problems that we're most concerned about. So when you add up the greenhouse gases in the lifetime of these various energy sources, nuclear is down there with wind and hydro, below solar and way below, obviously, all the fossil fuels. Wind is wonderful; I love wind. I love being around these big wind generators. But one of the things we're discovering is that wind, like solar, is an actually relatively dilute source of energy. And so it takes a very large footprint on the land, a very large footprint in terms of materials, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm. In places like Denmark and Germany, they've maxed out on wind already. They've run out of good sites. The power lines are getting overloaded. And you peak out. Likewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 square miles of southern California desert. Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen. It's okay on frapped-out agricultural land. Solar's wonderful on rooftops. But out in the landscape, one gigawatt is on the order of 50 square miles of bulldozed desert. When you add all these things up — Saul Griffith did the numbers and figured out what would it take to get 13 clean terawatts of energy from wind, solar and biofuels, and that area would be roughly the size of the United States, an area he refers to as "Renewistan." A guy who's added it up all this very well is David Mackay, a physicist in England, and in his wonderful book, "Sustainable Energy," among other things, he says, "I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic." (Laughter) In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. Ten percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads. We haven't even started the American stockpile. I think of most interest to a TED audience would be the new generation of reactors that are very small, down around 10 to 125 megawatts. This is one from Toshiba. Here's one the Russians are already building that floats on a barge. And that would be very interesting in the developing world. Typically, these things are put in the ground. They're referred to as nuclear batteries. They're incredibly safe, weapons proliferation-proof and all the rest of it. Here is a commercial version from New Mexico called the Hyperion, and another one from Oregon called NuScale. Babcock & Wilcox that make nuclear reactors, here's an integral fast reactor. Thorium reactor that Nathan Myhrvold's involved in. The governments of the world are going to have to decide that coals need to be made expensive, and these will go ahead. And here's the future. (Applause) CA: Okay. Okay. (Applause) So arguing against, a man who's been at the nitty, gritty heart of the energy debate and the climate change debate for years. In 2000, he discovered that soot was probably the second leading cause of global warming, after CO2. His team have been making detailed calculations of the relative impacts of different energy sources. His first time at TED, possibly a disadvantage — we shall see — from Stanford, Professor Mark Jacobson. Good luck. Mark Jacobson: Thank you. (Applause) So my premise here is that nuclear energy puts out more carbon dioxide, puts out more air pollutants, enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up than real renewable energy systems, namely wind, solar, geothermal power, hydro-tidal wave power. And it also enhances nuclear weapons proliferation. So let's start just by looking at the CO2 emissions from the life cycle. CO2e emissions are equivalent emissions of all the greenhouse gases and particles that cause warming and converted to CO2. And if you look, wind and concentrated solar have the lowest CO2 emissions, if you look at the graph. Nuclear — there are two bars here. One is a low estimate, and one is a high estimate. The low estimate is the nuclear energy industry estimate of nuclear. The high is the average of 103 scientific, peer-reviewed studies. And this is just the CO2 from the life cycle. If we look at the delays, it takes between 10 and 19 years to put up a nuclear power plant from planning to operation. This includes about three and a half to six years for a site permit. and another two and a half to four years for a construction permit and issue, and then four to nine years for actual construction. And in China, right now, they're putting up five gigawatts of nuclear. And the average, just for the construction time of these, is 7.1 years on top of any planning times. While you're waiting around for your nuclear, you have to run the regular electric power grid, which is mostly coal in the United States and around the world. And the chart here shows the difference between the emissions from the regular grid, resulting if you use nuclear, or anything else, versus wind, CSP or photovoltaics. Wind takes about two to five years on average, same as concentrated solar and photovoltaics. So the difference is the opportunity cost of using nuclear versus wind, or something else. So if you add these two together, alone, you can see a separation that nuclear puts out at least nine to 17 times more CO2 equivalent emissions than wind energy. And this doesn't even account for the footprint on the ground. If you look at the air pollution health effects, this is the number of deaths per year in 2020 just from vehicle exhaust. Let's say we converted all the vehicles in the United States to battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or flex fuel vehicles run on E85. Well, right now in the United States, 50 to 100,000 people die per year from air pollution, and vehicles are about 25,000 of those. In 2020, the number will go down to 15,000 due to improvements. And so, on the right, you see gasoline emissions, the death rates of 2020. If you go to corn or cellulosic ethanol, you'd actually increase the death rate slightly. If you go to nuclear, you do get a big reduction, but it's not as much as with wind and concentrated solar. Now if you consider the fact that nuclear weapons proliferation is associated with nuclear energy proliferation, because we know for example, India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons secretly by enriching uranium in nuclear energy facilities. North Korea did that to some extent. Iran is doing that right now. And Venezuela would be doing it if they started with their nuclear energy facilities. If you do a large scale expansion of nuclear energy across the world, and as a result there was just one nuclear bomb created that was used to destroy a city such as Mumbai or some other big city, megacity, the additional death rates due to this averaged over 30 years and then scaled to the population of the U.S. would be this. So, do we need this? The next thing is: What about the footprint? Stewart mentioned the footprint. Actually, the footprint on the ground for wind is by far the smallest of any energy source in the world. That, because the footprint, as you can see, is just the pole touching the ground. And you can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet with 73,000 to 145,000 five-megawatt wind turbines. That would take between one and three square kilometers of footprint on the ground, entirely. The spacing is something else. That's the footprint that is always being confused. People confuse footprint with spacing. As you can see from these pictures, the spacing between can be used for multiple purposes including agricultural land, range land or open space. Over the ocean, it's not even land. Now if we look at nuclear — (Laughter) With nuclear, what do we have? We have facilities around there. You also have a buffer zone that's 17 square kilometers. And you have the uranium mining that you have to deal with. Now if we go to the area, lots is worse than nuclear or wind. For example, cellulosic ethanol, to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet, this is how much land you would need. That's cellulosic, second generation biofuels from prairie grass. Here's corn ethanol. It's smaller. This is based on ranges from data, but if you look at nuclear, it would be the size of Rhode Island to power the U.S. vehicle fleet. For wind, there's a larger area, but much smaller footprint. And of course, with wind, you could put it all over the East Coast, offshore theoretically, or you can split it up. And now, if you go back to looking at geothermal, it's even smaller than both, and solar is slightly larger than the nuclear spacing, but it's still pretty small. And this is to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet. To power the entire world with 50 percent wind, you would need about one percent of world land. Matching the reliability, base load is actually irrelevant. We want to match the hour-by-hour power supply. You can do that by combining renewables. This is from real data in California, looking at wind data and solar data. And it considers just using existing hydro to match the hour-by-hour power demand. Here are the world wind resources. There's five to 10 times more wind available worldwide than we need for all the world. So then here's the final ranking. And one last slide I just want to show. This is the choice: You can either have wind or nuclear. If you use wind, you guarantee ice will last. Nuclear, the time lag alone will allow the Arctic to melt and other places to melt more. And we can guarantee a clean, blue sky or an uncertain future with nuclear power. (Applause) CA: All right. So while they're having their comebacks on each other — and yours is slightly short because you slightly overran — I need two people from either side. So if you're for this, if you're for nuclear power, put up two hands. If you're against, put up one. And I want two of each for the mics. Now then, you guys have — you have a minute comeback on him to pick up a point he said, challenge it, whatever. SB: I think a point of difference we're having, Mark, has to do with weapons and energy. These diagrams that show that nuclear is somehow putting out a lot of greenhouse gases — a lot of those studies include, "Well of course war will be inevitable and therefore we'll have cities burning and stuff like that," which is kind of finessing it a little bit, I think. The reality is that there's, what, 21 nations that have nuclear power? Of those, seven have nuclear weapons. In every case, they got the weapons before they got the nuclear power. There are two nations, North Korea and Israel, that have nuclear weapons and don't have nuclear power at all. The places that we would most like to have really clean energy occur are China, India, Europe, North America, all of which have sorted out their situation in relation to nuclear weapons. So that leaves a couple of places like Iran, maybe Venezuela, that you would like to have very close surveillance of anything that goes on with fissile stuff. Pushing ahead with nuclear power will mean we really know where all of the fissile material is, and we can move toward zero weapons left, once we know all that. CA: Mark, 30 seconds, either on that or on anything Stewart said. MJ: Well we know India and Pakistan had nuclear energy first, and then they developed nuclear weapons secretly in the factories. So the other thing is, we don't need nuclear energy. There's plenty of solar and wind. You can make it reliable, as I showed with that diagram. That's from real data. And this is an ongoing research. This is not rocket science. Solving the world's problems can be done, if you really put your mind to it and use clean, renewable energy. There's absolutely no need for nuclear power. (Applause) CA: We need someone for. Rod Beckstrom: Thank you Chris. I'm Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN. I've been involved in global warming policy since 1994, when I joined the board of Environmental Defense Fund that was one of the crafters of the Kyoto Protocol. And I want to support Stewart Brand's position. I've come around in the last 10 years. I used to be against nuclear power. I'm now supporting Stewart's position, softly, from a risk-management standpoint, agreeing that the risks of overheating the planet outweigh the risk of nuclear incident, which certainly is possible and is a very real problem. However, I think there may be a win-win solution here where both parties can win this debate, and that is, we face a situation where it's carbon caps on this planet or die. And in the United States Senate, we need bipartisan support — only one or two votes are needed — to move global warming through the Senate, and this room can help. So if we get that through, then Mark will solve these problems. Thanks Chris. CA: Thank you Rod Beckstrom. Against. David Fanton: Hi, I'm David Fanton. I just want to say a couple quick things. The first is: be aware of the propaganda. The propaganda from the industry has been very, very strong. And we have not had the other side of the argument fully aired so that people can draw their own conclusions. Be very aware of the propaganda. Secondly, think about this. If we build all these nuclear power plants, all that waste is going to be on hundreds, if not thousands, of trucks and trains, moving through this country every day. Tell me they're not going to have accidents. Tell me that those accidents aren't going to put material into the environment that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years. And then tell me that each and every one of those trucks and trains isn't a potential terrorist target. CA: Thank you. For. Anyone else for? Go. Alex: Hi, I'm Alex. I just wanted to say, I'm, first of all, renewable energy's biggest fan. I've got solar PV on my roof. I've got a hydro conversion at a watermill that I own. And I'm, you know, very much "pro" that kind of stuff. However, there's a basic arithmetic problem here. The capability of the sun shining, the wind blowing and the rain falling, simply isn't enough to add up. So if we want to keep the lights on, we actually need a solution which is going to keep generating all of the time. I campaigned against nuclear weapons in the '80s, and I continue to do so now. But we've got an opportunity to recycle them into something more useful that enables us to get energy all of the time. And, ultimately, the arithmetic problem isn't going to go away. We're not going to get enough energy from renewables alone. We need a solution that generates all of the time. If we're going to keep the lights on, nuclear is that solution. CA: Thank you. Anyone else against? Man: The last person who was in favor made the premise that we don't have enough alternative renewable resources. And our "against" proponent up here made it very clear that we actually do. And so the fallacy that we need this resource and we can actually make it in a time frame that is meaningful is not possible. I will also add one other thing. Ray Kurzweil and all the other talks — we know that the stick is going up exponentially. So you can't look at state-of-the-art technologies in renewables and say, "That's all we have." Because five years from now, it will blow you away what we'll actually have as alternatives to this horrible, disastrous nuclear power. CA: Point well made. Thank you. (Applause) So each of you has really just a couple sentences — 30 seconds each to sum up. Your final pitch, Stewart. SB: I loved your "It all balances out" chart that you had there. It was a sunny day and a windy night. And just now in England they had a cold spell. All of the wind in the entire country shut down for a week. None of those things were stirring. And as usual, they had to buy nuclear power from France. Two gigawatts comes through the Chunnel. This keeps happening. I used to worry about the 10,000 year factor. And the fact is, we're going to use the nuclear waste we have for fuel in the fourth generation of reactors that are coming along. And especially the small reactors need to go forward. I heard from Nathan Myhrvold — and I think here's the action point — it'll take an act of Congress to make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission start moving quickly on these small reactors, which we need very much, here and in the world. (Applause) MJ: So we've analyzed the hour-by-hour power demand and supply, looking at solar, wind, using data for California. And you can match that demand, hour-by-hour, for the whole year almost. Now, with regard to the resources, we've developed the first wind map of the world, from data alone, at 80 meters. We know what the wind resources are. You can cover 15 percent. Fifteen percent of the entire U.S. has wind at fast enough speeds to be cost-competitive. And there's much more solar than there is wind. There's plenty of resource. You can make it reliable. CA: Okay. So, thank you, Mark. (Applause) So if you were in Palm Springs ... (Laughter) (Applause) Shameless. Shameless. Shameless. (Applause) So, people of the TED community, I put it to you that what the world needs now is nuclear energy. All those in favor, raise your hands. (Shouts) And all those against. Ooooh. Now that is — my take on that ... Just put up ... Hands up, people who changed their minds during the debate, who voted differently. Those of you who changed your mind in favor of "for" put your hands up. Okay. So here's the read on it. Both people won supporters, but on my count, the mood of the TED community shifted from about 75 to 25 to about 65 to 35 in favor, in favor. You both won. I congratulate both of you. Thank you for that. (Applause)

How architecture helped music evolve

{0: 'David Byrne builds an idiosyncratic world of music, art, writing and film.'}

TED2010

This is the venue where, as a young man, some of the music that I wrote was first performed. It was, remarkably, a pretty good sounding room. With all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere, it actually sounded pretty good. This is a song that was recorded there. (Music) This is not Talking Heads, in the picture anyway. (Music: "A Clean Break (Let's Work)" by Talking Heads) So the nature of the room meant that words could be understood. The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood. The sound system was kind of decent. And there wasn't a lot of reverberation in the room. So the rhythms could be pretty intact too, pretty concise. Other places around the country had similar rooms. This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The music was in some ways different, but in structure and form, very much the same. The clientele behavior was very much the same too. And so the bands at Tootsie's or at CBGB's had to play loud enough — the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down, shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing. Since then, I've played other places that are much nicer. I've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that. And it's been very exciting. But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written, or was writing at the time, didn't sound all that great in some of those halls. We managed, but sometimes those halls didn't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made. So I asked myself: Do I write stuff for specific rooms? Do I have a place, a venue, in mind when I write? Is that a kind of model for creativity? Do we all make things with a venue, a context, in mind? Okay, Africa. (Music: "Wenlenga" / Various artists) Most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in West Africa. And the music there, I would say, the instruments, the intricate rhythms, the way it's played, the setting, the context, it's all perfect. It all works perfect. The music works perfectly in that setting. There's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms. The instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification, etc., etc. It's no accident. It's perfect for that particular context. And it would be a mess in a context like this. This is a gothic cathedral. (Music: "Spem In Alium" by Thomas Tallis) In a gothic cathedral, this kind of music is perfect. It doesn't change key, the notes are long, there's almost no rhythm whatsoever, and the room flatters the music. It actually improves it. This is the room that Bach wrote some of his music for. This is the organ. It's not as big as a gothic cathedral, so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate. He can, very innovatively, actually change keys without risking huge dissonances. (Music: "Fantasia On Jesu, Mein Freunde" by Johann S. Bach) This is a little bit later. This is the kind of rooms that Mozart wrote in. I think we're in like 1770, somewhere around there. They're smaller, even less reverberant, so he can write really frilly music that's very intricate — and it works. (Music: "Sonata in F," KV 13, by Wolfgang A. Mozart) It fits the room perfectly. This is La Scala. It's around the same time, I think it was built around 1776. People in the audience in these opera houses, when they were built, they used to yell out to one another. They used to eat, drink and yell out to people on the stage, just like they do at CBGB's and places like that. If they liked an aria, they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore, not at the end of the show, but immediately. (Laughter) And well, that was an opera experience. This is the opera house that Wagner built for himself. And the size of the room is not that big. It's smaller than this. But Wagner made an innovation. He wanted a bigger band. He wanted a little more bombast, so he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there. (Music: "Lohengrin / Prelude to Act III" by Richard Wagner) Okay. This is Carnegie Hall. Obviously, this kind of thing became popular. The halls got bigger. Carnegie Hall's fair-sized. It's larger than some of the other symphony halls. And they're a lot more reverberant than La Scala. Around the same, according to Alex Ross who writes for the New Yorker, this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet — no more eating, drinking and yelling at the stage, or gossiping with one another during the show. They had to be very quiet. So those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls. It meant that there could be extreme dynamics, which there weren't in some of these other kinds of music. Quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting. But because of the reverberation in those rooms like Carnegie Hall, the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural. (Music: "Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major" by Gustav Mahler) This is Mahler. It looks like Bob Dylan, but it's Mahler. That was Bob's last record, yeah. (Laughter) Popular music, coming along at the same time. This is a jazz band. According to Scott Joplin, the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs. Again, it's noisy. They're playing for dancers. There's certain sections of the song — the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked. And they'd say, "Play that part again." Well, there's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers. So the bands started to improvise new melodies. And a new form of music was born. (Music: "Royal Garden Blues" by W.C. Handy / Ethel Waters) These are played mainly in small rooms. People are dancing, shouting and drinking. So the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that. Same thing goes true for — that's the beginning of the century — for the whole of 20th-century popular music, whether it's rock or Latin music or whatever. [Live music] doesn't really change that much. It changes about a third of the way into the 20th century, when this became one of the primary venues for music. And this was one way that the music got there. Microphones enabled singers, in particular, and musicians and composers, to completely change the kind of music that they were writing. So far, a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music, but singers, like Frank Sinatra, could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone. Other singers after him went even further. (Music: "My Funny Valentine" by Chet Baker) This is Chet Baker. And this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone. It would have been impossible without recorded music as well. And he's singing right into your ear. He's whispering into your ears. The effect is just electric. It's like the guy is sitting next to you, whispering who knows what into your ear. So at this point, music diverged. There's live music, and there's recorded music. And they no longer have to be exactly the same. Now there's venues like this, a discotheque, and there's jukeboxes in bars, where you don't even need to have a band. There doesn't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever, and the sound systems are good. People began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems. And, as with jazz, the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others. So the early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections. (Music: "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang) The MC would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies. And another new form of music was born. Live performance, when it was incredibly successful, ended up in what is probably, acoustically, the worst sounding venues on the planet: sports stadiums, basketball arenas and hockey arenas. Musicians who ended up there did the best they could. They wrote what is now called arena rock, which is medium-speed ballads. (Music: "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2) They did the best they could given that this is what they're writing for. The tempos are medium. It sounds big. It's more a social situation than a musical situation. And in some ways, the music that they're writing for this place works perfectly. So there's more new venues. One of the new ones is the automobile. I grew up with a radio in a car. But now that's evolved into something else. The car is a whole venue. (Music: "Who U Wit" by Lil' Jon & the East Side Boyz) The music that, I would say, is written for automobile sound systems works perfectly on it. It might not be what you want to listen to at home, but it works great in the car — has a huge frequency spectrum, you know, big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle. Automobile music, you can share with your friends. There's one other kind of new venue, the private MP3 player. Presumably, this is just for Christian music. (Laughter) And in some ways it's like Carnegie Hall, or when the audience had to hush up, because you can now hear every single detail. In other ways, it's more like the West African music because if the music in an MP3 player gets too quiet, you turn it up, and the next minute, your ears are blasted out by a louder passage. So that doesn't really work. I think pop music, mainly, it's written today, to some extent, is written for these kind of players, for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail, but the dynamic doesn't change that much. So I asked myself: Okay, is this a model for creation, this adaptation that we do? And does it happen anywhere else? Well, according to David Attenborough and some other people, birds do it too — that the birds in the canopy, where the foliage is dense, their calls tend to be high-pitched, short and repetitive. And the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls, so that they don't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor. And birds like this Savannah sparrow, they tend to have a buzzing (Sound clip: Savannah sparrow song) type call. And it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs. Other birds, like this tanager, have adapted within the same species. The tananger on the East Coast of the United States, where the forests are a little denser, has one kind of call, and the tananger on the other side, on the west (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) has a different kind of call. (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) So birds do it too. And I thought: Well, if this is a model for creation, if we make music, primarily the form at least, to fit these contexts, and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls, and if we write software to fit existing operating systems, is that how it works? Yeah. I think it's evolutionary. It's adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there. This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional Romantic view. The Romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I'm saying, well, the passion's still there, but the vessel that it's going to be injected into and poured into, that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going. But this conflict of views is kind of interesting. The writer, Thomas Frank, says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests, that voters, like a lot of us, assume, that if they hear something that sounds like it's sincere, that it's coming from the gut, that it's passionate, that it's more authentic. And they'll vote for that. So that, if somebody can fake sincerity, if they can fake passion, they stand a better chance of being selected in that way, which seems a little dangerous. I'm saying the two, the passion, the joy, are not mutually exclusive. Maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds. We adapt. We sing. And like the birds, the joy is still there, even though we have changed what we do to fit the context. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The pattern behind self-deception

{0: "Michael Shermer debunks myths, superstitions and urban legends -- and explains why we believe them. Along with publishing Skeptic Magazine, he's author of Why People Believe Weird Things and The Mind of the Market."}

TED2010

So since I was here last in '06, we discovered that global climate change is turning out to be a pretty serious issue, so we covered that fairly extensively in Skeptic magazine. We investigate all kinds of scientific and quasi-scientific controversies, but it turns out we don't have to worry about any of this because the world's going to end in 2012. Another update: You will recall I introduced you guys to the Quadro Tracker. It's like a water dowsing device. It's just a hollow piece of plastic with an antenna that swivels around. And you walk around, and it points to things. Like if you're looking for marijuana in students' lockers, it'll point right to somebody. Oh, sorry. (Laughter) This particular one that was given to me finds golf balls, especially if you're at a golf course and you check under enough bushes. Well, under the category of "What's the harm of silly stuff like this?" this device, the ADE 651, was sold to the Iraqi government for 40,000 dollars apiece. It's just like this one, completely worthless, in which it allegedly worked by "electrostatic magnetic ion attraction," which translates to "pseudoscientific baloney" — would be the nice word — in which you string together a bunch of words that sound good, but it does absolutely nothing. In this case, at trespass points, allowing people to go through because your little tracker device said they were okay, actually cost lives. So there is a danger to pseudoscience, in believing in this sort of thing. So what I want to talk about today is belief. I want to believe, and you do too. And in fact, I think my thesis here is that belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural; disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural. It's more difficult. It's uncomfortable to not believe things. So like Fox Mulder on "X-Files," who wants to believe in UFOs? Well, we all do, and the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains. Essentially, we are pattern-seeking primates. We connect the dots: A is connected to B; B is connected to C. And sometimes A really is connected to B, and that's called association learning. We find patterns, we make those connections, whether it's Pavlov's dog here associating the sound of the bell with the food, and then he salivates to the sound of the bell, or whether it's a Skinnerian rat, in which he's having an association between his behavior and a reward for it, and therefore he repeats the behavior. In fact, what Skinner discovered is that, if you put a pigeon in a box like this, and he has to press one of these two keys, and he tries to figure out what the pattern is, and you give him a little reward in the hopper box there — if you just randomly assign rewards such that there is no pattern, they will figure out any kind of pattern. And whatever they were doing just before they got the reward, they repeat that particular pattern. Sometimes it was even spinning around twice counterclockwise, once clockwise and peck the key twice. And that's called superstition, and that, I'm afraid, we will always have with us. I call this process "patternicity" — that is, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. When we do this process, we make two types of errors. A Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it's not. Our second type of error is a false negative. A Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is. So let's do a thought experiment. You are a hominid three million years ago walking on the plains of Africa. Your name is Lucy, okay? And you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator, or is it just the wind? Your next decision could be the most important one of your life. Well, if you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, you've made an error in cognition, made a Type I error, false positive. But no harm. You just move away. You're more cautious. You're more vigilant. On the other hand, if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind, and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch. You've just won a Darwin award. You've been taken out of the gene pool. Now the problem here is that patternicities will occur whenever the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error. This is the only equation in the talk by the way. We have a pattern detection problem that is assessing the difference between a Type I and a Type II error is highly problematic, especially in split-second, life-and-death situations. So the default position is just: Believe all patterns are real — All rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not just the wind. And so I think that we evolved ... there was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines, our pattern-seeking brain processes, to always find meaningful patterns and infuse them with these sort of predatory or intentional agencies that I'll come back to. So for example, what do you see here? It's a horse head, that's right. It looks like a horse. It must be a horse. That's a pattern. And is it really a horse? Or is it more like a frog? See, our pattern detection device, which appears to be located in the anterior cingulate cortex — it's our little detection device there — can be easily fooled, and this is the problem. For example, what do you see here? Yes, of course, it's a cow. Once I prime the brain — it's called cognitive priming — once I prime the brain to see it, it pops back out again even without the pattern that I've imposed on it. And what do you see here? Some people see a Dalmatian dog. Yes, there it is. And there's the prime. So when I go back without the prime, your brain already has the model so you can see it again. What do you see here? Planet Saturn. Yes, that's good. How about here? Just shout out anything you see. That's a good audience, Chris. Because there's nothing in this. Well, allegedly there's nothing. This is an experiment done by Jennifer Whitson at U.T. Austin on corporate environments and whether feelings of uncertainty and out of control makes people see illusory patterns. That is, almost everybody sees the planet Saturn. People that are put in a condition of feeling out of control are more likely to see something in this, which is allegedly patternless. In other words, the propensity to find these patterns goes up when there's a lack of control. For example, baseball players are notoriously superstitious when they're batting, but not so much when they're fielding. Because fielders are successful 90 to 95 percent of the time. The best batters fail seven out of 10 times. So their superstitions, their patternicities, are all associated with feelings of lack of control and so forth. What do you see in this particular one here, in this field? Anybody see an object there? There actually is something here, but it's degraded. While you're thinking about that, this was an experiment done by Susan Blackmore, a psychologist in England, who showed subjects this degraded image and then ran a correlation between their scores on an ESP test: How much did they believe in the paranormal, supernatural, angels and so forth. And those who scored high on the ESP scale, tended to not only see more patterns in the degraded images but incorrect patterns. Here is what you show subjects. The fish is degraded 20 percent, 50 percent and then the one I showed you, 70 percent. A similar experiment was done by another [Swiss] psychologist named Peter Brugger, who found significantly more meaningful patterns were perceived on the right hemisphere, via the left visual field, than the left hemisphere. So if you present subjects the images such that it's going to end up on the right hemisphere instead of the left, then they're more likely to see patterns than if you put it on the left hemisphere. Our right hemisphere appears to be where a lot of this patternicity occurs. So what we're trying to do is bore into the brain to see where all this happens. Brugger and his colleague, Christine Mohr, gave subjects L-DOPA. L-DOPA's a drug, as you know, given for treating Parkinson's disease, which is related to a decrease in dopamine. L-DOPA increases dopamine. An increase of dopamine caused subjects to see more patterns than those that did not receive the dopamine. So dopamine appears to be the drug associated with patternicity. In fact, neuroleptic drugs that are used to eliminate psychotic behavior, things like paranoia, delusions and hallucinations, these are patternicities. They're incorrect patterns. They're false positives. They're Type I errors. And if you give them drugs that are dopamine antagonists, they go away. That is, you decrease the amount of dopamine, and their tendency to see patterns like that decreases. On the other hand, amphetamines like cocaine are dopamine agonists. They increase the amount of dopamine. So you're more likely to feel in a euphoric state, creativity, find more patterns. In fact, I saw Robin Williams recently talk about how he thought he was much funnier when he was doing cocaine, when he had that issue, than now. So perhaps more dopamine is related to more creativity. Dopamine, I think, changes our signal-to-noise ratio. That is, how accurate we are in finding patterns. If it's too low, you're more likely to make too many Type II errors. You miss the real patterns. You don't want to be too skeptical. If you're too skeptical, you'll miss the really interesting good ideas. Just right, you're creative, and yet you don't fall for too much baloney. Too high and maybe you see patterns everywhere. Every time somebody looks at you, you think people are staring at you. You think people are talking about you. And if you go too far on that, that's just simply labeled as madness. It's a distinction perhaps we might make between two Nobel laureates, Richard Feynman and John Nash. One sees maybe just the right number of patterns to win a Nobel Prize. The other one also, but maybe too many patterns. And we then call that schizophrenia. So the signal-to-noise ratio then presents us with a pattern-detection problem. And of course you all know exactly what this is, right? And what pattern do you see here? Again, I'm putting your anterior cingulate cortex to the test here, causing you conflicting pattern detections. You know, of course, this is Via Uno shoes. These are sandals. Pretty sexy feet, I must say. Maybe a little Photoshopped. And of course, the ambiguous figures that seem to flip-flop back and forth. It turns out what you're thinking about a lot influences what you tend to see. And you see the lamp here, I know. Because the lights on here. Of course, thanks to the environmentalist movement we're all sensitive to the plight of marine mammals. So what you see in this particular ambiguous figure is, of course, the dolphins, right? You see a dolphin here, and there's a dolphin, and there's a dolphin. That's a dolphin tail there, guys. (Laughter) If we can give you conflicting data, again, your ACC is going to be going into hyperdrive. If you look down here, it's fine. If you look up here, then you get conflicting data. And then we have to flip the image for you to see that it's a set up. The impossible crate illusion. It's easy to fool the brain in 2D. So you say, "Aw, come on Shermer, anybody can do that in a Psych 101 text with an illusion like that." Well here's the late, great Jerry Andrus' "impossible crate" illusion in 3D, in which Jerry is standing inside the impossible crate. And he was kind enough to post this and give us the reveal. Of course, camera angle is everything. The photographer is over there, and this board appears to overlap with this one, and this one with that one, and so on. But even when I take it away, the illusion is so powerful because of how are brains are wired to find those certain kinds of patterns. This is a fairly new one that throws us off because of the conflicting patterns of comparing this angle with that angle. In fact, it's the exact same picture side by side. So what you're doing is comparing that angle instead of with this one, but with that one. And so your brain is fooled. Yet again, your pattern detection devices are fooled. Faces are easy to see because we have an additional evolved facial recognition software in our temporal lobes. Here's some faces on the side of a rock. I'm actually not even sure if this is — this might be Photoshopped. But anyway, the point is still made. Now which one of these looks odd to you? In a quick reaction, which one looks odd? The one on the left. Okay. So I'll rotate it so it'll be the one on the right. And you are correct. A fairly famous illusion — it was first done with Margaret Thatcher. Now, they trade up the politicians every time. Well, why is this happening? Well, we know exactly where it happens, in the temporal lobe, right across, sort of above your ear there, in a little structure called the fusiform gyrus. And there's two types of cells that do this, that record facial features either globally, or specifically these large, rapid-firing cells, first look at the general face. So you recognize Obama immediately. And then you notice something quite a little bit odd about the eyes and the mouth. Especially when they're upside down, you're engaging that general facial recognition software there. Now I said back in our little thought experiment, you're a hominid walking on the plains of Africa. Is it just the wind or a dangerous predator? What's the difference between those? Well, the wind is inanimate; the dangerous predator is an intentional agent. And I call this process agenticity. That is the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency, often invisible beings from the top down. This is an idea that we got from a fellow TEDster here, Dan Dennett, who talked about taking the intentional stance. So it's a type of that expanded to explain, I think, a lot of different things: souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention, are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. I think it's the basis of animism and polytheism and monotheism. It's the belief that aliens are somehow more advanced than us, more moral than us, and the narratives always are that they're coming here to save us and rescue us from on high. The intelligent designer's always portrayed as this super intelligent, moral being that comes down to design life. Even the idea that government can rescue us — that's no longer the wave of the future, but that is, I think, a type of agenticity: projecting somebody up there, big and powerful, will come rescue us. And this is also, I think, the basis of conspiracy theories. There's somebody hiding behind there pulling the strings, whether it's the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers. But this is a pattern detection problem, isn't it? Some patterns are real and some are not. Was JFK assassinated by a conspiracy or by a lone assassin? Well, if you go there — there's people there on any given day — like when I went there, here — showing me where the different shooters were. My favorite one was he was in the manhole. And he popped out at the last second, took that shot. But of course, Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy. So we can't just uniformly dismiss all patterns like that. Because, let's face it, some patterns are real. Some conspiracies really are true. Explains a lot, maybe. And 9/11 has a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy. We did a whole issue on it. Nineteen members of Al Queda plotting to fly planes into buildings constitutes a conspiracy. But that's not what the "9/11 truthers" think. They think it was an inside job by the Bush administration. Well, that's a whole other lecture. You know how we know that 9/11 was not orchestrated by the Bush administration? Because it worked. (Laughter) (Applause) So we are natural-born dualists. Our agenticity process comes from the fact that we can enjoy movies like these. Because we can imagine, in essence, continuing on. We know that if you stimulate the temporal lobe, you can produce a feeling of out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, which you can do by just touching an electrode to the temporal lobe there. Or you can do it through loss of consciousness, by accelerating in a centrifuge. You get a hypoxia, or a lower oxygen. And the brain then senses that there's an out-of-body experience. You can use — which I did, went out and did — Michael Persinger's God Helmet, that bombards your temporal lobes with electromagnetic waves. And you get a sense of out-of-body experience. So I'm going to end here with a short video clip that sort of brings all this together. It's just a minute and a half. It ties together all this into the power of expectation and the power of belief. Go ahead and roll it. Narrator: This is the venue they chose for their fake auditions for an advert for lip balm. Woman: We're hoping we can use part of this in a national commercial, right? And this is test on some lip balms that we have over here. And these are our models who are going to help us, Roger and Matt. And we have our own lip balm, and we have a leading brand. Would you have any problem kissing our models to test it? Girl: No. Woman: You wouldn't? (Girl: No.) Woman: You'd think that was fine. Girl: That would be fine. (Woman: Okay.) So this is a blind test. I'm going to ask you to go ahead and put a blindfold on. Kay, now can you see anything? (Girl: No.) Pull it so you can't even see down. (Girl: Okay.) Woman: It's completely blind now, right? Girl: Yes. (Woman: Okay.) Now, what I'm going to be looking for in this test is how it protects your lips, the texture, right, and maybe if you can discern any flavor or not. Girl: Okay. (Woman: Have you ever done a kissing test before?) Girl: No. Woman: Take a step here. Okay, now I'm going to ask you to pucker up. Pucker up big and lean in just a little bit, okay? (Music) (Laughter) (Laughter) Woman: Okay. And, Jennifer, how did that feel? Jennifer: Good. (Laughter) Girl: Oh my God! (Laughter) Michael Shermer: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks.

How YouTube thinks about copyright

{0: "At Facebook (and previously at YouTube), Margaret Gould Stewart designs experiences that touch the lives of a large percentage of the world's population."}

TED2010

So, if you're in the audience today, or maybe you're watching this talk in some other time or place, you are a participant in the digital rights ecosystem. Whether you're an artist, a technologist, a lawyer or a fan, the handling of copyright directly impacts your life. Rights management is no longer simply a question of ownership, it's a complex web of relationships and a critical part of our cultural landscape. YouTube cares deeply about the rights of content owners, but in order to give them choices about what they can do with copies, mashups and more, we need to first identify when copyrighted material is uploaded to our site. Let's look at a specific video so you can see how it works. Two years ago, recording artist Chris Brown released the official video of his single "Forever." A fan saw it on TV, recorded it with her camera phone, and uploaded it to YouTube. Because Sony Music had registered Chris Brown's video in our Content ID system, within seconds of attempting to upload the video, the copy was detected, giving Sony the choice of what to do next. But how do we know that the user's video was a copy? Well, it starts with content owners delivering assets into our database, along with a usage policy that tells us what to do when we find a match. We compare each upload against all of the reference files in our database. This heat map is going to show you how the brain of the system works. Here we can see the original reference file being compared to the user generated content. The system compares every moment of one to the other to see if there's a match. This means that we can identify a match even if the copy used is just a portion of the original file, plays it in slow motion and has degraded audio and video quality. And we do this every time that a video is uploaded to YouTube. And that's over 20 hours of video every minute. When we find a match, we apply the policy that the rights owner has set down. And the scale and the speed of this system is truly breathtaking. We're not just talking about a few videos, we're talking about over 100 years of video every day, between new uploads and the legacy scans we regularly do across all of the content on the site. When we compare those hundred years of video, we're comparing it against millions of reference files in our database. It would be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and every day, without so much as a coffee break. Now, what do we do when we find a match? Well, most rights owners, instead of blocking, will allow the copy to be published. And then they benefit through the exposure, advertising and linked sales. Remember Chris Brown's video "Forever"? Well, it had its day in the sun and then it dropped off the charts, and that looked like the end of the story, but sometime last year, a young couple got married. This is their wedding video. You may have seen it. (Music) What's amazing about this is, if the processional of the wedding was this much fun, can you imagine how much fun the reception must have been? I mean, who are these people? I totally want to go to that wedding. So their little wedding video went on to get over 40 million views. And instead of Sony blocking, they allowed the upload to occur. And they put advertising against it and linked from it to iTunes. And the song, 18 months old, went back to number four on the iTunes charts. So Sony is generating revenue from both of these. And Jill and Kevin, the happy couple, they came back from their honeymoon and found that their video had gone crazy viral. And they've ended up on a bunch of talk shows, and they've used it as an opportunity to make a difference. The video's inspired over 26,000 dollars in donations to end domestic violence. The "JK Wedding [Entrance] Dance" became so popular that NBC parodied it on the season finale of "The Office," which just goes to show, it's truly an ecosystem of culture. Because it's not just amateurs borrowing from big studios, but sometimes big studios borrowing back. By empowering choice, we can create a culture of opportunity. And all it took to change things around was to allow for choice through rights identification. So why has no one ever solved this problem before? It's because it's a big problem, and it's complicated and messy. It's not uncommon for a single video to have multiple rights owners. There's musical labels. There's multiple music publishers. And each of these can vary by country. There's lots of cases where we have more than one work mashed together. So we have to manage many claims to the same video. YouTube's Content ID system addresses all of these cases. But the system only works through the participation of rights owners. If you have content that others are uploading to YouTube, you should register in the Content ID system, and then you'll have the choice about how your content is used. And think carefully about the policies that you attach to that content. By simply blocking all reuse, you'll miss out on new art forms, new audiences, new distribution channels and new revenue streams. But it's not just about dollars and impressions. Just look at all the joy that was spread through progressive rights management and new technology. And I think we can all agree that joy is definitely an idea worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause)

The intriguing sound of marine mammals

{0: 'Peter Tyack studies the social behavior and acoustic communication in whales and dolphins, learning how these animals use sound to perform critical activities, such as mating and locating food.'}

Mission Blue Voyage

Thank you so much. I'm going to try to take you on a journey of the underwater acoustic world of whales and dolphins. Since we are such a visual species, it's hard for us to really understand this, so I'll use a mixture of figures and sounds and hope this can communicate it. But let's also think, as a visual species, what it's like when we go snorkeling or diving and try to look underwater. We really can't see very far. Our vision, which works so well in air, all of a sudden is very restricted and claustrophobic. And what marine mammals have evolved over the last tens of millions of years is ways to depend on sound to both explore their world and also to stay in touch with one another. Dolphins and toothed whales use echolocation. They can produce loud clicks and listen for echoes from the sea floor in order to orient. They can listen for echoes from prey in order to decide where food is and to decide which one they want to eat. All marine mammals use sound for communication to stay in touch. So the large baleen whales will produce long, beautiful songs, which are used in reproductive advertisement for male and females, both to find one another and to select a mate. And mother and young and closely bonded animals use calls to stay in touch with one another, so sound is really critical for their lives. The first thing that got me interested in the sounds of these underwater animals, whose world was so foreign to me, was evidence from captive dolphins that captive dolphins could imitate human sounds. And I mentioned I'll use some visual representations of sounds. Here's the first example. This is a plot of frequency against time — sort of like musical notation, where the higher notes are up higher and the lower notes are lower, and time goes this way. This is a picture of a trainer's whistle, a whistle a trainer will blow to tell a dolphin it's done the right thing and can come get a fish. It sounds sort of like "tweeeeeet." Like that. This is a calf in captivity making an imitation of that trainer's whistle. If you hummed this tune to your dog or cat and it hummed it back to you, you ought to be pretty surprised. Very few nonhuman mammals can imitate sounds. It's really important for our music and our language. So it's a puzzle: The few other mammal groups that do this, why do they do it? A lot of my career has been devoted to trying to understand how these animals use their learning, use the ability to change what you say based on what you hear in their own communication systems. So let's start with calls of a nonhuman primate. Many mammals have to produce contact calls when, say, a mother and calf are apart. This is an example of a call produced by squirrel monkeys when they're isolated from another one. And you can see, there's not much variability in these calls. By contrast, the signature whistle which dolphins use to stay in touch, each individual here has a radically different call. They can use this ability to learn calls in order to develop more complicated and more distinctive calls to identify individuals. How about the setting in which animals need to use this call? Well let's look at mothers and calves. In normal life for mother and calf dolphin, they'll often drift apart or swim apart if Mom is chasing a fish, and when they separate they have to get back together again. What this figure shows is the percentage of the separations in which dolphins whistle, against the maximum distance. So when dolphins are separating by less than 20 meters, less than half the time they need to use whistles. Most of the time they can just find each other just by swimming around. But all of the time when they separate by more than 100 meters, they need to use these individually distinctive whistles to come back together again. Most of these distinctive signature whistles are quite stereotyped and stable through the life of a dolphin. But there are some exceptions. When a male dolphin leaves Mom, it will often join up with another male and form an alliance, which may last for decades. As these two animals form a social bond, their distinctive whistles actually converge and become very similar. This plot shows two members of a pair. As you can see at the top here, they share an up-sweep, like "woop, woop, woop." They both have that kind of up-sweep. Whereas these members of a pair go "wo-ot, wo-ot, wo-ot." And what's happened is they've used this learning process to develop a new sign that identifies this new social group. It's a very interesting way that they can form a new identifier for the new social group that they've had. Let's now take a step back and see what this message can tell us about protecting dolphins from human disturbance. Anybody looking at this picture will know this dolphin is surrounded, and clearly his behavior is being disrupted. This is a bad situation. But it turns out that when just a single boat is approaching a group of dolphins at a couple hundred meters away, the dolphins will start whistling, they'll change what they're doing, they'll have a more cohesive group, wait for the boat to go by, and then they'll get back to normal business. Well, in a place like Sarasota, Florida, the average interval between times that a boat is passing within a hundred meters of a dolphin group is six minutes. So even in the situation that doesn't look as bad as this, it's still affecting the amount of time these animals have to do their normal work. And if we look at a very pristine environment like western Australia, Lars Bider has done work comparing dolphin behavior and distribution before there were dolphin-watching boats. When there was one boat, not much of an impact. And two boats: When the second boat was added, what happened was that some of the dolphins left the area completely. Of the ones that stayed, their reproductive rate declined. So it could have a negative impact on the whole population. When we think of marine-protected areas for animals like dolphins, this means that we have to be quite conscious about activities that we thought were benign. We may need to regulate the intensity of recreational boating and actual whale watching in order to prevent these kinds of problems. I'd also like to point out that sound doesn't obey boundaries. So you can draw a line to try to protect an area, but chemical pollution and noise pollution will continue to move through the area. And I'd like to switch now from this local, familiar, coastal environment to a much broader world of the baleen whales and the open ocean. This is a kind of map we've all been looking at. The world is mostly blue. But I'd also like to point out that the oceans are much more connected than we think. Notice how few barriers there are to movement across all of the oceans compared to land. To me, the most mind-bending example of the interconnectedness of the ocean comes from an acoustic experiment where oceanographers took a ship to the southern Indian Ocean, deployed an underwater loudspeaker and played back a sound. That same sound traveled to the west, and could be heard in Bermuda, and traveled to the east, and could be heard in Monterey — the same sound. So we live in a world of satellite communication, are used to global communication, but it's still amazing to me. The ocean has properties that allow low-frequency sound to basically move globally. The acoustic transit time for each of these paths is about three hours. It's nearly halfway around the globe. In the early '70s, Roger Payne and an ocean acoustician published a theoretical paper pointing out that it was possible that sound could transmit over these large areas, but very few biologists believed it. It actually turns out, though, even though we've only known of long-range propagation for a few decades, the whales clearly have evolved, over tens of millions of years, a way to exploit this amazing property of the ocean. So blue whales and fin whales produce very low-frequency sounds that can travel over very long ranges. The top plot here shows a complicated series of calls that are repeated by males. They form songs, and they appear to play a role in reproduction, sort of like that of song birds. Down below here, we see calls made by both males and females that also carry over very long ranges. The biologists continued to be skeptical of the long-range communication issue well past the '70s, until the end of the Cold War. What happened was, during the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had a system that was secret at the time, that they used to track Russian submarines. It had deep underwater microphones, or hydrophones, cabled to shore, all wired back to a central place that could listen to sounds over the whole North Atlantic. And after the Berlin Wall fell, the Navy made these systems available to whale bio-acousticians to see what they could hear. This is a plot from Christopher Clark who tracked one individual blue whale as it passed by Bermuda, went down to the latitude of Miami and came back again. It was tracked for 43 days, swimming 1,700 kilometers, or more than 1,000 miles. This shows us both that the calls are detectable over hundreds of miles and that whales routinely swim hundreds of miles. They're ocean-based and scale animals who are communicating over much longer ranges than we had anticipated. Unlike fins and blues, which disperse into the temperate and tropical oceans, the humpbacked whales congregate in local traditional breeding grounds, so they can make a sound that's a little higher in frequency, broader-band and more complicated. So you're listening to the complicated song produced by humpbacks here. Humpbacks, when they develop the ability to sing this song, they're listening to other whales and modifying what they sing based on what they're hearing, just like song birds or the dolphin whistles I described. This means that humpback song is a form of animal culture, just like music for humans would be. I think one of the most interesting examples of this comes from Australia. Biologists on the east coast of Australia were recording the songs of humpbacks in that area. And this orange line here marks the typical songs of east coast humpbacks. In '95 they all sang the normal song. But in '96 they heard a few weird songs, and it turned out that these strange songs were typical of west coast whales. The west coast calls became more and more popular, until by 1998, none of the whales sang the east coast song; it was completely gone. They just sang the cool new west coast song. It's as if some new hit style had completely wiped out the old-fashioned style before, and with no golden oldies stations. Nobody sang the old ones. I'd like to briefly just show what the ocean does to these calls. Now you are listening to a recording made by Chris Clark, 0.2 miles away from a humpback. You can hear the full frequency range. It's quite loud. You sound very nearby. The next recording you're going to hear was made of the same humpback song 50 miles away. That's shown down here. You only hear the low frequencies. You hear the reverberation as the sound travels over long-range in the ocean and is not quite as loud. Now after I play back these humpback calls, I'll play blue whale calls, but they have to be sped up because they're so low in frequency that you wouldn't be able to hear it otherwise. Here's a blue whale call at 50 miles, which was distant for the humpback. It's loud, clear — you can hear it very clearly. Here's the same call recorded from a hydrophone 500 miles away. There's a lot of noise, which is mostly other whales. But you can still hear that faint call. Let's now switch and think about a potential for human impacts. The most dominant sound that humans put into the ocean comes from shipping. This is the sound of a ship, and I'm having to talk a little louder to talk over it. Imagine that whale listening from 500 miles. There's a potential problem that maybe this kind of shipping noise would prevent whales from being able to hear each other. Now this is something that's been known for quite a while. This is a figure from a textbook on underwater sound. And on the y-axis is the loudness of average ambient noise in the deep ocean by frequency. In the low frequencies, this line indicates sound that comes from seismic activity of the earth. Up high, these variable lines indicate increasing noise in this frequency range from higher wind and wave. But right in the middle here where there's a sweet spot, the noise is dominated by human ships. Now think about it. This is an amazing thing: That in this frequency range where whales communicate, the main source globally, on our planet, for the noise comes from human ships, thousands of human ships, distant, far away, just all aggregating. The next slide will show what the impact this may have on the range at which whales can communicate. So here we have the loudness of a call at the whale. And as we get farther away, the sound gets fainter and fainter. Now in the pre-industrial ocean, as we were mentioning, this whale call could be easily detected. It's louder than noise at a range of a thousand kilometers. Let's now take that additional increase in noise that we saw comes from shipping. All of a sudden, the effective range of communication goes from a thousand kilometers to 10 kilometers. Now if this signal is used for males and females to find each other for mating and they're dispersed, imagine the impact this could have on the recovery of endangered populations. Whales also have contact calls like I described for the dolphins. I'll play the sound of a contact call used by right whales to stay in touch. And this is the kind of call that is used by, say, right whale mothers and calves as they separate to come back again. Now imagine — let's put the ship noise in the picture. What's a mother to do if the ship comes by and her calf isn't there? I'll describe a couple strategies. One strategy is if your call's down here, and the noise is in this band, you could shift the frequency of your call out of the noise band and communicate better. Susan Parks of Penn State has actually studied this. She's looked in the Atlantic. Here's data from the South Atlantic. Here's a typical South Atlantic contact call from the '70s. Look what happened by 2000 to the average call. Same thing in the North Atlantic, in the '50s versus 2000. Over the last 50 years, as we've put more noise into the oceans, these whales have had to shift. It's as if the whole population had to shift from being basses to singing as a tenor. It's an amazing shift, induced by humans over this large scale, in both time and space. And we now know that whales can compensate for noise by calling louder, like I did when that ship was playing, by waiting for silence and by shifting their call out of the noise band. Now there's probably costs to calling louder or shifting the frequency away from where you want to be, and there's probably lost opportunities. If we also have to wait for silence, they may miss a critical opportunity to communicate. So we have to be very concerned about when the noise in habitats degrades the habitat enough that the animals either have to pay too much to be able to communicate, or are not able to perform critical functions. It's a really important problem. And I'm happy to say that there are several very promising developments in this area, looking at the impact of shipping on whales. In terms of the shipping noise, the International Maritime Organization of the United Nations has formed a group whose job is to establish guidelines for quieting ships, to tell the industry how you could quiet ships. And they've already found that by being more intelligent about better propeller design, you can reduce that noise by 90 percent. If you actually insulate and isolate the machinery of the ship from the hull, you can reduce that noise by 99 percent. So at this point, it's primarily an issue of cost and standards. If this group can establish standards, and if the shipbuilding industry adopts them for building new ships, we can now see a gradual decline in this potential problem. But there's also another problem from ships that I'm illustrating here, and that's the problem of collision. This is a whale that just squeaked by a rapidly moving container ship and avoided collision. But collision is a serious problem. Endangered whales are killed every year by ship collision, and it's very important to try to reduce this. I'll discuss two very promising approaches. The first case comes from the Bay of Fundy. These black lines mark shipping lanes in and out of the Bay of Fundy. The colorized area shows the risk of collision for endangered right whales because of the ships moving in this lane. It turns out that this lane here goes right through a major feeding area of right whales in the summer time, and it makes an area of a significant risk of collision. Well, biologists who couldn't take no for an answer went to the International Maritime Organization and petitioned them to say, "Can't you move that lane? Those are just lines on the ground. Can't you move them over to a place where there's less of a risk?" And the International Maritime Organization responded very strongly, "These are the new lanes." The shipping lanes have been moved. And as you can see, the risk of collision is much lower. So it's very promising, actually. We can be very creative about thinking of different ways to reduce these risks. Another action which was just taken independently by a shipping company itself was initiated because of concerns the shipping company had about greenhouse gas emissions with global warming. The Maersk Line looked at their competition and saw that everybody who is in shipping thinks time is money. They rush as fast as they can to get to their port. But then they often wait there. What Maersk did is they worked ways to slow down. They could slow down by about 50 percent. This reduced their fuel consumption by about 30 percent, which saved them money, and at the same time, it had a significant benefit for whales. It you slow down, you reduce the amount of noise you make and you reduce the risk of collision. So to conclude, I'd just like to point out, you know, the whales live in an amazing acoustic environment. They've evolved over tens of millions of years to take advantage of this. And we need to be very attentive and vigilant to thinking about where things that we do may unintentionally prevent them from being able to achieve their important activities. At the same time, we need to be really creative in thinking of solutions to be able to help reduce these problems. I hope these examples have shown some of the different directions we can take in addition to protected areas to be able to keep the ocean safe for whales to be able to continue to communicate. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs

{0: 'An entrepreneur since childhood, Cameron Herold wants parents and teachers to recognize -- and foster -- entrepreneurial talent in kids.'}

TEDxEdmonton

I would be willing to bet I'm the dumbest guy in the room, because I couldn't get through school; I struggled with school. But I knew at a very early age that I loved money, I loved business and I loved this entrepreneurial thing. I was raised to be an entrepreneur. What I've been really passionate about ever since — and I've never spoken about this ever, until now — so this is the first time anyone's heard it, except my wife, three days ago. She said, "What are you talking about?" I told her that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits, and to groom them or show them that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing. It's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified, which is what happens in a lot of society. Kids, when we grow up, have dreams, and we have passions, and we have visions, and somehow we get those things crushed. We get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor. My parents got me a tutor in French, and I still suck in French. Two years ago, I was the highest-rated lecturer at MIT's Entrepreneurial Master's Program. It was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world. When I was in grade two, I won a citywide speaking competition, but nobody had ever said, "Hey, this kid's a good speaker. He can't focus, but he loves walking around and getting people energized." No one said, "Get him a coach in speaking." They said, get me a tutor in what I suck at. So as kids show these traits — and we need to start looking for them — I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers. Unfortunately, the school system is grooming this world to say, "Let's be a lawyer," or, "Let's be a doctor." We're missing that opportunity, because no one ever says, "Hey, be an entrepreneur." Entrepreneurs are people — we have a lot of them in this room — who have ideas and passions or see these needs in the world and decide to stand up and do it. And we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen. We have the ability to get the groups of people around us that want to build that dream with us. And I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age, of being entrepreneurial, we could change everything in the world that's a problem today. Every problem out there, somebody has the idea for. And as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen, because you're too dumb to realize that you couldn't figure it out. I think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish — the old parable: "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." If we can teach our kids to be entrepreneurial, the ones that show the traits to be, like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science, what if we saw the ones with entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs? We could have these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts. What we do is teach our kids the things they shouldn't do: don't hit; don't bite; don't swear. Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs; the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. And the media says it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo or Crosby. Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs. The reason I avoided an MBA program, other than that I didn't get into any, since I had a 61 percent average out of high school, then a 61 percent average at the only school in Canada that accepted me, Carlton, is that our MBA programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs. They teach them to work in corporations. So who's starting these companies? It's these random few people. Even in popular literature, the only book I've ever found — and this should be on all your reading lists — the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur a hero is "Atlas Shrugged." Everything else in the world looks at entrepreneurs and says we're bad people. I look at even my family. Both my grandfathers and my dad were entrepreneurs. My brother, sister and I, all three of us own companies as well. We all decided to start these things because it's the only place we fit. We didn't fit in normal work; we couldn't work for somebody else, we're stubborn and we have all these other traits. But kids could be entrepreneurs as well. I'm a big part of a couple organizations called the Entrepreneurs' Organization and the Young Presidents' Organization. I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference. And everyone I met over there who's an entrepreneur struggled with school. I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed. So this thing right here is freaking me out. (Laughter) It's probably why I'm a bit panicked, other than all the caffeine I've had and the sugar. But this is really creepy for an entrepreneur. Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder. Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? Ted Turner's got it. Steve Jobs has it. All three of the founders of Netscape had it. I could go on and on. Kids — you can see these signs in kids. And we're giving them Ritalin and saying, "Don't be an entrepreneurial type. Fit into this other system and try to become a student." Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students. We fast-track. We figure out the game. I stole essays. I cheated on exams. I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. But as an entrepreneur, you don't do accounting, you hire accountants. So I just figured that out earlier. (Laughter) (Applause) At least I can admit I cheated in university; most of you won't. I'm also quoted — and I told the person who wrote the textbook — I'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian university and college studies — in managerial accounting, I'm chapter eight. I open up chapter eight, talking about budgeting. I told the author, after they did my interview, that I cheated in that same course. She thought it was too funny to not include it. But kids, you can see these signs in them. The definition of entrepreneur is "a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk of a business venture." That doesn't mean you have to go to an MBA program, or that you have to get through school. It just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut. We've heard, "Is it nurture or is it nature?" Right? Is it thing one or thing two? What is it? Well, I don't think it's either. I think it can be both. I was groomed as an entrepreneur. When I was growing up as a young kid, I had no choice, because I was taught at a very early age, when my dad realized I didn't fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school, that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies where we could employ other people. My first business venture: I was seven years old, in Winnipeg. I was in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords, calling all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much they'd pay me for coat hangers. And my mom came into the room and said, "Where are you going to get the hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?" And I said, "Let's go look in the basement." We went down to the basement, and I opened up this cupboard. There was about 1,000 hangers that I'd collected, because, when I told her I was going out to play, I was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect hangers to put in the basement, because I saw her a few weeks before that — you could get paid, they used to pay two cents per coat hanger. So I was like, well, there's all kinds of hangers, so I'll just go get them. I knew she wouldn't want me to get them, so I just did it anyway. And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. This one guy offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half. I even knew at seven years old that I could get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay it, because it multiplied up. At seven years old I figured it out. I got three and a half cents for 1,000 hangers. I sold license plate protectors door to door. My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me them at wholesale. At nine years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license-plate protectors door to door. And I remember this one customer so vividly — I also did some other stuff with these clients, I sold newspapers, and he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me, ever. But I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license-plate protector. And he's like, "We don't need one." I said, "But you've got two cars." Remember, I'm nine years old. I'm like, "You have two cars and they don't have license-plate protectors. And this car has one license plate that's all crumpled up." He said, "That's my wife's car." I said, "Why don't we test one on her car and see if it lasts longer?" So I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each. If I couldn't sell all four, I could at least get one. I learned that at a young age. I did comic book arbitrage. When I was about 10 years old, I sold comic books out of our cottage on Georgian Bay. I would go biking up to the end of the beach, buy all the comics from the poor kids, then go back to the other end of the beach to sell them to the rich kids. It was obvious to me: buy low, sell high. You've got this demand over here that has money. Don't try to sell to the poor kids; they don't have cash. The rich people do. Obvious, right? It's like a recession. So there's a recession. There's still 13 trillion dollars circulating in the US economy. Go get some of that. I learned that at a young age. I also learned, don't reveal your source: I got beat up after four weeks of this, because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics, and didn't like that he was paying more. I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old. I didn't want a paper route, but my dad said, "That's your next business." Not only did he get me one, but I had to get two. He wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did. Then I realized: collecting tips is how you made all the money. So I'd collect tips and get payment. I would collect for the papers — he could just deliver them. Because then I realized I could make money. By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee. (Laughter) My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop. He had all these old automotive parts lying around. They had this old brass and copper. I asked what he did with it, and he said he just throws it out. I said, "Wouldn't somebody pay for that?" And he goes, "Maybe." Remember: at 10 years old, 34 years ago, I saw opportunity in this stuff, I saw there was money in garbage. And I collected it from the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle. Then my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid. And I thought that was kind of cool. Strangely enough, 30 years later, we're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and making money off that, too. I built these little pincushions when I was 11 years old in Cubs. We made these pincushions for our moms for Mother's Day out of wooden clothespins — when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. And you'd make these chairs. And I had these little pillows that I would sew up. And you could stuff pins in them. Because people used to sew and they needed a pincushion. But I realized you had to have options, so I spray-painted a whole bunch of them brown, so when I went to the door, it wasn't, "Do you want to buy one?" It was, "Which color would you like?" I'm 10 years old; you're not going to say no, especially if you have two options, the brown one or the clear one. So I learned that lesson at a young age. I learned that manual labor really sucks. Right, like cutting lawns is brutal. But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing, that if I land this client once, and every week I get paid by that person, that's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person, because you can't sell them more. So I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age. Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. I would go to the golf course and caddy for people, but I realized there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole, that had this huge hill, and people could never get their bags up it. So I'd sit there in a lawn chair and carry for all the people who didn't have caddies. I'd carry their golf bags to the top; they'd pay me a dollar, while my friends worked for hours hauling some guy's bag around for 10 bucks. I'm like, "That's stupid. You have to work for five hours. That doesn't make sense. Figure out a way to make more money faster. Every week, I'd go to the corner store and buy all these pops, Then I'd deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge. They'd give me their orders for the following week. I'd deliver pop and charge twice. I had this captured market. You didn't need contracts, you just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you. These women weren't going to go to anybody else because they liked me, and I kind of figured it out. I went and got golf balls from golf courses. But everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. I'm like, screw that. They're in the pond. And nobody's going into the pond. So I'd go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes, just pick them up with both feet. You can't do it onstage. You get the golf balls, throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you're done, you've got a couple hundred of them. But the problem is, people didn't want all the golf balls. So I just packaged them. I'm like 12, right? I packaged them up three ways. I had the Pinnacles, DDHs and the really cool ones. Those sold for two dollars each. Then I had the good ones that didn't look crappy: 50 cents each. And then I'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones. And they could use those for practice balls. I sold sunglasses when I was in school, to all the kids in high school. This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you, because you're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time. But it paid the bills. So I sold lots and lots of sunglasses. Then when the school shut me down — they called me into the office and told me I couldn't do it — I went to the gas stations and sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers. That was cool because then, I had retail outlets. I think I was 14. Then I paid my entire way through first year of university at Carlton by selling wineskins door to door. You know you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin? So what, right? But you know what? Stuff that down your shorts when you go to a football game, you can get booze in for free. Everybody bought them. Supply, demand, big opportunity. I also branded it, so I sold them for five times the normal cost. It had our university logo on it. You know, we teach our kids and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games, if they're entrepreneurial kids, that nurture the traits you need to be entrepreneurs? Why don't you teach them not to waste money? I remember being told to walk out into the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta. I'd thrown a penny out in the street, and my dad said, "Go pick it up. I work too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you waste a penny." I remember that lesson to this day. Allowances teach kids the wrong habits. Allowances, by nature, are teaching kids to think about a job. An entrepreneur doesn't expect a regular paycheck. Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck. That's wrong, for me, if you want to raise entrepreneurs. What I do with my kids, nine and seven, is teach them to walk around the house and the yard, looking for stuff that needs to get done. Come and tell me what it is. Or I'll say, "Here's what I need done." And then, you know what we do? We negotiate. They go around looking for what it is, then we negotiate what they'll get paid. They don't have a regular check, but they have opportunities to find more stuff, and learn the skill of negotiating and of finding opportunities. You breed that kind of stuff. Each of my kids has two piggy banks. Fifty percent of all the money they earn goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. The toy account, they spend on whatever they want. The 50 percent in their house account, every six months, goes to the bank. they walk up with me. Every year, all the money in the bank goes to their broker. Both my nine- and seven-year-olds have a stockbroker already. I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying, "Maybe I'll start contributing to my RSP now." Shit, you've missed 25 years. You can teach those habits to young kids, when they don't even feel the pain yet. Don't read bedtime stories every night — maybe four nights of the week, and three nights, have them tell stories. Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four items, a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo and a laptop, and have them tell a story about those four things? My kids do that all the time. It teaches them to sell, teaches them creativity, teaches them to think on their feet. Do that kind of stuff, have fun with it. Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk, even if it's just in front of their friends, and do plays and have speeches. Those are entrepreneurial traits you want to be nurturing. Show kids what bad customers or bad employees look like. Show them grumpy employees. When you see grumpy customer service, point it out. Say, "By the way, that guy is a crappy employee." And say, "These are good ones." (Laughter) If you go into a restaurant and have bad customer service, show them what bad customer service looks like. (Laughter) We have all these lessons in front of us, but we don't take those opportunities; we teach kids to get a tutor. Imagine if you actually took all the kids' junk in the house right now, all the toys they outgrew two years ago and said, "Why don't we sell some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji?" And they actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when offers come in. They can come into your account or a sub account or whatever. But teach them how to fix the price, guess the price, pull up the photos. Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money. Then 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent in their toy account. My kids love this stuff. Some of the entrepreneurial traits you've got to nurture in kids: attainment, tenacity, leadership, introspection, interdependence, values. All these traits, you can find in young kids, and you can help nurture them. Look for that kind of stuff. There's two traits I want you to also look out for that we don't get out of their system. Don't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really, really freaking bad. (Applause) The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression, unless it is so clinically brutal, man. Bipolar disorder is nicknamed "the CEO disease." When Steve Jurvetson, Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale have all got it, and they built Netscape — imagine if they were given Ritalin. We wouldn't have that stuff, right? Al Gore really would have had to invented the Internet. (Laughter) These are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom, as well as everything else. I'm not saying don't get kids to want to be lawyers. But how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them? Because there's huge opportunities in that. I want to close with a quick video that was done by one of the companies I mentor. These guys, Grasshopper. It's about kids. It's about entrepreneurship. Hopefully, this inspires you to take what you've heard from me and do something with it to change the world. [Kid... "And you thought you could do anything?"] [You still can.] [Because a lot of what we consider impossible] [is easy to overcome] [Because in case you haven't noticed, we live in a place where] [one individual can make a difference] [Want proof?] [Just look at the people who built our country:] [Our parents, grandparents, our aunts, uncles] [They were immigrants, newcomers ready to make their mark] [Maybe they came with very little] [or perhaps they didn't own anything except for] [a single brilliant idea] [These people were thinkers, doers] [innovators] [until they came up with the name] [entrepreneurs] [They change the way we think about what is possible.] [They have a clear vision of how life can be better] [for all of us, even when times are tough.] [Right now, it's hard to see] [when our view is cluttered with obstacles.] [But turbulence creates opportunities] [for success, achievement, and pushes us] [to discover new ways of doing things] [So what opportunities will you go after and why?] [If you're an entrepreneur] [you know that risk isn't the reward.] [No. The rewards are driving innovation] [changing people's lives. Creating jobs.] [Fueling growth.] [And making a better world.] [Entrepreneurs are everywhere.] [They run small businesses that support our economy,] [design tools to help you] [stay connected with friends, family and colleagues] [And they're finding new ways of helping to solve society's oldest problems.] [Do you know an entrepreneur?] [Entrepreneurs can be anyone Even... you] [So seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted] [Help heal the economy] [Make a difference.] [Take your business to new heights,] [but most importantly,] [remember when you were a kid] [when everything was within your reach,] [and then say to yourself quietly, but with determination:] [it still is.] Thank you very much for having me. (Applause)

Fighting cancer with dance

{0: 'With precision and sparkling grace, Ananda Shankar Jayant performs and teaches the classical dance styles of Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi.'}

TEDIndia 2009

(Music) [Sanskrit] This is an ode to the mother goddess, that most of us in India learn when we are children. I learned it when I was four at my mother's knee. That year she introduced me to dance, and thus began my tryst with classical dance. Since then — it's been four decades now — I've trained with the best in the field, performed across the globe, taught young and old alike, created, collaborated, choreographed, and wove a rich tapestry of artistry, achievement and awards. The crowning glory was in 2007, when I received this country's fourth highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, for my contribution to art. (Applause) But nothing, nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on the first of July 2008. I heard the word "carcinoma." Yes, breast cancer. As I sat dumbstruck in my doctor's office, I heard other words: "cancer," "stage," "grade." Until then, Cancer was the zodiac sign of my friend, stage was what I performed on, and grades were what I got in school. That day, I realized I had an unwelcome, uninvited, new life partner. As a dancer, I know the nine rasas or the navarasas: anger, valor, disgust, humor and fear. I thought I knew what fear was. That day, I learned what fear was. Overcome with the enormity of it all and the complete feeling of loss of control, I shed copious tears and asked my dear husband, Jayant. I said, "Is this it? Is this the end of the road? Is this the end of my dance?" And he, the positive soul that he is, said, "No, this is just a hiatus, a hiatus during the treatment, and you'll get back to doing what you do best." I realized then that I, who thought I had complete control of my life, had control of only three things: My thought, my mind — the images that these thoughts created — and the action that derived from it. So here I was wallowing in a vortex of emotions and depression and what have you, with the enormity of the situation, wanting to go to a place of healing, health and happiness. I wanted to go from where I was to where I wanted to be, for which I needed something. I needed something that would pull me out of all this. So I dried my tears, and I declared to the world at large ... I said, "Cancer's only one page in my life, and I will not allow this page to impact the rest of my life." I also declared to the world at large that I would ride it out, and I would not allow cancer to ride me. But to go from where I was to where I wanted to be, I needed something. I needed an anchor, an image, a peg to peg this process on, so that I could go from there. And I found that in my dance, my dance, my strength, my energy, my passion, my very life breath. But it wasn't easy. Believe me, it definitely wasn't easy. How do you keep cheer when you go from beautiful to bald in three days? How do you not despair when, with the body ravaged by chemotherapy, climbing a mere flight of stairs was sheer torture, that to someone like me who could dance for three hours? How do you not get overwhelmed by the despair and the misery of it all? All I wanted to do was curl up and weep. But I kept telling myself fear and tears are options I did not have. So I would drag myself into my dance studio — body, mind and spirit — every day into my dance studio, and learn everything I learned when I was four, all over again, reworked, relearned, regrouped. It was excruciatingly painful, but I did it. Difficult. I focused on my mudras, on the imagery of my dance, on the poetry and the metaphor and the philosophy of the dance itself. And slowly, I moved out of that miserable state of mind. But I needed something else. I needed something to go that extra mile, and I found it in that metaphor which I had learned from my mother when I was four. The metaphor of Mahishasura Mardhini, of Durga. Durga, the mother goddess, the fearless one, created by the pantheon of Hindu gods. Durga, resplendent, bedecked, beautiful, her 18 arms ready for warfare, as she rode astride her lion into the battlefield to destroy Mahishasur. Durga, the epitome of creative feminine energy, or shakti. Durga, the fearless one. I made that image of Durga and her every attribute, her every nuance, my very own. Powered by the symbology of a myth and the passion of my training, I brought laser-sharp focus into my dance, laser-sharp focus to such an extent that I danced a few weeks after surgery. I danced through chemo and radiation cycles, much to the dismay of my oncologist. I danced between chemo and radiation cycles and badgered him to fit it to my performing dance schedule. What I had done is I had tuned out of cancer and tuned into my dance. Yes, cancer has just been one page in my life. My story is a story of overcoming setbacks, obstacles and challenges that life throws at you. My story is the power of thought. My story is the power of choice. It's the power of focus. It's the power of bringing ourselves to the attention of something that so animates you, so moves you, that something even like cancer becomes insignificant. My story is the power of a metaphor. It's the power of an image. Mine was that of Durga, Durga the fearless one. She was also called Simhanandini, the one who rode the lion. As I ride out, as I ride my own inner strength, my own inner resilience, armed as I am with what medication can provide and continue treatment, as I ride out into the battlefield of cancer, asking my rogue cells to behave, I want to be known not as a cancer survivor, but as a cancer conqueror. I present to you an excerpt of that work "Simhanandini." (Applause) (Music) (Applause)

Measuring what makes life worthwhile

{0: 'Chip Conley disrupted the hospitality industry -- twice.'}

TED2010

I'm going to talk about the simple truth in leadership in the 21st century. In the 21st century, we need to actually look at — and what I'm actually going to encourage you to consider today — is to go back to our school days when we learned how to count. But I think it's time for us to think about what we count. Because what we actually count truly counts. Let me start by telling you a little story. This is Van Quach. She came to this country in 1986 from Vietnam. She changed her name to Vivian because she wanted to fit in here in America. Her first job was at an inner-city motel in San Francisco as a maid. I happened to buy that motel about three months after Vivian started working there. So Vivian and I have been working together for 23 years. With the youthful idealism of a 26-year-old, in 1987, I started my company and I called it Joie de Vivre, a very impractical name, because I actually was looking to create joy of life. And this first hotel that I bought, motel, was a pay-by-the-hour, no-tell motel in the inner-city of San Francisco. As I spent time with Vivian, I saw that she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work. It made me question and curious: How could someone actually find joy in cleaning toilets for a living? So I spent time with Vivian, and I saw that she didn't find joy in cleaning toilets. Her job, her goal and her calling was not to become the world's greatest toilet scrubber. What counts for Vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and our guests. And what gave her inspiration and meaning was the fact that she was taking care of people who were far away from home. Because Vivian knew what it was like to be far away from home. That very human lesson, more than 20 years ago, served me well during the last economic downturn we had. In the wake of the dotcom crash and 9/11, San Francisco Bay Area hotels went through the largest percentage revenue drop in the history of American hotels. We were the largest operator of hotels in the Bay Area, so we were particularly vulnerable. But also back then, remember we stopped eating French fries in this country. Well, not exactly, of course not. We started eating "freedom fries," and we started boycotting anything that was French. Well, my name of my company, Joie de Vivre — so I started getting these letters from places like Alabama and Orange County saying to me that they were going to boycott my company because they thought we were a French company. And I'd write them back, and I'd say, "What a minute. We're not French. We're an American company. We're based in San Francisco." And I'd get a terse response: "Oh, that's worse." (Laughter) So one particular day when I was feeling a little depressed and not a lot of joie de vivre, I ended up in the local bookstore around the corner from our offices. And I initially ended up in the business section of the bookstore looking for a business solution. But given my befuddled state of mind, I ended up in the self-help section very quickly. That's where I got reacquainted with Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs." I took one psychology class in college, and I learned about this guy, Abraham Maslow, as many of us are familiar with his hierarchy of needs. But as I sat there for four hours, the full afternoon, reading Maslow, I recognized something that is true of most leaders. One of the simplest facts in business is something that we often neglect, and that is that we're all human. Each of us, no matter what our role is in business, has some hierarchy of needs in the workplace. So as I started reading more Maslow, what I started to realize is that Maslow, later in his life, wanted to take this hierarchy for the individual and apply it to the collective, to organizations and specifically to business. But unfortunately, he died prematurely in 1970, and so he wasn't really able to live that dream completely. So I realized in that dotcom crash that my role in life was to channel Abe Maslow. And that's what I did a few years ago when I took that five-level hierarchy of needs pyramid and turned it into what I call the transformation pyramid, which is survival, success and transformation. It's not just fundamental in business, it's fundamental in life. And we started asking ourselves the questions about how we were actually addressing the higher needs, these transformational needs for our key employees in the company. These three levels of the hierarchy needs relate to the five levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But as we started asking ourselves about how we were addressing the higher needs of our employees and our customers, I realized we had no metrics. We had nothing that actually could tell us whether we were actually getting it right. So we started asking ourselves: What kind of less obvious metrics could we use to actually evaluate our employees' sense of meaning, or our customers' sense of emotional connection with us? For example, we actually started asking our employees, do they understand the mission of our company, and do they feel like they believe in it, can they actually influence it, and do they feel that their work actually has an impact on it? We started asking our customers, did they feel an emotional connection with us, in one of seven different kinds of ways. Miraculously, as we asked these questions and started giving attention higher up the pyramid, what we found is we created more loyalty. Our customer loyalty skyrocketed. Our employee turnover dropped to one-third of the industry average, and during that five year dotcom bust, we tripled in size. As I went out and started spending time with other leaders out there and asking them how they were getting through that time, what they told me over and over again was that they just manage what they can measure. What we can measure is that tangible stuff at the bottom of the pyramid. They didn't even see the intangible stuff higher up the pyramid. So I started asking myself the question: How can we get leaders to start valuing the intangible? If we're taught as leaders to just manage what we can measure, and all we can measure is the tangible in life, we're missing a whole lot of things at the top of the pyramid. So I went out and studied a bunch of things, and I found a survey that showed that 94 percent of business leaders worldwide believe that the intangibles are important in their business, things like intellectual property, their corporate culture, their brand loyalty, and yet, only five percent of those same leaders actually had a means of measuring the intangibles in their business. So as leaders, we understand that intangibles are important, but we don't have a clue how to measure them. So here's another Einstein quote: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." I hate to argue with Einstein, but if that which is most valuable in our life and our business actually can't be counted or valued, aren't we going to spend our lives just mired in measuring the mundane? It was that sort of heady question about what counts that led me to take my CEO hat off for a week and fly off to the Himalayan peaks. I flew off to a place that's been shrouded in mystery for centuries, a place some folks call Shangri-La. It's actually moved from the survival base of the pyramid to becoming a transformational role model for the world. I went to Bhutan. The teenage king of Bhutan was also a curious man, but this was back in 1972, when he ascended to the throne two days after his father passed away. At age 17, he started asking the kinds of questions that you'd expect of someone with a beginner's mind. On a trip through India, early in his reign as king, he was asked by an Indian journalist about the Bhutanese GDP, the size of the Bhutanese GDP. The king responded in a fashion that actually has transformed us four decades later. He said the following, he said: "Why are we so obsessed and focused with gross domestic product? Why don't we care more about gross national happiness?" Now, in essence, the king was asking us to consider an alternative definition of success, what has come to be known as GNH, or gross national happiness. Most world leaders didn't take notice, and those that did thought this was just "Buddhist economics." But the king was serious. This was a notable moment, because this was the first time a world leader in almost 200 years had suggested that intangible of happiness — that leader 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson with the Declaration of Independence — 200 years later, this king was suggesting that intangible of happiness is something that we should measure, and it's something we should actually value as government officials. For the next three dozen years as king, this king actually started measuring and managing around happiness in Bhutan — including, just recently, taking his country from being an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy with no bloodshed, no coup. Bhutan, for those of you who don't know it, is the newest democracy in the world, just two years ago. So as I spent time with leaders in the GNH movement, I got to really understand what they're doing. And I got to spend some time with the prime minister. Over dinner, I asked him an impertinent question. I asked him, "How can you create and measure something which evaporates — in other words, happiness?" And he's a very wise man, and he said, "Listen, Bhutan's goal is not to create happiness. We create the conditions for happiness to occur. In other words, we create a habitat of happiness." Wow, that's interesting. He said that they have a science behind that art, and they've actually created four essential pillars, nine key indicators and 72 different metrics that help them to measure their GNH. One of those key indicators is: How do the Bhutanese feel about how they spend their time each day? It's a good question. How do you feel about how you spend your time each day? Time is one of the scarcest resources in the modern world. And yet, of course, that little intangible piece of data doesn't factor into our GDP calculations. As I spent my week up in the Himalayas, I started to imagine what I call an emotional equation. And it focuses on something I read long ago from a guy named Rabbi Hyman Schachtel. How many know him? Anybody? 1954, he wrote a book called "The Real Enjoyment of Living," and he suggested that happiness is not about having what you want; instead, it's about wanting what you have. Or in other words, I think the Bhutanese believe happiness equals wanting what you have — imagine gratitude — divided by having what you want — gratification. The Bhutanese aren't on some aspirational treadmill, constantly focused on what they don't have. Their religion, their isolation, their deep respect for their culture and now the principles of their GNH movement all have fostered a sense of gratitude about what they do have. How many of us here, as TEDsters in the audience, spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation, in the denominator? We are a bottom-heavy culture in more ways than one. (Laughter) The reality is, in Western countries, quite often we do focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out — an object that we're supposed to get, or maybe many objects. Actually, in fact, if you look in the dictionary, many dictionaries define pursuit as to "chase with hostility." Do we pursue happiness with hostility? Good question. But back to Bhutan. Bhutan's bordered on its north and south by 38 percent of the world's population. Could this little country, like a startup in a mature industry, be the spark plug that influences a 21st century of middle-class in China and India? Bhutan's created the ultimate export, a new global currency of well-being, and there are 40 countries around the world today that are studying their own GNH. You may have heard, this last fall Nicolas Sarkozy in France announcing the results of an 18-month study by two Nobel economists, focusing on happiness and wellness in France. Sarkozy suggested that world leaders should stop myopically focusing on GDP and consider a new index, what some French are calling a "joie de vivre index." I like it. Co-branding opportunities. Just three days ago, three days ago here at TED, we had a simulcast of David Cameron, potentially the next prime minister of the UK, quoting one of my favorite speeches of all-time, Robert Kennedy's poetic speech from 1968 when he suggested that we're myopically focused on the wrong thing and that GDP is a misplaced metric. So it suggests that the momentum is shifting. I've taken that Robert Kennedy quote, and I've turned it into a new balance sheet for just a moment here. This is a collection of things that Robert Kennedy said in that quote. GDP counts everything from air pollution to the destruction of our redwoods. But it doesn't count the health of our children or the integrity of our public officials. As you look at these two columns here, doesn't it make you feel like it's time for us to start figuring out a new way to count, a new way to imagine what's important to us in life? (Applause) Certainly Robert Kennedy suggested at the end of the speech exactly that. He said GDP "measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile." Wow. So how do we do that? Let me say one thing we can just start doing ten years from now, at least in this country. Why in the heck in America are we doing a census in 2010? We're spending 10 billion dollars on the census. We're asking 10 simple questions — it is simplicity. But all of those questions are tangible. They're about demographics. They're about where you live, how many people you live with, and whether you own your home or not. That's about it. We're not asking meaningful metrics. We're not asking important questions. We're not asking anything that's intangible. Abe Maslow said long ago something you've heard before, but you didn't realize it was him. He said, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." We've been fooled by our tool. Excuse that expression. (Laughter) We've been fooled by our tool. GDP has been our hammer. And our nail has been a 19th- and 20th-century industrial-era model of success. And yet, 64 percent of the world's GDP today is in that intangible industry we call service, the service industry, the industry I'm in. And only 36 percent is in the tangible industries of manufacturing and agriculture. So maybe it's time that we get a bigger toolbox, right? Maybe it's time we get a toolbox that doesn't just count what's easily counted, the tangible in life, but actually counts what we most value, the things that are intangible. I guess I'm sort of a curious CEO. I was also a curious economics major as an undergrad. I learned that economists measure everything in tangible units of production and consumption as if each of those tangible units is exactly the same. They aren't the same. In fact, as leaders, what we need to learn is that we can influence the quality of that unit of production by creating the conditions for our employees to live their calling. In Vivian's case, her unit of production isn't the tangible hours she works, it's the intangible difference she makes during that one hour of work. This is Dave Arringdale who's actually been a longtime guest at Vivian's motel. He stayed there a hundred times in the last 20 years, and he's loyal to the property because of the relationship that Vivian and her fellow employees have created with him. They've created a habitat of happiness for Dave. He tells me that he can always count on Vivian and the staff there to make him feel at home. Why is it that business leaders and investors quite often don't see the connection between creating the intangible of employee happiness with creating the tangible of financial profits in their business? We don't have to choose between inspired employees and sizable profits, we can have both. In fact, inspired employees quite often help make sizable profits, right? So what the world needs now, in my opinion, is business leaders and political leaders who know what to count. We count numbers. We count on people. What really counts is when we actually use our numbers to truly take into account our people. I learned that from a maid in a motel and a king of a country. What can you start counting today? What one thing can you start counting today that actually would be meaningful in your life, whether it's your work life or your business life? Thank you very much. (Applause)

Intricate beauty by design

{0: 'At the intersection of word and form, Marian Bantjes makes her art.'}

TED2010

I'm going to begin by reciting a poem. "Oh beloved dentist: Your rubber fingers in my mouth ... your voice so soft and muffled ... Lower the mask, dear dentist, lower the mask." (Laughter) Okay, in this presentation, I'm going to be putting the right side of your brains through a fairly serious workout. You're going to see a lot of imagery, and it's not always connected to what I'm talking about, so I need you to kind of split your brains in half and let the images flow over one side and listen to me on the other. So I am one of those people with a transformative personal story. Six years ago, after 20 years in graphic design and typography, I changed the way I was working and the way most graphic designers work to pursue a more personal approach to my work, with only the humble attempt to simply make a living doing something that I loved. But something weird happened. I became bizarrely popular. My current work seems to resonate with people in a way that has so taken me by surprise that I still frequently wonder what in the hell is going on. And I'm slowly coming to understand that the appeal of what I do may be connected to why I do it. These days, I call myself a graphic artist. So where my work as a graphic designer was to follow strategy, my work now follows my heart and my interests with the guidance of my ego to create work that is mutually beneficial to myself and a client. Now, this is heresy in the design world. The ego is not supposed to be involved in graphic design. But I find that for myself, without exception, the more I deal with the work as something of my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is as something that's compelling, interesting and sustaining. So I exist somewhat outside of the mainstream of design thinking. Where others might look at measurable results, I tend to be interested in more ethereal qualities, like "Does it bring joy?" "Is there a sense of wonder?" and "Does it invoke curiosity?" This is a scientific diagram, by the way. I don't have time to explain it, but it has to do with DNA and RNA. So I have a particular imaginative approach to visual work. The things that interest me when I'm working are visual structure, surprise and anything that requires figuring things out. So for this reason, I'm particularly drawn to systems and patterns. I'm going to give you a couple of examples of how my brain works. This is a piece that I did for The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. They have a magazine that they call G2. And this is for their puzzle special in 2007. And puzzling it is. I started by creating a series of tiling units. And these tiling units, I designed specifically so that they would contain parts of letterforms within their shapes so that I could then join those pieces together to create letters and then words within the abstract patterning. But then as well, I was able to just flip them, rotate them and combine them in different ways to create either regular patterns or abstract patterns. So here's the word puzzle again. And here it is with the abstract surrounding. And as you can see, it's extremely difficult to read. But all I have to do is fill certain areas of those letterforms and I can bring those words out of the background pattern. But maybe that's a little too obvious. So then I can add some color in with the background and add a bit more color in with the words themselves, and this way, working with the art director, I'm able to bring it to just the right point that it's puzzling for the audience — they can figure out that there's something they have to read — but it's not impossible for them to read. I'm also interested in working with unusual materials and common materials in unusual ways. So this requires figuring out how to get the most out of something's innate properties and also how to bend it to my will. So ultimately, my goal is to create something unexpected. To this end, I have worked in sugar for Stefan Sagmeister, three-time TED speaker. And this project began essentially on my kitchen table. I've been eating cereal for breakfast all of my life. And for that same amount of time, I've been spilling sugar on the table and just kind of playing with it with my fingers. And eventually I used this technique to create a piece of artwork. And then I used it again to create six pieces for Stefan's book, "Things in My Life I've Learned So Far." And these were created without sketches, just freehand, by putting the sugar down on a white surface and then manipulating it to get the words and designs out of it. Recently, I've also made some rather highbrow baroque borders out of lowbrow pasta. And this is for a chapter that I'm doing in a book, and the chapter is on honor. So it's a little bit unexpected, but, in a way, it refers to the macaroni art that children make for their parents or they make in school and give to their parents, which is in itself a form of honor. This is what you can do with some household tinfoil. Okay, well, it's what I can do with some household tinfoil. (Laughter) I'm very interested in wonder, in design as an impetus to inquiring. To say I wonder is to say I question, I ask. And to experience wonder is to experience awe. So I'm currently working on a book, which plays with both senses of the word, as I explore some of my own ideas and inquiries in a visual display of rather peacock-like grandeur. The world is full of wonder. But the world of graphic design, for the most part, is not. So I'm using my own writings as a kind of testing ground for a book that has an interdependency between word and image as a kind of seductive force. I think that one of the things that religions got right was the use of visual wonder to deliver a message. I think this true marriage of art and information is woefully underused in adult literature, and I'm mystified as to why visual wealth is not more commonly used to enhance intellectual wealth. When we look at works like this, we tend to associate them with children's literature. There's an implication that ornamental graphics detract from the seriousness of the content. But I really hope to have the opportunity to change that perception. This book is taking rather a long time, but I'm nearly done. For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to put an intermission in my talk. And this is it — just to give you and me a moment to catch up. (Laughter) So I do these valentines. I've been sending out valentines on a fairly large scale since 2005. These are my valentines from 2005 and 2006. And I started by doing just a single image like this and sending them out to each person. But in 2007, I got the cockamamie idea to hand-draw each valentine for everyone on my mailing list. I reduced my mailing list to 150 people. And I drew each person their own unique valentine and put their name on it and numbered it and signed it and sent it out. Believe it or not, I devised this as a timesaving method. I was very busy in the beginning of that year, and I didn't know when I was going to find time to design and print a single valentine. And I thought that I could kind of do this piecemeal as I was traveling. It didn't exactly work out that way. There's a longer story to this, but I did get them all done in time, and they were extremely well received. I got an almost 100 percent response rate. (Laughter) And those who didn't respond will never receive anything from me ever again. (Laughter) Last year, I took a more conceptual approach to the valentine. I had this idea that I wanted people to receive a kind of mysterious love letter, like a found fragment in their mailbox. I wanted it to be something that was not addressed to them or signed by me, something that caused them to wonder what on Earth this thing was. And I specifically wrote four pages that don't connect. There were four different versions of this. And I wrote them so that they begin in the middle of a sentence, end in the middle of a sentence. And they're on the one hand, universal, so I avoid specific names or places, but on the other hand, they're personal. So I wanted people to really get the sense that they had received something that could have been a love letter to them. And I'm just going to read one of them to you. "You've never really been sure of this, but I can assure you that this quirk you're so self-conscious of is intensely endearing. Just please accept that this piece of you escapes with your smile, and those of us who notice are happy to catch it in passing. Time spent with you is like chasing and catching small birds, but without the scratches and bird shit." (Laughter) "That is to say, your thoughts and words flit and dart, disconcertedly elusive at times, but when caught and examined — ahh, such a wonder, such a delightful reward. There's no passing time with you, only collecting — the collecting of moments with the hope for preservation and at the same time release. Impossible? I don't think so. I know this makes you embarrassed. I'm certain I can see you blushing. But I just have to tell you because sometimes I hear your self-doubt, and it's so crushing to think that you may not know how truly wonderful you are, how inspiring and delightful and really, truly the most completely ..." (Laughter) (Applause) So Valentine's Day is coming up in a couple of days, and these are currently arriving in mailboxes all around the world. This year, I got, what I really have to say is a rather brilliant idea, to laser cut my valentines out of used Christmas cards. So I solicited friends to send me their used Christmas cards, and I made 500 of these. Each one of them is completely different. I'm just really, really thrilled with them. I don't have that much else to say, but they turned out really well. I do spend a lot of time on my work. And one of the things that I've been thinking about recently is what is worth while. What is it that's worth spending my time on and my life on in this way? Working in the commercial world, this is something that I do have to struggle with at times. And yes, sometimes I'm swayed by money. But ultimately, I don't consider that a worthy goal. What makes something worthwhile for me is the people I work for or with, the conditions I work under and the audience that I'm able to reach. So I might ask: "Who is it for?" "What does it say?" and "What does it do?" You know, I have to tell you, it's really difficult for someone like me to come up on stage at this conference with these unbelievably brilliant minds, who are thinking these really big-picture, world-changing, life-changing ideas and technologies. And it's very, very common for designers and people in the visual arts to feel that we're not contributing enough, or worse, that all we're doing is contributing to landfill. Here I am; I'm showing you some pretty visuals and talking about aesthetics. But I've come to believe that truly imaginative visual work is extremely important in society. Just in the way that I'm inspired by books and magazines of all kinds, conversations I have, movies, so I also think, when I put visual work out there into the mass media, work that is interesting, unusual, intriguing, work that maybe opens up that sense of inquiry in the mind, that I'm seeding the imagination of the populace. And you just never know who is going to take something from that and turn it into something else, because inspiration is cross-pollinating. So a piece of mine may inspire a playwright or a novelist or a scientist, and that in turn may be the seed that inspires a doctor or a philanthropist or a babysitter. And this isn't something that you can quantify or track or measure, and we tend to undervalue things in society that we can't measure. But I really believe that a fully operating, rich society needs these seeds coming from all directions and all disciplines in order to keep the gears of inspiration and imagination flowing and cycling and growing. So that's why I do what I do, and why I spend so much time and effort on it, and why I work in the commercial, public sphere, as opposed to the isolated, private sphere of fine art: because I want as many people as possible to see my work, notice it, be drawn into it, and be able to take something from it. And I actually really feel that it's worthwhile to spend my valuable and limited time on this Earth in this way. And I thank you for allowing me to show it to you. (Applause)

Education innovation in the slums

{0: 'A researcher at the London think tank Demos, Charles Leadbeater was early to notice the rise of "amateur innovation" -- great ideas from outside the traditional walls, from people who suddenly have the tools to collaborate, innovate and make their expertise known.'}

TEDSalon London 2010

It's a great pleasure to be here. It's a great pleasure to speak after Brian Cox from CERN. I think CERN is the home of the Large Hadron Collider. What ever happened to the Small Hadron Collider? Where is the Small Hadron Collider? Because the Small Hadron Collider once was the big thing. Now, the Small Hadron Collider is in a cupboard, overlooked and neglected. You know when the Large Hadron Collider started, and it didn't work, and people tried to work out why, it was the Small Hadron Collider team who sabotaged it because they were so jealous. The whole Hadron Collider family needs unlocking. The lesson of Brian's presentation, in a way — all those fantastic pictures — is this really: that vantage point determines everything that you see. What Brian was saying was science has opened up successively different vantage points from which we can see ourselves, and that's why it's so valuable. So the vantage point you take determines virtually everything that you will see. The question that you will ask will determine much of the answer that you get. And so if you ask this question: Where would you look to see the future of education? The answer that we've traditionally given to that is very straightforward, at least in the last 20 years: You go to Finland. Finland is the best place in the world to see school systems. The Finns may be a bit boring and depressive and there's a very high suicide rate, but by golly, they are qualified. And they have absolutely amazing education systems. So we all troop off to Finland, and we wonder at the social democratic miracle of Finland and its cultural homogeneity and all the rest of it, and then we struggle to imagine how we might bring lessons back. Well, so, for this last year, with the help of Cisco who sponsored me, for some balmy reason, to do this, I've been looking somewhere else. Because actually radical innovation does sometimes come from the very best, but it often comes from places where you have huge need — unmet, latent demand — and not enough resources for traditional solutions to work — traditional, high-cost solutions, which depend on professionals, which is what schools and hospitals are. So I ended up in places like this. This is a place called Monkey Hill. It's one of the hundreds of favelas in Rio. Most of the population growth of the next 50 years will be in cities. We'll grow by six cities of 12 million people a year for the next 30 years. Almost all of that growth will be in the developed world. Almost all of that growth will be in places like Monkey Hill. This is where you'll find the fastest growing young populations of the world. So if you want recipes to work — for virtually anything — health, education, government politics and education — you have to go to these places. And if you go to these places, you meet people like this. This is a guy called Juanderson. At the age of 14, in common with many 14-year-olds in the Brazilian education system, he dropped out of school. It was boring. And Juanderson, instead, went into what provided kind of opportunity and hope in the place that he lived, which was the drugs trade. And by the age of 16, with rapid promotion, he was running the drugs trade in 10 favelas. He was turning over 200,000 dollars a week. He employed 200 people. He was going to be dead by the age of 25. And luckily, he met this guy, who is Rodrigo Baggio, the owner of the first laptop to ever appear in Brazil. 1994, Rodrigo started something called CDI, which took computers donated by corporations, put them into community centers in favelas and created places like this. What turned Juanderson around was technology for learning that made learning fun and accessible. Or you can go to places like this. This is Kibera, which is the largest slum in East Africa. Millions of people living here, stretched over many kilometers. And there I met these two, Azra on the left, Maureen on the right. They just finished their Kenyan certificate of secondary education. That name should tell you that the Kenyan education system borrows almost everything from Britain, circa 1950, but has managed to make it even worse. So there are schools in slums like this. They're places like this. That's where Maureen went to school. They're private schools. There are no state schools in slums. And the education they got was pitiful. It was in places like this. This a school set up by some nuns in another slum called Nakuru. Half the children in this classroom have no parents because they've died through AIDS. The other half have one parent because the other parent has died through AIDS. So the challenges of education in this kind of place are not to learn the kings and queens of Kenya or Britain. They are to stay alive, to earn a living, to not become HIV positive. The one technology that spans rich and poor in places like this is not anything to do with industrial technology. It's not to do with electricity or water. It's the mobile phone. If you want to design from scratch virtually any service in Africa, you would start now with the mobile phone. Or you could go to places like this. This is a place called the Madangiri Settlement Colony, which is a very developed slum about 25 minutes outside New Delhi, where I met these characters who showed me around for the day. The remarkable thing about these girls, and the sign of the kind of social revolution sweeping through the developing world is that these girls are not married. Ten years ago, they certainly would have been married. Now they're not married, and they want to go on to study further, to have a career. They've been brought up by mothers who are illiterate, who have never ever done homework. All across the developing world there are millions of parents — tens, hundreds of millions — who for the first time are with children doing homework and exams. And the reason they carry on studying is not because they went to a school like this. This is a private school. This is a fee-pay school. This is a good school. This is the best you can get in Hyderabad in Indian education. The reason they went on studying was this. This is a computer installed in the entrance to their slum by a revolutionary social entrepreneur called Sugata Mitra who has conducted the most radical experiments, showing that children, in the right conditions, can learn on their own with the help of computers. Those girls have never touched Google. They know nothing about Wikipedia. Imagine what their lives would be like if you could get that to them. So if you look, as I did, through this tour, and by looking at about a hundred case studies of different social entrepreneurs working in these very extreme conditions, look at the recipes that they come up with for learning, they look nothing like school. What do they look like? Well, education is a global religion. And education, plus technology, is a great source of hope. You can go to places like this. This is a school three hours outside of Sao Paulo. Most of the children there have parents who are illiterate. Many of them don't have electricity at home. But they find it completely obvious to use computers, websites, make videos, so on and so forth. When you go to places like this what you see is that education in these settings works by pull, not push. Most of our education system is push. I was literally pushed to school. When you get to school, things are pushed at you: knowledge, exams, systems, timetables. If you want to attract people like Juanderson who could, for instance, buy guns, wear jewelry, ride motorbikes and get girls through the drugs trade, and you want to attract him into education, having a compulsory curriculum doesn't really make sense. That isn't really going to attract him. You need to pull him. And so education needs to work by pull, not push. And so the idea of a curriculum is completely irrelevant in a setting like this. You need to start education from things that make a difference to them in their settings. What does that? Well, the key is motivation, and there are two aspects to it. One is to deliver extrinsic motivation, that education has a payoff. Our education systems all work on the principle that there is a payoff, but you have to wait quite a long time. That's too long if you're poor. Waiting 10 years for the payoff from education is too long when you need to meet daily needs, when you've got siblings to look after or a business to help with. So you need education to be relevant and help people to make a living there and then, often. And you also need to make it intrinsically interesting. So time and again, I found people like this. This is an amazing guy, Sebastiao Rocha, in Belo Horizonte, in the third largest city in Brazil. He's invented more than 200 games to teach virtually any subject under the sun. In the schools and communities that Taio works in, the day always starts in a circle and always starts from a question. Imagine an education system that started from questions, not from knowledge to be imparted, or started from a game, not from a lesson, or started from the premise that you have to engage people first before you can possibly teach them. Our education systems, you do all that stuff afterward, if you're lucky, sport, drama, music. These things, they teach through. They attract people to learning because it's really a dance project or a circus project or, the best example of all — El Sistema in Venezuela — it's a music project. And so you attract people through that into learning, not adding that on after all the learning has been done and you've eaten your cognitive greens. So El Sistema in Venezuela uses a violin as a technology of learning. Taio Rocha uses making soap as a technology of learning. And what you find when you go to these schemes is that they use people and places in incredibly creative ways. Masses of peer learning. How do you get learning to people when there are no teachers, when teachers won't come, when you can't afford them, and even if you do get teachers, what they teach isn't relevant to the communities that they serve? Well, you create your own teachers. You create peer-to-peer learning, or you create para-teachers, or you bring in specialist skills. But you find ways to get learning that's relevant to people through technology, people and places that are different. So this is a school in a bus on a building site in Pune, the fastest growing city in Asia. Pune has 5,000 building sites. It has 30,000 children on those building sites. That's one city. Imagine that urban explosion that's going to take place across the developing world and how many thousands of children will spend their school years on building sites. Well, this is a very simple scheme to get the learning to them through a bus. And they all treat learning, not as some sort of academic, analytical activity, but as that's something that's productive, something you make, something that you can do, perhaps earn a living from. So I met this character, Steven. He'd spent three years in Nairobi living on the streets because his parents had died of AIDS. And he was finally brought back into school, not by the offer of GCSEs, but by the offer of learning how to become a carpenter, a practical making skill. So the trendiest schools in the world, High Tech High and others, they espouse a philosophy of learning as productive activity. Here, there isn't really an option. Learning has to be productive in order for it to make sense. And finally, they have a different model of scale, and it's a Chinese restaurant model of how to scale. And I learned it from this guy, who is an amazing character. He's probably the most remarkable social entrepreneur in education in the world. His name is Madhav Chavan, and he created something called Pratham. And Pratham runs preschool play groups for, now, 21 million children in India. It's the largest NGO in education in the world. And it also supports working-class kids going into Indian schools. He's a complete revolutionary. He's actually a trade union organizer by background, and that's how he learned the skills to build his organization. When they got to a certain stage, Pratham got big enough to attract some pro bono support from McKinsey. McKinsey came along and looked at his model and said, "You know what you should do with this, Madhav? You should turn it into McDonald's. And what you do when you go to any new site is you kind of roll out a franchise. And it's the same wherever you go. It's reliable and people know exactly where they are. And there will be no mistakes." And Madhav said, "Why do we have to do it that way? Why can't we do it more like the Chinese restaurants?" There are Chinese restaurants everywhere, but there is no Chinese restaurant chain. Yet, everyone knows what is a Chinese restaurant. They know what to expect, even though it'll be subtly different and the colors will be different and the name will be different. You know a Chinese restaurant when you see it. These people work with the Chinese restaurant model — same principles, different applications and different settings — not the McDonald's model. The McDonald's model scales. The Chinese restaurant model spreads. So mass education started with social entrepreneurship in the 19th century. And that's desperately what we need again on a global scale. And what can we learn from all of that? Well, we can learn a lot because our education systems are failing desperately in many ways. They fail to reach the people they most need to serve. They often hit their target but miss the point. Improvement is increasingly difficult to organize; our faith in these systems, incredibly fraught. And this is just a very simple way of understanding what kind of innovation, what kind of different design we need. There are two basic types of innovation. There's sustaining innovation, which will sustain an existing institution or an organization, and disruptive innovation that will break it apart, create some different way of doing it. There are formal settings — schools, colleges, hospitals — in which innovation can take place, and informal settings — communities, families, social networks. Almost all our effort goes in this box, sustaining innovation in formal settings, getting a better version of the essentially Bismarckian school system that developed in the 19th century. And as I said, the trouble with this is that, in the developing world there just aren't teachers to make this model work. You'd need millions and millions of teachers in China, India, Nigeria and the rest of developing world to meet need. And in our system, we know that simply doing more of this won't eat into deep educational inequalities, especially in inner cities and former industrial areas. So that's why we need three more kinds of innovation. We need more reinvention. And all around the world now you see more and more schools reinventing themselves. They're recognizably schools, but they look different. There are Big Picture schools in the U.S. and Australia. There are Kunskapsskolan schools in Sweden. Of 14 of them, only two of them are in schools. Most of them are in other buildings not designed as schools. There is an amazing school in Northen Queensland called Jaringan. And they all have the same kind of features: highly collaborative, very personalized, often pervasive technology, learning that starts from questions and problems and projects, not from knowledge and curriculum. So we certainly need more of that. But because so many of the issues in education aren't just in school, they're in family and community, what you also need, definitely, is more on the right hand side. You need efforts to supplement schools. The most famous of these is Reggio Emilia in Italy, the family-based learning system to support and encourage people in schools. The most exciting is the Harlem Children's Zone, which over 10 years, led by Geoffrey Canada, has, through a mixture of schooling and family and community projects, attempted to transform not just education in schools, but the entire culture and aspiration of about 10,000 families in Harlem. We need more of that completely new and radical thinking. You can go to places an hour away, less, from this room, just down the road, which need that, which need radicalism of a kind that we haven't imagined. And finally, you need transformational innovation that could imagine getting learning to people in completely new and different ways. So we are on the verge, 2015, of an amazing achievement, the schoolification of the world. Every child up to the age of 15 who wants a place in school will be able to have one in 2015. It's an amazing thing. But it is, unlike cars, which have developed so rapidly and orderly, actually the school system is recognizably an inheritance from the 19th century, from a Bismarkian model of German schooling that got taken up by English reformers, and often by religious missionaries, taken up in the United States as a force of social cohesion, and then in Japan and South Korea as they developed. It's recognizably 19th century in its roots. And of course it's a huge achievement. And of course it will bring great things. It will bring skills and learning and reading. But it will also lay waste to imagination. It will lay waste to appetite. It will lay waste to social confidence. It will stratify society as much as it liberates it. And we are bequeathing to the developing world school systems that they will now spend a century trying to reform. That is why we need really radical thinking, and why radical thinking is now more possible and more needed than ever in how we learn. Thank you. (Applause)

A second opinion on developmental disorders

{0: 'Aditi Shankardass is pioneering the use of EEG technology to give children with developmental disorders their most accurate diagnosis.'}

TEDIndia 2009

When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands. And that day I knew that when I grew up, I was going to become a brain doctor, scientist, something or the other. Years later, when I finally grew up, my dream came true. And it was while I was doing my Ph.D. on the neurological causes of dyslexia in children that I encountered a startling fact that I'd like to share with you all today. It is estimated that one in six children, that's one in six children, suffer from some developmental disorder. This is a disorder that retards mental development in the child and causes permanent mental impairments. Which means that each and every one of you here today knows at least one child that is suffering from a developmental disorder. But here's what really perplexed me. Despite the fact that each and every one of these disorders originates in the brain, most of these disorders are diagnosed solely on the basis of observable behavior. But diagnosing a brain disorder without actually looking at the brain is analogous to treating a patient with a heart problem based on their physical symptoms, without even doing an ECG or a chest X-ray to look at the heart. It seemed so intuitive to me. To diagnose and treat a brain disorder accurately, it would be necessary to look at the brain directly. Looking at behavior alone can miss a vital piece of the puzzle and provide an incomplete, or even a misleading, picture of the child's problems. Yet, despite all the advances in medical technology, the diagnosis of brain disorders in one in six children still remained so limited. And then I came across a team at Harvard University that had taken one such advanced medical technology and finally applied it, instead of in brain research, towards diagnosing brain disorders in children. Their groundbreaking technology records the EEG, or the electrical activity of the brain, in real time, allowing us to watch the brain as it performs various functions and then detect even the slightest abnormality in any of these functions: vision, attention, language, audition. A program called Brain Electrical Activity Mapping then triangulates the source of that abnormality in the brain. And another program called Statistical Probability Mapping then performs mathematical calculations to determine whether any of these abnormalities are clinically significant, allowing us to provide a much more accurate neurological diagnosis of the child's symptoms. And so I became the head of neurophysiology for the clinical arm of this team, and we're finally able to use this technology towards actually helping children with brain disorders. And I'm happy to say that I'm now in the process of setting up this technology here in India. I'd like to tell you about one such child, whose story was also covered by ABC News. Seven-year-old Justin Senigar came to our clinic with this diagnosis of very severe autism. Like many autistic children, his mind was locked inside his body. There were moments when he would actually space out for seconds at a time. And the doctors told his parents he was never going to be able to communicate or interact socially, and he would probably never have too much language. When we used this groundbreaking EEG technology to actually look at Justin's brain, the results were startling. It turned out that Justin was almost certainly not autistic. He was suffering from brain seizures that were impossible to see with the naked eye, but that were actually causing symptoms that mimicked those of autism. After Justin was given anti-seizure medication, the change in him was amazing. Within a period of 60 days, his vocabulary went from two to three words to 300 words. And his communication and social interaction were improved so dramatically that he was enrolled into a regular school and even became a karate super champ. Research shows that 50 percent of children, almost 50 percent of children diagnosed with autism are actually suffering from hidden brain seizures. These are the faces of the children that I have tested with stories just like Justin. All these children came to our clinic with a diagnosis of autism, attention deficit disorder, mental retardation, language problems. Instead, our EEG scans revealed very specific problems hidden within their brains that couldn't possibly have been detected by their behavioral assessments. So these EEG scans enabled us to provide these children with a much more accurate neurological diagnosis and much more targeted treatment. For too long now, children with developmental disorders have suffered from misdiagnosis while their real problems have gone undetected and left to worsen. And for too long, these children and their parents have suffered undue frustration and desperation. But we are now in a new era of neuroscience, one in which we can finally look directly at brain function in real time with no risks and no side effects, non-invasively, and find the true source of so many disabilities in children. So if I could inspire even a fraction of you in the audience today to share this pioneering diagnostic approach with even one parent whose child is suffering from a developmental disorder, then perhaps one more puzzle in one more brain will be solved. One more mind will be unlocked. And one more child who has been misdiagnosed or even undiagnosed by the system will finally realize his or her true potential while there's still time for his or her brain to recover. And all this by simply watching the child's brainwaves. Thank you. (Applause)

LEGO for grownups

{0: "When Hillel Cooperman isn't running his startup or seeking out the world's best food, he's investigating the secret underground world of Lego toys."}

TED2010

So, these are the Dark Ages. And the Dark Ages are the time between when you put away the LEGO for the last time as a kid, and you decide as an adult that it is okay to play with a kid's toy. Started out with my then four-year-old: "Oh, should buy the kid some LEGO. That stuff's cool." Walked into the LEGO store. Bought him this. It's totally appropriate for a four-year-old. (Laughter) I think the box says — let's see here — "8 to 12" on it. I turn to my wife and said, "Who are we buying this for?" She's like, "Oh, us." I'm like, "Okay. All right. That's cool." Pretty soon it got a little bit out of control. The dining room looked like this. You walk there, and it hurts. So we took a room downstairs in the basement that had been used as sort of an Abu Ghraib annex. (Laughter) Torture, very funny. Wow, you guys are great. And we put down those little floor tiles, and then I went onto eBay and bought 150 pounds of LEGO — (Laughter) which is insane. My daughter — the day we got it, I was tucking her in — and I said, "Honey, you're my treasure." And she said, "No, the LEGO is the treasure." (Laughter) And then she said, "Dad, we're LEGO rich." I was like, "Yeah. I suppose we are." So then once you do that you're like, "Oh, crap. Where am I going to put all this?" So you go to The Container Store and spend an enormous amount of money, and then you start this crazy sorting process that never — it's just nuts. Whatever. So then you realize there are these conventions. And you go to one of these conventions, and some dude built the Titanic. And you're like, "Holy shit! He had to come in like a truck, a semi, with this thing." And then someone built this — this is the Smith Tower in Seattle. Just beautiful. And there's a dude selling these aftermarket weapons for LEGO, because LEGO — the Danish — no, they're not into guns. But the Americans? Oh, we'll make some guns for LEGO, no problem. And at a certain point, you look around, you're like, "Whoa, this is a really nerdy crowd." And I mean like this is a nerdy crowd, but that's like a couple of levels above furries. (Laughter) The nerds here, they get laid — except for the lady with the condoms in her pocket — and you say to yourself at some point, "Am I part of this group? Like, am I into this?" And I was just like, "Yeah, I guess I am. I'm coming out. I'm kind of into this stuff, and I'm going to stop being embarrassed." So then you really get into it, and you're like, "Well, the LEGO people in Denmark, they've got all this software to let you build your own virtually." And so this is like this CAD program where you build it. And then whatever you design virtually, you click the button and it shows up at your doorstep a week later. And then some of the designs that people do they actually sell in the store. The LEGO guys don't give you any royalties, strangely, but some user made this and then it sold. And it's pretty amazing actually. Then you notice that if that LEGO-provided CAD program isn't enough, there's an entire open-source, third-party, independent LEGO CAD program that lets you do 3D modeling and 3D rendering and make, in fact, movies out of LEGO, 3D films of which there are thousands on YouTube, and some of them sort of mimicking famous films and some totally original content — just beautiful — and people recreating all sorts of things. I have to take a moment. I love the guy who's like running away with his clasps, his hooks. Okay. Anyway. (Laughter) There's a whole programming language and robotics tool, so if you want to teach someone how to program, kid, adult, whatever it is. And the guy that made this, he made a slot machine out of LEGO. And I don't mean he made LEGO that looked like a slot machine; I mean he made a slot machine out of LEGO. The insides were LEGO. There's people getting drunk building LEGO, and you've got to finish the thing before you puke. There's a whole gray market for LEGO, thousands of home-based businesses. And some people will fund their entire LEGO habit by selling the little guy, but then you have no guys in your ships. And then, just some examples. This stuff really is sculpture. This is amazing what you can do. And don't kid yourself: some architectural details, incredible organic shapes and just, even, nature out of, again, little blocks. This is my house. And this is my house. I was afraid a car was going to come smash it as I was taking a picture for you guys. Anyway, I'm out of time. But just very quickly — we'll just see if I can do this quick. Because there aren't enough TED logos around here. (Laughter) Let's see here. Okay. Ta-da. (Applause)

How cognitive surplus will change the world

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

TED@Cannes

The story starts in Kenya in December of 2007, when there was a disputed presidential election, and in the immediate aftermath of that election, there was an outbreak of ethnic violence. And there was a lawyer in Nairobi, Ory Okolloh — who some of you may know from her TEDTalk — who began blogging about it on her site, Kenyan Pundit. And shortly after the election and the outbreak of violence, the government suddenly imposed a significant media blackout. And so weblogs went from being commentary as part of the media landscape to being a critical part of the media landscape in trying to understand where the violence was. And Okolloh solicited from her commenters more information about what was going on. The comments began pouring in, and Okolloh would collate them. She would post them. And she quickly said, "It's too much. I could do this all day every day and I can't keep up. There is more information about what's going on in Kenya right now than any one person can manage. If only there was a way to automate this." And two programmers who read her blog held their hands up and said, "We could do that," and in 72 hours, they launched Ushahidi. Ushahidi — the name means "witness" or "testimony" in Swahili — is a very simple way of taking reports from the field, whether it's from the web or, critically, via mobile phones and SMS, aggregating it and putting it on a map. That's all it is, but that's all that's needed because what it does is it takes the tacit information available to the whole population — everybody knows where the violence is, but no one person knows what everyone knows — and it takes that tacit information and it aggregates it, and it maps it and it makes it public. And that, that maneuver called "crisis mapping," was kicked off in Kenya in January of 2008. And enough people looked at it and found it valuable enough that the programmers who created Ushahidi decided they were going to make it open source and turn it into a platform. It's since been deployed in Mexico to track electoral fraud. It's been deployed in Washington D.C. to track snow cleanup. And it's been used most famously in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. And when you look at the map now posted on the Ushahidi front page, you can see that the number of deployments in Ushahidi has gone worldwide, all right? This went from a single idea and a single implementation in East Africa in the beginning of 2008 to a global deployment in less than three years. Now what Okolloh did would not have been possible without digital technology. What Okolloh did would not have been possible without human generosity. And the interesting moment now, the number of environments where the social design challenge relies on both of those things being true. That is the resource that I'm talking about. I call it cognitive surplus. And it represents the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects. Cognitive surplus is made up of two things. The first, obviously, is the world's free time and talents. The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects. Now, that free time existed in the 20th century, but we didn't get Ushahidi in the 20th century. That's the second half of cognitive surplus. The media landscape in the 20th century was very good at helping people consume, and we got, as a result, very good at consuming. But now that we've been given media tools — the Internet, mobile phones — that let us do more than consume, what we're seeing is that people weren't couch potatoes because we liked to be. We were couch potatoes because that was the only opportunity given to us. We still like to consume, of course. But it turns out we also like to create, and we like to share. And it's those two things together — ancient human motivation and the modern tools to allow that motivation to be joined up in large-scale efforts — that are the new design resource. And using cognitive surplus, we're starting to see truly incredible experiments in scientific, literary, artistic, political efforts. Designing. We're also getting, of course, a lot of LOLcats. LOLcats are cute pictures of cats made cuter with the addition of cute captions. And they are also part of the abundant media landscape we're getting now. This is one of the participatory — one of the participatory models we see coming out of that, along with Ushahidi. Now I want to stipulate, as the lawyers say, that LOLcats are the stupidest possible creative act. There are other candidates of course, but LOLcats will do as a general case. But here's the thing: The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. Someone who has done something like this, however mediocre and throwaway, has tried something, has put something forward in public. And once they've done it, they can do it again, and they could work on getting it better. There is a spectrum between mediocre work and good work, and as anybody who's worked as an artist or a creator knows, it's a spectrum you're constantly struggling to get on top of. The gap is between doing anything and doing nothing. And someone who makes a LOLcat has already crossed over that gap. Now it's tempting to want to get the Ushahidis without the LOLcats, right, to get the serious stuff without the throwaway stuff. But media abundance never works that way. Freedom to experiment means freedom to experiment with anything. Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals. So before I talk about what is, I think, the critical difference between LOLcats and Ushahidi, I want to talk about their shared source. And that source is design for generosity. It is one of the curiosities of our historical era that even as cognitive surplus is becoming a resource we can design around, social sciences are also starting to explain how important our intrinsic motivations are to us, how much we do things because we like to do them rather than because our boss told us to do them, or because we're being paid to do them. This is a graph from a paper by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, who set out to test, at the beginning of this decade, what they called "deterrence theory." And deterrence theory is a very simple theory of human behavior: If you want somebody to do less of something, add a punishment and they'll do less of it. Simple, straightforward, commonsensical — also, largely untested. And so they went and studied 10 daycare centers in Haifa, Israel. They studied those daycare centers at the time of highest tension, which is pick-up time. At pick-up time the teachers, who have been with your children all day, would like you to be there at the appointed hour to take your children back. Meanwhile, the parents — perhaps a little busy at work, running late, running errands — want a little slack to pick the kids up late. So Gneezy and Rustichini said, "How many instances of late pick-ups are there at these 10 daycare centers?" Now they saw — and this is what the graph is, these are the number of weeks and these are the number of late arrivals — that there were between six and 10 instances of late pick-ups on average in these 10 daycare centers. So they divided the daycare centers into two groups. The white group there is the control group; they change nothing. But the group of daycare centers represented by the black line, they said, "We are changing this bargain as of right now. If you pick your kid up more than 10 minutes late, we're going to add a 10 shekel fine to your bill. Boom. No ifs, ands or buts." And the minute they did that, the behavior in those daycare centers changed. Late pick-ups went up every week for the next four weeks until they topped out at triple the pre-fine average, and then they fluctuated at between double and triple the pre-fine average for the life of the fine. And you can see immediately what happened, right? The fine broke the culture of the daycare center. By adding a fine, what they did was communicate to the parents that their entire debt to the teachers had been discharged with the payment of 10 shekels, and that there was no residue of guilt or social concern that the parents owed the teachers. And so the parents, quite sensibly, said, "10 shekels to pick my kid up late? What could be bad?" (Laughter) The explanation of human behavior that we inherited in the 20th century was that we are all rational, self-maximizing actors, and in that explanation — the daycare center had no contract — should have been operating without any constraints. But that's not right. They were operating with social constraints rather than contractual ones. And critically, the social constraints created a culture that was more generous than the contractual constraints did. So Gneezy and Rustichini run this experiment for a dozen weeks — run the fine for a dozen weeks — and then they say, "Okay, that's it. All done; fine." And then a really interesting thing happens: Nothing changes. The culture that got broken by the fine stayed broken when the fine was removed. Not only are economic motivations and intrinsic motivations incompatible, that incompatibility can persist over long periods. So the trick in designing these kinds of situations is to understand where you're relying on the economic part of the bargain — as with the parents paying the teachers — and when you're relying on the social part of the bargain, when you're really designing for generosity. This brings me back to the LOLcats and to Ushahidi. This is, I think, the range that matters. Both of these rely on cognitive surplus. Both of these design for the assumption that people like to create and we want to share. Here is the critical difference between these: LOLcats is communal value. It's value created by the participants for each other. Communal value on the networks we have is everywhere — every time you see a large aggregate of shared, publicly available data, whether it's photos on Flickr or videos on Youtube or whatever. This is good. I like LOLcats as much as the next guy, maybe a little more even, but this is also a largely solved problem. I have a hard time envisioning a future in which someone is saying, "Where, oh where, can I find a picture of a cute cat?" Ushahidi, by contrast, is civic value. It's value created by the participants but enjoyed by society as a whole. The goals set out by Ushahidi are not just to make life better for the participants, but to make life better for everyone in the society in which Ushahidi is operating. And that kind of civic value is not just a side effect of opening up to human motivation. It really is going to be a side effect of what we, collectively, make of these kinds of efforts. There are a trillion hours a year of participatory value up for grabs. That will be true year-in and year-out. The number of people who are going to be able to participate in these kinds of projects is going to grow, and we can see that organizations designed around a culture of generosity can achieve incredible effects without an enormous amount of contractual overhead — a very different model than our default model for large-scale group action in the 20th century. What's going to make the difference here is what Dean Kamen said, the inventor and entrepreneur. Kamen said, "Free cultures get what they celebrate." We've got a choice before us. We've got this trillion hours a year. We can use it to crack each other up, and we're going to do that. That, we get for free. But we can also celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value. And to the degree we're going to do that, to the degree we're able to do that, we'll be able to change society. Thank you very much.

Retrofitting suburbia

{0: 'Ellen Dunham-Jones takes an unblinking look at our underperforming suburbs -- and proposes plans for making them livable and sustainable.'}

TEDxAtlanta

In the last 50 years, we've been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. And I'm going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it's redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially retail, sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges. So why is this important? I think there are any number of reasons, and I'm just going to not get into detail but mention a few. Just from the perspective of climate change, the average urban dweller in the U.S. has about one-third the carbon footprint of the average suburban dweller, mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more, and living in detached buildings, you have that much more exterior surface to leak energy out of. So strictly from a climate change perspective, the cities are already relatively green. The big opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is actually in urbanizing the suburbs. All that driving that we've been doing out in the suburbs, we have doubled the amount of miles we drive. It's increased our dependence on foreign oil despite the gains in fuel efficiency. We're just driving so much more; we haven't been able to keep up technologically. Public health is another reason to consider retrofitting. Researchers at the CDC and other places have increasingly been linking suburban development patterns with sedentary lifestyles. And those have been linked then with the rather alarming, growing rates of obesity, shown in these maps here, and that obesity has also been triggering great increases in heart disease and diabetes to the point where a child born today has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. And that rate has been escalating at the same rate as children not walking to school anymore, again, because of our development patterns. And then there's finally — there's the affordability question. I mean, how affordable is it to continue to live in suburbia with rising gas prices? Suburban expansion to cheap land, for the last 50 years — you know the cheap land out on the edge — has helped generations of families enjoy the American dream. But increasingly, the savings promised by drive-till-you-qualify affordability — which is basically our model — those savings are wiped out when you consider the transportation costs. For instance, here in Atlanta, about half of households make between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, and they are spending 29 percent of their income on housing and 32 percent on transportation. I mean, that's 2005 figures. That's before we got up to the four bucks a gallon. You know, none of us really tend to do the math on our transportation costs, and they're not going down any time soon. Whether you love suburbia's leafy privacy or you hate its soulless commercial strips, there are reasons why it's important to retrofit. But is it practical? I think it is. June Williamson and I have been researching this topic for over a decade, and we've found over 80 varied projects. But that they're really all market driven, and what's driving the market in particular — number one — is major demographic shifts. We all tend to think of suburbia as this very family-focused place, but that's really not the case anymore. Since 2000, already two-thirds of households in suburbia did not have kids in them. We just haven't caught up with the actual realities of this. The reasons for this have a lot to with the dominance of the two big demographic groups right now: the Baby Boomers retiring — and then there's a gap, Generation X, which is a small generation. They're still having kids — but Generation Y hasn't even started hitting child-rearing age. They're the other big generation. So as a result of that, demographers predict that through 2025, 75 to 85 percent of new households will not have kids in them. And the market research, consumer research, asking the Boomers and Gen Y what it is they would like, what they would like to live in, tells us there is going to be a huge demand — and we're already seeing it — for more urban lifestyles within suburbia. That basically, the Boomers want to be able to age in place, and Gen Y would like to live an urban lifestyle, but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia. The other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt. Now I keep thinking this would be a great name for an indie rock band, but developers generally use it to refer to underused parking lots — and suburbia is full of them. When the postwar suburbs were first built out on the cheap land away from downtown, it made sense to just build surface parking lots. But those sites have now been leapfrogged and leapfrogged again, as we've just continued to sprawl, and they now have a relatively central location. It no longer just makes sense. That land is more valuable than just surface parking lots. It now makes sense to go back in, build a deck and build up on those sites. So what do you do with a dead mall, dead office park? It turns out, all sorts of things. In a slow economy like ours, re-inhabitation is one of the more popular strategies. So this happens to be a dead mall in St. Louis that's been re-inhabited as art-space. It's now home to artist studios, theater groups, dance troupes. It's not pulling in as much tax revenue as it once was, but it's serving its community. It's keeping the lights on. It's becoming, I think, a really great institution. Other malls have been re-inhabited as nursing homes, as universities, and as all variety of office space. We also found a lot of examples of dead big-box stores that have been converted into all sorts of community-serving uses as well — lots of schools, lots of churches and lots of libraries like this one. This was a little grocery store, a Food Lion grocery store, that is now a public library. In addition to, I think, doing a beautiful adaptive reuse, they tore up some of the parking spaces, put in bioswales to collect and clean the runoff, put in a lot more sidewalks to connect to the neighborhoods. And they've made this, what was just a store along a commercial strip, into a community gathering space. This one is a little L-shaped strip shopping center in Phoenix, Arizona. Really all they did was they gave it a fresh coat of bright paint, a gourmet grocery, and they put up a restaurant in the old post office. Never underestimate the power of food to turn a place around and make it a destination. It's been so successful, they've now taken over the strip across the street. The real estate ads in the neighborhood all very proudly proclaim, "Walking distance to Le Grande Orange," because it provided its neighborhood with what sociologists like to call "a third place." If home is the first place and work is the second place, the third place is where you go to hang out and build community. And especially as suburbia is becoming less centered on the family, the family households, there's a real hunger for more third places. So the most dramatic retrofits are really those in the next category, the next strategy: redevelopment. Now, during the boom, there were several really dramatic redevelopment projects where the original building was scraped to the ground and then the whole site was rebuilt at significantly greater density, a sort of compact, walkable urban neighborhoods. But some of them have been much more incremental. This is Mashpee Commons, the oldest retrofit that we've found. And it's just incrementally, over the last 20 years, built urbanism on top of its parking lots. So the black and white photo shows the simple 60's strip shopping center. And then the maps above that show its gradual transformation into a compact, mixed-use New England village, and it has plans now that have been approved for it to connect to new residential neighborhoods across the arterials and over to the other side. So, you know, sometimes it's incremental. Sometimes, it's all at once. This is another infill project on the parking lots, this one of an office park outside of Washington D.C. When Metrorail expanded transit into the suburbs and opened a station nearby to this site, the owners decided to build a new parking deck and then insert on top of their surface lots a new Main Street, several apartments and condo buildings, while keeping the existing office buildings. Here is the site in 1940: It was just a little farm in the village of Hyattsville. By 1980, it had been subdivided into a big mall on one side and the office park on the other and then some buffer sites for a library and a church to the far right. Today, the transit, the Main Street and the new housing have all been built. Eventually, I expect that the streets will probably extend through a redevelopment of the mall. Plans have already been announced for a lot of those garden apartments above the mall to be redeveloped. Transit is a big driver of retrofits. So here's what it looks like. You can sort of see the funky new condo buildings in between the office buildings and the public space and the new Main Street. This one is one of my favorites, Belmar. I think they really built an attractive place here and have just employed all-green construction. There's massive P.V. arrays on the roofs as well as wind turbines. This was a very large mall on a hundred-acre superblock. It's now 22 walkable urban blocks with public streets, two public parks, eight bus lines and a range of housing types, and so it's really given Lakewood, Colorado the downtown that this particular suburb never had. Here was the mall in its heyday. They had their prom in the mall. They loved their mall. So here's the site in 1975 with the mall. By 1995, the mall has died. The department store has been kept — and we found this was true in many cases. The department stores are multistory; they're better built. They're easy to be re-adapted. But the one story stuff ... that's really history. So here it is at projected build-out. This project, I think, has great connectivity to the existing neighborhoods. It's providing 1,500 households with the option of a more urban lifestyle. It's about two-thirds built out right now. Here's what the new Main Street looks like. It's very successful, and it's helped to prompt — eight of the 13 regional malls in Denver have now, or have announced plans to be, retrofitted. But it's important to note that all of this retrofitting is not occurring — just bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city. No, it's pockets of walkability on the sites of under-performing properties. And so it's giving people more choices, but it's not taking away choices. But it's also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability. You want to also try to get more systemic transformation. We need to also retrofit the corridors themselves. So this is one that has been retrofitted in California. They took the commercial strip shown on the black-and-white images below, and they built a boulevard that has become the Main Street for their town. And it's transformed from being an ugly, unsafe, undesirable address, to becoming a beautiful, attractive, dignified sort of good address. I mean now we're hoping we start to see it; they've already built City Hall, attracted two hotels. I could imagine beautiful housing going up along there without tearing down another tree. So there's a lot of great things, but I'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitting. But densification is not going to work everywhere. Sometimes re-greening is really the better answer. There's a lot to learn from successful landbanking programs in cities like Flint, Michigan. There's also a burgeoning suburban farming movement — sort of victory gardens meets the Internet. But perhaps one of the most important re-greening aspects is the opportunity to restore the local ecology, as in this example outside of Minneapolis. When the shopping center died, the city restored the site's original wetlands, creating lakefront property, which then attracted private investment, the first private investment to this very low-income neighborhood in over 40 years. So they've managed to both restore the local ecology and the local economy at the same time. This is another re-greening example. It also makes sense in very strong markets. This one in Seattle is on the site of a mall parking lot adjacent to a new transit stop. And the wavy line is a path alongside a creek that has now been daylit. The creek had been culverted under the parking lot. But daylighting our creeks really improves their water quality and contributions to habitat. So I've shown you some of the first generation of retrofits. What's next? I think we have three challenges for the future. The first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale. We need to be able to target which areas really should be re-greened. Where should we be redeveloping? And where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation? These slides just show two images from a larger project that looked at trying to do that for Atlanta. I led a team that was asked to imagine Atlanta 100 years from now. And we chose to try to reverse sprawl through three simple moves — expensive, but simple. One, in a hundred years, transit on all major rail and road corridors. Two, in a hundred years, thousand foot buffers on all stream corridors. It's a little extreme, but we've got a little water problem. In a hundred years, subdivisions that simply end up too close to water or too far from transit won't be viable. And so we've created the eco-acre transfer-to-transfer development rights to the transit corridors and allow the re-greening of those former subdivisions for food and energy production. So the second challenge is to improve the architectural design quality of the retrofits. And I close with this image of democracy in action: This is a protest that's happening on a retrofit in Silver Spring, Maryland on an Astroturf town green. Now, retrofits are often accused of being examples of faux downtowns and instant urbanism, and not without reason; you don't get much more phony than an Astroturf town green. I have to say, these are very hybrid places. They are new but trying to look old. They have urban streetscapes, but suburban parking ratios. Their populations are more diverse than typical suburbia, but they're less diverse than cities. And they are public places, but that are managed by private companies. And just the surface appearance are often — like the Astroturf here — they make me wince. So, you know, I mean I'm glad that the urbanism is doing its job. The fact that a protest is happening really does mean that the layout of the blocks, the streets and blocks, the putting in of public space, compromised as it may be, is still a really great thing. But we've got to get the architecture better. The final challenge is for all of you. I want you to join the protest and start demanding more sustainable suburban places — more sustainable places, period. But culturally, we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that. But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to. It's time to let them grow up, so I want you to all support the zoning changes, the road diets, the infrastructure improvements and the retrofits that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Thank you.

Hidden toxins in the fish we eat

{0: 'Stephen Palumbi studies the way humanity and ocean life interact and intertwine. His insights into our codependence offer ideas for protecting both the ocean and ourselves.'}

Mission Blue Voyage

It can be a very complicated thing, the ocean. And it can be a very complicated thing, what human health is. And bringing those two together might seem a very daunting task, but what I'm going to try to say is that even in that complexity, there's some simple themes that I think, if we understand, we can really move forward. And those simple themes aren't really themes about the complex science of what's going on, but things that we all pretty well know. And I'm going to start with this one: If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. We know that, right? We've experienced that. And if we just take that and we build from there, then we can go to the next step, which is that if the ocean ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. That's the theme of my talk. And we're making the ocean pretty unhappy in a lot of different ways. This is a shot of Cannery Row in 1932. Cannery Row, at the time, had the biggest industrial canning operation on the west coast. We piled enormous amounts of pollution into the air and into the water. Rolf Bolin, who was a professor at the Hopkin's Marine Station where I work, wrote in the 1940s that "The fumes from the scum floating on the inlets of the bay were so bad they turned lead-based paints black." People working in these canneries could barely stay there all day because of the smell, but you know what they came out saying? They say, "You know what you smell? You smell money." That pollution was money to that community, and those people dealt with the pollution and absorbed it into their skin and into their bodies because they needed the money. We made the ocean unhappy; we made people very unhappy, and we made them unhealthy. The connection between ocean health and human health is actually based upon another couple simple adages, and I want to call that "pinch a minnow, hurt a whale." The pyramid of ocean life ... Now, when an ecologist looks at the ocean — I have to tell you — we look at the ocean in a very different way, and we see different things than when a regular person looks at the ocean because when an ecologist looks at the ocean, we see all those interconnections. We see the base of the food chain, the plankton, the small things, and we see how those animals are food to animals in the middle of the pyramid, and on so up this diagram. And that flow, that flow of life, from the very base up to the very top, is the flow that ecologists see. And that's what we're trying to preserve when we say, "Save the ocean. Heal the ocean." It's that pyramid. Now why does that matter for human health? Because when we jam things in the bottom of that pyramid that shouldn't be there, some very frightening things happen. Pollutants, some pollutants have been created by us: molecules like PCBs that can't be broken down by our bodies. And they go in the base of that pyramid, and they drift up; they're passed up that way, on to predators and on to the top predators, and in so doing, they accumulate. Now, to bring that home, I thought I'd invent a little game. We don't really have to play it; we can just think about it here. It's the Styrofoam and chocolate game. Imagine that when we got on this boat, we were all given two Styrofoam peanuts. Can't do much with them: Put them in your pocket. Suppose the rules are: every time you offer somebody a drink, you give them the drink, and you give them your Styrofoam peanuts too. What'll happen is that the Styrofoam peanuts will start moving through our society here, and they will accumulate in the drunkest, stingiest people. (Laughter) There's no mechanism in this game for them to go anywhere but into a bigger and bigger pile of indigestible Styrofoam peanuts. And that's exactly what happens with PDBs in this food pyramid: They accumulate into the top of it. Now suppose, instead of Styrofoam peanuts, we take these lovely little chocolates that we get and we had those instead. Well, some of us would be eating those chocolates instead of passing them around, and instead of accumulating, they will just pass into our group here and not accumulate in any one group because they're absorbed by us. And that's the difference between a PCB and, say, something natural like an omega-3, something we want out of the marine food chain. PCBs accumulate. We have great examples of that, unfortunately. PCBs accumulate in dolphins in Sarasota Bay, in Texas, in North Carolina. They get into the food chain. The dolphins eat the fish that have PCBs from the plankton, and those PCBs, being fat-soluble, accumulate in these dolphins. Now, a dolphin, mother dolphin, any dolphin — there's only one way that a PCB can get out of a dolphin. And what's that? In mother's milk. Here's a diagram of the PCB load of dolphins in Sarasota Bay. Adult males: a huge load. Juveniles: a huge load. Females after their first calf is already weaned: a lower load. Those females, they're not trying to. Those females are passing the PCBs in the fat of their own mother's milk into their offspring, and their offspring don't survive. The death rate in these dolphins, for the first calf born of every female dolphin, is 60 to 80 percent. These mothers pump their first offspring full of this pollutant, and most of them die. Now, the mother then can go and reproduce, but what a terrible price to pay for the accumulation of this pollutant in these animals — the death of the first-born calf. There's another top predator in the ocean, it turns out. That top predator, of course, is us. And we also are eating meat that comes from some of these same places. This is whale meat that I photographed in a grocery store in Tokyo — or is it? In fact, what we did a few years ago was learn how to smuggle a molecular biology lab into Tokyo and use it to genetically test the DNA out of whale meat samples and identify what they really were. And some of those whale meat samples were whale meat. Some of them were illegal whale meat, by the way. That's another story. But some of them were not whale meat at all. Even though they were labeled whale meat, they were dolphin meat. Some of them were dolphin liver. Some of them were dolphin blubber. And those dolphin parts had a huge load of PCBs, dioxins and heavy metals. And that huge load was passing into the people that ate this meat. It turns out that a lot of dolphins are being sold as meat in the whale meat market around the world. That's a tragedy for those populations, but it's also a tragedy for the people eating them because they don't know that that's toxic meat. We had these data a few years ago. I remember sitting at my desk being about the only person in the world who knew that whale meat being sold in these markets was really dolphin meat, and it was toxic. It had two-to-three-to-400 times the toxic loads ever allowed by the EPA. And I remember there sitting at my desk thinking, "Well, I know this. This is a great scientific discovery," but it was so awful. And for the very first time in my scientific career, I broke scientific protocol, which is that you take the data and publish them in scientific journals and then begin to talk about them. We sent a very polite letter to the Minister of Health in Japan and simply pointed out that this is an intolerable situation, not for us, but for the people of Japan because mothers who may be breastfeeding, who may have young children, would be buying something that they thought was healthy, but it was really toxic. That led to a whole series of other campaigns in Japan, and I'm really proud to say that at this point, it's very difficult to buy anything in Japan that's labeled incorrectly, even though they're still selling whale meat, which I believe they shouldn't. But at least it's labeled correctly, and you're no longer going to be buying toxic dolphin meat instead. It isn't just there that this happens, but in a natural diet of some communities in the Canadian arctic and in the United States and in the European arctic, a natural diet of seals and whales leads to an accumulation of PCBs that have gathered up from all parts of the world and ended up in these women. These women have toxic breast milk. They cannot feed their offspring, their children, their breast milk because of the accumulation of these toxins in their food chain, in their part of the world's ocean pyramid. That means their immune systems are compromised. It means that their children's development can be compromised. And the world's attention on this over the last decade has reduced the problem for these women, not by changing the pyramid, but by changing what they particularly eat out of it. We've taken them out of their natural pyramid in order to solve this problem. That's a good thing for this particular acute problem, but it does nothing to solve the pyramid problem. There's other ways of breaking the pyramid. The pyramid, if we jam things in the bottom, can get backed up like a sewer line that's clogged. And if we jam nutrients, sewage, fertilizer in the base of that food pyramid, it can back up all through it. We end up with things we've heard about before: red tides, for example, which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage. We can also see blooms of bacteria, blooms of viruses in the ocean. These are two shots of a red tide coming on shore here and a bacteria in the genus vibrio, which includes the genus that has cholera in it. How many people have seen a "beach closed" sign? Why does that happen? It happens because we have jammed so much into the base of the natural ocean pyramid that these bacteria clog it up and overfill onto our beaches. Often what jams us up is sewage. Now how many of you have ever gone to a state park or a national park where you had a big sign at the front saying, "Closed because human sewage is so far over this park that you can't use it"? Not very often. We wouldn't tolerate that. We wouldn't tolerate our parks being swamped by human sewage, but beaches are closed a lot in our country. They're closed more and more and more all around the world for the same reason, and I believe we shouldn't tolerate that either. It's not just a question of cleanliness; it's also a question of how those organisms then turn into human disease. These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people. They can go into your skin and create skin infections. This is a graph from NOAA's ocean and human health initiative, showing the rise of the infections by vibrio in people over the last few years. Surfers, for example, know this incredibly. And if you can see on some surfing sites, in fact, not only do you see what the waves are like or what the weather's like, but on some surf rider sites, you see a little flashing poo alert. That means that the beach might have great waves, but it's a dangerous place for surfers to be because they can carry with them, even after a great day of surfing, this legacy of an infection that might take a very long time to solve. Some of these infections are actually carrying antibiotic resistance genes now, and that makes them even more difficult. These same infections create harmful algal blooms. Those blooms are generating other kinds of chemicals. This is just a simple list of some of the types of poisons that come out of these harmful algal blooms: shellfish poisoning,fish ciguatera, diarrheic shellfish poisoning — you don't want to know about that — neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, paralytic shellfish poisoning. These are things that are getting into our food chain because of these blooms. Rita Calwell very famously traced a very interesting story of cholera into human communities, brought there, not by a normal human vector, but by a marine vector, this copepod. Copepods are small crustaceans. They're a tiny fraction of an inch long, and they can carry on their little legs some of the cholera bacteria that then leads to human disease. That has sparked cholera epidemics in ports along the world and has led to increased concentration on trying to make sure shipping doesn't move these vectors of cholera around the world. So what do you do? We have major problems in disrupted ecosystem flow that the pyramid may not be working so well, that the flow from the base up into it is being blocked and clogged. What do you do when you have this sort of disrupted flow? Well, there's a bunch of things you could do. You could call Joe the Plumber, for example. And he could come in and fix the flow. But in fact, if you look around the world, not only are there hope spots for where we may be able to fix problems, there have been places where problems have been fixed, where people have come to grips with these issues and begun to turn them around. Monterey is one of those. I started out showing how much we had distressed the Monterey Bay ecosystem with pollution and the canning industry and all of the attendant problems. In 1932, that's the picture. In 2009, the picture is dramatically different. The canneries are gone. The pollution has abated. But there's a greater sense here that what the individual communities need is working ecosystems. They need a functioning pyramid from the base all the way to the top. And that pyramid in Monterey, right now, because of the efforts of a lot of different people, is functioning better than it's ever functioned for the last 150 years. It didn't happen accidentally. It happened because many people put their time and effort and their pioneering spirit into this. On the left there, Julia Platt, the mayor of my little hometown in Pacific Grove. At 74 years old, became mayor because something had to be done to protect the ocean. In 1931, she produced California's first community-based marine protected area, right next to the biggest polluting cannery, because Julia knew that when the canneries eventually were gone, the ocean needed a place to grow from, that the ocean needed a place to spark a seed, and she wanted to provide that seed. Other people, like David Packard and Julie Packard, who were instrumental in producing the Monterey Bay aquarium to lock into people's notion that the ocean and the health of the ocean ecosystem were just as important to the economy of this area as eating the ecosystem would be. That change in thinking has led to a dramatic shift, not only in the fortunes of Monterey Bay, but other places around the world. Well, I want to leave you with the thought that what we're really trying to do here is protect this ocean pyramid, and that ocean pyramid connects to our own pyramid of life. It's an ocean planet, and we think of ourselves as a terrestrial species, but the pyramid of life in the ocean and our own lives on land are intricately connected. And it's only through having the ocean being healthy that we can remain healthy ourselves. Thank you very much. (Applause)

A 3D atlas of the universe

{0: 'Carter Emmart uses astronomy and computational modeling to create scientifically accurate, three-dimensional tours of our universe. '}

TED2010

It's a great honor today to share with you The Digital Universe, which was created for humanity to really see where we are in the universe. And so I think we can roll the video that we have. [The Himalayas.] (Music) The flat horizon that we've evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite: unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste. It wasn't until we really left Earth, got above the atmosphere and had seen the horizon bend back on itself, that we could understand our planet as a limited condition. The Digital Universe Atlas has been built at the American Museum of Natural History over the past 12 years. We maintain that, put that together as a project to really chart the universe across all scales. What we see here are satellites around the Earth and the Earth in proper registration against the universe, as we see. NASA supported this work 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of the Hayden Planetarium so that we would share this with the world. The Digital Universe is the basis of our space show productions that we do — our main space shows in the dome. But what you see here is the result of, actually, internships that we hosted with Linkoping University in Sweden. I've had 12 students work on this for their graduate work, and the result has been this software called Uniview and a company called SCISS in Sweden. This software allows interactive use, so this actual flight path and movie that we see here was actually flown live. I captured this live from my laptop in a cafe called Earth Matters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where I live, and it was done as a collaborative project with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology. And so as we move out, we see continuously from our planet all the way out into the realm of galaxies, as we see here, light-travel time, giving you a sense of how far away we are. As we move out, the light from these distant galaxies have taken so long, we're essentially backing up into the past. We back so far up we're finally seeing a containment around us — the afterglow of the Big Bang. This is the WMAP microwave background that we see. We'll fly outside it here, just to see this sort of containment. If we were outside this, it would almost be meaningless, in the sense as before time. But this our containment of the visible universe. We know the universe is bigger than that which we can see. Coming back quickly, we see here the radio sphere that we jumped out of in the beginning, but these are positions, the latest positions of exoplanets that we've mapped, and our sun here, obviously, with our own solar system. What you're going to see — we're going to have to jump in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to where we see the solar system — these are the paths of Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 11 and Pioneer 10, the first four spacecraft to have left the solar system. Coming in closer, picking up Earth, orbit of the Moon, and we see the Earth. This map can be updated, and we can add in new data. I know Dr. Carolyn Porco is the camera P.I. for the Cassini mission. But here we see the complex trajectory of the Cassini mission color coded for different mission phases, ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon, Titan, which is larger that the planet Mercury, diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase. This software allows us to come close and look at parts of this. This software can also be networked between domes. We have a growing user base of this, and we network domes. And we can network between domes and classrooms. We're actually sharing tours of the universe with the first sub-Saharan planetarium in Ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in the ghettos in Columbia and a high school in Cambodia. And the Cambodians have actually controlled the Hayden Planetarium from their high school. This is an image from Saturday, photographed by the Aqua satellite, but through the Uniview software. So you're seeing the edge of the Earth. This is Nepal. This is, in fact, right here is the valley of Lhasa, right here in Tibet. But we can see the haze from fires and so forth in the Ganges valley down below in India. This is Nepal and Tibet. And just in closing, I'd just like to say this beautiful world that we live on — here we see a bit of the snow that some of you may have had to brave in coming out — so I'd like to just say that what the world needs now is a sense of being able to look at ourselves in this much larger condition now and a much larger sense of what home is. Because our home is the universe, and we are the universe, essentially. We carry that in us. And to be able to see our context in this larger sense at all scales helps us all, I think, in understanding where we are and who we are in the universe. Thank you. (Applause)

Don't build your home, grow it!

{0: "Soft cars, jet packs and houses made of meat are all in a day's work for urban designer, architect and TED Fellow Mitchell Joachim."}

TED2010

Why grow homes? Because we can. Right now, America is in an unremitting state of trauma. And there's a cause for that, all right. We've got McPeople, McCars, McHouses. As an architect, I have to confront something like this. So what's a technology that will allow us to make ginormous houses? Well, it's been around for 2,500 years. It's called pleaching, or grafting trees together, or grafting inosculate matter into one contiguous, vascular system. And we do something different than what we did in the past; we add kind of a modicum of intelligence to that. We use CNC to make scaffolding to train semi-epithetic matter, plants, into a specific geometry that makes a home that we call a Fab Tree Hab. It fits into the environment. It is the environment. It is the landscape, right? And you can have a hundred million of these homes, and it's great because they suck carbon. They're perfect. You can have 100 million families, or take things out of the suburbs, because these are homes that are a part of the environment. Imagine pre-growing a village — it takes about seven to 10 years — and everything is green. So not only do we do the veggie house, we also do the in-vitro meat habitat, or homes that we're doing research on now in Brooklyn, where, as an architecture office, we're for the first of its kind to put in a molecular cell biology lab and start experimenting with regenerative medicine and tissue engineering and start thinking about what the future would be if architecture and biology became one. So we've been doing this for a couple of years, and that's our lab. And what we do is we grow extracellular matrix from pigs. We use a modified inkjet printer, and we print geometry. We print geometry where we can make industrial design objects like, you know, shoes, leather belts, handbags, etc., where no sentient creature is harmed. It's victimless. It's meat from a test tube. So our theory is that eventually we should be doing this with homes. So here is a typical stud wall, an architectural construction, and this is a section of our proposal for a meat house, where you can see we use fatty cells as insulation, cilia for dealing with wind loads and sphincter muscles for the doors and windows. (Laughter) And we know it's incredibly ugly. It could have been an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial, but we kind of chose this shape. And there it is kind of grown, at least one particular section of it. We had a big show in Prague, and we decided to put it in front of the cathedral so religion can confront the house of meat. That's why we grow homes. Thanks very much. (Applause)

Fractals and the art of roughness

{0: "Benoit Mandelbrot's work led the world to a deeper understanding of fractals, a broad and powerful tool in the study of roughness, both in nature and in humanity's works."}

TED2010

Thank you very much. Please excuse me for sitting; I'm very old. (Laughter) Well, the topic I'm going to discuss is one which is, in a certain sense, very peculiar because it's very old. Roughness is part of human life forever and forever, and ancient authors have written about it. It was very much uncontrollable, and in a certain sense, it seemed to be the extreme of complexity, just a mess, a mess and a mess. There are many different kinds of mess. Now, in fact, by a complete fluke, I got involved many years ago in a study of this form of complexity, and to my utter amazement, I found traces — very strong traces, I must say — of order in that roughness. And so today, I would like to present to you a few examples of what this represents. I prefer the word roughness to the word irregularity because irregularity — to someone who had Latin in my long-past youth — means the contrary of regularity. But it is not so. Regularity is the contrary of roughness because the basic aspect of the world is very rough. So let me show you a few objects. Some of them are artificial. Others of them are very real, in a certain sense. Now this is the real. It's a cauliflower. Now why do I show a cauliflower, a very ordinary and ancient vegetable? Because old and ancient as it may be, it's very complicated and it's very simple, both at the same time. If you try to weigh it — of course it's very easy to weigh it, and when you eat it, the weight matters — but suppose you try to measure its surface. Well, it's very interesting. If you cut, with a sharp knife, one of the florets of a cauliflower and look at it separately, you think of a whole cauliflower, but smaller. And then you cut again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, and you still get small cauliflowers. So the experience of humanity has always been that there are some shapes which have this peculiar property, that each part is like the whole, but smaller. Now, what did humanity do with that? Very, very little. (Laughter) So what I did actually is to study this problem, and I found something quite surprising. That one can measure roughness by a number, a number, 2.3, 1.2 and sometimes much more. One day, a friend of mine, to bug me, brought a picture and said, "What is the roughness of this curve?" I said, "Well, just short of 1.5." It was 1.48. Now, it didn't take me any time. I've been looking at these things for so long. So these numbers are the numbers which denote the roughness of these surfaces. I hasten to say that these surfaces are completely artificial. They were done on a computer, and the only input is a number, and that number is roughness. So on the left, I took the roughness copied from many landscapes. To the right, I took a higher roughness. So the eye, after a while, can distinguish these two very well. Humanity had to learn about measuring roughness. This is very rough, and this is sort of smooth, and this perfectly smooth. Very few things are very smooth. So then if you try to ask questions: "What's the surface of a cauliflower?" Well, you measure and measure and measure. Each time you're closer, it gets bigger, down to very, very small distances. What's the length of the coastline of these lakes? The closer you measure, the longer it is. The concept of length of coastline, which seems to be so natural because it's given in many cases, is, in fact, complete fallacy; there's no such thing. You must do it differently. What good is that, to know these things? Well, surprisingly enough, it's good in many ways. To begin with, artificial landscapes, which I invented sort of, are used in cinema all the time. We see mountains in the distance. They may be mountains, but they may be just formulae, just cranked on. Now it's very easy to do. It used to be very time-consuming, but now it's nothing. Now look at that. That's a real lung. Now a lung is something very strange. If you take this thing, you know very well it weighs very little. The volume of a lung is very small, but what about the area of the lung? Anatomists were arguing very much about that. Some say that a normal male's lung has an area of the inside of a basketball [court]. And the others say, no, five basketball [courts]. Enormous disagreements. Why so? Because, in fact, the area of the lung is something very ill-defined. The bronchi branch, branch, branch and they stop branching, not because of any matter of principle, but because of physical considerations: the mucus, which is in the lung. So what happens is that in a way you have a much bigger lung, but it branches and branches down to distances about the same for a whale, for a man and for a little rodent. Now, what good is it to have that? Well, surprisingly enough, amazingly enough, the anatomists had a very poor idea of the structure of the lung until very recently. And I think that my mathematics, surprisingly enough, has been of great help to the surgeons studying lung illnesses and also kidney illnesses, all these branching systems, for which there was no geometry. So I found myself, in other words, constructing a geometry, a geometry of things which had no geometry. And a surprising aspect of it is that very often, the rules of this geometry are extremely short. You have formulas that long. And you crank it several times. Sometimes repeatedly: again, again, again, the same repetition. And at the end, you get things like that. This cloud is completely, 100 percent artificial. Well, 99.9. And the only part which is natural is a number, the roughness of the cloud, which is taken from nature. Something so complicated like a cloud, so unstable, so varying, should have a simple rule behind it. Now this simple rule is not an explanation of clouds. The seer of clouds had to take account of it. I don't know how much advanced these pictures are. They're old. I was very much involved in it, but then turned my attention to other phenomena. Now, here is another thing which is rather interesting. One of the shattering events in the history of mathematics, which is not appreciated by many people, occurred about 130 years ago, 145 years ago. Mathematicians began to create shapes that didn't exist. Mathematicians got into self-praise to an extent which was absolutely amazing, that man can invent things that nature did not know. In particular, it could invent things like a curve which fills the plane. A curve's a curve, a plane's a plane, and the two won't mix. Well, they do mix. A man named Peano did define such curves, and it became an object of extraordinary interest. It was very important, but mostly interesting because a kind of break, a separation between the mathematics coming from reality, on the one hand, and new mathematics coming from pure man's mind. Well, I was very sorry to point out that the pure man's mind has, in fact, seen at long last what had been seen for a long time. And so here I introduce something, the set of rivers of a plane-filling curve. And well, it's a story unto itself. So it was in 1875 to 1925, an extraordinary period in which mathematics prepared itself to break out from the world. And the objects which were used as examples, when I was a child and a student, as examples of the break between mathematics and visible reality — those objects, I turned them completely around. I used them for describing some of the aspects of the complexity of nature. Well, a man named Hausdorff in 1919 introduced a number which was just a mathematical joke, and I found that this number was a good measurement of roughness. When I first told it to my friends in mathematics they said, "Don't be silly. It's just something [silly]." Well actually, I was not silly. The great painter Hokusai knew it very well. The things on the ground are algae. He did not know the mathematics; it didn't yet exist. And he was Japanese who had no contact with the West. But painting for a long time had a fractal side. I could speak of that for a long time. The Eiffel Tower has a fractal aspect. I read the book that Mr. Eiffel wrote about his tower, and indeed it was astonishing how much he understood. This is a mess, mess, mess, Brownian loop. One day I decided — halfway through my career, I was held by so many things in my work — I decided to test myself. Could I just look at something which everybody had been looking at for a long time and find something dramatically new? Well, so I looked at these things called Brownian motion — just goes around. I played with it for a while, and I made it return to the origin. Then I was telling my assistant, "I don't see anything. Can you paint it?" So he painted it, which means he put inside everything. He said: "Well, this thing came out ..." And I said, "Stop! Stop! Stop! I see; it's an island." And amazing. So Brownian motion, which happens to have a roughness number of two, goes around. I measured it, 1.33. Again, again, again. Long measurements, big Brownian motions, 1.33. Mathematical problem: how to prove it? It took my friends 20 years. Three of them were having incomplete proofs. They got together, and together they had the proof. So they got the big [Fields] medal in mathematics, one of the three medals that people have received for proving things which I've seen without being able to prove them. Now everybody asks me at one point or another, "How did it all start? What got you in that strange business?" What got you to be, at the same time, a mechanical engineer, a geographer and a mathematician and so on, a physicist? Well actually I started, oddly enough, studying stock market prices. And so here I had this theory, and I wrote books about it — financial prices increments. To the left you see data over a long period. To the right, on top, you see a theory which is very, very fashionable. It was very easy, and you can write many books very fast about it. (Laughter) There are thousands of books on that. Now compare that with real price increments. Where are real price increments? Well, these other lines include some real price increments and some forgery which I did. So the idea there was that one must be able to — how do you say? — model price variation. And it went really well 50 years ago. For 50 years, people were sort of pooh-poohing me because they could do it much, much easier. But I tell you, at this point, people listened to me. (Laughter) These two curves are averages: Standard & Poor, the blue one; and the red one is Standard & Poor's from which the five biggest discontinuities are taken out. Now discontinuities are a nuisance, so in many studies of prices, one puts them aside. "Well, acts of God. And you have the little nonsense which is left. Acts of God." In this picture, five acts of God are as important as everything else. In other words, it is not acts of God that we should put aside. That is the meat, the problem. If you master these, you master price, and if you don't master these, you can master the little noise as well as you can, but it's not important. Well, here are the curves for it. Now, I get to the final thing, which is the set of which my name is attached. In a way, it's the story of my life. My adolescence was spent during the German occupation of France. Since I thought that I might vanish within a day or a week, I had very big dreams. And after the war, I saw an uncle again. My uncle was a very prominent mathematician, and he told me, "Look, there's a problem which I could not solve 25 years ago, and which nobody can solve. This is a construction of a man named [Gaston] Julia and [Pierre] Fatou. If you could find something new, anything, you will get your career made." Very simple. So I looked, and like the thousands of people that had tried before, I found nothing. But then the computer came, and I decided to apply the computer, not to new problems in mathematics — like this wiggle wiggle, that's a new problem — but to old problems. And I went from what's called real numbers, which are points on a line, to imaginary, complex numbers, which are points on a plane, which is what one should do there, and this shape came out. This shape is of an extraordinary complication. The equation is hidden there, z goes into z squared, plus c. It's so simple, so dry. It's so uninteresting. Now you turn the crank once, twice: twice, marvels come out. I mean this comes out. I don't want to explain these things. This comes out. This comes out. Shapes which are of such complication, such harmony and such beauty. This comes out repeatedly, again, again, again. And that was one of my major discoveries, to find that these islands were the same as the whole big thing, more or less. And then you get these extraordinary baroque decorations all over the place. All that from this little formula, which has whatever, five symbols in it. And then this one. The color was added for two reasons. First of all, because these shapes are so complicated that one couldn't make any sense of the numbers. And if you plot them, you must choose some system. And so my principle has been to always present the shapes with different colorings because some colorings emphasize that, and others it is that or that. It's so complicated. (Laughter) In 1990, I was in Cambridge, U.K. to receive a prize from the university, and three days later, a pilot was flying over the landscape and found this thing. So where did this come from? Obviously, from extraterrestrials. (Laughter) Well, so the newspaper in Cambridge published an article about that "discovery" and received the next day 5,000 letters from people saying, "But that's simply a Mandelbrot set very big." Well, let me finish. This shape here just came out of an exercise in pure mathematics. Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Obesity + hunger = 1 global food issue

{0: 'Co-founder of FEED and creator of The 30 Project, Ellen Gustafson is trying to change the way the world eats.'}

TEDxEast

I'm Ellen and I'm totally obsessed with food. But I didn't start out obsessed with food. I started out obsessed with global security policy, because I lived in New York during 9/11 and it was a very relevant thing. I got from global security policy to food because I realized when I'm hungry, I'm really pissed off, and I'm assuming the rest of the world is too. Especially if you and your kids are hungry and your neighbor's kids are hungry and your whole neighborhood is hungry. And actually, it looks like the areas of the world that are hungry are also the areas of the world that are pretty insecure. So I took a job at the United Nations World Food Programme as a way to try to address these security issues through food security issues. There, I came across what I think is the most brilliant of their programs. It's called School Feeding and it's a really simple idea to get in the middle of the cycle of poverty and hunger that continues for a lot of people around the world, and stop it. A free school meal gets kids into school, which is education, the first step out of poverty, but it also gives them the micronutrients and the macronutrients they need to develop mentally and physically. While I was working at the UN, I met this girl. Her name is Lauren Bush. And she had this really awesome idea to sell the bag, called the "Feed Bag" — which is really beautifully ironic because you can strap on the Feed Bag. But each bag we'd sell would provide a year's worth of school meals for one kid. It's so simple, and we thought, OK, it costs between 20 and 50 bucks to provide school feeding for a year. We could sell these bags and raise a ton of money and awareness for the World Food Programme. But at the UN, sometimes things move slowly and they basically said no. And we thought, this is such a good idea, it's going to raise so much money. So we said screw it, we'll start our own company, which we did, three years ago. That was my first dream, to start this company called FEED, and here's a screenshot of our website. We did a bag for Haiti just a month after the earthquake to provide school meals for kids in Haiti. So FEED's doing great. We've so far provided 55 million meals to kids around the world by selling now 550,000 bags, a ton of bags, a lot of bags. All this time you're really — hunger is a hard thing to think about, because what we think about is eating. I think about eating a lot and I really love it. And the thing that's strange about international hunger and talking about international issues is that most people want to know: "What are you doing for America's kids?" There's definitely hunger in America: 49 million people and almost 16.7 million children. I mean that's pretty dramatic for our own country. Hunger definitely means something different in America than it does internationally, but it's incredibly important to address hunger in our own country. But the bigger problem that we all know about is obesity, and it's dramatic. The other thing that's dramatic is that both hunger and obesity have really risen in the last 30 years. Unfortunately, obesity's not only an American problem. It's actually been spreading all around the world and mainly through our kind of food systems that we're exporting. The numbers are pretty crazy. There's a billion people obese or overweight and a billion people hungry. So those seem like two bifurcated problems, but I kind of started to think about, you know, what is obesity and hunger? What are both those things about? Well, they're both about food. And when you think about food, the underpinning of food in both cases is potentially problematic agriculture. And agriculture is where food comes from. Agriculture in America's very interesting. It's very consolidated and the foods that are produced lead to the foods that we eat. The foods that are produced are, more or less, corn, soy and wheat. And that's three-quarters of the food that we're eating: processed foods and fast foods. Unfortunately, in our agricultural system, we haven't done a good job in the last three decades of exporting those technologies around the world. So African agriculture, which is the place of most hunger in the world, has actually fallen precipitously as hunger has risen. So somehow we're not making the connect between exporting a good agricultural system that will help feed people all around the world. Who is farming? That's what I was wondering. So I went and stood on a big grain bin in the Midwest, and that really didn't help me understand farming, but I think it's a really cool picture. And the reality is that between farmers in America — who actually, quite frankly, when I spend time in the Midwest, are pretty large in general. And their farms are also large. But farmers in the rest of the world are actually quite skinny, and that's because they're starving. Most hungry people in the world are subsistence farmers. And most of those people are women — which is a totally other topic that I won't get on right now, but I'd love to do the feminist thing at some point. I think it's really interesting to look at agriculture from these two sides. There's this large, consolidated farming that's led to what we eat in America, and it's really been since around 1980, after the oil crisis, when, you know — mass consolidation, mass exodus of small farmers in this country. And then in the same time period, we've kind of left Africa's farmers to do their own thing. Unfortunately, what is farmed ends up as what we eat. And in America, a lot of what we eat has led to obesity and has led to a real change in sort of what our diet is, in the last 30 years. It's crazy. A fifth of kids under two drinks soda. Hello! You don't put soda in bottles. But people do, because it's so cheap, and so our whole food system in the last 30 years has really shifted. I mean, you know, it's not just in our own country, but really we're exporting the system around the world, and when you look at the data of least developed countries — especially in cities, which are growing really rapidly — people are eating American processed foods. And in one generation, they're going from hunger and all of the detrimental health effects of hunger to obesity and things like diabetes and heart disease in one generation. So the problematic food system is affecting both hunger and obesity. Not to beat a dead horse, but this is a global food system where there's a billion people hungry and a billion people obese. I think that's the only way to look at it. And instead of taking these two things as bifurcated problems that are very separate, it's really important to look at them as one system. We get a lot of our food from all around the world and people from all around the world are importing our food system, so it's incredibly relevant to start a new way of looking at it. I've learned — and the technology people here, which I'm totally not one of — but apparently, it really takes 30 years for a lot of technologies to become really endemic to us, like the mouse and the Internet and Windows. You know, there's 30-year cycles. I think 2010 can be a really interesting year because it is the end of the 30-year cycle, and it's the birthday of the global food system. That's the first birthday I want to talk about. If we really think that this is something that's happened in the last 30 years, there's hope in that. It's the 30th anniversary of GMO crops and the Big Gulp, Chicken McNuggets, high-fructose corn syrup, the farm crisis in America and the change in how we've addressed agriculture internationally. So there's a lot of reasons to take this 30-year time period as sort of the creation of this new food system. I'm not the only one who's obsessed with this whole 30-year thing. The icons like Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver in his TED Prize wish both addressed this last three-decade time period as incredibly relevant for food system change. Well, I really care about 1980 because it's also the 30th anniversary of me this year. And so in my lifetime, a lot of what's happened in the world — and being a person obsessed with food — a lot of this has really changed. So my second dream is that I think we can look to the next 30 years as a time to change the food system again. And we know what's happened in the past, so if we start now and we look at technologies and improvements to the food system long-term, we might be able to recreate the food system so when I give my next talk and I'm 60 years old, I'll be able to say that it's been a success. So I'm announcing today the start of a new organization, or a new fund within the FEED Foundation, called the 30 Project. And the 30 Project is really focused on these long-term ideas for food system change. And I think by aligning international advocates that are addressing hunger and domestic advocates that are addressing obesity, we might actually look for long-term solutions that will make the food system better for everyone. We all tend to think that these systems are quite different and people argue whether or not organic can feed the world, but if we take a 30-year view, there's more hope in collaborative ideas. So I'm hoping that by connecting really disparate organizations like the ONE campaign and Slow Food, which don't seem right now to have much in common, we can talk about holistic, long-term, systemic solutions that will improve food for everyone. Some ideas I've had is like, look, the reality is — kids in the South Bronx need apples and carrots and so do kids in Botswana. And how are we going to get those kids those nutritious foods? Another thing that's become incredibly global is production of meat and fish. Understanding how to produce protein in a way that's healthy for the environment and healthy for people will be incredibly important to address things like climate change and how we use petrochemical fertilizers. And, you know, these are really relevant topics that are long-term and important for both people in Africa who are small farmers and people in America who are farmers and eaters. And I also think that thinking about processed foods in a new way, where we actually price the negative externalities like petrochemicals and like fertilizer runoff into the price of a bag of chips — Well, if that bag of chips then becomes inherently more expensive than an apple, then maybe it's time for a different sense of personal responsibility in food choice because the choices are actually choices instead of three-quarters of the products being made just from corn, soy and wheat. The 30Project.org is launched and I've gathered a coalition of a few organizations to start. And it'll be growing over the next few months. But I really hope that you will all think of ways that you can look long-term at things like the food system and make change. (Applause)

Life science in prison

{0: 'Called "the queen of canopy research," Nalini Nadkarni explores the rich, vital world found in the tops of trees. She communicates what she finds to non-scientists -- with the help of poets, preachers and prisoners.'}

TED2010

Trees epitomize stasis. Trees are rooted in the ground in one place for many human generations, but if we shift our perspective from the trunk to the twigs, trees become very dynamic entities, moving and growing. And I decided to explore this movement by turning trees into artists. I simply tied the end of a paintbrush onto a twig. I waited for the wind to come up and held up a canvas, and that produced art. The piece of art you see on your left is painted by a western red cedar and that on your right by a Douglas fir, and what I learned was that different species have different signatures, like a Picasso versus a Monet. But I was also interested in the movement of trees and how this art might let me capture that and quantify it, so to measure the distance that a single vine maple tree — which produced this painting — moved in a single year, I simply measured and summed each of those lines. I multiplied them by the number of twigs per branch and the number of branches per tree and then divided that by the number of minutes per year. And so I was able to calculate how far a single tree moved in a single year. You might have a guess. The answer is actually 186,540 miles, or seven times around the globe. And so simply by shifting our perspective from a single trunk to the many dynamic twigs, we are able to see that trees are not simply static entities, but rather extremely dynamic. And I began to think about ways that we might consider this lesson of trees, to consider other entities that are also static and stuck, but which cry for change and dynamicism, and one of those entities is our prisons. Prisons, of course, are where people who break our laws are stuck, confined behind bars. And our prison system itself is stuck. The United States has over 2.3 million incarcerated men and women. That number is rising. Of the 100 incarcerated people that are released, 60 will return to prison. Funds for education, for training and for rehabilitation are declining, so this despairing cycle of incarceration continues. I decided to ask whether the lesson I had learned from trees as artists could be applied to a static institution such as our prisons, and I think the answer is yes. In the year 2007, I started a partnership with the Washington State Department of Corrections. Working with four prisons, we began bringing science and scientists, sustainability and conservation projects to four state prisons. We give science lectures, and the men here are choosing to come to our science lectures instead of watching television or weightlifting. That, I think, is movement. We partnered with the Nature Conservancy for inmates at Stafford Creek Correctional Center to grow endangered prairie plants for restoration of relic prairie areas in Washington state. That, I think, is movement. We worked with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife to grow endangered frogs — the Oregon spotted frog — for later release into protected wetlands. That, I think, is movement. And just recently, we've begun to work with those men who are segregated in what we call Supermax facilities. They've incurred violent infractions by becoming violent with guards and with other prisoners. They're kept in bare cells like this for 23 hours a day. When they have meetings with their review boards or mental health professionals, they're placed in immobile booths like this. For one hour a day they're brought to these bleak and bland exercise yards. Although we can't bring trees and prairie plants and frogs into these environments, we are bringing images of nature into these exercise yards, putting them on the walls, so at least they get contact with visual images of nature. This is Mr. Lopez, who has been in solitary confinement for 18 months, and he's providing input on the types of images that he believes would make him and his fellow inmates more serene, more calm, less apt to violence. And so what we see, I think, is that small, collective movements of change can perhaps move an entity such as our own prison system in a direction of hope. We know that trees are static entities when we look at their trunks. But if trees can create art, if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year, if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs, then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves, like grief, like addictions, like racism, that can also change. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Global population growth, box by box

{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.'}

TED@Cannes

I still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people, and that was in 1960. I'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future, but I will not use digital technology, as I've done during my first five TEDTalks. Instead, I have progressed, and I am, today, launching a brand new analog teaching technology that I picked up from IKEA: this box. This box contains one billion people. And our teacher told us that the industrialized world, 1960, had one billion people. In the developing world, she said, they had two billion people. And they lived away then. There was a big gap between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world. In the industrialized world, people were healthy, educated, rich, and they had small families. And their aspiration was to buy a car. And in 1960, all Swedes were saving to try to buy a Volvo like this. This was the economic level at which Sweden was. But in contrast to this, in the developing world, far away, the aspiration of the average family there was to have food for the day. They were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes. There was an enormous gap in the world when I grew up. And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world, which we still use linguistically when we talk about "the West" and "the Developing World." But the world has changed, and it's overdue to upgrade that mindset and that taxonomy of the world, and to understand it. And that's what I'm going to show you, because since 1960 what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a staggering four billion people have been added to the world population. Just look how many. The world population has doubled since I went to school. And of course, there's been economic growth in the West. A lot of companies have happened to grow the economy, so the Western population moved over to here. And now their aspiration is not only to have a car. Now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly. So this is where they are today. And the most successful of the developing countries, they have moved on, you know, and they have become emerging economies, we call them. They are now buying cars. And what happened a month ago was that the Chinese company, Geely, they acquired the Volvo company, and then finally the Swedes understood that something big had happened in the world. (Laughter) So there they are. And the tragedy is that the two billion over here that is struggling for food and shoes, they are still almost as poor as they were 50 years ago. The new thing is that we have the biggest pile of billions, the three billions here, which are also becoming emerging economies, because they are quite healthy, relatively well-educated, and they already also have two to three children per woman, as those [richer also] have. And their aspiration now is, of course, to buy a bicycle, and then later on they would like to have a motorbike also. But this is the world we have today, no longer any gap. But the distance from the poorest here, the very poorest, to the very richest over here is wider than ever. But there is a continuous world from walking, biking, driving, flying — there are people on all levels, and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle. This is the new world we have today in 2010. And what will happen in the future? Well, I'm going to project into 2050. I was in Shanghai recently, and I listened to what's happening in China, and it's pretty sure that they will catch up, just as Japan did. All the projections [say that] this one [billion] will [only] grow with one to two or three percent. [But this second] grows with seven, eight percent, and then they will end up here. They will start flying. And these lower or middle income countries, the emerging income countries, they will also forge forwards economically. And if, but only if, we invest in the right green technology — so that we can avoid severe climate change, and energy can still be relatively cheap — then they will move all the way up here. And they will start to buy electric cars. This is what we will find there. So what about the poorest two billion? What about the poorest two billion here? Will they move on? Well, here population [growth] comes in because there [among emerging economies] we already have two to three children per woman, family planning is widely used, and population growth is coming to an end. Here [among the poorest], population is growing. So these [poorest] two billion will, in the next decades, increase to three billion, and they will thereafter increase to four billion. There is nothing — but a nuclear war of a kind we've never seen — that can stop this [growth] from happening. Because we already have this [growth] in process. But if, and only if, [the poorest] get out of poverty, they get education, they get improved child survival, they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone and come [to live] here, then population growth will stop in 2050. We cannot have people on this level looking for food and shoes because then we get continued population growth. And let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology. Here I have on the screen my country bubbles. Every bubble is a country. The size is population. The colors show the continent. The yellow on there is the Americas; dark blue is Africa; brown is Europe; green is the Middle East and this light blue is South Asia. That's India and this is China. Size is population. Here I have children per woman: two children, four children, six children, eight children — big families, small families. The year is 1960. And down here, child survival, the percentage of children surviving childhood up to starting school: 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, 90, and almost 100 percent, as we have today in the wealthiest and healthiest countries. But look, this is the world my teacher talked about in 1960: one billion Western world here — high child-survival, small families — and all the rest, the rainbow of developing countries, with very large families and poor child survival. What has happened? I start the world. Here we go. Can you see, as the years pass by, child survival is increasing? They get soap, hygiene, education, vaccination, penicillin and then family planning. Family size is decreasing. [When] they get up to 90-percent child survival, then families decrease, and most of the Arab countries in the Middle East is falling down there [to small families]. Look, Bangladesh catching up with India. The whole emerging world joins the Western world with good child survival and small family size, but we still have the poorest billion. Can you see the poorest billion, those [two] boxes I had over here? They are still up here. And they still have a child survival of only 70 to 80 percent, meaning that if you have six children born, there will be at least four who survive to the next generation. And the population will double in one generation. So the only way of really getting world population [growth] to stop is to continue to improve child survival to 90 percent. That's why investments by Gates Foundation, UNICEF and aid organizations, together with national government in the poorest countries, are so good; because they are actually helping us to reach a sustainable population size of the world. We can stop at nine billion if we do the right things. Child survival is the new green. It's only by child survival that we will stop population growth. And will it happen? Well, I'm not an optimist, neither am I a pessimist. I'm a very serious "possibilist." It's a new category where we take emotion apart, and we just work analytically with the world. It can be done. We can have a much more just world. With green technology and with investments to alleviate poverty, and global governance, the world can become like this. And look at the position of the old West. Remember when this blue box was all alone, leading the world, living its own life. This will not happen [again]. The role of the old West in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world — nothing more, nothing less. But it's a very important role. Do it well and get used to it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The oil spill's unseen villains -- and victims

{0: "Carl Safina's writing explores the scientific, moral and social dimensions of our relationship with nature."}

TEDxOilSpill

This is the ocean as I used to know it. And I find that since I've been in the Gulf a couple of times, I really kind of am traumatized because whenever I look at the ocean now, no matter where I am, even where I know that none of the oil has gone, I sort of see slicks, and I'm finding that I'm very much haunted by it. But what I want to talk to you about today is a lot of things that try to put all of this in context, not just about the oil eruption, but what it means and why it has happened. First, just a little bit about me. I'm basically just a guy that likes to go fishing ever since I was a little kid, and because I did, I wound up studying sea birds to try to stay in the coastal habitats that I so loved. And now I mainly write books about how the ocean is changing, and the ocean is certainly changing very rapidly. Now we saw this graphic earlier on, that we really live on a hard marble that has just a slight bit of wetness to it. It's like you dipped a marble in water. And the same thing with the atmosphere: If you took all the atmosphere and rolled it up in a ball, you would get that little sphere of gas on the right. So we live on the most fragile little soap bubble you can imagine, a very sacred soap bubble, but one that is very, very easy to affect. And all the burning of oil and coal and gas, all the fossil fuels, have changed the atmosphere greatly. Carbon dioxide level has gone up and up and up. We're warming the climate. So the blowout in the Gulf is just a little piece of a much larger problem that we have with the energy that we use to run civilization. Beyond warming, we have the problem of the oceans getting more acidified — and already measurably so, and already affecting animals. Now in the laboratory, if you take a clam and you put it in the pH that is not 8.1, which is the normal pH of seawater, but 7.5, it dissolves in about three days. If you take a sea urchin larva from 8.1, put it in a pH of 7.7 — not a huge change — it becomes deformed and dies. Already, commercial oyster larvae are dying at large scales in some places. Coral reefs are growing slower in some places because of this problem. So this really matters. Now, let's take a little tour around the Gulf a little bit. One of the things that really impresses me about the people in the Gulf: They are really, really aquatic people. And they can handle water. They can handle a hurricane that comes and goes. When the water goes down, they know what to do. But when it's something other than water, and their water habitat changes, they don't have many options. In fact, those entire communities really don't have many options. They don't have another thing they can do. They can't go and work in the local hotel business because there isn't one in their community. If you go to the Gulf and you look around, you do see a lot of oil. You see a lot of oil on the ocean. You see a lot of oil on the shoreline. If you go to the site of the blowout, it looks pretty unbelievable. It looks like you just emptied the oil pan in your car, and you just dumped it in the ocean. And one of the really most incredible things, I think, is that there's nobody out there trying to collect it at the site where it is densest. Parts of the ocean there look just absolutely apocalyptic. You go in along the shore, you can find it everywhere. It's really messy. If you go to the places where it's just arriving, like the eastern part of the Gulf, in Alabama, there's still people using the beach while there are people cleaning up the beach. And they have a very strange way of cleaning up the beach. They're not allowed to put more than 10 pounds of sand in a 50-gallon plastic bag. They have thousands and thousands of plastic bags. I don't know what they'll do with all that stuff. Meanwhile, there are still people trying to use the beach. They don't see the sign that says: "Stay out of the water." Their kids are in the water; they're getting tar all over their clothes and their sandals— It's a mess. If you go to where the oil has been for a while, it's an even bigger mess. And there's basically nobody there anymore, a few people trying to keep using it. You see people who are really shell-shocked. They are very hardworking people. All they know about life is they get up in the morning, and if their engine starts, they go to work. They always felt that they could rely on the assurances that nature brought them through the ecosystem of the Gulf. They're finding that their world is really collapsing. And so you can see, literally, signs of their shock ... signs of their outrage ... signs of their anger ... and signs of their grief. These are the things that you can see. There's a lot you can't see, also, underwater. What's going on underwater? Well, some people say there are oil plumes. Some people say there are not oil plumes. And Congressman Markey asks, you know, "Is it going to take a submarine ride to see if there are really oil plumes?" But I couldn't take a submarine ride — especially between the time I knew I was coming here and today — so I had to do a little experiment myself to see if there was oil in the Gulf of Mexico. So this is the Gulf of Mexico ... sparkling place full of fish. And I created a little oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And I learned, in fact, I confirmed the hypothesis that oil and water don't mix ... until you add a dispersant ... and then ... they start mixing. And you add a little energy from the wind and the waves, and you get a big mess, a big mess that you can't possibly clean, you can't touch, you can't extract and, I think most importantly — this is what I think — you can't see it. I think it's being hidden on purpose. Now this is such a catastrophe and such a mess that lots of stuff is leaking out on the edges of the information stream. But as many people have said, there's a large attempt to suppress what's going on. Personally, I think that the dispersants are a major strategy to hide the body, because we put the murderer in charge of the crime scene. But you can see it. You can see where the oil is concentrated at the surface, and then it is attacked, because they don't want the evidence, in my opinion. OK. We heard that bacteria eat oil? So do sea turtles. When it breaks up, it has a long way to go before it gets down to bacteria. Turtles eat it. It gets in the gills of fish. These guys have to swim around through it. I heard the most incredible story today when I was on the train coming here. A writer named Ted Williams called me, and he was asking me a couple of questions about what I saw, because he's writing an article for Audubon magazine. He said that he had been in the Gulf a little while ago; like about a week ago, and a guy who had been a recreational fishing guide took him out to show him what's going on. That guide's entire calendar year is canceled bookings. He has no bookings left. Everybody wanted their deposit back, everybody is fleeing. That's the story of thousands of people. But he told Ted that on the last day he went out, a bottlenose dolphin suddenly appeared next to the boat, and it was splattering oil out its blowhole. And he moved away because it was his last fishing trip, and he knew that the dolphins scare fish. So he moved away from it, turned around a few minutes later, it was right next to the side of the boat again. He said that in 30 years of fishing he had never seen a dolphin do that. And he felt that — (Sigh) he felt that it was coming to ask for help. Sorry. Now, in the Exxon Valdez spill, about 30 percent of the killer whales died in the first few months. Their numbers have never recovered. So the recovery rate of all this stuff is going to be variable. It's going to take longer for some things. And some things, I think, will probably come back a little faster. The other thing about the Gulf that is important is that there are a lot of animals that concentrate in the Gulf at certain parts of the year. So the Gulf is a really important piece of water — more important than a similar volume of water in the open Atlantic Ocean. These tuna swim the entire ocean. They get in the Gulf Stream, they go all the way to Europe. When it comes time to spawn, they come inside, and these two tuna that were tagged, you can see them on the spawning grounds very much right in the area of the slick. They're probably having, at the very least, a catastrophic spawning season this year. I'm hoping that maybe the adults are avoiding that dirty water. They don't usually like to go into water that is very cloudy anyway. But these are really high-performance athletic animals. I don't know what this kind of stuff will do in their gills. I don't know if it'll affect the adults. If it's not, it's certainly affecting their eggs and larvae, I would certainly think. But if you look at that graph that goes down and down and down, that's what we've done to this species through overfishing over many decades. So while the oil spill, the leak, the eruption, is a catastrophe, I think it's important to keep in mind that we've done a lot to affect what's in the ocean, for a very long time. It's not like we're starting with something that's been OK. We're starting with something that's had a lot of stresses and a lot of problems to begin with. If you look around at the birds, there are a lot of birds in the Gulf that concentrate in the Gulf at certain times of the year, but then leave. And they populate much larger areas. For instance, most of the birds in this picture are migratory birds. They were all on the Gulf in May, while oil was starting to come ashore in certain places. Down on the lower left there are ruddy turnstones and sanderlings. They breed in the High Arctic, and they winter down in southern South America. But they concentrate in the Gulf and then fan out all across the Arctic. I saw birds that breed in Greenland, in the Gulf. So this is a hemispheric issue. The economic effects go at least nationally in many ways. The biological effects are certainly hemispheric. I think that this is one of the most absolutely mind-boggling examples of total unpreparedness that I can even think of. Even when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, at least they shot back. And we just seem to be unable to figure out what to do. There was nothing ready, and, you know, as we can see by what they're doing. Mainly what they're doing is booms and dispersants. The booms are absolutely not made for open water. They don't even attempt to corral the oil where it is most concentrated. They get near shore — Look at these two boats. That one on the right is called Fishing Fool. And I think, you know, that's a great name for boats that think that they're going to do anything to make a dent in this, by dragging a boom between them when there are literally hundreds of thousands of square miles in the Gulf right now with oil at the surface. The dispersants make the oil go right under the booms. The booms are only about 13 inches in diameter. So it's just absolutely crazy. Here are shrimp boats employed. There are hundreds of shrimp boats employed to drag booms instead of nets. Here they are working. You can see easily that all the oily water just goes over the back of the boom. All they're doing is stirring it. It's just ridiculous. Also, for all the shoreline that has booms — hundreds and hundreds of miles of shoreline — all of the shoreline that has booms, there's adjacent shoreline that doesn't have any booms. There is ample opportunity for oil and dirty water to get in behind them. And that lower photo, that's a bird colony that has been boomed. Everybody's trying to protect the bird colonies there. Well, as an ornithologist, I can tell you that birds fly, and that — (Laughter) and that booming a bird colony doesn't do it; it doesn't do it. These birds make a living by diving into the water. In fact ... really what I think they should do, if anything — they're trying so hard to protect those nests — actually, if they destroyed every single nest, some of the birds would leave, and that would be better for them this year. As far as cleaning them ... I don't mean to cast any aspersion on people cleaning birds. It's really, really important that we express our compassion. I think that's the most important thing that people have, is compassion. It's really important to get those images and to show it. But really, where are those birds going to get released to? It's like taking somebody out of a burning building, treating them for smoke inhalation and sending them back into the building, because the oil is still gushing. I refuse to acknowledge this as anything like an accident. I think that this is the result of gross negligence. (Applause) Not just BP. BP operated very sloppily and very recklessly because they could. And they were allowed to do so because of the absolute failure of oversight of the government that is supposed to be our government, protecting us. It turns out that — you see this sign on every commercial vessel in the United States — you know, if you spilled a couple of gallons of oil, you would be in big trouble. And you have to really wonder who are the laws made for, and who has gotten above the laws. And there are things that we can do in the future. We could have the kinds of equipment that we would really need. It would not take an awful lot to anticipate that after making 30,000 holes in the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico looking for oil, oil might start coming out of one of them. And you'd have some idea of what to do. That's certainly one of the things we need to do. But I think we have to understand where this leak really started from. It really started from the destruction of the idea that the government is there because it's our government, meant to protect the larger public interest. So I think that the oil blowout, the bank bailout, the mortgage crisis and all these things are absolutely symptoms of the same cause. We still seem to understand that at least, we need the police to protect us from a few bad people. And even though the police can be a little annoying at times — giving us tickets and stuff like that — nobody says that we should just get rid of them. But in the entire rest of government right now and for the last at least 30 years, there has been a culture of deregulation that is caused directly by the people who we need to be protected from, buying the government out from under us. (Applause) Now this has been a problem for a very, very long time. You can see that corporations were illegal at the founding of America, and even Thomas Jefferson complained that they were already bidding defiance to the laws of our country. OK, people who say they're conservative, if they really wanted to be really conservative and patriotic, they would tell these corporations to go to hell. That's what it would really mean to be conservative. So what we really need to do is regain the idea that it's our government safeguarding our interests, and regain a sense of unity and common cause in our country that really has been lost. I think there are signs of hope. We seem to be waking up a little bit. The Glass-Steagall Act — which was really to protect us from the kind of thing that caused the recession to happen, and the bank meltdown and all that stuff that required the bailouts — that was put in effect in 1933, was systematically destroyed. Now there's a mood to put some of that stuff back in place, but the lobbyists are already there trying to weaken the regulations after the legislation has just passed. So it's a continued fight. It's a historic moment right now. We're either going to have an absolutely unmitigated catastrophe of this oil leak in the Gulf, or we will make the moment we need out of this, as many people have noted today. There's certainly a common theme about needing to make the moment out of this. We've been through this before with other ways of offshore drilling. The first offshore wells were called whales. The first offshore drills were called harpoons. We emptied the ocean of the whales at that time. Now are we stuck with this? Ever since we lived in caves, every time we wanted any energy, we lit something on fire, and that is still what we're doing. We're still lighting something on fire every time we want energy. And people say we can't have clean energy because it's too expensive. Who says it's too expensive? People who sell us fossil fuels. We've been here before with energy, and people saying the economy cannot withstand a switch, because the cheapest energy was slavery. Energy is always a moral issue. It's an issue that is moral right now. It's a matter of right and wrong. Thank you very much. (Applause)

When ideas have sex

{0: 'Matt Ridley argues that, through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, "ideas having sex with each other."'}

TEDGlobal 2010

When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled. How did we achieve that, whether you think it's a good thing or not? How did we achieve that? How did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous? The size of the blob in this graph represents the size of the population, and the level of the graph represents GDP per capita. I think to answer that question you need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex. I want you to imagine how we got from making objects like this to making objects like this. These are both real objects. One is an Acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by Homo erectus. The other is obviously a computer mouse. They're both exactly the same size and shape to an uncanny degree. I've tried to work out which is bigger, and it's almost impossible. And that's because they're both designed to fit the human hand. They're both technologies. In the end, their similarity is not that interesting. It just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand. The differences are what interest me, because the one on the left was made to a pretty unvarying design for about a million years — from one-and-a-half million years ago to half a million years ago. Homo erectus made the same tool for 30,000 generations. Of course there were a few changes, but tools changed slower than skeletons in those days. There was no progress, no innovation. It's an extraordinary phenomenon, but it's true. Whereas the object on the right is obsolete after five years. And there's another difference too, which is the object on the left is made from one substance. The object on the right is made from a confection of different substances, from silicon and metal and plastic and so on. And more than that, it's a confection of different ideas, the idea of plastic, the idea of a laser, the idea of transistors. They've all been combined together in this technology. And it's this combination, this cumulative technology, that intrigues me, because I think it's the secret to understanding what's happening in the world. My body's an accumulation of ideas too: the idea of skin cells, the idea of brain cells, the idea of liver cells. They've come together. How does evolution do cumulative, combinatorial things? Well, it uses sexual reproduction. In an asexual species, if you get two different mutations in different creatures, a green one and a red one, then one has to be better than the other. One goes extinct for the other to survive. But if you have a sexual species, then it's possible for an individual to inherit both mutations from different lineages. So what sex does is it enables the individual to draw upon the genetic innovations of the whole species. It's not confined to its own lineage. What's the process that's having the same effect in cultural evolution as sex is having in biological evolution? And I think the answer is exchange, the habit of exchanging one thing for another. It's a unique human feature. No other animal does it. You can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange — and indeed there's reciprocity in other animals — But the exchange of one object for another never happens. As Adam Smith said, "No man ever saw a dog make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog." (Laughter) You can have culture without exchange. You can have, as it were, asexual culture. Chimpanzees, killer whales, these kinds of creatures, they have culture. They teach each other traditions which are handed down from parent to offspring. In this case, chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks. But the difference is that these cultures never expand, never grow, never accumulate, never become combinatorial, and the reason is because there is no sex, as it were, there is no exchange of ideas. Chimpanzee troops have different cultures in different troops. There's no exchange of ideas between them. And why does exchange raise living standards? Well, the answer came from David Ricardo in 1817. And here is a Stone Age version of his story, although he told it in terms of trade between countries. Adam takes four hours to make a spear and three hours to make an axe. Oz takes one hour to make a spear and two hours to make an axe. So Oz is better at both spears and axes than Adam. He doesn't need Adam. He can make his own spears and axes. Well no, because if you think about it, if Oz makes two spears and Adam make two axes, and then they trade, then they will each have saved an hour of work. And the more they do this, the more true it's going to be, because the more they do this, the better Adam is going to get at making axes and the better Oz is going to get at making spears. So the gains from trade are only going to grow. And this is one of the beauties of exchange, is it actually creates the momentum for more specialization, which creates the momentum for more exchange and so on. Adam and Oz both saved an hour of time. That is prosperity, the saving of time in satisfying your needs. Ask yourself how long you would have to work to provide for yourself an hour of reading light this evening to read a book by. If you had to start from scratch, let's say you go out into the countryside. You find a sheep. You kill it. You get the fat out of it. You render it down. You make a candle, etc. etc. How long is it going to take you? Quite a long time. How long do you actually have to work to earn an hour of reading light if you're on the average wage in Britain today? And the answer is about half a second. Back in 1950, you would have had to work for eight seconds on the average wage to acquire that much light. And that's seven and a half seconds of prosperity that you've gained since 1950, as it were, because that's seven and a half seconds in which you can do something else, or you can acquire another good or service. And back in 1880, it would have been 15 minutes to earn that amount of light on the average wage. Back in 1800, you'd have had to work six hours to earn a candle that could burn for an hour. In other words, the average person on the average wage could not afford a candle in 1800. Go back to this image of the axe and the mouse, and ask yourself: "Who made them and for who?" The stone axe was made by someone for himself. It was self-sufficiency. We call that poverty these days. But the object on the right was made for me by other people. How many other people? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? You know, I think it's probably millions. Because you've got to include the man who grew the coffee, which was brewed for the man who was on the oil rig, who was drilling for oil, which was going to be made into the plastic, etc. They were all working for me, to make a mouse for me. And that's the way society works. That's what we've achieved as a species. In the old days, if you were rich, you literally had people working for you. That's how you got to be rich; you employed them. Louis XIV had a lot of people working for him. They made his silly outfits, like this, (Laughter) and they did his silly hairstyles, or whatever. He had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night. But a modern tourist going around the palace of Versailles and looking at Louis XIV's pictures, he has 498 people doing his dinner tonight too. They're in bistros and cafes and restaurants and shops all over Paris, and they're all ready to serve you at an hour's notice with an excellent meal that's probably got higher quality than Louis XIV even had. And that's what we've done, because we're all working for each other. We're able to draw upon specialization and exchange to raise each other's living standards. Now, you do get other animals working for each other too. Ants are a classic example; workers work for queens and queens work for workers. But there's a big difference, which is that it only happens within the colony. There's no working for each other across the colonies. And the reason for that is because there's a reproductive division of labor. That is to say, they specialize with respect to reproduction. The queen does it all. In our species, we don't like doing that. It's the one thing we insist on doing for ourselves, is reproduction. (Laughter) Even in England, we don't leave reproduction to the Queen. (Applause) So when did this habit start? And how long has it been going on? And what does it mean? Well, I think, probably, the oldest version of this is probably the sexual division of labor. But I've got no evidence for that. It just looks like the first thing we did was work male for female and female for male. In all hunter-gatherer societies today, there's a foraging division of labor between, on the whole, hunting males and gathering females. It isn't always quite that simple, but there's a distinction between specialized roles for males and females. And the beauty of this system is that it benefits both sides. The woman knows that, in the Hadzas' case here — digging roots to share with men in exchange for meat — she knows that all she has to do to get access to protein is to dig some extra roots and trade them for meat. And she doesn't have to go on an exhausting hunt and try and kill a warthog. And the man knows that he doesn't have to do any digging to get roots. All he has to do is make sure that when he kills a warthog it's big enough to share some. And so both sides raise each other's standards of living through the sexual division of labor. When did this happen? We don't know, but it's possible that Neanderthals didn't do this. They were a highly cooperative species. They were a highly intelligent species. Their brains on average, by the end, were bigger than yours and mine in this room today. They were imaginative. They buried their dead. They had language, probably, because we know they had the FOXP2 gene of the same kind as us, which was discovered here in Oxford. And so it looks like they probably had linguistic skills. They were brilliant people. I'm not dissing the Neanderthals. But there's no evidence of a sexual division of labor. There's no evidence of gathering behavior by females. It looks like the females were cooperative hunters with the men. And the other thing there's no evidence for is exchange between groups, because the objects that you find in Neanderthal remains, the tools they made, are always made from local materials. For example, in the Caucasus there's a site where you find local Neanderthal tools. They're always made from local chert. In the same valley there are modern human remains from about the same date, 30,000 years ago, and some of those are from local chert, but more — but many of them are made from obsidian from a long way away. And when human beings began moving objects around like this, it was evidence that they were exchanging between groups. Trade is 10 times as old as farming. People forget that. People think of trade as a modern thing. Exchange between groups has been going on for a hundred thousand years. And the earliest evidence for it crops up somewhere between 80 and 120,000 years ago in Africa, when you see obsidian and jasper and other things moving long distances in Ethiopia. You also see seashells — as discovered by a team here in Oxford — moving 125 miles inland from the Mediterranean in Algeria. And that's evidence that people have started exchanging between groups. And that will have led to specialization. How do you know that long-distance movement means trade rather than migration? Well, you look at modern hunter gatherers like aboriginals, who quarried for stone axes at a place called Mount Isa, which was a quarry owned by the Kalkadoon tribe. They traded them with their neighbors for things like stingray barbs, and the consequence was that stone axes ended up over a large part of Australia. So long-distance movement of tools is a sign of trade, not migration. What happens when you cut people off from exchange, from the ability to exchange and specialize? And the answer is that not only do you slow down technological progress, you can actually throw it into reverse. An example is Tasmania. When the sea level rose and Tasmania became an island 10,000 years ago, the people on it not only experienced slower progress than people on the mainland, they actually experienced regress. They gave up the ability to make stone tools and fishing equipment and clothing because the population of about 4,000 people was simply not large enough to maintain the specialized skills necessary to keep the technology they had. It's as if the people in this room were plonked on a desert island. How many of the things in our pockets could we continue to make after 10,000 years? It didn't happen in Tierra del Fuego — similar island, similar people. The reason: because Tierra del Fuego is separated from South America by a much narrower straight, and there was trading contact across that straight throughout 10,000 years. The Tasmanians were isolated. Go back to this image again and ask yourself, not only who made it and for who, but who knew how to make it. In the case of the stone axe, the man who made it knew how to make it. But who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody, literally nobody. There is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse. I mean this quite seriously. The president of the computer mouse company doesn't know. He just knows how to run a company. The person on the assembly line doesn't know because he doesn't know how to drill an oil well to get oil out to make plastic, and so on. We all know little bits, but none of us knows the whole. I am of course quoting from a famous essay by Leonard Read, the economist in the 1950s, called "I, Pencil" in which he wrote about how a pencil came to be made, and how nobody knows even how to make a pencil, because the people who assemble it don't know how to mine graphite, and they don't know how to fell trees and that kind of thing. And what we've done in human society, through exchange and specialization, is we've created the ability to do things that we don't even understand. It's not the same with language. With language we have to transfer ideas that we understand with each other. But with technology, we can actually do things that are beyond our capabilities. We've gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree. And by the way, that's one of the reasons that I'm not interested in the debate about I.Q., about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s than other groups. It's completely irrelevant. What's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they're cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. So we've created something called the collective brain. We're just the nodes in the network. We're the neurons in this brain. It's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit. However, bad things happen. And in the future, as we go forward, we will, of course, experience terrible things. There will be wars; there will be depressions; there will be natural disasters. Awful things will happen in this century, I'm absolutely sure. But I'm also sure that, because of the connections people are making, and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before, I'm also sure that technology will advance, and therefore living standards will advance. Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing, through the bottom-up world that we've created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation. Thank you. (Applause)

Listening to global voices

{0: 'Ethan Zuckerman studies how the world -- the whole world -- uses new media to share information and moods across cultures, languages and platforms.'}

TEDGlobal 2010

I'm an American, which means, generally, I ignore football unless it involves guys my size or Bruno's size running into each other at extremely high speeds. That said, it's been really hard to ignore football for the last couple of weeks. I go onto Twitter, there are all these strange words that I've never heard before: FIFA, vuvuzela, weird jokes about octopi. But the one that's really been sort of stressing me out, that I haven't been able to figure out, is this phrase "Cala a boca, Galvao." If you've gone onto Twitter in the last couple of weeks, you've probably seen this. It's been a major trending topic. Being a monolingual American, I obviously don't know what the phrase means. So I went onto Twitter, and I asked some people if they could explain to me "Cala a boca, Galvao." And fortunately, my Brazilian friends were more than ready to help. They explained that the Galvao bird is a rare and endangered parrot that's in terrible, terrible danger. In fact, I'll let them tell you a bit more about it. Narrator: A word about Galvao, a very rare kind of bird native to Brazil. Every year, more than 300,000 Galvao birds are killed during Carnival parades. Ethan Zuckerman: Obviously, this is a tragic situation, and it actually gets worse. It turns out that, not only is the Galvao parrot very attractive, useful for headdresses, it evidently has certain hallucinogenic properties, which means that there's a terrible problem with Galvao abuse. Some sick and twisted people have found themselves snorting Galvao. And it's terribly endangered. The good news about this is that the global community — again, my Brazilian friends tell me — is pitching in to help out. It turns out that Lady Gaga has released a new single — actually five or six new singles, as near as I can tell — titled "Cala a boca, Galvao." And my Brazilian friends tell me that if I just tweet the phrase "Cala a boca, Galvao," 10 cents will be given to a global campaign to save this rare and beautiful bird. Now, most of you have figured out that this was a prank, and actually a very, very good one. "Cala a boca, Galvao" actually means something very different. In Portugese, it means "Shut your mouth, Galvao." And it specifically refers to this guy, Galvao Bueno, who's the lead soccer commentator for Rede Globo. And what I understand from my Brazilian friends is that this guy is just a cliche machine. He can ruin the most interesting match by just spouting cliche again and again and again. So Brazilians went to that first match against North Korea, put up this banner, started a Twitter campaign and tried to convince the rest of us to tweet the phrase: "Cala a boca, Galvao." And in fact, were so successful at this that it topped Twitter for two weeks. Now there's a couple — there's a couple of lessons that you can take from this. And the first lesson, which I think is a worthwhile one, is that you cannot go wrong asking people to be active online, so long as activism just means retweeting a phrase. So as long as activism is that simple, it's pretty easy to get away with. The other thing you can take from this, by the way, is that there are a lot of Brazilians on Twitter. There's more than five million of them. As far as national representation, 11 percent of Brazilian internet users are on Twitter. That's a much higher number than in the U.S. or U.K. Next to Japan, it's the second most represented by population. Now if you're using Twitter or other social networks, and you didn't realize this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it, you're like most of us. Because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with. And if you are like me, a big, geeky, white, American guy, you tend to interact with a lot of other geeky, white, American guys. And you don't necessarily have the sense that Twitter is in fact a very heavily Brazilian space. It's also extremely surprising to many Americans, a heavily African-American space. Twitter recently did some research. They looked at their local population. They believe that 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population. And again, that was very shocking to many Twitter users, but it shouldn't be. And the reason it shouldn't be is that on any day you can go into Trending Topics. And you tend to find topics that are almost entirely African-American conversations. This was a visualization done by Fernando Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, two amazing visualization designers, who looked at a weekend's worth of Twitter traffic and essentially found that a lot of these trending topics were basically segregated conversations — and in ways that you wouldn't expect. It turns out that oil spill is a mostly white conversation, that cookout is a mostly black conversation. And what's crazy about this is that if you wanted to mix up who you were seeing on Twitter, it's literally a quick click away. You click on that cookout tag, there an entirely different conversation with different people participating in it. But generally speaking, most of us don't. We end up within these filter bubbles, as my friend Eli Pariser calls them, where we see the people we already know and the people who are similar to the people we already know. And we tend not to see that wider picture. Now for me, I'm surprised by this, because this wasn't how the internet was supposed to be. If you go back into the early days of the internet, when cyber-utopians like Nick Negroponte were writing big books like "Being Digital," the prediction was that the internet was going to be an incredibly powerful force to smooth out cultural differences, to put us all on a common field of one fashion or another. Negroponte started his book with a story about how hard it is to build connections in the world of atoms. He's at a technology conference in Florida. And he's looking at something really, truly absurd, which is bottles of Evian water on the table. And Negroponte says this is crazy. This is the old economy. It's the economy of moving these heavy, slow atoms over long distances that's very difficult to do. We're heading to the future of bits, where everything is speedy, it's weightless. It can be anywhere in the world at any time. And it's going to change the world as we know it. Now, Negroponte has been right about a lot of things. He's totally wrong about this one. It turns out that in many cases atoms are much more mobile than bits. If I walk into a store in the United States, it's very, very easy for me to buy water that's bottled in Fiji, shipped at great expense to the United States. It's actually surprisingly hard for me to see a Fijian feature film. It's really difficult for me to listen to Fijian music. It's extremely difficult for me to get Fijian news, which is strange, because actually there's an enormous amount going on in Fiji. There's a coup government. There's a military government. There's crackdowns on the press. It's actually a place that we probably should be paying attention to at the moment. Here's what I think is going on. I think that we tend to look a lot at the infrastructure of globalization. We look at the framework that makes it possible to live in this connected world. And that's a framework that includes things like airline routes. It includes things like the Internet cables. We look at a map like this one, and it looks like the entire world is flat because everything is a hop or two away. You can get on a flight in London, you can end up in Bangalore later today. Two hops, you're in Suva, the capitol of Fiji. It's all right there. When you start looking at what actually flows on top of these networks, you get a very different picture. You start looking at how the global plane flights move, and you suddenly discover that the world isn't even close to flat. It's extremely lumpy. There are parts of the world that are very, very well connected. There's basically a giant pathway in the sky between London and New York. but look at this map, and you can watch this for, you know, two or three minutes. You won't see very many planes go from South America to Africa. And you'll discover that there are parts of the globe that are systematically cut off. When we stop looking at the infrastructure that makes connection possible, and we look at what actually happens, we start realizing that the world doesn't work quite the same way that we think it does. So here's the problem that I've been interested in in the last decade or so. The world is, in fact, getting more global. It's getting more connected. More of problems are global in scale. More of our economics is global in scale. And our media is less global by the day. If you watched a television broadcast in the United States in the 1970s, 35 to 40 percent of it would have been international news on a nightly new broadcast. That's down to about 12 to 15 percent. And this tends to give us a very distorted view of the world. Here's a slide that Alisa Miller showed at a previous TED Talk. Alisa's the president of Public Radio International. And she made a cartogram, which is basically a distorted map based on what American television news casts looked at for a month. And you see that when you distort a map based on attention, the world within American television news is basically reduced to this giant bloated U.S. and a couple of other countries which we've invaded. And that's basically what our media is about. And before you conclude that this is just a function of American TV news — which is dreadful, and I agree that it's dreadful — I've been mapping elite media like the New York Times, and I get the same thing. When you look at the New York Times, you look at other elite media, what you largely get are pictures of very wealthy nations and the nations we've invaded. It turns out that new media isn't necessarily helping us all that much. Here's a map made by Mark Graham who's down the street at the Oxford Internet Institute. A this is a map of articles in Wikipedia that have been geo-coded. And you'll notice that there's a very heavy bias towards North America and Western Europe. Even within Wikipedias, where we're creating their own content online, there's a heavy bias towards the place where a lot of the Wikipedia authors are based, rather than to the rest of the world. In the U.K., you can get up, you can pick up your computer when you get out of this session, you could read a newspaper from India or from Australia, from Canada, God forbid from the U.S. You probably won't. If you look at online media consumption — in this case, in the top 10 users of the internet — more than 95 percent of the news readership is on domestic news sites. It's one of these rare cases where the U.S. is actually slightly better than [the U.K.], because we actually like reading your media, rather than vice versa. So all of this starts leading me to think that we're in a state that I refer to as imaginary cosmopolitanism. We look at the internet. We think we're getting this wide view of the globe. We occasionally stumble onto a page in Chinese, and we decide that we do in fact have the greatest technology ever built to connect us to the rest of the world. And we forget that most of the time we're checking Boston Red Sox scores. So this is a real problem — not just because the Red Sox are having a bad year — but it's a real problem because, as we're discussing here at TED, the real problems in the world the interesting problems to solve are global in scale and scope, they require global conversations to get to global solutions. This is a problem we have to solve. So here's the good news. For six years, I've been hanging out with these guys. This is a group called Global Voices. This is a team of bloggers from around the world. Our mission was to fix the world's media. We started in 2004. You might have noticed, we haven't done all that well so far. Nor do I think we are by ourselves, actually going to solve the problem. But the more that I think about it, the more that I think that a few things that we have learned along the way are interesting lessons for how we would rewire if we we wanted to use the web to have a wider world. The first thing you have to consider is that there are parts of the world that are dark spots in terms of attention. In this case — the map of the world at night by NASA — they're dark literally because of lack of electricity. And I used to think that a dark spot on this map basically meant you're not going to get media from there because there are more basic needs. What I'm starting to realize is that you can get media, it's just an enormous amount of work, and you need an enormous amount of encouragement. One of those dark spots is Madagascar, a country which is generally better known for the Dreamworks film than it is actually known for the lovely people who live there. And so the people who founded Foko Club in Madagascar weren't actually concerned with trying to change the image of their country. They were doing something much simpler. It was a club to learn English and to learn computers and the internet. but what happened was that Madagascar went through a violent coup. Most independent media was shut down. And the high school students who were learning to blog through Foko Club suddenly found themselves talking to an international audience about the demonstrations, the violence, everything that was going on within this country. So a very, very small program designed to get people in front of computers, publishing their own thoughts, publishing independent media, ended up having a huge impact on what we know about this country. Now the trick with this is that I'm guessing most people here don't speak Malagasy. I'm also guessing that most of you don't even speak Chinese — which is sort of sad if you think about it, as it's now the most represented language on the internet. Fortunately people are trying to figure out how to fix this. If you're using Google Chrome and you go to a Chinese language site, you notice this really cute box at the top, which automatically detects that the page is in Chinese and very quickly at a mouse click will give you a translation of the page. Unfortunately, it's a machine translation of the page. And while Google is very, very good with some languages, it's actually pretty dreadful with Chinese. And the results can be pretty funny. What you really want — what I really want, is eventually the ability to push a button and have this queued so a human being can translate this. And if you think this is absurd, it's not. There's a group right now in China called Yeeyan. And Yeeyan is a group of 150,000 volunteers who get online every day. They look for the most interesting content in the English language. They translate roughly 100 articles a day from major newspapers, major websites. They put it online for free. It's the project of a guy named Zhang Lei, who was living in the United States during the Lhasa riots and who couldn't believe how biased American media coverage was. And he said, "If there's one thing I can do, I can start translating, so that people between these countries start understanding each other a little bit better." And my question to you is: if Yeeyan can line up 150,000 people to translate the English internet into Chinese, where's the English language Yeeyan? Who's going after Chinese, which now has 400 million internet users out there? My guess is at least one of them has something interesting to say. So even if we can find a way to translate from Chinese, there's no guarantee that we're going to find it. When we look for information online, we basically have two strategies. We use a lot of search. And search is terrific if you know what you're looking for. But if what you're looking for is serendipity, if you want to stumble onto something that you didn't know you needed, our main philosophy is to look to our social networks, to look for our friends. What are they looking at? Maybe we should be looking at it. The problem with this is that essentially what you end up getting after a while is the wisdom of the flock. You end up flocking with a lot of people who are probably similar to you, who have similar interests. And it's very, very hard to get information from the other flocks, from the other parts of the world where people getting together and talking about their own interests. To do this, at a certain point, you need someone to bump you out of your flock and into another flock. You need a guide. So this is Amira Al Hussaini. She is the Middle East editor for Global Voices. She has one of the hardest jobs in the world. Not only does she have to keep our Israeli and Palestinian contributors from killing each other, she has to figure out what is going to interest you about the Middle East. And in that sense of trying to get you out of your normal orbit, and to try to get you to pay attention to a story about someone who's given up smoking for the month of Ramadan, she has to know something about a global audience. She has to know something about what stories are available. Basically, she's a deejay. She's a skilled human curator who knows what material is available to her, who's able to listen to the audience, and who's able to make a selection and push people forward in one fashion or another. I don't think this is necessarily an algorithmic process. I think what's great about the internet is that it actually makes it much easier for deejays to reach a wider audience. I know Amira. I can ask her what to read. But with the internet, she's in a position where she can tell a lot of people what to read. And you can listen to her as well, if this is a way that you're interested in having your web widened. So once you start widening like this, once you start lighting up voices in the dark spots, once you start translating, once you start curating, you end up in some really weird places. This is an image from pretty much my favorite blog, which is AfriGadget. And AfriGadget is a blog that looks at technology in an Africa context. And specifically, it's looking at a blacksmith in Kibera in Nairobi, who is turning the shaft of a Landrover into a cold chisel. And when you look at this image, you might find yourself going, "Why would I conceivably care about this?" And the truth is, this guy can probably explain this to you. This is Erik Hersman. You guys may have seen him around the conference. He goes by the moniker White African. He's both a very well known American geek, but he's also Kenyan; he was born in Sudan, grew up in Kenya. He is a bridge figure. He is someone who literally has feet in both worlds — one in the world of the African technology community, one in the world of the American technology community. And so he's able to tell a story about this blacksmith in Kibera and turn it into a story about repurposing technology, about innovating from constraint, about looking for inspiration based on reusing materials. He knows one world, and he's finding a way to communicate it to another world, both of which he has deep connections to. These bridge figures, I'm pretty well convinced, are the future of how we try to make the world wider through using the web. But the trick with bridges is, ultimately, you need someone to cross them. And that's where we start talking about xenophiles. So if I found myself in the NFL, I suspect I would spend my off-season nursing my wounds, enjoying my house, so on and so forth — possibly recording a hip-hop album. Dhani Jones, who is the middle linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals, has a slightly different approach to the off-season. Dhani has a television show. It's called "Dhani Tackles the Globe." And every week on this television show, Dhani travels to a different nation of the world. He finds a local sporting team. He trains with them for a week, and he plays a match with them. And his reason for this is not just that he wants to master Muay Thai boxing. It's because, for him, sport is the language that allows him to encounter the full width and wonder of the world. For some of us it might be music. For some of us it might be food. For a lot of us it might be literature or writing. But there are all these different techniques that allow you to go out and look at the world and find your place within it. The goal of my Talk here is not to persuade the people in this room to embrace your xenophilia. My guess — given that you're at a conference called TEDGlobal — is that most of you are xenophiles, whether or not you use that term. My challenge instead is this. It's not enough to make the personal decision that you want a wider world. We have to figure out how to rewire the systems that we have. We have to fix our media. We have to fix the internet. We have to fix our education. We have to fix our immigration policy. We need to look at ways of creating serendipity, of making translation pervasive, and we need to find ways to embrace and celebrate these bridge figures. And we need to figure out how to cultivate xenophiles. That's what I'm trying to do. I need your help. (Applause)

The politics of fiction

{0: "Elif Shafak explicitly defies definition -- her writing blends East and West, feminism and tradition, the local and the global, Sufism and rationalism, creating one of today's most unique voices in literature."}

TEDGlobal 2010

I'm a storyteller. That's what I do in life — telling stories, writing novels — and today I would like to tell you a few stories about the art of storytelling and also some supernatural creatures called the djinni. But before I go there, please allow me to share with you glimpses of my personal story. I will do so with the help of words, of course, but also a geometrical shape, the circle, so throughout my talk, you will come across several circles. I was born in Strasbourg, France to Turkish parents. Shortly after, my parents got separated, and I came to Turkey with my mom. From then on, I was raised as a single child by a single mother. Now in the early 1970s, in Ankara, that was a bit unusual. Our neighborhood was full of large families, where fathers were the heads of households, so I grew up seeing my mother as a divorcee in a patriarchal environment. In fact, I grew up observing two different kinds of womanhood. On the one hand was my mother, a well-educated, secular, modern, westernized, Turkish woman. On the other hand was my grandmother, who also took care of me and was more spiritual, less educated and definitely less rational. This was a woman who read coffee grounds to see the future and melted lead into mysterious shapes to fend off the evil eye. Many people visited my grandmother, people with severe acne on their faces or warts on their hands. Each time, my grandmother would utter some words in Arabic, take a red apple and stab it with as many rose thorns as the number of warts she wanted to remove. Then one by one, she would encircle these thorns with dark ink. A week later, the patient would come back for a follow-up examination. Now, I'm aware that I should not be saying such things in front of an audience of scholars and scientists, but the truth is, of all the people who visited my grandmother for their skin conditions, I did not see anyone go back unhappy or unhealed. I asked her how she did this. Was it the power of praying? In response she said, "Yes, praying is effective, but also beware of the power of circles." From her, I learned, amongst many other things, one very precious lesson — that if you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside. Now we all live in some kind of a social and cultural circle. We all do. We're born into a certain family, nation, class. But if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted, then we too run the risk of drying up inside. Our imagination might shrink; our hearts might dwindle, and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons. Our friends, neighbors, colleagues, family — if all the people in our inner circle resemble us, it means we are surrounded with our mirror image. Now one other thing women like my grandma do in Turkey is to cover mirrors with velvet or to hang them on the walls with their backs facing out. It's an old Eastern tradition based on the knowledge that it's not healthy for a human being to spend too much time staring at his own reflection. Ironically, [living in] communities of the like-minded is one of the greatest dangers of today's globalized world. And it's happening everywhere, among liberals and conservatives, agnostics and believers, the rich and the poor, East and West alike. We tend to form clusters based on similarity, and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people. In my opinion, one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling. Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see. I started writing fiction at the age of eight. My mother came home one day with a turquoise notebook and asked me if I'd be interested in keeping a personal journal. In retrospect, I think she was slightly worried about my sanity. I was constantly telling stories at home, which was good, except I told this to imaginary friends around me, which was not so good. I was an introverted child, to the point of communicating with colored crayons and apologizing to objects when I bumped into them, so my mother thought it might do me good to write down my day-to-day experiences and emotions. What she didn't know was that I thought my life was terribly boring, and the last thing I wanted to do was to write about myself. Instead, I began to write about people other than me and things that never really happened. And thus began my life-long passion for writing fiction. So from the very beginning, fiction for me was less of an autobiographical manifestation than a transcendental journey into other lives, other possibilities. And please bear with me: I'll draw a circle and come back to this point. Now one other thing happened around this same time. My mother became a diplomat. So from this small, superstitious, middle-class neighborhood of my grandmother, I was zoomed into this posh, international school [in Madrid], where I was the only Turk. It was here that I had my first encounter with what I call the "representative foreigner." In our classroom, there were children from all nationalities, yet this diversity did not necessarily lead to a cosmopolitan, egalitarian classroom democracy. Instead, it generated an atmosphere in which each child was seen — not as an individual on his own, but as the representative of something larger. We were like a miniature United Nations, which was fun, except whenever something negative, with regards to a nation or a religion, took place. The child who represented it was mocked, ridiculed and bullied endlessly. And I should know, because during the time I attended that school, a military takeover happened in my country, a gunman of my nationality nearly killed the Pope, and Turkey got zero points in [the] Eurovision Song Contest. (Laughter) I skipped school often and dreamed of becoming a sailor during those days. I also had my first taste of cultural stereotypes there. The other children asked me about the movie "Midnight Express," which I had not seen; they inquired how many cigarettes a day I smoked, because they thought all Turks were heavy smokers, and they wondered at what age I would start covering my hair. I came to learn that these were the three main stereotypes about my country: politics, cigarettes and the veil. After Spain, we went to Jordan, Germany and Ankara again. Everywhere I went, I felt like my imagination was the only suitcase I could take with me. Stories gave me a sense of center, continuity and coherence, the three big Cs that I otherwise lacked. In my mid-twenties, I moved to Istanbul, the city I adore. I lived in a very vibrant, diverse neighborhood where I wrote several of my novels. I was in Istanbul when the earthquake hit in 1999. When I ran out of the building at three in the morning, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. There was the local grocer there — a grumpy, old man who didn't sell alcohol and didn't speak to marginals. He was sitting next to a transvestite with a long black wig and mascara running down her cheeks. I watched the man open a pack of cigarettes with trembling hands and offer one to her, and that is the image of the night of the earthquake in my mind today — a conservative grocer and a crying transvestite smoking together on the sidewalk. In the face of death and destruction, our mundane differences evaporated, and we all became one even if for a few hours. But I've always believed that stories, too, have a similar effect on us. I'm not saying that fiction has the magnitude of an earthquake, but when we are reading a good novel, we leave our small, cozy apartments behind, go out into the night alone and start getting to know people we had never met before and perhaps had even been biased against. Shortly after, I went to a women's college in Boston, then Michigan. I experienced this, not so much as a geographical shift, as a linguistic one. I started writing fiction in English. I'm not an immigrant, refugee or exile — they ask me why I do this — but the commute between languages gives me the chance to recreate myself. I love writing in Turkish, which to me is very poetic and very emotional, and I love writing in English, which to me is very mathematical and cerebral. So I feel connected to each language in a different way. For me, like millions of other people around the world today, English is an acquired language. When you're a latecomer to a language, what happens is you live there with a continuous and perpetual frustration. As latecomers, we always want to say more, you know, crack better jokes, say better things, but we end up saying less because there's a gap between the mind and the tongue. And that gap is very intimidating. But if we manage not to be frightened by it, it's also stimulating. And this is what I discovered in Boston — that frustration was very stimulating. At this stage, my grandmother, who had been watching the course of my life with increasing anxiety, started to include in her daily prayers that I urgently get married so that I could settle down once and for all. And because God loves her, I did get married. (Laughter) But instead of settling down, I went to Arizona. And since my husband is in Istanbul, I started commuting between Arizona and Istanbul — the two places on the surface of earth that couldn't be more different. I guess one part of me has always been a nomad, physically and spiritually. Stories accompany me, keeping my pieces and memories together, like an existential glue. Yet as much as I love stories, recently, I've also begun to think that they lose their magic if and when a story is seen as more than a story. And this is a subject that I would love to think about together. When my first novel written in English came out in America, I heard an interesting remark from a literary critic. "I liked your book," he said, "but I wish you had written it differently." (Laughter) I asked him what he meant by that. He said, "Well, look at it. There's so many Spanish, American, Hispanic characters in it, but there's only one Turkish character and it's a man." Now the novel took place on a university campus in Boston, so to me, it was normal that there be more international characters in it than Turkish characters, but I understood what my critic was looking for. And I also understood that I would keep disappointing him. He wanted to see the manifestation of my identity. He was looking for a Turkish woman in the book because I happened to be one. We often talk about how stories change the world, but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated, read and reviewed. Many authors feel this pressure, but non-Western authors feel it more heavily. If you're a woman writer from the Muslim world, like me, then you are expected to write the stories of Muslim women and, preferably, the unhappy stories of unhappy Muslim women. You're expected to write informative, poignant and characteristic stories and leave the experimental and avant-garde to your Western colleagues. What I experienced as a child in that school in Madrid is happening in the literary world today. Writers are not seen as creative individuals on their own, but as the representatives of their respective cultures: a few authors from China, a few from Turkey, a few from Nigeria. We're all thought to have something very distinctive, if not peculiar. The writer and commuter James Baldwin gave an interview in 1984 in which he was repeatedly asked about his homosexuality. When the interviewer tried to pigeonhole him as a gay writer, Baldwin stopped and said, "But don't you see? There's nothing in me that is not in everybody else, and nothing in everybody else that is not in me." When identity politics tries to put labels on us, it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger. There's a fuzzy category called multicultural literature in which all authors from outside the Western world are lumped together. I never forget my first multicultural reading, in Harvard Square about 10 years ago. We were three writers, one from the Philippines, one Turkish and one Indonesian — like a joke, you know. (Laughter) And the reason why we were brought together was not because we shared an artistic style or a literary taste. It was only because of our passports. Multicultural writers are expected to tell real stories, not so much the imaginary. A function is attributed to fiction. In this way, not only the writers themselves, but also their fictional characters become the representatives of something larger. But I must quickly add that this tendency to see a story as more than a story does not solely come from the West. It comes from everywhere. And I experienced this firsthand when I was put on trial in 2005 for the words my fictional characters uttered in a novel. I had intended to write a constructive, multi-layered novel about an Armenian and a Turkish family through the eyes of women. My micro story became a macro issue when I was prosecuted. Some people criticized, others praised me for writing about the Turkish-Armenian conflict. But there were times when I wanted to remind both sides that this was fiction. It was just a story. And when I say, "just a story," I'm not trying to belittle my work. I want to love and celebrate fiction for what it is, not as a means to an end. Writers are entitled to their political opinions, and there are good political novels out there, but the language of fiction is not the language of daily politics. Chekhov said, "The solution to a problem and the correct way of posing the question are two completely separate things. And only the latter is an artist's responsibility." Identity politics divides us. Fiction connects. One is interested in sweeping generalizations. The other, in nuances. One draws boundaries. The other recognizes no frontiers. Identity politics is made of solid bricks. Fiction is flowing water. In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called "meddah." They would go to coffee houses, where they would tell a story in front of an audience, often improvising. With each new person in the story, the meddah would change his voice, impersonating that character. Everybody could go and listen, you know — ordinary people, even the sultan, Muslims and non-Muslims. Stories cut across all boundaries, like "The Tales of Nasreddin Hodja," which were very popular throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and Asia. Today, stories continue to transcend borders. When Palestinian and Israeli politicians talk, they usually don't listen to each other, but a Palestinian reader still reads a novel by a Jewish author, and vice versa, connecting and empathizing with the narrator. Literature has to take us beyond. If it cannot take us there, it is not good literature. Books have saved the introverted, timid child that I was — that I once was. But I'm also aware of the danger of fetishizing them. When the poet and mystic, Rumi, met his spiritual companion, Shams of Tabriz, one of the first things the latter did was to toss Rumi's books into water and watch the letters dissolve. The Sufis say, "Knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance." The problem with today's cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge — we know a lot about each other, or so we think — but knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves: it makes us elitist, distant and disconnected. There's a metaphor which I love: living like a drawing compass. As you know, one leg of the compass is static, rooted in a place. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a wide circle, constantly moving. Like that, my fiction as well. One part of it is rooted in Istanbul, with strong Turkish roots, but the other part travels the world, connecting to different cultures. In that sense, I like to think of my fiction as both local and universal, both from here and everywhere. Now those of you who have been to Istanbul have probably seen Topkapi Palace, which was the residence of Ottoman sultans for more than 400 years. In the palace, just outside the quarters of the favorite concubines, there's an area called The Gathering Place of the Djinn. It's between buildings. I'm intrigued by this concept. We usually distrust those areas that fall in between things. We see them as the domain of supernatural creatures like the djinn, who are made of smokeless fire and are the symbol of elusiveness. But my point is perhaps that elusive space is what writers and artists need most. When I write fiction I cherish elusiveness and changeability. I like not knowing what will happen 10 pages later. I like it when my characters surprise me. I might write about a Muslim woman in one novel, and perhaps it will be a very happy story, and in my next book, I might write about a handsome, gay professor in Norway. As long as it comes from our hearts, we can write about anything and everything. Audre Lorde once said, "The white fathers taught us to say, 'I think, therefore I am.'" She suggested, "I feel, therefore I am free." I think it was a wonderful paradigm shift. And yet, why is it that, in creative writing courses today, the very first thing we teach students is "write what you know"? Perhaps that's not the right way to start at all. Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about. We should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write what we can feel. We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next. In the end, stories move like whirling dervishes, drawing circles beyond circles. They connect all humanity, regardless of identity politics, and that is the good news. And I would like to finish with an old Sufi poem: "Come, let us be friends for once; let us make life easy on us; let us be lovers and loved ones; the earth shall be left to no one." Thank you. (Applause)

Why the world needs WikiLeaks

{0: 'Julian Assange serves as spokesperson for WikiLeaks.'}

TEDGlobal 2010

Chris Anderson: Julian, welcome. It's been reported that WikiLeaks, your baby, has, in the last few years has released more classified documents than the rest of the world's media combined. Can that possibly be true? Julian Assange: Yeah, can it possibly be true? It's a worry — isn't it? — that the rest of the world's media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than the rest of the world press combined. CA: How does it work? How do people release the documents? And how do you secure their privacy? JA: So these are — as far as we can tell — classical whistleblowers, and we have a number of ways for them to get information to us. So we use this state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the Internet, to hide trails, pass it through legal jurisdictions like Sweden and Belgium to enact those legal protections. We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it — which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information — release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks. CA: So you make an effort to ensure the documents are legitimate, but you actually almost never know who the identity of the source is? JA: That's right, yeah. Very rarely do we ever know, and if we find out at some stage then we destroy that information as soon as possible. (Phone ring) God damn it. (Laughter) CA: I think that's the CIA asking what the code is for a TED membership. (Laughter) So let's take [an] example, actually. This is something you leaked a few years ago. If we can have this document up ... So this was a story in Kenya a few years ago. Can you tell us what you leaked and what happened? JA: So this is the Kroll Report. This was a secret intelligence report commissioned by the Kenyan government after its election in 2004. Prior to 2004, Kenya was ruled by Daniel arap Moi for about 18 years. He was a soft dictator of Kenya. And when Kibaki got into power — through a coalition of forces that were trying to clean up corruption in Kenya — they commissioned this report, spent about two million pounds on this and an associated report. And then the government sat on it and used it for political leverage on Moi, who was the richest man — still is the richest man — in Kenya. It's the Holy Grail of Kenyan journalism. So I went there in 2007, and we managed to get hold of this just prior to the election — the national election, December 28. When we released that report, we did so three days after the new president, Kibaki, had decided to pal up with the man that he was going to clean out, Daniel arap Moi, so this report then became a dead albatross around President Kibaki's neck. CA: And — I mean, to cut a long story short — word of the report leaked into Kenya, not from the official media, but indirectly, and in your opinion, it actually shifted the election. JA: Yeah. So this became front page of the Guardian and was then printed in all the surrounding countries of Kenya, in Tanzanian and South African press. And so it came in from the outside. And that, after a couple of days, made the Kenyan press feel safe to talk about it. And it ran for 20 nights straight on Kenyan TV, shifted the vote by 10 percent, according to a Kenyan intelligence report, which changed the result of the election. CA: Wow, so your leak really substantially changed the world? JA: Yep. (Applause) CA: Here's — We're going to just show a short clip from this Baghdad airstrike video. The video itself is longer, but here's a short clip. This is — this is intense material, I should warn you. Radio: ... just fuckin', once you get on 'em just open 'em up. I see your element, uh, got about four Humvees, uh, out along ... You're clear. All right. Firing. Let me know when you've got them. Let's shoot. Light 'em all up. C'mon, fire! (Machine gun fire) Keep shoot 'n. Keep shoot 'n. (Machine gun fire) Keep shoot 'n. Hotel ... Bushmaster Two-Six, Bushmaster Two-Six, we need to move, time now! All right, we just engaged all eight individuals. Yeah, we see two birds [helicopters], and we're still firing. Roger. I got 'em. Two-Six, this is Two-Six, we're mobile. Oops, I'm sorry. What was going on? God damn it, Kyle. All right, hahaha. I hit 'em. CA: So, what was the impact of that? JA: The impact on the people who worked on it was severe. We ended up sending two people to Baghdad to further research that story. So this is just the first of three attacks that occurred in that scene. CA: So, I mean, 11 people died in that attack, right, including two Reuters employees? JA: Yeah. Two Reuters employees, two young children were wounded. There were between 18 and 26 people killed all together. CA: And releasing this caused widespread outrage. What was the key element of this that actually caused the outrage, do you think? JA: I don't know. I guess people can see the gross disparity in force. You have guys walking in a relaxed way down the street, and then an Apache helicopter sitting up at one kilometer firing 30-millimeter cannon shells on everyone — looking for any excuse to do so — and killing people rescuing the wounded. And there was two journalists involved that clearly weren't insurgents because that's their full-time job. CA: I mean, there's been this U.S. intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, arrested, and it's alleged that he confessed in a chat room to have leaked this video to you, along with 280,000 classified U.S. embassy cables. I mean, did he? JA: We have denied receiving those cables. He has been charged, about five days ago, with obtaining 150,000 cables and releasing 50. Now, we had released, early in the year, a cable from the Reykjavik U.S. embassy, but this is not necessarily connected. I mean, I was a known visitor of that embassy. CA: I mean, if you did receive thousands of U.S. embassy diplomatic cables ... JA: We would have released them. (CA: You would?) JA: Yeah. (CA: Because?) JA: Well, because these sort of things reveal what the true state of, say, Arab governments are like, the true human-rights abuses in those governments. If you look at declassified cables, that's the sort of material that's there. CA: So let's talk a little more broadly about this. I mean, in general, what's your philosophy? Why is it right to encourage leaking of secret information? JA: Well, there's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform. And there's a lot of information. So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good — because the organizations that know it best, that know it from the inside out, are spending work to conceal it. And that's what we've found in practice, and that's what the history of journalism is. CA: But are there risks with that, either to the individuals concerned or indeed to society at large, where leaking can actually have an unintended consequence? JA: Not that we have seen with anything we have released. I mean, we have a harm immunization policy. We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal — personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets — you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret — but we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well-motivated. CA: So they are well-motivated. And what would you say to, for example, the, you know, the parent of someone whose son is out serving the U.S. military, and he says, "You know what, you've put up something that someone had an incentive to put out. It shows a U.S. soldier laughing at people dying. That gives the impression, has given the impression, to millions of people around the world that U.S. soldiers are inhuman people. Actually, they're not. My son isn't. How dare you?" What would you say to that? JA: Yeah, we do get a lot of that. But remember, the people in Baghdad, the people in Iraq, the people in Afghanistan — they don't need to see the video; they see it every day. So it's not going to change their opinion. It's not going to change their perception. That's what they see every day. It will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all, and that's our hope. CA: So you found a way to shine light into what you see as these sort of dark secrets in companies and in government. Light is good. But do you see any irony in the fact that, in order for you to shine that light, you have to, yourself, create secrecy around your sources? JA: Not really. I mean, we don't have any WikiLeaks dissidents yet. We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us, but we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up. CA: I'd actually be interested, just based on what we've heard so far — I'm curious as to the opinion in the TED audience. You know, there might be a couple of views of WikiLeaks and of Julian. You know, hero — people's hero — bringing this important light. Dangerous troublemaker. Who's got the hero view? Who's got the dangerous troublemaker view? JA: Oh, come on. There must be some. CA: It's a soft crowd, Julian, a soft crowd. We have to try better. Let's show them another example. Now here's something that you haven't yet leaked, but I think for TED you are. I mean it's an intriguing story that's just happened, right? What is this? JA: So this is a sample of what we do sort of every day. So late last year — in November last year — there was a series of well blowouts in Albania, like the well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, but not quite as big. And we got a report — a sort of engineering analysis into what happened — saying that, in fact, security guards from some rival, various competing oil firms had, in fact, parked trucks there and blown them up. And part of the Albanian government was in this, etc., etc. And the engineering report had nothing on the top of it, so it was an extremely difficult document for us. We couldn't verify it because we didn't know who wrote it and knew what it was about. So we were kind of skeptical that maybe it was a competing oil firm just sort of playing the issue up. So under that basis, we put it out and said, "Look, we're skeptical about this thing. We don't know, but what can we do? The material looks good, it feels right, but we just can't verify it." And we then got a letter just this week from the company who wrote it, wanting to track down the source — (Laughter) saying, "Hey, we want to track down the source." And we were like, "Oh, tell us more. What document is it, precisely, you're talking about? Can you show that you had legal authority over that document? Is it really yours?" So they sent us this screen shot with the author in the Microsoft Word ID. Yeah. (Applause) That's happened quite a lot though. This is like one of our methods of identifying, of verifying, what a material is, is to try and get these guys to write letters. CA: Yeah. Have you had information from inside BP? JA: Yeah, we have a lot, but I mean, at the moment, we are undergoing a sort of serious fundraising and engineering effort. So our publication rate over the past few months has been sort of minimized while we're re-engineering our back systems for the phenomenal public interest that we have. That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth, and that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information. CA: So that's the key bottleneck, basically journalistic volunteers and/or the funding of journalistic salaries? JA: Yep. Yeah, and trusted people. I mean, we're an organization that is hard to grow very quickly because of the sort of material we deal with, so we have to restructure in order to have people who will deal with the highest national security stuff, and then lower security cases. CA: So help us understand a bit about you personally and how you came to do this. And I think I read that as a kid you went to 37 different schools. Can that be right? JA: Well, my parents were in the movie business and then on the run from a cult, so the combination between the two ... (Laughter) CA: I mean, a psychologist might say that's a recipe for breeding paranoia. JA: What, the movie business? (Laughter) (Applause) CA: And you were also — I mean, you were also a hacker at an early age and ran into the authorities early on. JA: Well, I was a journalist. You know, I was a very young journalist activist at an early age. I wrote a magazine, was prosecuted for it when I was a teenager. So you have to be careful with hacker. I mean there's like — there's a method that can be deployed for various things. Unfortunately, at the moment, it's mostly deployed by the Russian mafia in order to steal your grandmother's bank accounts. So this phrase is not, not as nice as it used to be. CA: Yeah, well, I certainly don't think you're stealing anyone's grandmother's bank account, but what about your core values? Can you give us a sense of what they are and maybe some incident in your life that helped determine them? JA: I'm not sure about the incident. But the core values: well, capable, generous men do not create victims; they nurture victims. And that's something from my father and something from other capable, generous men that have been in my life. CA: Capable, generous men do not create victims; they nurture victims? JA: Yeah. And you know, I'm a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurture, but some way — there is another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators of crime. And so that is something that has been in my character for a long time. CA: So just tell us, very quickly in the last minute, the story: what happened in Iceland? You basically published something there, ran into trouble with a bank, then the news service there was injuncted from running the story. Instead, they publicized your side. That made you very high-profile in Iceland. What happened next? JA: Yeah, this is a great case, you know. Iceland went through this financial crisis. It was the hardest hit of any country in the world. Its banking sector was 10 times the GDP of the rest of the economy. Anyway, so we release this report in July last year. And the national TV station was injuncted five minutes before it went on air, like out of a movie: injunction landed on the news desk, and the news reader was like, "This has never happened before. What do we do?" Well, we just show the website instead, for all that time, as a filler, and we became very famous in Iceland, went to Iceland and spoke about this issue. And there was a feeling in the community that that should never happen again, and as a result, working with Icelandic politicians and some other international legal experts, we put together a new sort of package of legislation for Iceland to sort of become an offshore haven for the free press, with the strongest journalistic protections in the world, with a new Nobel Prize for freedom of speech. Iceland's a Nordic country, so, like Norway, it's able to tap into the system. And just a month ago, this was passed by the Icelandic parliament unanimously. CA: Wow. (Applause) Last question, Julian. When you think of the future then, do you think it's more likely to be Big Brother exerting more control, more secrecy, or us watching Big Brother, or it's just all to be played for either way? JA: I'm not sure which way it's going to go. I mean, there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world — within the E.U., between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see. That's why it's a very interesting time to be in — because with just a little bit of effort, we can shift it one way or the other. CA: Well, it looks like I'm reflecting the audience's opinion to say, Julian, be careful, and all power to you. JA: Thank you, Chris. (CA: Thank you.) (Applause)

Superheroes inspired by Islam

{0: 'Naif Al-Mutawa has created a group of comic superheroes based on Islamic culture and religion. They derive their superpowers from the 99 attributes of Allah.'}

TEDGlobal 2010

In October 2010, the Justice League of America will be teaming up with The 99. Icons like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and their colleagues will be teaming up with icons Jabbar, Noora, Jami and their colleagues. It's a story of intercultural intersections, and what better group to have this conversation than those that grew out of fighting fascism in their respective histories and geographies? As fascism took over Europe in the 1930s, an unlikely reaction came out of North America. As Christian iconography got changed, and swastikas were created out of crucifixes, Batman and Superman were created by Jewish young men in the United States and Canada, also going back to the Bible. Consider this: like the prophets, all the superheroes are missing parents. Superman's parents die on Krypton before the age of one. Bruce Wayne, who becomes Batman, loses his parents at the age of six in Gotham City. Spiderman is raised by his aunt and uncle. And all of them, just like the prophets who get their message from God through Gabriel, get their message from above. Peter Parker is in a library in Manhattan when the spider descends from above and gives him his message through a bite. Bruce Wayne is in his bedroom when a big bat flies over his head, and he sees it as an omen to become Batman. Superman is not only sent to Earth from the heavens, or Krypton, but he's sent in a pod, much like Moses was on the Nile. (Laughter) And you hear the voice of his father, Jor-El, saying to Earth, "I have sent to you my only son." (Laughter) (Applause) These are clearly biblical archetypes, and the thinking behind that was to create positive, globally-resonating storylines that could be tied to the same things that other people were pulling mean messages out of because then the person that's using religion for the wrong purpose just becomes a bad man with a bad message. And it's only by linking positive things that the negative can be delinked. This is the kind of thinking that went into creating The 99. The 99 references the 99 attributes of Allah in the Koran, things like generosity and mercy and foresight and wisdom and dozens of others that no two people in the world would disagree about. It doesn't matter what your religion is; even if you're an atheist, you don't raise your kid telling him, you know, "Make sure you lie three times a day." Those are basic human values. And so the backstory of The 99 takes place in 1258, which history tells us the Mongols invaded Baghdad and destroyed it. All the books from Bait al-Hikma library, the most famous library in its day, were thrown in the Tigris River, and the Tigris changes color with ink. It's a story passed on generation after generation. I rewrote that story, and in my version, the librarians find out that this is going to happen — and here's a side note: if you want a comic book to do well, make the librarians the hero. It always works well. (Laughter) (Applause) So the librarians find out and they get together a special solution, a chemical solution called King's Water, that when mixed with 99 stones would be able to save all that culture and history in the books. But the Mongols get there first. The books and the solution get thrown in the Tigris River. Some librarians escape, and over the course of days and weeks, they dip the stones into the Tigris and suck up that collective wisdom that we all think is lost to civilization. Those stones have been smuggled as three prayer beads of 33 stones each through Arabia into Andalusia in Spain, where they're safe for 200 years. But in 1492, two important things happen. The first is the fall of Granada, the last Muslim enclave in Europe. The second is Columbus finally gets funded to go to India, but he gets lost. (Laughter) So 33 of the stones are smuggled onto the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria and are spread in the New World. Thirty-three go on the Silk Road to China, South Asia and Southeast Asia. And 33 are spread between Europe, the Middle East and Africa. And now it's 2010, and there are 99 heroes from 99 different countries. Now it's very easy to assume that those books, because they were from a library called Bait al-Hikma, were Muslim books, but that's not the case because the caliph that built that library, his name was al-Ma'mun — he was Harun al-Rashid's son. He had told his advisers, "Get me all the scholars to translate any book they can get their hands onto into Arabic, and I will pay them its weight in gold." After a while, his advisers complained. They said, "Your Highness, the scholars are cheating. They're writing in big handwriting to take more gold." To which he said, "Let them be, because what they're giving us is worth a lot more than what we're paying them." So the idea of an open architecture, an open knowledge, is not new to my neck of the desert. The concept centers on something called the Noor stones. Noor is Arabic for light. So these 99 stones, a few kind of rules in the game: Number one, you don't choose the stone; the stone chooses you. There's a King Arthur element to the storyline, okay. Number two, all of The 99, when they first get their stone, or their power, abuse it; they use it for self-interest. And there's a very strong message in there that when you start abusing your stone, you get taken advantage of by people who will exploit your powers, okay. Number three, the 99 stones all have within them a mechanism that self-updates. Now there are two groups that exist within the Muslim world. Everybody believes the Koran is for all time and all place. Some believe that means that the original interpretation from a couple thousand years ago is what's relevant today. I don't belong there. Then there's a group that believes the Koran is a living, breathing document, and I captured that idea within these stones that self-update. Now the main bad guy, Rughal, does not want these stones to update, so he's trying to get them to stop updating. He can't use the stones, but he can stop them. And by stopping them, he has more of a fascist agenda, where he gets some of The 99 to work for him — they're all wearing cookie-cutter, same color uniforms They're not allowed to individually express who they are and what they are. And he controls them from the top down — whereas when they work for the other side, eventually, when they find out this is the wrong person, they've been manipulated, they actually, each one has a different, colorful kind of dress. And the last point about the 99 Noor stones is this. So The 99 work in teams of three. Why three? A couple of reasons. Number one, we have a thing within Islam that you don't leave a boy and a girl alone together, because the third person is temptation or the devil, right? I think that's there in all cultures, right? But this is not about religion, it's not about proselytizing. There's this very strong social message that needs to get to kind of the deepest crevices of intolerance, and the only way to get there is to kind of play the game. And so this is the way I dealt with it. They work in teams of three: two boys and a girl, two girls and a boy, three boys, three girls, no problem. And the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, also spoke about the importance of the number three in all cultures, so I figure I'm covered. Well ... I got accused in a few blogs that I was actually sent by the Pope to preach the Trinity and Catholicism in the Middle East, so you — (Laughter) you believe who you want. I gave you my version of the story. So here's some of the characters that we have. Mujiba, from Malaysia: her main power is she's able to answer any question. She's the Trivial Pursuit queen, if you want, but when she first gets her power, she starts going on game shows and making money. We have Jabbar from Saudi who starts breaking things when he has the power. Now, Mumita was a fun one to name. Mumita is the destroyer. So the 99 attributes of Allah have the yin and the yang; there's the powerful, the hegemonous, the strong, and there's also the kind, the generous. I'm like, are all the girls going to be kind and merciful and the guys all strong? I'm like, you know what, I've met a few girls who were destroyers in my lifetime, so ... (Laughter) We have Jami from Hungary, who first starts making weapons: He's the technology wiz. Musawwira from Ghana, Hadya from Pakistan, Jaleel from Iran who uses fire. And this is one of my favorites, Al-Batina from Yemen. Al-Batina is the hidden. So Al-Batina is hidden, but she's a superhero. I came home to my wife and I said, "I created a character after you." My wife is a Saudi from Yemeni roots. And she said, "Show me." So I showed this. She said, "That's not me." I said, "Look at the eyes. They're your eyes." (Laughter) So I promised my investors this would not be another made-in-fifth-world-country production. This was going to be Superman, or it wasn't worth my time or their money. So from day one, the people involved in the project, bottom left is Fabian Nicieza, writer for X-Men and Power Rangers. Next to him is Dan Panosian, one of the character creators for the modern-day X-Men. Top right is Stuart Moore, a writer for Iron Man. Next to him is John McCrea, who was an inker for Spiderman. And we entered Western consciousness with a tagline: "Next Ramadan, the world will have new heroes," back in 2005. Now I went to Dubai, to an Arab Thought Foundation Conference, and I was waiting by the coffee for the right journalist. Didn't have a product, but had energy. And I found somebody from The New York Times, and I cornered him, and I pitched him. And I think I scared him — (Laughter) because he basically promised me — we had no product — but he said, "We'll give you a paragraph in the arts section if you'll just go away." (Laughter) So I said, "Great." So I called him up a few weeks afterward. I said, "Hi, Hesa." And he said, "Hi." I said, "Happy New Year." He said, "Thank you. We had a baby." I said, "Congratulations." Like I care, right? "So when's the article coming out?" He said, "Naif, Islam and cartoon? That's not timely. You know, maybe next week, next month, next year, but, you know, it'll come out." So a few days after that, what happens? What happens is the world erupts in the Danish cartoon controversy. I became timely. (Laughter) So flurry of phone calls and emails from The New York Times. Next thing you knew, there's a full page covering us positively, January 22nd, 2006, which changed our lives forever, because anybody Googling Islam and cartoon or Islam and comic, guess what they got; they got me. And The 99 were like superheroes kind of flying out of what was happening around the world. And that led to all kinds of things, from being in curricula in universities and schools to — one of my favorite pictures I have from South Asia, it was a couple of men with long beards and a lot of girls wearing the hijab — it looked like a school. The good news is they're all holding copies of The 99, smiling, and they found me to sign the picture. The bad news is they were all photocopies, so we didn't make a dime in revenue. (Laughter) We've been able to license The 99 comic books into eight languages so far — Chinese, Indonesian, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish. Opened a theme park through a license in Kuwait a year and a half ago called The 99 Village Theme Park — 300,000 square feet, 20 rides, all with our characters: a couple back-to-school licenses in Spain and Turkey. But the biggest thing we've done to date, which is just amazing, is that we've done a 26-episode animated series, which is done for global audiences: in fact, we're already going to be in the U.S. and Turkey, we know. It's 3D CGI, which is going to be very high-quality, written in Hollywood by the writers behind Ben 10 and Spiderman and Star Wars: Clone Wars. In this clip I'm about to show you, which has never been seen in the public before, there is a struggle. Two of the characters, Jabbar, the one with the muscles, and Noora, the one that can use light, are actually wearing the cookie-cutter fascist gray uniform because they're being manipulated. They don't know, OK, and they're trying to get another member of The 99 to join them. So there's a struggle within the team. So if we can get the lights ... ["The 99"] Jabbar: Dana, I can't see where to grab hold. I need more light. What's happening? Dana: There's too much darkness. Rughal: There must be something we can do. Man: I won't send any more commandos in until I know it's safe. Dr. Razem: It's time to go, Miklos. Miklos: Must download file contents. I can't forget auntie. Jabbar: Dana, I can't do this without you. Dana: But I can't help. Jabbar: You can, even if you don't believe in yourself right now. I believe in you. You are Noora the Light. Dana: No. I don't deserve it. I don't deserve anything. Jabbar: Then what about the rest of us? Don't we deserve to be saved? Don't I? Now, tell me which way to go. Dana: That way. Alarm: Threat imminent. Jabbar: Aaaahhh! Miklos: Stay away from me. Jabbar: We're here to help you. Dr. Razem: Don't listen to them. Dana: Miklos, that man is not your friend. Miklos: No. He gave me access, and you want to reboot the [unclear]. No more [unclear]. ["The 99"] Thank you. (Applause) So "The 99" is technology; it's entertainment; it's design. But that's only half the story. As the father of five sons, I worry about who they're going to be using as role models. I worry because all around me, even within my extended family, I see religion being manipulated. As a psychologist, I worry for the world in general, but worry about the perception of how people see themselves in my part of the world. Now, I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm licensed in New York State. I trained at Bellevue Hospital Survivors of Political Torture Program, and I heard one too many stories of people growing up to idolize their leadership, only to end up being tortured by their heroes. And torture's a terrible enough thing as it is, but when it's done by your hero, that just breaks you in so many ways. I left Bellevue, went to business school and started this. Now, one of the things that I refer to when I — about the importance of this message — is that I gave a lecture at the medical school at Kuwait University, where I lecture on the biological basis of behavior, and I gave the students two articles, one from The New York Times and one from New York magazine. And I took away the name of the writer, the name of the [unclear] — everything was gone except the facts. And the first one was about a group called The Party of God, who wanted to ban Valentine's Day. Red was made illegal. Any boys and girls caught flirting would get married off immediately, okay. The second one was about a woman complaining because three minivans with six bearded men pulled up and started interrogating her on the spot for talking to a man who wasn't related to her. And I asked the students in Kuwait where they thought these incidents took place. The first one, they said Saudi Arabia. There was no debate. The second one, they were actually split between Saudi and Afghanistan. What blew their mind was the first one took place in India, it was the party of a Hindu God. The second one took place in upstate New York. It was an Orthodox Jewish community. But what breaks my heart and what's alarming is that in those two interviews, the people around, who were interviewed as well, refer to that behavior as Talibanization. In other words, good Hindus and good Jews don't act this way. This is Islam's influence on Hinduism and Judaism. But what do the students in Kuwait say? They said it's us — and this is dangerous. It's dangerous when a group self-identifies itself as extreme. This is one of my sons, Rayan, who's a Scooby Doo addict. You can tell by the glasses there. He actually called me a meddling kid the other day. (Laughter) But I borrow a lesson that I learned from him. Last summer when we were in our home in New York, he was out in the yard playing in his playhouse. And I was in my office working, and he came in, "Baba, I want you to come with me. I want my toy." "Yes, Rayan, just go away." He left his Scooby Doo in his house. I said, "Go away. I'm working. I'm busy." And what Rayan did then is he sat there, he tapped his foot on the floor, at three and a half, and he looked at me and he said, "Baba, I want you to come with me to my office in my house. I have work to do." (Laughter) (Applause) Rayan reframed the situation and brought himself down to my level. (Laughter) And with The 99, that is what we aim to do. You know, I think that there's a big parallel between bending the crucifix out of shape and creating swastikas. And when I see pictures like this, of parents or uncles who think it's cute to have a little child holding a Koran and having a suicide bomber belt around them to protest something, the hope is by linking enough positive things to the Koran, that one day we can move this child from being proud in the way they're proud there, to that. And I think — I think The 99 can and will achieve its mission. As an undergrad at Tufts University, we were giving away free falafel one day and, you know, it was Middle East Day or something. And people came up and picked up the culturally resonant image of the falafel, ate it and, you know, talked and left. And no two people could disagree about what the word free was and what the word falafel was, behind us, "free falafel." You know. (Laughter) Or so we thought, until a woman came rushing across the campus and dropped her bag on the floor, pointed up to the sign and said, "Who's falafel?" (Laughter) True story. (Laughter) She was actually coming out of an Amnesty International meeting. (Laughter) Just today, D.C. Comics announced the cover of our upcoming crossover. On that cover you see Batman, Superman and a fully-clothed Wonder Woman with our Saudi member of The 99, our Emirati member and our Libyan member. On April 26, 2010, President Barack Obama said that of all the initiatives since his now famous Cairo speech — in which he reached out to the Muslim world — the most innovative was that The 99 reach back out to the Justice League of America. We live in a world in which the most culturally innocuous symbols, like the falafel, can be misunderstood because of baggage, and where religion can be twisted and purposefully made where it's not supposed to be by others. In a world like that, they'll always be a job for Superman and The 99. Thank you very much. (Applause)