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Your brain on improv

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

TEDxMidAtlantic

So I am a surgeon who studies creativity, and I have never had a patient tell me, "I really want you to be creative during surgery," and so I guess there's a little bit of irony to it. I will say though that, after having done surgery a lot, it's similar to playing a musical instrument. And for me, this deep and enduring fascination with sound is what led me to both be a surgeon and to study the science of sound, particularly music. I'm going to talk over the next few minutes about my career in terms of how I'm able to study music and try to grapple with all these questions of how the brain is able to be creative. I've done most of this work at Johns Hopkins University, and at the National Institute of Health where I was previously. I'll go over some science experiments and cover three musical experiments. I will start off by playing a video for you. This video is of Keith Jarrett, who's a well-known jazz improviser and probably the most well-known, iconic example of someone who takes improvisation to a higher level. And he'll improvise entire concerts off the top of his head, and he'll never play it exactly the same way again, so as a form of intense creativity, I think this is a great example. And so why don't we go and click the video. (Music) (Music ends) It's really a remarkable thing that happens there. I've always as a listener, as a fan, I listen to that, and I'm astounded. I think — how can this possibly be? How can the brain generate that much information, that much music, spontaneously? And so I set out with this concept, scientifically, that artistic creativity, it's magical, but it's not magic, meaning that it's a product of the brain. There's not too many brain-dead people creating art. With this notion that artistic creativity is in fact a neurologic product, I took this thesis that we could study it just like we study any other complex neurologic process, and there are subquestions that I put there. Is it possible to study creativity scientifically? And I think that's a good question. And I'll tell you that most scientific studies of music, they're very dense, and when you go through them, it's very hard to recognize the music in it. In fact, they seem to be unmusical entirely and to miss the point of the music. This brings the second question: Why should scientists study creativity? Maybe we're not the right people to do it. (Laughter) Well it may be, but I will say that, from a scientific perspective, we talked a lot about innovation today, the science of innovation, how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate is in its infancy, and truly, we know very little about how we are able to be creative. I think that we're going to see, over the next 10, 20, 30 years, a real science of creativity that's burgeoning and is going to flourish, Because we now have new methods that can enable us to take this process like complex jazz improvisation, and study it rigorously. So it gets down to the brain. All of us have this remarkable brain, which is poorly understood, to say the least. I think that neuroscientists have more questions than answers, and I'm not going to give you answers today, just ask a lot of questions. And that's what I do in my lab. I ask questions about what is the brain doing to enable us to do this. This is the main method that I use. This is functional MRI. If you've been in an MRI scanner, it's very much the same, but this one is outfitted in a special way to not just take pictures of your brain, but to also take pictures of active areas of the brain. The way that's done is by the following: There's something called BOLD imaging, which is Blood Oxygen Level Dependent imaging. When you're in an fMRI scanner, you're in a big magnet that's aligning your molecules in certain areas. When an area of the brain is active, meaning a neural area is active, it gets blood flow shunted to that area. That blood flow causes an increase in local blood to that area with a deoxyhemoglobin change in concentration. Deoxyhemoglobin can be detected by MRI, whereas oxyhemoglobin can't. So through this method of inference — and we're measuring blood flow, not neural activity — we say that an area of the brain that's getting more blood was active during a particular task, and that's the crux of how fMRI works. And it's been used since the '90s to study really complex processes. I'm going to review a study that I did, which was jazz in an fMRI scanner. It was done with a colleague, Alan Braun, at the NIH. This is a short video of how we did this project. (Video) Charles Limb: This is a plastic MIDI piano keyboard that we use for the jazz experiments. And it's a 35-key keyboard designed to fit both inside the scanner, be magnetically safe, have minimal interference that would contribute to any artifact, and have this cushion so that it can rest on the players' legs while they're lying down in the scanner, playing on their back. It works like this — this doesn't actually produce any sound. It sends out what's called a MIDI signal — or a Musical Instrument Digital Interface — through these wires into the box and then the computer, which then trigger high-quality piano samples like this. (Music) (Music) (Music ends) OK, so it works. And so through this piano keyboard, we have the means to take a musical process and study it. So what do you do now that you have this cool piano keyboard? You can't just say, "It's great we have a keyboard." We have to come up with a scientific experiment. The experiment really rests on the following: What happens in the brain during something that's memorized and over-learned, and what happens in the brain during something that is spontaneously generated, or improvised, in a way that's matched motorically and in terms of lower-level sensory motor features? I have here what we call the paradigms. There's a scale paradigm, which is playing a scale up and down, memorized, then there's improvising on a scale, quarter notes, metronome, right hand — scientifically very safe, but musically really boring. Then there's the bottom one, which is called the jazz paradigm. So we brought professional jazz players to the NIH, and we had them memorize this piece of music on the lower-left, which is what you heard me playing — and we had them improvise to the same chord changes. And if you can hit that lower-right sound icon, that's an example of what was recorded in the scanner. (Music) (Music ends) In the end, it's not the most natural environment, but they're able to play real music. And I've listened to that solo 200 times, and I still like it. And the musicians were comfortable in the end. We first measured the number of notes. Were they playing more notes when they were improvising? That was not what was going on. And then we looked at the brain activity. I will try to condense this for you. These are contrast maps that are showing subtractions between what changes when you're improvising vs. when you're doing something memorized. In red is an area that's active in the prefrontal cortex, the frontal lobe of the brain, and in blue is this area that was deactivated. So we had this focal area called the medial prefrontal cortex that went way up in activity. We had this broad patch of area called the lateral prefrontal cortex that went way down in activity, I'll summarize that for you. These are multifunctional areas of the brain, these are not the jazz areas of the brain. They do a whole host of things that have to do with self-reflection, introspection, working memory etc. Really, consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe. But we have this combination of an area that's thought to be involved in self-monitoring, turning off, and this area that's thought to be autobiographical, or self-expressive, turning on. We think, at least in this preliminary — it's one study; it's probably wrong, but it's one study — (Laughter) we think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you should have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on, and a big area shuts off, so that you're not inhibited, you're willing to make mistakes, so that you're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses. Now a lot of people know that music is not always a solo activity — sometimes it's done communicatively. The next question was: What happens when musicians are trading back and forth, something called "trading fours," which is something they do normally in a jazz experiment. So this is a 12-bar blues, and I've broken it down into four-bar groups, so you would know how you would trade. We brought a musician into the scanner, same way, had them memorize this melody then had another musician out in the control room trading back and forth interactively. So this is a musician, Mike Pope, one of the world's best bassists and a fantastic piano player. (Music) He's now playing the piece that we just saw a little better than I wrote it. (Video) CL: Mike, come on in. Mike Pope: May the force be with you. Nurse: Nothing in your pockets, Mike? MP: No. Nothing's in my pockets. CL: You have to have the right attitude to agree to do it. (Laughter) It's kind of fun, actually. (Music) Now we're playing back and forth. He's in there. You can see his legs up there. (Music) And then I'm in the control room here, playing back and forth. (Music) (Music ends) (Video) Mike Pope: This is a pretty good representation of what it's like. And it's good that it's not too quick. The fact that we do it over and over again lets you acclimate to your surroundings. So the hardest thing for me was the kinesthetic thing, looking at my hands through two mirrors, laying on my back, and not able to move at all except for my hand. That was challenging. But again — there were moments, for sure — (Laughter) there were moments of real, honest-to-God musical interplay, for sure. CL: At this point, I'll take a few moments. So what you're seeing here — and I'm doing a cardinal sin in science, which is to show you preliminary data. This is one subject's data. This is, in fact, Mike Pope's data. So what am I showing you here? When he was trading fours with me, improvising vs. memorized, his language areas lit up, his Broca's area, in the inferior frontal gyrus on the left. He had it also homologous on the right. This is an area thought to be involved in expressive communication. This whole notion that music is a language — maybe there's a neurologic basis to it after all, and we can see it when two musicians are having a musical conversation. So we've done this on eight subjects now, and we're getting all the data together, hopefully we'll have something to say about it meaningfully. Now when I think about improvisation and the language, what's next? Rap, of course, rap — freestyle. I've always been fascinated by freestyle. And let's play this video. (Video) Mos Def: Brown skin I be, standing five-ten I be Rockin' it when I be, in your vicinity Whole-style synergy, recognize symmetry Go and try to injure me, broke 'em down chemically Ain't the number 10 MC, talk about how been I be Styled it like Kennedy, late like a 10 to three When I say when I be, girls say bend that key cut CL: So there's a lot of analogy between what takes place in freestyle rap and jazz. There are a lot of correlates between the two forms of music, I think, in different time periods, in lot of ways, rap serves the same social function that jazz used to serve. So how do you study rap scientifically? And my colleagues think I'm crazy, but I think it's very viable. This is what you do: You have a freestyle artist come and memorize a rap that you write for them, that they've never heard before, and then you have them freestyle. So I told my lab members that I would rap for TED, and they said, "No, you won't." And then I thought — (Laughter) (Applause) But here's the thing. With this big screen, you can all rap with me. OK? So what we had them do was memorize this lower-left sound icon, please. This is the control condition. This is what they memorized. Computer: Memory, thump. CL: Thump of the beat in a known repeat Rhythm and rhyme, they make me complete The climb is sublime when I'm on the mic Spittin' rhymes that hit you like a lightning strike Computer: Search. CL: I search for the truth in this eternal quest My passion's not fashion, you can see how I'm dressed Psychopathic words in my head appear Whisper these lyrics only I can hear Computer: Art. CL: The art of discovering and that which is hovering Inside the mind of those unconfined All of these words keep pouring out like rain I need a mad scientist to check my brain Computer: Stop. (Applause) I guarantee you that will never happen again. (Laughter) So now, what's great about these free-stylers, they will get cued different words. They don't know what's coming, but they'll hear something off the cuff. Go hit that right sound icon, there will be cued three square words: like, not and head. He doesn't know what's coming. Computer: Like. Freestyler: I'm like some kind of extraterrestrial, celestial scene Back in the days, I used to sit in pyramids and meditate With two microphones — Computer: Head hovering over my head See if I could still listen, spittin' off the sound See what you grinning I teach the children in the back of the classroom About the message of apocalyptical Computer: Not. Not really though, 'cause I've got to keep it simple instrumental Detrimental playing Super Mario boxes [unclear] hip hop Computer: Stop. CL: It's an incredible thing that's taking place. It's doing something neurologically remarkable. Whether or not you like the music is irrelevant. Creatively speaking, it's just a phenomenal thing. This is a short video of how we do this in a scanner. [fMRI of Hip-Hop Rap] (Laughter) (Video) CL: We're here with Emmanuel. CL: That was recorded in the scanner, by the way. (Video) CL: That's Emmanuel in the scanner. He's just memorized a rhyme for us. [Control Condition Memorized Verses] Emmanuel: Top of the beat with no repeat Rhythm and rhyme make me complete Climb is sublime when I'm on the mic Spittin' rhymes that'll hit you like a lightning strike Computer: Search. I search for the truth in this eternal quest I'm passing on fashion; you can see how I'm dressed CL: I'm going to stop that there; so what do we see in his brain? This is four rappers' brains. And we do see language areas lighting up, but then, eyes closed — when you are freestyling vs. memorizing, you've got major visual areas lighting up. You've got major cerebellar activity, which is involved in motor coordination. You have heightened brain activity when you're doing a comparable task, when that one task is creative and the other task is memorized. It's very preliminary, but I think it's kind of cool. To conclude, we've got a lot of questions to ask, and like I said, we'll ask questions here, not answer them. But we want to get at the root of what is creative genius neurologically, and I think, with these methods, we're getting close. And I think, hopefully in the next 10, 20 years, you'll see real, meaningful studies that say science has to catch up to art, and maybe we're starting now to get there. Thank you for your time, I appreciate it. (Applause)

A test that finds 3x more breast tumors, and why it's not available to you

{0: 'Deborah Rhodes is an expert at managing breast-cancer risk. The director of the Mayo Clinic’s Executive Health Program is now testing a gamma camera that can see tumors that get missed by mammography.'}

TEDWomen 2010

There are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography — women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it doesn't work well at all. Do you know which group you're in? If you don't, you're not alone. Because the breast has become a very political organ. The truth has become lost in all the rhetoric coming from the press, politicians, radiologists and medical imaging companies. I will do my best this morning to tell you what I think is the truth. But first, my disclosures. I am not a breast cancer survivor. I'm not a radiologist. I don't have any patents, and I've never received any money from a medical imaging company, and I am not seeking your vote. (Laughter) What I am is a doctor of internal medicine who became passionately interested in this topic about 10 years ago when a patient asked me a question. She came to see me after discovering a breast lump. Her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s. She and I were both very pregnant at that time, and my heart just ached for her, imagining how afraid she must be. Fortunately, her lump proved to be benign. But she asked me a question: how confident was I that I would find a tumor early on her mammogram if she developed one? So I studied her mammogram, and I reviewed the radiology literature, and I was shocked to discover that, in her case, our chances of finding a tumor early on the mammogram were less than the toss of a coin. You may recall a year ago when a firestorm erupted after the United States Preventive Services Task Force reviewed the world's mammography screening literature and issued a guideline recommending against screening mammograms in women in their 40s. Now everybody rushed to criticize the Task Force, even though most of them weren't in anyway familiar with the mammography studies. It took the Senate just 17 days to ban the use of the guidelines in determining insurance coverage. Radiologists were outraged by the guidelines. The pre-eminent mammographer in the United States issued the following quote to the Washington Post. The radiologists were, in turn, criticized for protecting their own financial self-interest. But in my view, the radiologists are heroes. There's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms, and that's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret, and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause. But that very fact is telling. Where there is this much legal smoke, there is likely to be some fire. The factor most responsible for that fire is breast density. Breast density refers to the relative amount of fat — pictured here in yellow — versus connective and epithelial tissues — pictured in pink. And that proportion is primarily genetically determined. Two-thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue, which is why mammography doesn't work as well in them. And although breast density generally declines with age, up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause. So how do you know if your breasts are dense? Well, you need to read the details of your mammography report. Radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram. If the breast is less than 25 percent dense, that's called fatty-replaced. The next category is scattered fibroglandular densities, followed by heterogeneously dense and extremely dense. And breasts that fall into these two categories are considered dense. The problem with breast density is that it's truly the wolf in sheep's clothing. Both tumors and dense breast tissue appear white on a mammogram, and the X-ray often can't distinguish between the two. So it's easy to see this tumor in the upper part of this fatty breast. But imagine how difficult it would be to find that tumor in this dense breast. That's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts, but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts. Now it's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer, but it turns out that it's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer. It's a stronger risk factor than having a mother or a sister with breast cancer. At the time my patient posed this question to me, breast density was an obscure topic in the radiology literature, and very few women having mammograms, or the physicians ordering them, knew about this. But what else could I offer her? Mammograms have been around since the 1960's, and it's changed very little. There have been surprisingly few innovations, until digital mammography was approved in 2000. Digital mammography is still an X-ray of the breast, but the images can be stored and manipulated digitally, just like we can with a digital camera. The U.S. has invested four billion dollars converting to digital mammography equipment, and what have we gained from that investment? In a study funded by over 25 million taxpayer dollars, digital mammography was found to be no better over all than traditional mammography, and in fact, it was worse in older women. But it was better in one group, and that was women under 50 who were pre-menopausal and had dense breasts, and in those women, digital mammography found twice as many cancers, but it still only found 60 percent. So digital mammography has been a giant leap forward for manufacturers of digital mammography equipment, but it's been a very small step forward for womankind. What about ultrasound? Ultrasound generates more biopsies that are unnecessary relative to other technologies, so it's not widely used. And MRI is exquisitely sensitive for finding tumors, but it's also very expensive. If we think about disruptive technology, we see an almost ubiquitous pattern of the technology getting smaller and less expensive. Think about iPods compared to stereos. But it's the exact opposite in health care. The machines get ever bigger and ever more expensive. Screening the average young woman with an MRI is kind of like driving to the grocery store in a Hummer. It's just way too much equipment. One MRI scan costs 10 times what a digital mammogram costs. And sooner or later, we're going to have to accept the fact that health care innovation can't always come at a much higher price. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker on innovation, and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual's genius. Rather, big ideas can be orchestrated, if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they don't ordinarily talk about. It's like the essence of TED. He quotes one innovator who says, "The only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick." (Laughter) This makes no sense, because physicians have all kinds of problems that they don't realize have solutions. And physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they don't realize are problems. Now, take a look at this cartoon that accompanied Gladwell's article, and tell me if you see something disturbing about this depiction of innovative thinkers. (Laughter) So if you will allow me a little creative license, I will tell you the story of the serendipitous collision of my patient's problem with a physicist's solution. Shortly after her visit, I was introduced to a nuclear physicist at Mayo named Michael O'Conner, who was a specialist in cardiac imaging, something I had nothing to do with. And he happened to tell me about a conference he'd just returned from in Israel, where they were talking about a new type of gamma detector. Now gamma imaging has been around for a long time to image the heart, and it had even been tried to image the breast. But the problem was that the gamma detectors were these huge, bulky tubes, and they were filled with these scintillating crystals, and you just couldn't get them close enough around the breast to find small tumors. But the potential advantage was that gamma rays, unlike X-rays, are not influenced by breast density. But this technology could not find tumors when they're small, and finding a small tumor is critical for survival. If you can find a tumor when it's less than a centimeter, survival exceeds 90 percent, but drops off rapidly as tumor size increases. But Michael told me about a new type of gamma detector that he'd seen, and this is it. It's made not of a bulky tube, but of a thin layer of a semiconductor material that serves as the gamma detector. And I started talking to him about this problem with breast density, and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors. So after putting together a grid of these cubes with tape — (Laughter) — Michael hacked off the X-ray plate of a mammography machine that was about to be thrown out, and we attached the new detector, and we decided to call this machine Molecular Breast Imaging, or MBI. This is an image from our first patient. And you can see, using the old gamma technology, that it just looked like noise. But using our new detector, we could begin to see the outline of a tumor. So here we were, a nuclear physicist, an internist, soon joined by Carrie Hruska, a biomedical engineer, and two radiologists, and we were trying to take on the entrenched world of mammography with a machine that was held together by duct tape. To say that we faced high doses of skepticism in those early years is just a huge understatement, but we were so convinced that we might be able to make this work that we chipped away with incremental modifications to this system. This is our current detector. And you can see that it looks a lot different. The duct tape is gone, and we added a second detector on top of the breast, which has further improved our tumor detection. So how does this work? The patient receives an injection of a radio tracer that's taken up by rapidly proliferating tumor cells, but not by normal cells, and this is the key difference from mammography. Mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue, and we've seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast. But MBI exploits the different molecular behavior of tumors, and therefore, it's impervious to breast density. After the injection, the patient's breast is placed between the detectors. And if you've ever had a mammogram — if you're old enough to have had a mammogram — you know what comes next: pain. You may be surprised to know that mammography is the only radiologic study that's regulated by federal law, and the law requires that the equivalent of a 40-pound car battery come down on your breast during this study. But with MBI, we use just light, pain-free compression. (Applause) And the detector then transmits the image to the computer. So here's an example. You can see, on the right, a mammogram showing a faint tumor, the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue. But the MBI image shows that tumor much more clearly, as well as a second tumor, which profoundly influence that patient's surgical options. In this example, although the mammogram found one tumor, we were able to demonstrate three discrete tumors — one is small as three millimeters. Our big break came in 2004. After we had demonstrated that we could find small tumors, we used these images to submit a grant to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. And we were elated when they took a chance on a team of completely unknown investigators and funded us to study 1,000 women with dense breasts, comparing a screening mammogram to an MBI. Of the tumors that we found, mammography found only 25 percent of those tumors. MBI found 83 percent. Here's an example from that screening study. The digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue, but the MBI shows an area of intense uptake, which correlated with a two-centimeter tumor. In this case, a one-centimeter tumor. And in this case, a 45-year-old medical secretary at Mayo, who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was very young, wanted to enroll in our study. And her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue, but her MBI showed an area of worrisome uptake, which we can also see on a color image. And this corresponded to a tumor the size of a golf ball. But fortunately it was removed before it had spread to her lymph nodes. So now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast, we had to solve one very important problem. We had to figure out how to lower the radiation dose, and we have spent the last three years making modifications to every aspect of the imaging system to allow this. And I'm very happy to report that we're now using a dose of radiation that is equivalent to the effective dose from one digital mammogram. And at this low dose, we're continuing this screening study, and this image from three weeks ago in a 67-year-old woman shows a normal digital mammogram, but an MBI image showing an uptake that proved to be a large cancer. So this is not just young women that it's benefiting. It's also older women with dense tissue. And we're now routinely using one-fifth the radiation dose that's used in any other type of gamma technology. MBI generates four images per breast. MRI generates over a thousand. It takes a radiologist years of specialty training to become expert in differentiating the normal anatomic detail from the worrisome finding. But I suspect even the non-radiologists in the room can find the tumor on the MBI image. But this is why MBI is so potentially disruptive — it's as accurate as MRI, it's far less complex to interpret, and it's a fraction of the cost. But you can understand why there may be forces in the breast-imaging world who prefer the status quo. After achieving what we felt were remarkable results, our manuscript was rejected by four journals. After the fourth rejection, we requested reconsideration of the manuscript, because we strongly suspected that one of the reviewers who had rejected it had a financial conflict of interest in a competing technology. Our manuscript was then accepted and will be published later this month in the journal Radiology. (Applause) We still need to complete the screening study using the low dose, and then our findings will need to be replicated at other institutions, and this could take five or more years. If this technology is widely adopted, I will not benefit financially in any way, and that is very important to me, because it allows me to continue to tell you the truth. But I recognize — (Applause) I recognize that the adoption of this technology will depend as much on economic and political forces as it will on the soundness of the science. The MBI unit has now been FDA approved, but it's not yet widely available. So until something is available for women with dense breasts, there are things that you should know to protect yourself. First, know your density. Ninety percent of women don't, and 95 percent of women don't know that it increases your breast cancer risk. The State of Connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram. I was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast-imaging last week in Chicago, and I was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is. Of course we should. And if you don't know, please ask your doctor or read the details of your mammography report. Second, if you're pre-menopausal, try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle, when breast density is relatively lower. Third, if you notice a persistent change in your breast, insist on additional imaging. And fourth and most important, the mammography debate will rage on, but I do believe that all women 40 and older should have an annual mammogram. Mammography isn't perfect, but it's the only test that's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer. But this mortality banner is the very sword which mammography's most ardent advocates use to deter innovation. Some women who develop breast cancer die from it many years later, and most women, thankfully, survive. So it takes 10 or more years for any screening method to demonstrate a reduction in mortality from breast cancer. Mammography's the only one that's been around long enough to have a chance of making that claim. It is time for us to accept both the extraordinary successes of mammography and the limitations. We need to individualize screening based on density. For women without dense breasts, mammography is the best choice. But for women with dense breasts; we shouldn't abandon screening altogether, we need to offer them something better. The babies that we were carrying when my patient first asked me this question are now both in middle school, and the answer has been so slow to come. She's given me her blessing to share this story with you. After undergoing biopsies that further increased her risk for cancer and losing her sister to cancer, she made the difficult decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy. We can and must do better, not just in time for her granddaughters and my daughters, but in time for you. Thank you. (Applause)

The 3 A's of awesome

{0: "Neil Pasricha is one of the world's leading authorities on intentional living."}

TEDxToronto 2010

So the Awesome story: It begins about 40 years ago, when my mom and my dad came to Canada. My mom left Nairobi, Kenya. My dad left a small village outside of Amritsar, India. And they got here in the late 1960s. They settled in a shady suburb about an hour east of Toronto, and they settled into a new life. They saw their first dentist, they ate their first hamburger, and they had their first kids. My sister and I grew up here, and we had quiet, happy childhoods. We had close family, good friends, a quiet street. We grew up taking for granted a lot of the things that my parents couldn't take for granted when they grew up — things like power always on in our houses, things like schools across the street and hospitals down the road and popsicles in the backyard. We grew up, and we grew older. I went to high school. I graduated. I moved out of the house, I got a job, I found a girl, I settled down — and I realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a Cat Stevens' song — (Laughter) but life was pretty good. Life was pretty good. 2006 was a great year. Under clear blue skies in July in the wine region of Ontario, I got married, surrounded by 150 family and friends. 2007 was a great year. I graduated from school, and I went on a road trip with two of my closest friends. Here's a picture of me and my friend, Chris, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. We actually saw seals out of our car window, and we pulled over to take a quick picture of them and then blocked them with our giant heads. (Laughter) So you can't actually see them, but it was breathtaking, believe me. (Laughter) 2008 and 2009 were a little tougher. I know that they were tougher for a lot of people, not just me. First of all, the news was so heavy. It's still heavy now, and it was heavy before that, but when you flipped open a newspaper, when you turned on the TV, it was about ice caps melting, wars going on around the world, earthquakes, hurricanes and an economy that was wobbling on the brink of collapse, and then eventually did collapse, and so many of us losing our homes, or our jobs, or our retirements, or our livelihoods. 2008, 2009 were heavy years for me for another reason, too. I was going through a lot of personal problems at the time. My marriage wasn't going well, and we just were growing further and further apart. One day my wife came home from work and summoned the courage, through a lot of tears, to have a very honest conversation. And she said, "I don't love you anymore," and it was one of the most painful things I'd ever heard and certainly the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever heard, until only a month later, when I heard something even more heartbreaking. My friend Chris, who I just showed you a picture of, had been battling mental illness for some time. And for those of you whose lives have been touched by mental illness, you know how challenging it can be. I spoke to him on the phone at 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday night. We talked about the TV show we watched that evening. And Monday morning, I found out that he disappeared. Very sadly, he took his own life. And it was a really heavy time. And as these dark clouds were circling me, and I was finding it really, really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow. So I came home from work one night, and I logged onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.com. I was trying to remind myself of the simple, universal, little pleasures that we all love, but we just don't talk about enough — things like waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking, being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding, wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer, or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line — even if you were last at the other line, swoop right in there. (Laughter) And slowly over time, I started putting myself in a better mood. I mean, 50,000 blogs are started a day, and so my blog was just one of those 50,000. And nobody read it except for my mom. Although I should say that my traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 percent when she forwarded it to my dad. (Laughter) And then I got excited when it started getting tens of hits, and then I started getting excited when it started getting dozens and then hundreds and then thousands and then millions. It started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then I got a phone call, and the voice at the other end of the line said, "You've just won the Best Blog In the World award." I was like, that sounds totally fake. (Laughter) (Applause) Which African country do you want me to wire all my money to? (Laughter) But it turns out, I jumped on a plane, and I ended up walking a red carpet between Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart. And I went onstage to accept a Webby award for Best Blog. And the surprise and just the amazement of that was only overshadowed by my return to Toronto, when, in my inbox, 10 literary agents were waiting for me to talk about putting this into a book. Flash-forward to the next year and "The Book of Awesome" has now been number one on the bestseller list for 20 straight weeks. (Applause) But look, I said I wanted to do three things with you today. I said I wanted to tell you the Awesome story, I wanted to share with you the three As of Awesome, and I wanted to leave you with a closing thought. So let's talk about those three As. Over the last few years, I haven't had that much time to really think. But lately I have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself: "What is it over the last few years that helped me grow my website, but also grow myself?" And I've summarized those things, for me personally, as three As. They are Attitude, Awareness and Authenticity. I'd love to just talk about each one briefly. So Attitude: Look, we're all going to get lumps, and we're all going to get bumps. None of us can predict the future, but we do know one thing about it and that's that it ain't gonna go according to plan. We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages, father-daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room, but between those high highs, we may also have some lumps and some bumps too. It's sad, and it's not pleasant to talk about, but your husband might leave you, your girlfriend could cheat, your headaches might be more serious than you thought, or your dog could get hit by a car on the street. It's not a happy thought, but your kids could get mixed up in gangs or bad scenes. Your mom could get cancer, your dad could get mean. And there are times in life when you will be tossed in the well, too, with twists in your stomach and with holes in your heart, and when that bad news washes over you, and when that pain sponges and soaks in, I just really hope you feel like you've always got two choices. One, you can swirl and twirl and gloom and doom forever, or two, you can grieve and then face the future with newly sober eyes. Having a great attitude is about choosing option number two, and choosing, no matter how difficult it is, no matter what pain hits you, choosing to move forward and move on and take baby steps into the future. The second "A" is Awareness. I love hanging out with three year-olds. I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. I love the way that they can stare at a bug crossing the sidewalk. I love the way that they'll stare slack-jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes and a mitt on their hand, soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the peanuts and the smell of the hotdogs. I love the way that they'll spend hours picking dandelions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for Thanksgiving dinner. I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. Having a sense of awareness is just about embracing your inner three year-old. Because you all used to be three years old. That three-year-old boy is still part of you. That three-year-old girl is still part of you. They're in there. And being aware is just about remembering that you saw everything you've seen for the first time once, too. So there was a time when it was your first time ever hitting a string of green lights on the way home from work. There was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt the bakery air, or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jacket pocket and said, "Found money." The last "A" is Authenticity. And for this one, I want to tell you a quick story. Let's go all the way back to 1932 when, on a peanut farm in Georgia, a little baby boy named Roosevelt Grier was born. Roosevelt Grier, or Rosey Grier, as people used to call him, grew up and grew into a 300-pound, six-foot-five linebacker in the NFL. He's number 76 in the picture. Here he is pictured with the "fearsome foursome." These were four guys on the L.A. Rams in the 1960s you did not want to go up against. They were tough football players doing what they love, which was crushing skulls and separating shoulders on the football field. But Rosey Grier also had another passion. In his deeply authentic self, he also loved needlepoint. (Laughter) He loved knitting. He said that it calmed him down, it relaxed him, it took away his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks. That's what he said. I mean, he loved it so much that, after he retired from the NFL, he started joining clubs. And he even put out a book called "Rosey Grier's Needlepoint for Men." (Laughter) (Applause) It's a great cover. If you notice, he's actually needlepointing his own face. (Laughter) And so what I love about this story is that Rosey Grier is just such an authentic person, and that's what authenticity is all about. It's just about being you and being cool with that. And I think when you're authentic, you end up following your heart, and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy. You meet people that you like talking to. You go places you've dreamt about. And you end you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled. So those are the three A's. For the closing thought, I want to take you all the way back to my parents coming to Canada. I don't know what it would feel like coming to a new country when you're in your mid-20s. I don't know, because I never did it, but I would imagine that it would take a great attitude. I would imagine that you'd have to be pretty aware of your surroundings and appreciating the small wonders that you're starting to see in your new world. And I think you'd have to be really authentic, you'd have to be really true to yourself in order to get through what you're being exposed to. I'd like to pause my TEDTalk for about 10 seconds right now, because you don't get many opportunities in life to do something like this, and my parents are sitting in the front row. So I wanted to ask them to, if they don't mind, stand up. And I just wanted to say thank you to you guys. (Applause) When I was growing up, my dad used to love telling the story of his first day in Canada. And it's a great story, because what happened was he got off the plane at the Toronto airport, and he was welcomed by a non-profit group, which I'm sure someone in this room runs. (Laughter) And this non-profit group had a big welcoming lunch for all the new immigrants to Canada. And my dad says he got off the plane and he went to this lunch and there was this huge spread. There was bread, there was those little, mini dill pickles, there was olives, those little white onions. There was rolled up turkey cold cuts, rolled up ham cold cuts, rolled up roast beef cold cuts and little cubes of cheese. There was tuna salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches. There was lasagna, there was casseroles, there was brownies, there was butter tarts, and there was pies, lots and lots of pies. And when my dad tells the story, he says, "The craziest thing was, I'd never seen any of that before, except bread. (Laughter) I didn't know what was meat, what was vegetarian. I was eating olives with pie. (Laughter) I just couldn't believe how many things you can get here." (Laughter) When I was five years old, my dad used to take me grocery shopping, and he would stare in wonder at the little stickers that are on the fruits and vegetables. He would say, "Look, can you believe they have a mango here from Mexico? They've got an apple here from South Africa. Can you believe they've got a date from Morocco?" He's like, "Do you know where Morocco even is?" And I'd say, "I'm five. I don't even know where I am. Is this A&P?" And he'd say, "I don't know where Morocco is either, but let's find out." And so we'd buy the date, and we'd go home. And we'd actually take an atlas off the shelf, and we'd flip through until we found this mysterious country. And when we did, my dad would say, "Can you believe someone climbed a tree over there, picked this thing off it, put it in a truck, drove it all the way to the docks and then sailed it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and then put it in another truck and drove that all the way to a tiny grocery store just outside our house, so they could sell it to us for 25 cents?" And I'd say, "I don't believe that." And he's like, "I don't believe it either. Things are amazing. There's just so many things to be happy about." When I stop to think about it, he's absolutely right. There are so many things to be happy about. We are the only species on the only life-giving rock in the entire universe that we've ever seen, capable of experiencing so many of these things. I mean, we're the only ones with architecture and agriculture. We're the only ones with jewelry and democracy. We've got airplanes, highway lanes, interior design and horoscope signs. We've got fashion magazines, house party scenes. You can watch a horror movie with monsters. You can go to a concert and hear guitars jamming. We've got books, buffets and radio waves, wedding brides and rollercoaster rides. You can sleep in clean sheets. You can go to the movies and get good seats. You can smell bakery air, walk around with rain hair, pop bubble wrap or take an illegal nap. We've got all that, but we've only got 100 years to enjoy it. And that's the sad part. The cashiers at your grocery store, the foreman at your plant, the guy tailgating you home on the highway, the telemarketer calling you during dinner, every teacher you've ever had, everyone that's ever woken up beside you, every politician in every country, every actor in every movie, every single person in your family, everyone you love, everyone in this room and you will be dead in a hundred years. Life is so great that we only get such a short time to experience and enjoy all those tiny little moments that make it so sweet. And that moment is right now, and those moments are counting down, and those moments are always, always, always fleeting. You will never be as young as you are right now. And that's why I believe that if you live your life with a great attitude, choosing to move forward and move on whenever life deals you a blow, living with a sense of awareness of the world around you, embracing your inner three year-old and seeing the tiny joys that make life so sweet and being authentic to yourself, being you and being cool with that, letting your heart lead you and putting yourself in experiences that satisfy you, then I think you'll live a life that is rich and is satisfying, and I think you'll live a life that is truly awesome. Thank you.

A realistic vision for world peace

{0: 'Jody Williams won a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to eradicate landmines. Now she’s teaming up with five other female peace laureates to empower women to fight violence, injustice and inequality.'}

TEDWomen 2010

I'm actually here to make a challenge to people. I know there have been many challenges made to people. The one I'm going to make is that it is time for us to reclaim what peace really means. Peace is not "Kumbaya, my Lord." Peace is not the dove and the rainbow — as lovely as they are. When I see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove, I think of personal serenity. I think of meditation. I do not think about what I consider to be peace, which is sustainable peace with justice and equality. It is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives, where these people have enough access to education and health care, so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear. This is called human security. And I am not a complete pacifist like some of my really, really heavy-duty, non-violent friends, like Mairead McGuire. I understand that humans are so "messed up" — to use a nice word, because I promised my mom I'd stop using the F-bomb in public. And I'm trying harder and harder. Mom, I'm really trying. We need a little bit of police; we need a little bit of military, but for defense. We need to redefine what makes us secure in this world. It is not arming our country to the teeth. It is not getting other countries to arm themselves to the teeth with the weapons that we produce and we sell them. It is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure, to make the people of the world secure. I was thinking about the recent ongoings in Congress, where the president is offering 8.4 billion dollars to try to get the START vote. I certainly support the START vote. But he's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of nuclear weapons. Do you know the figure that the U.N. talks about for fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals is 80 billion dollars? Just that little bit of money, which to me, I wish it was in my bank account — it's not, but ... In global terms, it's a little bit of money. But it's going to modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime, unless we get up off our ... and take action to make it happen, unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security. It is saving the tigers. It is stopping the tar sands. It is having access to medical equipment that can actually tell who does have cancer. It is all of those things. It is using our money for all of those things. It is about action. I was in Hiroshima a couple of weeks ago, and His Holiness — we're sitting there in front of thousands of people in the city, and there were about eight of us Nobel laureates. And he's a bad guy. He's like a bad kid in church. We're staring at everybody, waiting our turn to speak, and he leans over to me, and he says, "Jody, I'm a Buddhist monk." I said, "Yes, Your Holiness. Your robe gives it away." (Laughter) He said, "You know that I kind of like meditation, and I pray." I said, "That's good. That's good. We need that in the world. I don't follow that, but that's cool." And he says, "But I have become skeptical. I do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this world. I think what we need is action." His Holiness, in his robes, is my new action hero. I spoke with Aung Sun Suu Kyi a couple of days ago. As most of you know, she's a hero for democracy in her country, Burma. You probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20 years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy. She was just released a couple of weeks ago, and we're very concerned to see how long she will be free, because she is already out in the streets in Rangoon, agitating for change. She is already out in the streets, working with the party to try to rebuild it. But I talked to her for a range of issues. But one thing that I want to say, because it's similar to what His Holiness said. She said, "You know, we have a long road to go to finally get democracy in my country. But I don't believe in hope without endeavor. I don't believe in the hope of change, unless we take action to make it so." Here's another woman hero of mine. She's my friend, Dr. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She has been in exile for the last year and a half. You ask her where she lives — where does she live in exile? She says the airports of the world. She is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections. And instead of going home, she conferred with all the other women that she works with, who said to her, "Stay out. We need you out. We need to be able to talk to you out there, so that you can give the message of what's happening here." A year and a half — she's out speaking on behalf of the other women in her country. Wangari Maathai — 2004 Peace laureate. They call her the "Tree Lady," but she's more than the Tree Lady. Working for peace is very creative. It's hard work every day. When she was planting those trees, I don't think most people understand that, at the same time, she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country. People could not gather without getting busted and taken to jail. But if they were together planting trees for the environment, it was okay — creativity. But it's not just iconic women like Shirin, like Aung Sun Suu Kyi, like Wangari Maathai — it is other women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world. The Women's League of Burma, 11 individual organizations of Burmese women came together because there's strength in numbers. Working together is what changes our world. The Million Signatures Campaign of women inside Burma working together to change human rights, to bring democracy to that country. When one is arrested and taken to prison, another one comes out and joins the movement, recognizing that if they work together, they will ultimately bring change in their own country. Mairead McGuire in the middle, Betty Williams on the right-hand side — bringing peace to Northern Ireland. I'll tell you the quick story. An IRA driver was shot, and his car plowed into people on the side of the street. There was a mother and three children. The children were killed on the spot. It was Mairead's sister. Instead of giving in to grief, depression, defeat in the face of that violence, Mairead hooked up with Betty — a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic — and they took to the streets to say, "No more violence." And they were able to get tens of thousands of, primarily, women, some men, in the streets to bring about change. And they have been part of what brought peace to Northern Ireland, and they're still working on it, because there's still a lot more to do. This is Rigoberta Menchu Tum. She also received the Peace Prize. She is now running for president. She is educating the indigenous people of her country about what it means to be a democracy, about how you bring democracy to the country, about educating, about how to vote — but that democracy is not just about voting; it's about being an active citizen. That's what I got stuck doing — the landmine campaign. One of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two NGOs to thousands in 90 countries around the world, working together in common cause to ban landmines. Some of the people who worked in our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month. They could maybe volunteer that much. There were others, like myself, who were full-time. But it was the actions, together, of all of us that brought about that change. In my view, what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the meaning of peace. It's not a dirty word. It's hard work every single day. And if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could, we would change this world, we would save this world. And we can't wait for the other guy. We have to do it ourselves. Thank you. (Applause)

We are all cyborgs now

{0: 'Amber Case studies the symbiotic interactions between humans and machines -- and considers how our values and culture are being shaped by living lives increasingly mediated by high technology. '}

TEDWomen 2010

I would like to tell you all that you are all actually cyborgs, but not the cyborgs that you think. You're not RoboCop, and you're not Terminator, but you're cyborgs every time you look at a computer screen or use one of your cell phone devices. So what's a good definition for cyborg? Well, traditional definition is "an organism to which exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments." That came from a 1960 paper on space travel, because, if you think about it, space is pretty awkward. People aren't supposed to be there. But humans are curious, and they like to add things to their bodies so they can go to the Alps one day and then become a fish in the sea the next. So let's look at the concept of traditional anthropology. Somebody goes to another country, says, "How fascinating these people are, how interesting their tools are, how curious their culture is." And then they write a paper, and maybe a few other anthropologists read it, and we think it's very exotic. Well, what's happening is that we've suddenly found a new species. I, as a cyborg anthropologist, have suddenly said, "Oh, wow. Now suddenly we're a new form of Homo sapiens, and look at these fascinating cultures, and look at these curious rituals that everybody's doing around this technology. They're clicking on things and staring at screens." Now there's a reason why I study this, versus traditional anthropology. And the reason is that tool use, in the beginning — for thousands and thousands of years, everything has been a physical modification of self. It has helped us to extend our physical selves, go faster, hit things harder, and there's been a limit on that. But now what we're looking at is not an extension of the physical self, but an extension of the mental self, and because of that, we're able to travel faster, communicate differently. And the other thing that happens is that we're all carrying around little Mary Poppins technology. We can put anything we want into it, and it doesn't get heavier, and then we can take anything out. What does the inside of your computer actually look like? Well, if you print it out, it looks like a thousand pounds of material that you're carrying around all the time. And if you actually lose that information, it means that you suddenly have this loss in your mind, that you suddenly feel like something's missing, except you aren't able to see it, so it feels like a very strange emotion. The other thing that happens is that you have a second self. Whether you like it or not, you're starting to show up online, and people are interacting with your second self when you're not there. And so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open, which is basically your Facebook wall, so that people don't write on it in the middle of the night — because it's very much the equivalent. And suddenly we have to start to maintain our second self. You have to present yourself in digital life in a similar way that you would in your analog life. So, in the same way that you wake up, take a shower and get dressed, you have to learn to do that for your digital self. And the problem is that a lot of people now, especially adolescents, have to go through two adolescences. They have to go through their primary one, that's already awkward, and then they go through their second self's adolescence, and that's even more awkward because there's an actual history of what they've gone through online. And anybody coming in new to technology is an adolescent online right now, and so it's very awkward, and it's very difficult for them to do those things. So when I was little, my dad would sit me down at night and he would say, "I'm going to teach you about time and space in the future." And I said, "Great." And he said one day, "What's the shortest distance between two points?" And I said, "Well, that's a straight line. You told me that yesterday." I thought I was very clever. He said, "No, no, no. Here's a better way." He took a piece of paper, drew A and B on one side and the other and folded them together so where A and B touched. And he said, "That is the shortest distance between two points." And I said, "Dad, dad, dad, how do you do that?" He said, "Well, you just bend time and space, it takes an awful lot of energy, and that's just how you do it." And I said, "I want to do that." And he said, "Well, okay." And so, when I went to sleep for the next 10 or 20 years, I was thinking at night, "I want to be the first person to create a wormhole, to make things accelerate faster. And I want to make a time machine." I was always sending messages to my future self using tape recorders. But then what I realized when I went to college is that technology doesn't just get adopted because it works. It gets adopted because people use it and it's made for humans. So I started studying anthropology. And when I was writing my thesis on cell phones, I realized that everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pockets. They weren't physically transporting themselves; they were mentally transporting themselves. They would click on a button, and they would be connected as A to B immediately. And I thought, "Oh, wow. I found it. This is great." So over time, time and space have compressed because of this. You can stand on one side of the world, whisper something and be heard on the other. One of the other ideas that comes around is that you have a different type of time on every single device that you use. Every single browser tab gives you a different type of time. And because of that, you start to dig around for your external memories — where did you leave them? So now we're all these paleontologists that are digging for things that we've lost on our external brains that we're carrying around in our pockets. And that incites a sort of panic architecture — "Oh no, where's this thing?" We're all "I Love Lucy" on a great assembly line of information, and we can't keep up. And so what happens is, when we bring all that into the social space, we end up checking our phones all the time. So we have this thing called ambient intimacy. It's not that we're always connected to everybody, but at anytime we can connect to anyone we want. And if you were able to print out everybody in your cell phone, the room would be very crowded. These are the people that you have access to right now, in general — all of these people, all of your friends and family that you can connect to. And so there are some psychological effects that happen with this. One I'm really worried about is that people aren't taking time for mental reflection anymore, and that they aren't slowing down and stopping, being around all those people in the room all the time that are trying to compete for their attention on the simultaneous time interfaces, paleontology and panic architecture. They're not just sitting there. And really, when you have no external input, that is a time when there is a creation of self, when you can do long-term planning, when you can try and figure out who you really are. And then, once you do that, you can figure out how to present your second self in a legitimate way, instead of just dealing with everything as it comes in — and oh, I have to do this, and I have to do this, and I have to do this. And so this is very important. I'm really worried that, especially kids today, they're not going to be dealing with this down-time, that they have an instantaneous button-clicking culture, and that everything comes to them, and that they become very excited about it and very addicted to it. So if you think about it, the world hasn't stopped either. It has its own external prosthetic devices, and these devices are helping us all to communicate and interact with each other. But when you actually visualize it, all the connections that we're doing right now — this is an image of the mapping of the Internet — it doesn't look technological. It actually looks very organic. This is the first time in the entire history of humanity that we've connected in this way. And it's not that machines are taking over. It's that they're helping us to be more human, helping us to connect with each other. The most successful technology gets out of the way and helps us live our lives. And really, it ends up being more human than technology, because we're co-creating each other all the time. And so this is the important point that I like to study: that things are beautiful, that it's still a human connection — it's just done in a different way. We're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect with each other, regardless of geography. So that's why I study cyborg anthropology. Thank you. (Applause)

How I built a toaster -- from scratch

{0: 'Thomas Thwaites is a designer "of a more speculative sort," he says.'}

TEDSalon London 2010

If we look around us, much of what surrounds us started life as various rocks and sludge buried in the ground in various places in the world. But, of course, they don't look like rocks and sludge now. They look like TV cameras, monitors, annoying radio mics. And so this magical transformation is what I was trying to get at with my project, which became known as the Toaster Project. And it was also inspired by this quote from Douglas Adams, and the situation is from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." And the situation it describes is the hero of the book — he's a 20th-century man — finds himself alone on a strange planet populated only by a technologically primitive people. And he kind of assumes that, yes, he'll become — these villagers — he'll become their emperor and transform their society with his wonderful command of technology and science and the elements, but, of course, realizes that without the rest of human society, he can barely make a sandwich, let alone a toaster. But he didn't have Wikipedia. So I thought, okay, I'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch. And, working on the idea that the cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest to reverse-engineer, I went and bought the cheapest toaster I could find, took it home and was kind of dismayed to discover that, inside this object, which I'd bought for just 3.49 pounds, there were 400 different bits made out of a hundred-plus different materials. I didn't have the rest of my life to do this project. I had maybe nine months. So I thought, okay, I'll start with five. And these were steel, mica, plastic, copper and nickel. So, starting with steel: how do you make steel? I went and knocked on the door of the Rio Tinto Chair of Advanced Mineral Extraction at the Royal School of Mines and said, "How do you make steel?" And Professor Cilliers was very kind and talked me through it. And my vague rememberings from GCSE science — well, steel comes from iron, so I phoned up an iron mine. And said, "Hi, I'm trying to make a toaster. Can I come up and get some iron?" Unfortunately, when I got there — emerges Ray. He had misheard me and thought I was coming up because I was trying to make a poster, and so wasn't prepared to take me into the mines. But after some nagging, I got him to do that. (Video) Ray: It was Crease Limestone, and that was produced by sea creatures 350 million years ago in a nice, warm, sunny atmosphere. When you study geology, you can see what's happened in the past, and there were terrific changes in the earth. Thomas Thwaites: As you can see, they had the Christmas decorations up. And of course, it wasn't actually a working mine anymore, because, though Ray was a miner there, the mine had closed and had been reopened as a kind of tourist attraction, because, of course, it can't compete on the scale of operations which are happening in South America, Australia, wherever. But anyway, I got my suitcase of iron ore and dragged it back to London on the train, and then was faced with the problem: Okay, how do you make this rock into components for a toaster? So I went back to Professor Cilliers, and he said, "Go to the library." So I did and was looking through the undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy — completely useless for what I was trying to do. Because, of course, they don't actually tell you how to do it if you want to do it yourself and you don't have a smelting plant. So I ended up going to the History of Science Library and looking at this book. This is the first textbook on metallurgy written in the West, at least. And there you can see that woodcut is basically what I ended up doing. But instead of a bellows, I had a leaf blower. (Laughter) And that was something that reoccurred throughout the project, was, the smaller the scale you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go. And so this is after a day and about half a night smelting this iron. I dragged out this stuff, and it wasn't iron. But luckily, I found a patent online for industrial furnaces that use microwaves, and at 30 minutes at full power, and I was able to finish off the process. So, my next — (Applause) The next thing I was trying to get was copper. Again, this mine was once the largest copper mine in the world. It's not anymore, but I found a retired geology professor to take me down, and he said, "Okay, I'll let you have some water from the mine." And the reason I was interested in getting water is because water which goes through mines becomes kind of acidic and will start picking up, dissolving the minerals from the mine. And a good example of this is the Rio Tinto, which is in Portugal. As you can see, it's got lots and lots of minerals dissolved in it. So many such that it's now just a home for bacteria who really like acidic, toxic conditions. But anyway, the water I dragged back from the Isle of Anglesey where the mine was — there was enough copper in it such that I could cast the pins of my metal electric plug. So my next thing: I was off to Scotland to get mica. And mica is a mineral which is a very good insulator and very good at insulating electricity. That's me getting mica. And the last material I'm going to talk about today is plastic, and, of course, my toaster had to have a plastic case. Plastic is the defining feature of cheap electrical goods. And so plastic comes from oil, so I phoned up BP and spent a good half an hour trying to convince the PR office at BP that it would be fantastic for them if they flew me to an oil rig and let me have a jug of oil. BP obviously has a bit more on their mind now. But even then they weren't convinced and said, "Okay, we'll phone you back" — never did. So I looked at other ways of making plastic. And you can actually make plastic from obviously oils which come from plants, but also from starches. So this is attempting to make potato starch plastic. And for a while that was looking really good. I poured it into the mold, which you can see there, which I've made from a tree trunk. And it was looking good for a while, but I left it outside, because you had to leave it outside to dry, and unfortunately I came back and there were snails eating the unhydrolyzed bits of potato. So kind of out of desperation, I decided that I could think laterally. And geologists have actually christened — well, they're debating whether to christen — the age that we're living in — they're debating whether to make it a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, the age of Man. And that's because geologists of the future would kind of see a sharp shift in the strata of rock that is being laid down now. So suddenly, it will become kind of radioactive from Chernobyl and the 2,000 or so nuclear bombs that have been set off since 1945. And there'd also be an extinction event — like fossils would suddenly disappear. And also, I thought that there would be synthetic polymers, plastics, embedded in the rock. So I looked up a plastic — so I decided that I could mine some of this modern-day rock. And I went up to Manchester to visit a place called Axion Recycling. And they're at the sharp end of what's called the WEEE, which is this European electrical and electronic waste directive. And that was brought into force to try and deal with the mountain of stuff that is just being made and then living for a while in our homes and then going to landfill. But this is it. (Music) (Laughter) So there's a picture of my toaster. (Applause) That's it without the case on. And there it is on the shelves. Thanks. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: I'm told you did plug it in once. TT: Yeah, I did plug it in. I don't know if you could see, but I was never able to make insulation for the wires. Kew Gardens were insistent that I couldn't come and hack into their rubber tree. So the wires were uninsulated. So there was 240 volts going through these homemade copper wires, homemade plug. And for about five seconds, the toaster toasted, but then, unfortunately, the element kind of melted itself. But I considered it a partial success, to be honest. BG: Thomas Thwaites. TT: Thanks.

Take "the Other" to lunch

{0: "Elizabeth Lesser helps her readers and students transform their lives after brushes with pain, adversity and life's myriad problems."}

TEDWomen 2010

This room may appear to be holding 600 people, but there's actually so many more, because within each one of us, there is a multitude of personalities. I have two primary personalities that have been in conflict and conversation within me since I was a little girl. I call them "the mystic" and "the warrior." I was born into a family of politically active intellectual atheists. There was this equation in my family that went something like this: if you are intelligent, you therefore are not spiritual. I was the freak of the family. I was this weird little kid who wanted to have deep talks about the worlds that might exist beyond the ones we perceive with our senses. I wanted to know if what we human beings see and hear and think is a full and accurate picture of reality. So, looking for answers, I went to Catholic mass; I tagged along with my neighbors. I read Sartre and Socrates. And then a wonderful thing happened when I was in high school: gurus from the East started washing up on the shores of America. (Laughter) And I said to myself, "I wanna get me one of them." (Laughter) And ever since, I've been walking the mystic path, trying to peer beyond what Albert Einstein called the "optical delusion" of everyday consciousness. So what did he mean by this? I'll show you. Take a breath right now of this clear air in this room. Now, see this strange, underwater-coral-reef-looking thing? It's actually a person's trachea. And those colored globs are microbes that are actually swimming around in this room right now, all around us. If we're blind to this simple biology, imagine what we're missing at the smallest subatomic level right now and at the grandest cosmic levels. My years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions. They've made me a proud "I-don't-know-it-all." Now, when the mystic part of me jabbers on and on like this, the warrior rolls her eyes. She's concerned about what's happening in this world right now. She's worried. She says, "Excuse me, I'm pissed off, and I know a few things, and we better get busy about them right now." I've spent my life as a warrior, working for women's issues, working on political campaigns, being an activist for the environment. And it can be sort of crazymaking, housing both the mystic and the warrior in one body. I've always been attracted to those rare people who pull that off, who devote their lives to humanity with the grit of the warrior and the grace of the mystic — people like Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote, "I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be." "This," he wrote, "is the interrelated structure of reality." Then Mother Teresa, another mystic warrior, who said, "The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small." And Nelson Mandela, who lives by the African concept of "ubuntu," which means "I need you in order to be me, and you need me in order to be you." Now, we all love to trot out these three mystic warriors as if they were born with a "saint" gene. But we all actually have the same capacity that they do. And we need to do their work now. I'm deeply disturbed by the ways in which all of our cultures are demonizing "the other," by the voice we're giving to the most divisive among us. Listen to these titles of some of the best-selling books from both sides of the political divide here in the US: "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder," "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot," "Pinheads and Patriots," "Arguing with Idiots." They're supposedly tongue-in-cheek, but they're actually dangerous. Now here's a title that may sound familiar, but whose author may surprise you: "Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice." Who wrote that? That was Adolf Hitler's first title for "Mein Kampf" — "My Struggle" — the book that launched the Nazi Party. The worst eras in human history, whether in Cambodia or Germany or Rwanda — they start like this, with negative otherizing. And then they morph into violent extremism. This is why I'm launching a new initiative. And it's to help all of us, myself included, to counteract the tendency to otherize. And I realize we're all busy people, so don't worry, you can do this on a lunch break. I'm calling my initiative "Take the Other to Lunch." If you are a Republican, you can take a Democrat to lunch. Or if you're a Democrat, think of it as taking a Republican to lunch. Now, if the idea of taking any of these people to lunch makes you lose your appetite, (Laughter) I suggest you start more local, because there is no shortage of the other right in your own neighborhood: maybe that person who worships at the mosque or the church or the synagogue down the street; or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict; or maybe your brother-in-law who doesn't believe in global warming — (Laughter) anyone whose lifestyle may frighten you or whose point of view makes smoke come out of your ears. A couple of weeks ago, I took a conservative Tea Party woman to lunch. Now, on paper, she passed my "smoking ears" test: (Laughter) she's an activist from the Right, and I'm an activist from the Left. We used some guidelines to keep our conversation elevated. And you can use them, too, because I know you're all going to take an other to lunch. So first of all, decide on a goal: to get to know one person from a group you may have negatively stereotyped. And then, before you get together, agree on some ground rules. My Tea Party lunch mate and I came up with these: "Don't persuade, defend or interrupt; be curious, be conversational, be real; and listen." From there, we dove in, and we used these questions: "Share some of your life experiences with me — what issues deeply concern you? And what have you always wanted to ask someone from the other side?" My lunch partner and I came away with some really important insights, and I'm going to share just one with you. I think it has relevance to any problem between people anywhere. I asked her why her side makes such outrageous allegations and lies about my side. "What?" she wanted to know. "Like, we're a bunch of elitist, morally corrupt terrorist-lovers." Well, she was shocked. She thought my side beat up on her side way more often — that we called them brainless, gun-toting racists. And we both marveled at the labels that fit none of the people we actually know. And since we had established some trust, we believed in each other's sincerity. We agreed we'd speak up in our own communities when we witnessed the kind of "otherizing" talk that can wound and fester into paranoia and then be used by those on the fringes to incite. By the end of our lunch, we acknowledged each other's openness. Neither of us had tried to change the other, but we also hadn't pretended that our differences were just going to melt away after a lunch. Instead, we had taken first steps together, past our knee-jerk reactions to the ubuntu place, which is the only place where solutions to our most intractable-seeming problems will be found. So who should you invite to lunch? Next time you catch yourself in the act of otherizing, that'll be your clue. And what might happen at your lunch? Will the heavens open and "We are the World" play over the restaurant sound system? Probably not. Because ubuntu work is slow, and it's difficult. It's two people dropping the pretense of being know-it-alls. It's two people, two warriors, dropping their weapons and reaching toward each other. Here's how the great Persian poet Rumi put it: "Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." (Applause)

Gaming to re-engage boys in learning

{0: 'Ali Carr-Chellman is an instructional designer and author who studies the most effective ways to teach kids and to make changes at school.'}

TEDxPSU

So I'm here to tell you that we have a problem with boys, and it's a serious problem with boys. Their culture isn't working in schools, and I'm going to share with you ways that we can think about overcoming that problem. First, I want to start by saying, this is a boy, and this is a girl, and this is probably stereotypically what you think of as a boy and a girl. If I essentialize gender for you today, then you can dismiss what I have to say. So I'm not going to do that, I'm not interested in doing that. This is a different kind of boy and a different kind of girl. So the point here is that not all boys exist within these rigid boundaries of what we think of as boys and girls, and not all girls exist within those rigid boundaries of what we think of as girls. But, in fact, most boys tend to be a certain way, and most girls tend to be a certain way. And the point is that, for boys, the way that they exist and the culture that they embrace isn't working well in schools now. How do we know that? The 100 girls project tells us some really nice statistics. For example, for every 100 girls that are suspended from school, there are 250 boys that are suspended from school. For every 100 girls who are expelled from school, there are 335 boys who are expelled from school. For every 100 girls in special education, there are 217 boys. For every 100 girls with a learning disability, there are 276 boys. For every 100 girls with an emotional disturbance diagnosed, we have 324 boys. And by the way, all of these numbers are significantly higher if you happen to be black, if you happen to be poor, if you happen to exist in an overcrowded school. And if you are a boy, you're four times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Now there is another side to this. And it is important that we recognize that women still need help in school, that salaries are still significantly lower, even when controlled for job types, and that girls have continued to struggle in math and science for years. That's all true. Nothing about that prevents us from paying attention to the literacy needs of our boys between ages three and 13. And so we should. In fact, what we ought to do is take a page from their playbook, because the initiatives and programs that have been set in place for women in science and engineering and mathematics are fantastic. They've done a lot of good for girls in these situations, and we ought to be thinking about how we can make that happen for boys too in their younger years. Even in their older years, what we find is that there's still a problem. When we look at the universities, 60 percent of baccalaureate degrees are going to women now, which is a significant shift. And in fact, university administrators are a little uncomfortable about the idea that we may be getting close to 70 percent female population in universities. This makes university administrators very nervous, because girls don't want to go to schools that don't have boys. And so we're starting to see the establishment of men centers and men studies to think about how do we engage men in their experiences in the university. If you talk to faculty, they may say, "Ugh. Yeah, well, they're playing video games, and they're gambling online all night long, and they're playing World of Warcraft, and that's affecting their academic achievement." Guess what? Video games are not the cause. Video games are a symptom. They were turned off a long time before they got here. So let's talk about why they got turned off when they were between the ages of three and 13. There are three reasons that I believe that boys are out of sync with the culture of schools today. The first is zero tolerance. A kindergarten teacher I know, her son donated all of his toys to her, and when he did, she had to go through and pull out all the little plastic guns. You can't have plastic knives and swords and axes and all that kind of thing in a kindergarten classroom. What is it that we're afraid that this young man is going to do with this gun? I mean, really. But here he stands as testament to the fact that you can't roughhouse on the playground today. Now I'm not advocating for bullies. I'm not suggesting that we need to be allowing guns and knives in the school. But when we say that an Eagle Scout in a high school classroom who has a locked parked car in the parking lot and a penknife in it, has to be suspended from school, I think we may have gone a little too far with zero tolerance. Another way that zero tolerance lives itself out is in the writing of boys. In a lot of classrooms today, you're not allowed to write about anything that's violent. You're not allowed to write about anything that has to do with video games. These topics are banned. Boy comes home from school, and he says, "I hate writing." "Why do you hate writing, son? What's wrong with writing?" "Now I have to write what she tells me to write." "OK, what is she telling you to write?" "Poems. I have to write poems. And little moments in my life. I don't want to write that stuff." "Well, what do you want to write? What do you want to write about?" "I want to write about video games. I want to write about leveling-up. I want to write about this really interesting world. I want to write about a tornado that comes into our house and blows all the windows out, and ruins all the furniture and kills everybody." "All right. OK." You tell a teacher that, and they'll ask you, in all seriousness, "Should we send this child to the psychologist?" And the answer is no, he's just a boy. He's just a little boy. It's not OK to write these kinds of things in classrooms today. So that's the first reason: Zero tolerance policies and the way they're lived out. The next reason that boys' cultures are out of sync with school cultures: there are fewer male teachers. Anybody who's over 15 doesn't know what this means, because in the last 10 years, the number of elementary school classroom teachers has been cut in half. We went from 14 percent to seven percent. That means that 93 percent of the teachers that our young men get in elementary classrooms are women. Now what's the problem with this? Women are great, yep, absolutely. But male role models for boys that say it's all right to be smart — they've got dads, they've got pastors, they've got Cub Scout leaders, but ultimately, six hours a day, five days a week they're spending in a classroom, and most of those classrooms are not places where men exist. And so they say, I guess this really isn't a place for boys. This is a place for girls. And I'm not very good at this, so I guess I'd better go play video games or get into sports, or something like that, because I obviously don't belong here. Men don't belong here, that's pretty obvious. So that may be a very direct way that we see it happen. But less directly, the lack of male presence in the culture — you've got a teachers' lounge, and they're having a conversation about Joey and Johnny who beat each other up on the playground. "What are we going to do with these boys?" The answer to that question changes depending on who's sitting around that table. Are there men around that table? Are there moms who've raised boys around that table? You'll see, the conversation changes depending upon who's sitting around the table. Third reason that boys are out of sync with school today: Kindergarten is the old second grade, folks. We have a serious compression of the curriculum happening out there. When you're three, you better be able to write your name legibly, or else we'll consider it a developmental delay. By the time you're in first grade, you should be able to read paragraphs of text with maybe a picture, maybe not, in a book of maybe 25 to 30 pages. If you don't, we're probably going to be putting you into a Title I special reading program. And if you ask Title I teachers, they'll tell you they've got about four or five boys for every girl that's in their program, in the elementary grades. The reason that this is a problem is because the message that boys are getting is, "You need to do what the teacher asks you to do all the time." The teacher's salary depends on "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top" and accountability and testing and all of this. So she has to figure out a way to get all these boys through this curriculum — and girls. This compressed curriculum is bad for all active kids. And what happens is, she says, "Please, sit down, be quiet, do what you're told, follow the rules, manage your time, focus, be a girl." That's what she tells them. Indirectly, that's what she tells them. And so this is a very serious problem. Where is it coming from? It's coming from us. (Laughter) We want our babies to read when they are six months old. Have you seen the ads? We want to live in Lake Wobegon where every child is above average ... but what this does to our children is really not healthy. It's not developmentally appropriate, and it's particularly bad for boys. So what do we do? We need to meet them where they are. We need to put ourselves into boy culture. We need to change the mindset of acceptance in boys in elementary schools. More specifically, we can do some very specific things. We can design better games. Most of the educational games that are out there today are really flashcards. They're glorified drill and practice. They don't have the depth, the rich narrative that really engaging video games have, that the boys are really interested in. So we need to design better games. We need to talk to teachers and parents and school board members and politicians. We need to make sure that people see that we need more men in the classroom. We need to look carefully at our zero tolerance policies. Do they make sense? We need to think about how to uncompress this curriculum if we can, trying to bring boys back into a space that is comfortable for them. All of those conversations need to be happening. There are some great examples out there of schools — the New York Times just talked about a school recently. A game designer from the New School put together a wonderful video gaming school. But it only treats a few kids, and so this isn't very scalable. We have to change the culture and the feelings that politicians and school board members and parents have about the way we accept and what we accept in our schools today. We need to find more money for game design. Because good games, really good games, cost money, and World of Warcraft has quite a budget. Most of the educational games do not. Where we started: my colleagues Mike Petner, Shawn Vashaw, myself, we started by trying to look at the teachers' attitudes and find out how do they really feel about gaming, what do they say about it. And we discovered that they talk about the kids in their school, who talk about gaming, in pretty demeaning ways. They say, "Oh, yeah. They're always talking about that stuff. They're talking about their little action figures and their little achievements or merit badges, or whatever it is that they get. And they're always talking about this stuff." And they say these things as if it's OK. But if it were your culture, think of how that might feel. It's very uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of that kind of language. They're nervous about anything that has anything to do with violence because of the zero tolerance policies. They are sure that parents and administrators will never accept anything. So we really need to think about looking at teacher attitudes and finding ways to change the attitudes, so that teachers are much more open and accepting of boy cultures in their classrooms. Because, ultimately, if we don't, then we're going to have boys who leave elementary school saying, "Well I guess that was just a place for girls, it wasn't for me. So I've got to do gaming, or I've got to do sports." If we change these things, if we pay attention to these things, and we reengage boys in their learning, they will leave the elementary schools saying, "I'm smart." Thank you. (Applause)

Addicted to risk

{0: 'Naomi Klein is a public intellectual, journalist and activist.'}

TEDWomen 2010

I just did something I've never done before. I spent a week at sea on a research vessel. Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South Florida who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the boat we were on, by the way. The scientists I was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff — the birds, the turtles, the dolphins, the glamorous stuff. They're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that eventually gets eaten by the big stuff. And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it. So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn't have to worry about it, this disaster is still unfolding. It's still working its way up the food chain. Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to us. Rachel Carson — the godmother of modern environmentalism — warned us about this very thing back in 1962. She pointed out that the "control men" — as she called them — who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT, were only trying to kill the little stuff, the insects, not the birds. But they forgot this: the fact that birds dine on grubs, that robins eat lots of worms now saturated with DDT. And so, robin eggs failed to hatch, songbirds died en masse, towns fell silent. Thus the title "Silent Spring." I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties. And I think what it is is I don't think we have fully come to terms with the meaning of this disaster, with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world, with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earth gush forth on live TV, 24 hours a day, for months. After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it — "top hats," "top kills" and, most memorably, the "junk shot" — the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world. But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed — the carelessness, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up. If there is one thing BP's watery improv act made clear, it is that, as a culture, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy. And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years. Our leaders barrel into wars, telling themselves happy stories about cakewalks and welcome parades. Then, it is years of deadly damage control, Frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies, and once again, no exit strategy. Our financial wizards routinely fall victim to similar overconfidence, convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market — the kind that never goes down. And when it inevitably does, the best and the brightest reach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot — in this case, throwing massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole. As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price. We have to figure out why we keep letting this happen, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all — deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate change. Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the climate debate, on the question of, "What if the IPC scientists are all wrong?" Now a far more relevant question — as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it — is, "What if those scientists are right?" Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle — the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait for perfect scientific certainty. Better to err on the side of caution. More overt, the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that would be harmed, but rather on the industry that stands to profit. But climate policy in the wealthy world — to the extent that such a thing exists — is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis — finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP. So rather than asking, as precaution would demand, what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe, we ask bizarre questions like this: "What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? Can we put this off till 2020, 2030, 2050?" Or we ask, "How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive? Can we go with two degrees, three degrees, or — where we're currently going — four degrees Celsius?" And by the way, the assumption that we can safely control the Earth's awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat, making the planet not too hot, not too cold, but just right — sort of Goldilocks style — this is pure fantasy, and it's not coming from the climate scientists. It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science. The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops. So once again, why do we take these crazy risks with the precious? A range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now, like "greed." This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of money. Another explanation that you often hear for recklessness is hubris. And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness. For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay. And you actually don't have a lot of options. You're either an incredibly good scammer, and you're getting away with it — you gamed the system — or you're some kind of boy genius, the likes of which the world has never seen. Now both of these options — the boy genius and the scammer — are going to make you vastly overconfident and therefore more prone to taking even bigger risks in the future. By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" Now this is actually a popular plaque, and this is a crowd of overachievers, so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque. Don't feel ashamed. Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TEDTalk, but personally, I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of Icarus hanging from the wall, because — maybe not that one in particular — but I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time. So we have greed, we've got overconfidence/hubris, but since we're here at TEDWomen, let's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness. Now I'm not going to belabor this point, but studies do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do. So it turns out that being paid less and praised less has its upsides — for society at least. The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gifted, chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides. And this problem — call it the "perils of privilege" — brings us closer, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness. Because none of us — at least in the global North — neither men nor women, are fully exempt from this message. Here's what I'm talking about. Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature — the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation. And just when you think these stories are fading into history, and that we've gotten over them, they pop up in the strangest places. For instance, I stumbled across this advertisement outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport. It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone, and yes, it really does say, "Slap Mother Nature in the face." And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola — that's just a bonus. I'm showing it because — they're not a sponsor, are they? — because, in its own way, this is a crass version of our founding story. We slapped Mother Nature around and won, and we always win, because dominating nature is our destiny. But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature. There's another one, equally important, about how that very same Mother Nature is so nurturing and so resilient that we can never make a dent in her abundance. Let's hear from Tony Hayward again. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." In other words, the ocean is big; she can take it. It is this underlying assumption of limitlessness that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do. Because this is our real master-narrative: however much we mess up, there will always be more — more water, more land, more untapped resources. A new bubble will replace the old one. A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped. And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system, one that cannot survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers. Now the problem is that the story was always a lie. The Earth always did have limits. They were just beyond our sights. And now we are hitting those limits on multiple fronts. I believe that we know this, yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop. Not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories, but we are now doing so with a frenzy and a fury that, frankly, verges on camp. How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin? Now on the one hand, exhorting us to "drill, baby, drill," because God put those resources into the ground in order for us to exploit them, and on the other, glorying in the wilderness of Alaska's untouched beauty on her hit reality TV show. The twin message is as comforting as it is mad. Ignore those creeping fears that we have finally hit the wall. There are still no limits. There will always be another frontier. So stop worrying and keep shopping. Now, would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her reality TV show. In environmental circles, we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables, we are continuing with business as usual. This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic. The truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy. So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water, including the icy Arctic seas, where a clean-up may simply be impossible. It means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal, the likes of which we haven't yet seen. And most controversially, it means the tar sands. I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar Sands, which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States. It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice, because I believe it speaks to recklessness and the path we're on like little else. So this is where the tar sands live, under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests. The oil is not liquid. You can't just drill a hole and pump it out. Tar sand's oil is solid, mixed in with the soil. So to get at it, you first have to get rid of the trees. Then, you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand. The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds. That's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates. Now looking at these images, it's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation, which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of England. I find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth, the largest ever built. That's a person down there by the wheel. My point is that this is not oil drilling. It's not even mining. It is terrestrial skinning. Vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray. Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon. But the truth is that, on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil in Canada. How else to describe this, but as a form of mass insanity? Just when we know we need to be learning to live on the surface of our planet, off the power of sun, wind and waves, we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable. This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country — a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only stand to look at it for so long. As Jared Diamond and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes. The problem is that our master-narrative has an answer for that too. At the very last minute, we are going to get saved just like in every Hollywood movie, just like in the Rapture. But, of course, our secular religion is technology. Now, you may have noticed more and more headlines like these. The idea behind this form of "geoengineering" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the planet. The wackiest plan — and I'm not making this up — would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky, suspended by balloons, to spew sulfur dioxide. So, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution. Think of it as the ultimate junk shot. The serious scientists involved in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested. They don't know if they'll work, and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could unleash. Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles, particularly media circles, with a relief tinged with euphoria. An escape hatch has been reached. A new frontier has been found. Most importantly, we don't have to change our lifestyles after all. You see, for some people, their savior is a guy in a flowing robe. For other people, it's a guy with a garden hose. We badly need some new stories. We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks — risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action — like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested, blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining. We need stories that replace that linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around. That this is our only home. There is no escape hatch. Call it karma, call it physics, action and reaction, call it precaution — the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit. Thank you. (Applause)

Singing after a double lung transplant

{0: 'Charity Tillemann-Dick was a soprano who appeared on opera and concert stages around the world. Her roles included Titania in "A Midsummer\'s Night Dream," Gilda in "Rigoletto" and Violetta in "La Traviata."'}

TEDMED 2010

You may not know this, but you are celebrating an anniversary with me. I'm not married, but one year ago today, I woke up from a month-long coma, following a double lung transplant. Crazy, I know. Insane. Thank you. Six years before that, I was starting my career as an opera singer in Europe, when I was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension — also known as PH. It happens when there's a thickening in the pulmonary veins, making the right side of the heart work overtime, and causing what I call the reverse-Grinch effect. My heart was three-and-a-half sizes too big. Physical activity becomes very difficult for people with this condition, and usually after two to five years, you die. I went to see this specialist, and she was top-of-the-field and told me I had to stop singing. She said, "Those high notes are going to kill you." While she didn't have any medical evidence to back up her claim that there was a relationship between operatic arias and pulmonary hypertension, she was absolutely emphatic I was singing my own obituary. I was very limited by my condition, physically. But I was not limited when I sang, and as air came up from my lungs, through my vocal cords and passed my lips as sound, it was the closest thing I had ever come to transcendence. And just because of someone's hunch, I wasn't going to give it up. Thankfully, I met Reda Girgis, who is dry as toast, but he and his team at Johns Hopkins didn't just want me to survive, they wanted me to live a meaningful life. This meant making trade-offs. I come from Colorado. It's a mile high, and I grew up there with my 10 brothers and sisters and two adoring parents. Well, the altitude exacerbated my symptoms. So I moved to Baltimore to be near my doctors and enrolled in a conservatory nearby. I couldn't walk as much as I used to, so I opted for five-inch heels. And I gave up salt, I went vegan, and I started taking huge doses of sildenafil, also known as Viagra. (Laughter) My father and my grandfather were always looking for the newest thing in alternative or traditional therapies for PH, but after six months, I couldn't walk up a small hill. I couldn't climb a flight of stairs. I could barely stand up without feeling like I was going to faint. I had a heart catheterization, where they measure this internal arterial pulmonary pressure, which is supposed to be between 15 and 20. Mine was 146. I like to do things big, and it meant one thing: there is a big gun treatment for pulmonary hypertension called Flolan, and it's not just a drug; it's a way of life. Doctors insert a catheter into your chest, which is attached to a pump that weighs about four-and-a-half pounds. Every day, 24 hours, that pump is at your side, administering medicine directly to your heart, and it's not a particularly preferable medicine in many senses. This is a list of the side effects: if you eat too much salt, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you'll probably end up in the ICU. If you go through a metal detector, you'll probably die. If you get a bubble in your medicine — because you have to mix it every morning — and it stays in there, you probably die. If you run out of medicine, you definitely die. No one wants to go on Flolan. But when I needed it, it was a godsend. Within a few days, I could walk again. Within a few weeks, I was performing, and in a few months, I debuted at the Kennedy Center. The pump was a little bit problematic when performing, so I'd attach it to my inner thigh with the help of the girdle and an ACE bandage. Literally hundreds of elevator rides were spent with me alone stuffing the pump into my Spanx, hoping the doors wouldn't open unexpectedly. And the tubing coming out of my chest was a nightmare for costume designers. I graduated from graduate school in 2006, and I got a fellowship to go back to Europe. A few days after arriving, I met this wonderful, old conductor who started casting me in all of these roles. And before long, I was commuting between Budapest, Milan and Florence. Though I was attached to this ugly, unwanted, high-maintenance, mechanical pet, my life was kind of like the happy part in an opera — very complicated, but in a good way. Then in February of 2008, my grandfather passed away. He was a big figure in all of our lives, and we loved him very much. It certainly didn't prepare me for what came next. Seven weeks later, I got a call from my family. My father had been in a catastrophic car accident, and he died. At 24, my death would have been entirely expected. But his — well, the only way I can articulate how it felt was that it precipitated my medical decline. Against my doctors' and family's wishes, I needed to go back for the funeral. I had to say goodbye in some way, shape or form. But soon I was showing signs of right-heart failure, and I had to return to sea level, doing so knowing that I probably would never see my home again. I canceled most of my engagements that summer, but I had one left in Tel Aviv, so I went. After one performance, I could barely drag myself from the stage to the taxicab. I sat down and felt the blood rush down from my face, and in the heat of the desert, I was freezing cold. My fingers started turning blue, and I was like, "What is going on here?" I heard my heart's valves snapping open and closed. The cab stopped, and I pulled my body from it feeling each ounce of weight as I walked to the elevator. I fell through my apartment door and crawled to the bathroom where I found my problem: I had forgotten to mix in the most important part of my medicine. I was dying, and if I didn't mix that stuff up fast, I would never leave that apartment alive. I started mixing, and I felt like everything was going to fall out through one hole or another, but I just kept on going. Finally, with the last bottle in and the last bubble out, I attached the pump to the tubing and lay there hoping it would kick in soon enough. If it didn't, I'd probably see my father sooner than I anticipated. Thankfully, in a few minutes, I saw the signature hive-like rash appear on my legs, which is a side effect of the medication, and I knew I'd be okay. We're not big on fear in my family, but I was scared. I went back to the States, anticipating I'd return to Europe, but the heart catheterization showed that I wasn't going anywhere further that a flight-for-life from Johns Hopkins Hospital. I performed here and there, but as my condition deteriorated, so did my voice. My doctor wanted me to get on the list for a lung transplant. I didn't. I had two friends who had recently died months after having very challenging surgeries. I knew another young man, though, who had PH who died while waiting for one. I wanted to live. I thought stem cells were a good option, but they hadn't developed to a point where I could take advantage of them yet. I officially took a break from singing, and I went to the Cleveland Clinic to be reevaluated for the third time in five years, for transplant. I was sitting there kind of unenthusiastically talking with the head transplant surgeon, and I asked him if I needed a transplant, what I could do to prepare. He said, "Be happy. A happy patient is a healthy patient." It was like in one verbal swoop he had channeled my thoughts on life and medicine and Confucius. I still didn't want a transplant, but in a month, I was back in the hospital with some severely edemic kankles — very attractive. And it was right-heart failure. I finally decided it was time to take my doctor's advice. It was time for me to go to Cleveland and to start the agonizing wait for a match. But the next morning, while I was still in the hospital, I got a telephone call. It was my doctor in Cleveland, Marie Budev. And they had lungs. It was a match. They were from Texas. And everybody was really happy for me, but me. Because, despite their problems, I had spent my whole life training my lungs, and I was not particularly enthusiastic about giving them up. I flew to Cleveland, and my family rushed there in hopes that they would meet me and say what we knew might be our final goodbye. But organs don't wait, and I went into surgery before I could say goodbye. The last thing I remember was lying on a white blanket, telling my surgeon that I needed to see my mother again, and to please try and save my voice. I fell into this apocalyptic dream world. During the thirteen-and-a-half-hour surgery, I flatlined twice, 40 quarts of blood were infused into my body. And in my surgeon's 20-year career, he said it was among the most difficult transplants that he's ever performed. They left my chest open for two weeks. You could see my over-sized heart beating inside of it. I was on a dozen machines that were keeping me alive. An infection ravaged my skin. I had hoped my voice would be saved, but my doctors knew that the breathing tubes going down my throat might have already destroyed it. If they stayed in, there was no way I would ever sing again. So my doctor got the ENT, the top guy at the clinic, to come down and give me surgery to move the tubes around my voice box. He said it would kill me. So my own surgeon performed the procedure in a last-ditch attempt to save my voice. Though my mom couldn't say goodbye to me before the surgery, she didn't leave my side in the months of recovery that followed. And if you want an example of perseverance, grit and strength in a beautiful, little package, it is her. One year ago to this very day, I woke up. I was 95 lbs. There were a dozen tubes coming in and out of my body. I couldn't walk, I couldn't talk, I couldn't eat, I couldn't move, I certainly couldn't sing, I couldn't even breathe, but when I looked up and I saw my mother, I couldn't help but smile. Whether by a Mack truck or by heart failure or faulty lungs, death happens. But life isn't really just about avoiding death, is it? It's about living. Medical conditions don't negate the human condition. And when people are allowed to pursue their passions, doctors will find they have better, happier and healthier patients. My parents were totally stressed out about me going and auditioning and traveling and performing all over the place, but they knew that it was much better for me to do that than be preoccupied with my own mortality all of the time. And I'm so grateful they did. This past summer, when I was running and singing and dancing and playing with my nieces and my nephews and my brothers and my sisters and my mother and my grandmother in the Colorado Rockies, I couldn't help but think of that doctor who told me that I couldn't sing. And I wanted to tell her, and I want to tell you, we need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams. When we do, we will find that patients don't just survive; we thrive. And some of us might even sing. (Applause) [Singing: French] Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. And I'd like to thank my pianist, Monica Lee. (Applause) Thank you so much. Thank you.

The economic injustice of plastic

{0: 'Van Jones sees a clear link between social justice and green energy -- and works for both.'}

TEDxGreatPacificGarbagePatch

I am honored to be here, and I'm honored to talk about this topic, which I think is of grave importance. We've been talking a lot about the horrific impacts of plastic on the planet and on other species, but plastic hurts people, too — especially poor people. And both in the production of plastic, the use of plastic and the disposal of plastic, the people who have the bull's-eye on their foreheads are poor people. People got very upset when the BP oil spill happened, for very good reason. People thought, "Oh, my God. This is terrible, this oil — it's in the water. It's going to destroy the living systems there. People are going to be hurt. This is a terrible thing, this oil is going to hurt the people in the Gulf." What people don't think about is: What if the oil had made it safely to shore? What if the oil actually got where it was trying to go? Not only would it have been burned in engines and added to global warming, but there's a place called "Cancer Alley," and the reason it's called "Cancer Alley" is because the petrochemical industry takes that oil and turns it into plastic and in the process, kills people. It shortens the lives of the people who live there in the Gulf. So oil and petrochemicals are not just a problem when there's a spill; they're a problem when there's not. And what we don't often appreciate is the price that poor people pay for us to have these disposable products. The other thing we often don't appreciate is, it's not just at the point of production that poor people suffer. Poor people also suffer at the point of use. Those of us who earn a certain income level, we have something called choice. The reason why you want to work hard and have a job and not be poor and broke is so you can have choices, economic choices. We actually get a chance to choose not to use products that have dangerous, poisonous plastic in them. Other people who are poor don't have those choices. So low-income people often are the ones who are buying the products that have those dangerous chemicals in them that their children are using. Those are the people who wind up ingesting a disproportionate amount of this poisonous plastic in using it. And people say, "Well, they should just buy a different product." Well, the problem with being poor is you don't have those choices. You often have to buy the cheapest products. The cheapest products are often the most dangerous. And if that weren't bad enough — if it wasn't just the production of plastic that's giving people cancer in places like Cancer Alley, and shortening lives and hurting poor kids at the point of use — at the point of disposal, once again, it's poor people who bear the burden. Often, we think we're doing a good thing: You're in your office, drinking your bottled water or whatever it is, and you think to yourself, "I'm going to throw this away. No — I'm going to be virtuous. I'm going to put it in the blue bin." You think, "I put mine in the blue bin." And then you look at your colleague and say, "Why, you cretin! You put yours in the white bin." And we use that as a moral tickle. We feel so good about ourselves. If we — well, OK, I'm just ... me. Not you, but I feel this way often. (Laughter) And so we kind of have this moral feel-good moment. But if we were to be able to follow that little bottle on its journey, we would be shocked to discover that, all too often, that bottle is going to be put on a boat, it's going to go all the way across the ocean at some expense, and it's going to wind up in a developing country, often China. I think in our minds, we imagine somebody's going to take the little bottle and say, "Oh, little bottle! We're so happy to see you, little bottle." (Laughter) "You've served so well." (Laughter) He's given a little bottle massage, a little bottle medal. And they say, "What would you like to do next?" The little bottle says, "I just don't know ..." (Laughter) But that's not actually what happens. You know? That bottle winds up getting burned. The recycling of plastic in many developing countries means the incineration of the plastic, the burning of the plastic, which releases incredible toxic chemicals and, once again, kills people. And so, poor people who are making these products in petrochemical centers like Cancer Alley, poor people who are consuming these products disproportionately, and then poor people who, even at the tail end of the recycling, are having their lives shortened. They're all being harmed — greatly — by this addiction that we have to disposability. Now, you think to yourself — I know how you are — you say, "That sure is terrible for those poor people. It's just awful. Those poor people. I hope someone does something to help them." But what we don't understand is — here we are in Los Angeles. We worked very hard to get the smog reduction happening here in Los Angeles. But guess what? Because they're doing so much dirty production in Asia now, because the environmental laws don't protect the people in Asia now, almost all of the clean air gains and the toxic air gains that we've achieved here in California have been wiped out by dirty air coming over from Asia. So we all are being hit. We all are being impacted. It's just that the poor people get it first and worst. But the dirty production, the burning of toxins, the lack of environmental standards in Asia, is actually creating so much dirty air pollution, it's coming across the ocean, and has erased our gains here in California. We're back where we were in the 1970s. And so we're on one planet, and we have to be able to get to the root of these problems. The root of this problem, in my view, is the idea of disposability itself. You see, if you understand the link between what we're doing to poison and pollute the planet and what we're doing to poor people, you arrive at a very troubling but also very helpful insight: In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people. But if you create a world where you don't trash people, you can't trash the planet. So now we are at a moment where the coming together of social justice as an idea and ecology as an idea, we finally can now see that they are really, at the end of the day, one idea. And it's the idea that we don't have disposable anything. We don't have disposable resources. We don't have disposable species. And we don't have disposable people, either. We don't have a throwaway planet, and we don't have throwaway children — it's all precious. And as we all begin to come back to that basic understanding, new opportunities for action begin to emerge. Biomimicry, which is an emerging science, winds up being a very important social justice idea. People who are just learning about this stuff: biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. Democracy, by the way, means respecting the wisdom of all people — we'll get to that. But biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. It turns out we're a pretty clever species. We have this big cortex, we're pretty proud of ourselves. But if we want to make something hard, we say, "I know! I'm going to make a hard substance. I know! I'm going to get vacuums and furnaces and drag stuff out of the ground and get things hot and poison and pollute ... But I got this hard thing!" (Laughter) "I'm so clever!" And you look behind you, and there's destruction all around you. But guess what? You're so clever, but you're not as clever as a clam. A clamshell is hard. There's no vacuums. There's no big furnaces. There's no poison. There's no pollution. It turns out that other species figured out a long time ago how to create many of the things we need using biological processes that nature knows how to use well. That insight of biomimicry, of our scientists finally realizing that we have as much to learn from other species — I don't mean taking a mouse and sticking it with stuff. I don't mean looking at it from that way, abusing the little species. I mean actually respecting them, respecting what they've achieved. That's called biomimicry, and that opens the door to zero waste production; zero pollution production; that we could actually enjoy a high quality of life, a high standard of living, without trashing the planet. Well, that idea of biomimicry, respecting the wisdom of all species, combined with the idea of democracy and social justice, respecting the wisdom and the worth of all people, would give us a different society. We would have a different economy. We would have a green society that Dr. King would be proud of. That should be the goal. And the way that we get there is to first of all recognize that the idea of disposability not only hurts the species we've talked about, but it even corrupts our own society. We're so proud to live here in California. We just had this vote, and everybody's like, "Well — not in our state!" (Laughter) I don't know what those other states were doing, but ..." (Laughter) Just so proud. And, yeah, I'm proud, too. But ... California, though we lead the world in some of the green stuff, we also, unfortunately, lead the world in some of the gulag stuff. California has one of the highest incarceration rates of all the 50 states. We have a moral challenge in this movement. We are passionate about rescuing some dead materials from the landfill, but sometimes not as passionate about rescuing living beings, living people. And I would say that we live in a country — five percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the greenhouse gases, but also 25 percent of the world's prisoners. One of every four people locked up anywhere in the world is locked up right here in the United States. So that is consistent with this idea that disposability is something we believe in. And yet, as a movement that has to broaden its constituency, that has to grow, that has to reach out beyond our natural comfort zone, one of the challenges to the success of this movement, of getting rid of things like plastic and helping the economy shift, is people look at our movement with some suspicion. And they ask a question, and the question is: How can these people be so passionate? A poor person, a low-income person, somebody in Cancer Alley, somebody in Watts, somebody in Harlem, somebody on an Indian reservation, might say to themselves — and rightfully so — "How can these people be so passionate about making sure that a plastic bottle has a second chance in life, or an aluminum can has a second chance, and yet, when my child gets in trouble and goes to prison, he doesn't get a second chance?" "How can this movement be so passionate about saying we don't have throwaway stuff, no throwaway dead materials, and yet accept throwaway lives and throwaway communities like Cancer Alley?" And so, we now get a chance to be truly proud of this movement. When we take on topics like this, it gives us that extra call to reach out to other movements and to become more inclusive and to grow, and we can finally get out of this crazy dilemma that we've been in. Most of you are good, softhearted people. When you were younger, you cared about the whole world, and at some point, somebody said you had to pick an issue, you had to boil your love down to an issue. "Can't love the whole world — you've got to work on trees or you've got to work on immigration. You've got to shrink it down and be about one issue." And really, they fundamentally told you, "Are you going to hug a tree? Or are you going to hug a child? Pick. Are you going to hug a tree? Or are you going to hug a child? Pick." Well, when you start working on issues like plastic, you realize the whole thing is connected. And luckily, most of us are blessed to have two arms — we can hug both. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Visualizing the medical data explosion

{0: 'Anders Ynnerman studies the fundamental aspects of computer graphics and visualization, in particular large scale and complex data sets with a focus on volume rendering and multi-modal interaction. '}

TEDxGöteborg 2010

I will start by posing a little bit of a challenge: the challenge of dealing with data, data that we have to deal with in medical situations. It's really a huge challenge for us. And this is our beast of burden — this is a Computer Tomography machine, a CT machine. It's a fantastic device. It uses X-rays, X-ray beams, that are rotating very fast around the human body. It takes about 30 seconds to go through the whole machine and is generating enormous amounts of information that comes out of the machine. So this is a fantastic machine that we can use for improving health care, but as I said, it's also a challenge for us. And the challenge is really found in this picture here. It's the medical data explosion that we're having right now. We're facing this problem. And let me step back in time. Let's go back a few years in time and see what happened back then. These machines that came out — they started coming in the 1970s — they would scan human bodies, and they would generate about 100 images of the human body. And I've taken the liberty, just for clarity, to translate that to data slices. That would correspond to about 50 megabytes of data, which is small when you think about the data we can handle today just on normal mobile devices. If you translate that to phone books, it's about one meter of phone books in the pile. Looking at what we're doing today with these machines that we have, we can, just in a few seconds, get 24,000 images out of a body, and that would correspond to about 20 gigabytes of data, or 800 phone books, and the pile would then be 200 meters of phone books. What's about to happen — and we're seeing this; it's beginning — a technology trend that's happening right now is that we're starting to look at time-resolved situations as well. So we're getting the dynamics out of the body as well. And just assume that we will be collecting data during five seconds, and that would correspond to one terabyte of data — that's 800,000 books and 16 kilometers of phone books. That's one patient, one data set. And this is what we have to deal with. So this is really the enormous challenge that we have. And already today — this is 25,000 images. Imagine the days when we had radiologists doing this. They would put up 25,000 images, they would go like this, "25,0000, okay, okay. There is the problem." They can't do that anymore. That's impossible. So we have to do something that's a little bit more intelligent than doing this. So what we do is that we put all these slices together. Imagine that you slice your body in all these directions, and then you try to put the slices back together again into a pile of data, into a block of data. So this is really what we're doing. So this gigabyte or terabyte of data, we're putting it into this block. But of course, the block of data just contains the amount of X-ray that's been absorbed in each point in the human body. So what we need to do is to figure out a way of looking at the things we do want to look at and make things transparent that we don't want to look at. So transforming the data set into something that looks like this. And this is a challenge. This is a huge challenge for us to do that. Using computers, even though they're getting faster and better all the time, it's a challenge to deal with gigabytes of data, terabytes of data and extracting the relevant information. I want to look at the heart. I want to look at the blood vessels. I want to look at the liver. Maybe even find a tumor, in some cases. So this is where this little dear comes into play. This is my daughter. This is as of 9 a.m. this morning. She's playing a computer game. She's only two years old, and she's having a blast. So she's really the driving force behind the development of graphics-processing units. As long as kids are playing computer games, graphics is getting better and better and better. So please go back home, tell your kids to play more games, because that's what I need. So what's inside of this machine is what enables me to do the things that I'm doing with the medical data. So really what I'm doing is using these fantastic little devices. And you know, going back maybe 10 years in time when I got the funding to buy my first graphics computer — it was a huge machine. It was cabinets of processors and storage and everything. I paid about one million dollars for that machine. That machine is, today, about as fast as my iPhone. So every month there are new graphics cards coming out, and here is a few of the latest ones from the vendors — NVIDIA, ATI, Intel is out there as well. And you know, for a few hundred bucks you can get these things and put them into your computer, and you can do fantastic things with these graphics cards. So this is really what's enabling us to deal with the explosion of data in medicine, together with some really nifty work in terms of algorithms — compressing data, extracting the relevant information that people are doing research on. So I'm going to show you a few examples of what we can do. This is a data set that was captured using a CT scanner. You can see that this is a full data [set]. It's a woman. You can see the hair. You can see the individual structures of the woman. You can see that there is [a] scattering of X-rays on the teeth, the metal in the teeth. That's where those artifacts are coming from. But fully interactively on standard graphics cards on a normal computer, I can just put in a clip plane. And of course all the data is inside, so I can start rotating, I can look at it from different angles, and I can see that this woman had a problem. She had a bleeding up in the brain, and that's been fixed with a little stent, a metal clamp that's tightening up the vessel. And just by changing the functions, then I can decide what's going to be transparent and what's going to be visible. I can look at the skull structure, and I can see that, okay, this is where they opened up the skull on this woman, and that's where they went in. So these are fantastic images. They're really high resolution, and they're really showing us what we can do with standard graphics cards today. Now we have really made use of this, and we have tried to squeeze a lot of data into the system. And one of the applications that we've been working on — and this has gotten a little bit of traction worldwide — is the application of virtual autopsies. So again, looking at very, very large data sets, and you saw those full-body scans that we can do. We're just pushing the body through the whole CT scanner, and just in a few seconds we can get a full-body data set. So this is from a virtual autopsy. And you can see how I'm gradually peeling off. First you saw the body bag that the body came in, then I'm peeling off the skin — you can see the muscles — and eventually you can see the bone structure of this woman. Now at this point, I would also like to emphasize that, with the greatest respect for the people that I'm now going to show — I'm going to show you a few cases of virtual autopsies — so it's with great respect for the people that have died under violent circumstances that I'm showing these pictures to you. In the forensic case — and this is something that ... there's been approximately 400 cases so far just in the part of Sweden that I come from that has been undergoing virtual autopsies in the past four years. So this will be the typical workflow situation. The police will decide — in the evening, when there's a case coming in — they will decide, okay, is this a case where we need to do an autopsy? So in the morning, in between six and seven in the morning, the body is then transported inside of the body bag to our center and is being scanned through one of the CT scanners. And then the radiologist, together with the pathologist and sometimes the forensic scientist, looks at the data that's coming out, and they have a joint session. And then they decide what to do in the real physical autopsy after that. Now looking at a few cases, here's one of the first cases that we had. You can really see the details of the data set. It's very high-resolution, and it's our algorithms that allow us to zoom in on all the details. And again, it's fully interactive, so you can rotate and you can look at things in real time on these systems here. Without saying too much about this case, this is a traffic accident, a drunk driver hit a woman. And it's very, very easy to see the damages on the bone structure. And the cause of death is the broken neck. And this women also ended up under the car, so she's quite badly beaten up by this injury. Here's another case, a knifing. And this is also again showing us what we can do. It's very easy to look at metal artifacts that we can show inside of the body. You can also see some of the artifacts from the teeth — that's actually the filling of the teeth — but because I've set the functions to show me metal and make everything else transparent. Here's another violent case. This really didn't kill the person. The person was killed by stabs in the heart, but they just deposited the knife by putting it through one of the eyeballs. Here's another case. It's very interesting for us to be able to look at things like knife stabbings. Here you can see that knife went through the heart. It's very easy to see how air has been leaking from one part to another part, which is difficult to do in a normal, standard, physical autopsy. So it really, really helps the criminal investigation to establish the cause of death, and in some cases also directing the investigation in the right direction to find out who the killer really was. Here's another case that I think is interesting. Here you can see a bullet that has lodged just next to the spine on this person. And what we've done is that we've turned the bullet into a light source, so that bullet is actually shining, and it makes it really easy to find these fragments. During a physical autopsy, if you actually have to dig through the body to find these fragments, that's actually quite hard to do. One of the things that I'm really, really happy to be able to show you here today is our virtual autopsy table. It's a touch device that we have developed based on these algorithms, using standard graphics GPUs. It actually looks like this, just to give you a feeling for what it looks like. It really just works like a huge iPhone. So we've implemented all the gestures you can do on the table, and you can think of it as an enormous touch interface. So if you were thinking of buying an iPad, forget about it. This is what you want instead. Steve, I hope you're listening to this, all right. So it's a very nice little device. So if you have the opportunity, please try it out. It's really a hands-on experience. So it gained some traction, and we're trying to roll this out and trying to use it for educational purposes, but also, perhaps in the future, in a more clinical situation. There's a YouTube video that you can download and look at this, if you want to convey the information to other people about virtual autopsies. Okay, now that we're talking about touch, let me move on to really "touching" data. And this is a bit of science fiction now, so we're moving into really the future. This is not really what the medical doctors are using right now, but I hope they will in the future. So what you're seeing on the left is a touch device. It's a little mechanical pen that has very, very fast step motors inside of the pen. And so I can generate a force feedback. So when I virtually touch data, it will generate forces in the pen, so I get a feedback. So in this particular situation, it's a scan of a living person. I have this pen, and I look at the data, and I move the pen towards the head, and all of a sudden I feel resistance. So I can feel the skin. If I push a little bit harder, I'll go through the skin, and I can feel the bone structure inside. If I push even harder, I'll go through the bone structure, especially close to the ear where the bone is very soft. And then I can feel the brain inside, and this will be the slushy like this. So this is really nice. And to take that even further, this is a heart. And this is also due to these fantastic new scanners, that just in 0.3 seconds, I can scan the whole heart, and I can do that with time resolution. So just looking at this heart, I can play back a video here. And this is Karljohan, one of my graduate students who's been working on this project. And he's sitting there in front of the Haptic device, the force feedback system, and he's moving his pen towards the heart, and the heart is now beating in front of him, so he can see how the heart is beating. He's taken the pen, and he's moving it towards the heart, and he's putting it on the heart, and then he feels the heartbeats from the real living patient. Then he can examine how the heart is moving. He can go inside, push inside of the heart, and really feel how the valves are moving. And this, I think, is really the future for heart surgeons. I mean it's probably the wet dream for a heart surgeon to be able to go inside of the patient's heart before you actually do surgery, and do that with high-quality resolution data. So this is really neat. Now we're going even further into science fiction. And we heard a little bit about functional MRI. Now this is really an interesting project. MRI is using magnetic fields and radio frequencies to scan the brain, or any part of the body. So what we're really getting out of this is information of the structure of the brain, but we can also measure the difference in magnetic properties of blood that's oxygenated and blood that's depleted of oxygen. That means that it's possible to map out the activity of the brain. So this is something that we've been working on. And you just saw Motts the research engineer, there, going into the MRI system, and he was wearing goggles. So he could actually see things in the goggles. So I could present things to him while he's in the scanner. And this is a little bit freaky, because what Motts is seeing is actually this. He's seeing his own brain. So Motts is doing something here, and probably he is going like this with his right hand, because the left side is activated on the motor cortex. And then he can see that at the same time. These visualizations are brand new. And this is something that we've been researching for a little while. This is another sequence of Motts' brain. And here we asked Motts to calculate backwards from 100. So he's going "100, 97, 94." And then he's going backwards. And you can see how the little math processor is working up here in his brain and is lighting up the whole brain. Well this is fantastic. We can do this in real time. We can investigate things. We can tell him to do things. You can also see that his visual cortex is activated in the back of the head, because that's where he's seeing, he's seeing his own brain. And he's also hearing our instructions when we tell him to do things. The signal is really deep inside of the brain as well, and it's shining through, because all of the data is inside this volume. And in just a second here you will see — okay, here. Motts, now move your left foot. So he's going like this. For 20 seconds he's going like that, and all of a sudden it lights up up here. So we've got motor cortex activation up there. So this is really, really nice, and I think this is a great tool. And connecting also with the previous talk here, this is something that we could use as a tool to really understand how the neurons are working, how the brain is working, and we can do this with very, very high visual quality and very fast resolution. Now we're also having a bit of fun at the center. So this is a CAT scan — Computer Aided Tomography. So this is a lion from the local zoo outside of Norrkoping in Kolmarden, Elsa. So she came to the center, and they sedated her and then put her straight into the scanner. And then, of course, I get the whole data set from the lion. And I can do very nice images like this. I can peel off the layer of the lion. I can look inside of it. And we've been experimenting with this. And I think this is a great application for the future of this technology, because there's very little known about the animal anatomy. What's known out there for veterinarians is kind of basic information. We can scan all sorts of things, all sorts of animals. The only problem is to fit it into the machine. So here's a bear. It was kind of hard to get it in. And the bear is a cuddly, friendly animal. And here it is. Here is the nose of the bear. And you might want to cuddle this one, until you change the functions and look at this. So be aware of the bear. So with that, I'd like to thank all the people who have helped me to generate these images. It's a huge effort that goes into doing this, gathering the data and developing the algorithms, writing all the software. So, some very talented people. My motto is always, I only hire people that are smarter than I am and most of these are smarter than I am. So thank you very much. (Applause)

Silicon-based comedy

{0: 'Heather Knight runs Marilyn Monrobot, which creates socially intelligent robot performances and sensor-based electronic art. (and she helped build the amazing Rube Goldberg machine for OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass.")'}

TEDWomen 2010

Some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields. So tonight I'd like to tell you about the intersection that I'm most excited about at this very moment, which is entertainment and robotics. So if we're trying to make robots that can be more expressive and that can connect better with us in society, maybe we should look to some of the human professionals of artificial emotion and personality that occur in the dramatic arts. I'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology. Some people in the last decade or two have started creating artwork with technology. With my new venture, Marilyn Monrobot, I would like to use art to create tech. (Laughter) So we're based in New York City. And if you're a performer that wants to collaborate with an adorable robot, or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation, please contact me, the Bot-Agent. The bot, our rising celebrity, also has his own Twitter account: @robotinthewild. I'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots, Data. He's named after the Star Trek character. I think he's going to be super popular. We've got the robot — in his head is a database of a lot of jokes. Now each of these jokes is labeled with certain attributes. So it knows something about the subject; it knows about the length. It knows how much it's moving. And so it's going to try to watch your response. I actually have no idea what my robot is going to do today. (Laughter) It can also learn from you about the quality of its jokes and cater things, sort of like Netflix-style, over longer-term to different communities or audiences, children versus adults, different cultures. You can learn something from the robot about the community that you're in. And also I can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions. Some of you in this middle section — you have red/green paddles. If you like what's going on, show the green. If you don't like the subject or the performance, you can hold the red. Now don't be shy. It's just a robot. It doesn't have feelings ... yet. (Laughter) And the rest of you, you still count, you still matter. There's also a microphone that's listening to the aggregate laughter and applause and booing — I hope not — to help make some of its next decisions. Right, so, let the robot stand-up comedy begin. Data: Hello TEDWomen. It's an honor to be here. (Laughter) (Applause) You guys are looking good out there. Ready for some jokes? Audience: Yeah. Data: Here's the first one. Right, so, a doctor says to his patient, "I have bad news and worse news. The bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live." "That's terrible," said the patient. "How can the news possibly be worse?" "I've been trying to contact you since yesterday." (Laughter) (Applause) The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Heather Knight: He's talking about the Swiss. Data: Pretty lucky for them. Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with? "Come on buddy, I have the toe clippers right here. You get past me, the guy behind me has a spoon." (Laughter) HK: He's a French robot. Data: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods. One of them falls to the ground. He does not seem to be breathing. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911. He gasps to the operator, "My friend is dead. What can I do?" The operator says, "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, and the operator hears a shot. The guy's voice comes back on the line, "Okay, now what?" (Laughter) (Applause) Question: Why is television called a medium? Anyone? Because it's neither rare nor well done. But to be completely honest with you, I kind of love television. Any of you like television? Audience: Yes. Data: I find it incredibly educational. Actually, as soon as someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read. (Laughter) That's all for now. Was that okay for my first time? (Applause) You've been a great audience. Thank you. HK: Yay. (Applause) So this is actually the first time we've ever done live audience feedback to a performance. So thank you all for being a part of it. There's a lot more to come. And we hope to learn a lot about robot expression. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Understanding the rise of China

{0: 'Martin Jacques is the author of "When China Rules the World," and a columnist for the Guardian and New Statesman. He was a co-founder of the think tank Demos.'}

TEDSalon London 2010

The world is changing with really remarkable speed. If you look at the chart at the top here, you'll see that in 2025, these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crisis. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020. That's just a decade away. China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it's a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year. And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country. Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world — which I think is what China will become — will be not from the West and from very, very different civilizational roots. Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very different. Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China? How do we try to understand what China is? And the problem we have in the West at the moment, by and large, is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms, using Western ideas. We can't. Now I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like, just as a beginning. The first is this: that China is not really a nation-state. Okay, it's called itself a nation-state for the last hundred years, but everyone who knows anything about China knows it's a lot older than this. This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring-state period — the birth of modern China. And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China. Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2,000 years ago. And you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China, which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now. Now what is extraordinary about this is, what gives China its sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation-state period, which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization-state. I'm thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values and so on. These are all things that come from the period of the civilization-state. In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization-state, rather than as a nation-state. And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this: Of course we know China's big, huge, demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people. What we often aren't really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized. You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though we think this to be the case. It's never been the case. So this is China, a civilization-state, rather than a nation-state. And what does it mean? Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications. I'll give you two quick ones. The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown — the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization-state, together. The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I'll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them. "Window dressing. When China gets its hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case." Thirteen years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997. We were wrong. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough, in nation-state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation-state mentality. But you can't run a country like China, a civilization-state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn't work. So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong — as it will be to the question of Taiwan — was a natural response: one civilization, many systems. Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China — maybe not sort of a comfortable one. The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han? Now, this is completely different from the world's [other] most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil — all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. So the question is, why? Well the reason, I think, essentially is, again, back to the civilization-state. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged — of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity. Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together. The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference. They really believe in their own superiority, and they are disrespectful of those who are not. Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans. Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state. Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think — in these days at least — that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state. And the reason for this is because — well, there are two reasons, I think. And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy. And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special — it enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization-state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role. And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state's power is continuously challenged — I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on — for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged. It's had no serious rivals. So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history. The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state. Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don't see the state like that at all. The Chinese view the state as an intimate — not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family — not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family. This is the Chinese view of the state — very, very different to ours. It's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West. And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we've had to think about in the past. Know that China believes in the market and the state. I mean, Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century, said, "The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe." And, apart from the Mao period, that has remained more or less the case ever since. But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state. The state is everywhere in China. I mean, it's leading firms — many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state. And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas — as we are familiar with — with something like the one-child policy. Moreover, this is a very old state tradition, a very old tradition of statecraft. I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one. But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today, which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China. So there we have three building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is China — the civilization-state, the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society. And yet we still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong — our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect — this is the reason. Unfortunately, I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality. It's kind of arrogant. It's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure. And secondly, it's ignorant. We refuse to really address the issue of difference. You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian. And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures. But it's not. In many ways, it's the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way. Whereas those cultures — virtually the rest of the world, in fact, which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West — have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West's presence in those societies. And therefore, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West. I mean, take the question of East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. — a third of the world's population lives there. Now the largest economic region in the world. And I'll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia. Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid, to the present. Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning, the Goldman Sachs chart. What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world. We've seen this in terms of the G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. And there are two consequences of this. First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world. There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago — Copenhagen, climate change conference. Europe was not at the final negotiating table. When did that last happen? I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago. And that is what is going to happen in the future. And the second implication is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with, or conversant with. And at last, I'm afraid — take Europe; America is slightly different — but Europeans by and large, I have to say, are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing. Some people — I've got an English friend in China, and he said, "The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion." Well, maybe that's true, maybe that's an exaggeration. But there's another problem which goes along with this — that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world — and that is a sort of loss of a sense of the future. I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future in its confidence. Take the 19th century, for example. But this, alas, is no longer true. If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future, try China — there's old Confucius. This is a railway station the likes of which you've never seen before. It doesn't even look like a railway station. This is the new [Wuhan] railway station for the high-speed trains. China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together. Or take this: now this is an idea, but it's an idea to be tried out shortly in a suburb of Beijing. Here you have a megabus, on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people. It travels on rails down a suburban road, and the cars travel underneath it. And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour. Now this is the way things are going to move, because China has a very specific problem, which is different from Europe and different from the United States: China has huge numbers of people and no space. So this is a solution to a situation where China's going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people. Okay, so how would I like to finish? Well, what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us? I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it. But I want to argue, above all, a big-picture positive for this world. For 200 years, the world was essentially governed by a fragment of the human population. That's what Europe and North America represented. The arrival of countries like China and India — between them 38 percent of the world's population — and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years. Civilizations and cultures, which had been ignored, which had no voice, which were not listened to, which were not known about, will have a different sort of representation in this world. As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation, and we will have to learn about these civilizations. This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea, the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa. The little boat in front of it was the one in which, 80 years later, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. (Laughter) Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368. I think they're playing golf. Christ, the Chinese even invented golf. Welcome to the future. Thank you. (Applause)

It's time to redesign medical data

{0: 'Thomas Goetz is the co-founder of Iodine and author of "The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine.”'}

TEDMED 2010

I'm going to be talking to you about how we can tap a really underutilized resource in health care, which is the patient, or, as I like to use the scientific term, people. Because we are all patients, we are all people. Even doctors are patients at some point. So I want to talk about that as an opportunity that we really have failed to engage with very well in this country and, in fact, worldwide. If you want to get at the big part — I mean from a public health level, where my training is — you're looking at behavioral issues. You're looking at things where people are actually given information, and they're not following through with it. It's a problem that manifests itself in diabetes, obesity, many forms of heart disease, even some forms of cancer — when you think of smoking. Those are all behaviors where people know what they're supposed to do. They know what they're supposed to be doing, but they're not doing it. Now behavior change is something that is a long-standing problem in medicine. It goes all the way back to Aristotle. And doctors hate it, right? I mean, they complain about it all the time. We talk about it in terms of engagement, or non-compliance. When people don't take their pills, when people don't follow doctors' orders — these are behavior problems. But for as much as clinical medicine agonizes over behavior change, there's not a lot of work done in terms of trying to fix that problem. So the crux of it comes down to this notion of decision-making — giving information to people in a form that doesn't just educate them or inform them, but actually leads them to make better decisions, better choices in their lives. One part of medicine, though, has faced the problem of behavior change pretty well, and that's dentistry. Dentistry might seem — and I think it is — many dentists would have to acknowledge it's somewhat of a mundane backwater of medicine. Not a lot of cool, sexy stuff happening in dentistry. But they have really taken this problem of behavior change and solved it. It's the one great preventive health success we have in our health care system. People brush and floss their teeth. They don't do it as much as they should, but they do it. So I'm going to talk about one experiment that a few dentists in Connecticut cooked up about 30 years ago. So this is an old experiment, but it's a really good one, because it was very simple, so it's an easy story to tell. So these Connecticut dentists decided that they wanted to get people to brush their teeth and floss their teeth more often, and they were going to use one variable: they wanted to scare them. They wanted to tell them how bad it would be if they didn't brush and floss their teeth. They had a big patient population. They divided them up into two groups. They had a low-fear population, where they basically gave them a 13-minute presentation, all based in science, but told them that, if you didn't brush and floss your teeth, you could get gum disease. If you get gum disease, you will lose your teeth, but you'll get dentures, and it won't be that bad. So that was the low-fear group. The high-fear group, they laid it on really thick. They showed bloody gums. They showed puss oozing out from between their teeth. They told them that their teeth were going to fall out. They said that they could have infections that would spread from their jaws to other parts of their bodies, and ultimately, yes, they would lose their teeth. They would get dentures, and if you got dentures, you weren't going to be able to eat corn-on-the-cob, you weren't going to be able to eat apples, you weren't going to be able to eat steak. You'll eat mush for the rest of your life. So go brush and floss your teeth. That was the message. That was the experiment. Now they measured one other variable. They wanted to capture one other variable, which was the patients' sense of efficacy. This was the notion of whether the patients felt that they actually would go ahead and brush and floss their teeth. So they asked them at the beginning, "Do you think you'll actually be able to stick with this program?" And the people who said, "Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty good about that," they were characterized as high efficacy, and the people who said, "Eh, I never get around to brushing and flossing as much as I should," they were characterized as low efficacy. So the upshot was this. The upshot of this experiment was that fear was not really a primary driver of the behavior at all. The people who brushed and flossed their teeth were not necessarily the people who were really scared about what would happen — it's the people who simply felt that they had the capacity to change their behavior. So fear showed up as not really the driver. It was the sense of efficacy. So I want to isolate this, because it was a great observation — 30 years ago, right, 30 years ago — and it's one that's laid fallow in research. It was a notion that really came out of Albert Bandura's work, who studied whether people could get a sense of empowerment. The notion of efficacy basically boils down to one — that if somebody believes that they have the capacity to change their behavior. In health care terms, you could characterize this as whether or not somebody feels that they see a path towards better health, that they can actually see their way towards getting better health, and that's a very important notion. It's an amazing notion. We don't really know how to manipulate it, though, that well. Except, maybe we do. So fear doesn't work, right? Fear doesn't work. And this is a great example of how we haven't learned that lesson at all. This is a campaign from the American Diabetes Association. This is still the way we're communicating messages about health. I mean, I showed my three-year-old this slide last night, and he's like, "Papa, why is an ambulance in these people's homes?" And I had to explain, "They're trying to scare people." And I don't know if it works. Now here's what does work: personalized information works. Again, Bandura recognized this years ago, decades ago. When you give people specific information about their health, where they stand, and where they want to get to, where they might get to, that path, that notion of a path — that tends to work for behavior change. So let me just spool it out a little bit. So you start with personalized data, personalized information that comes from an individual, and then you need to connect it to their lives. You need to connect it to their lives, hopefully not in a fear-based way, but one that they understand. Okay, I know where I sit. I know where I'm situated. And that doesn't just work for me in terms of abstract numbers — this overload of health information that we're inundated with. But it actually hits home. It's not just hitting us in our heads; it's hitting us in our hearts. There's an emotional connection to information because it's from us. That information then needs to be connected to choices, needs to be connected to a range of options, directions that we might go to — trade-offs, benefits. Finally, we need to be presented with a clear point of action. We need to connect the information always with the action, and then that action feeds back into different information, and it creates, of course, a feedback loop. Now this is a very well-observed and well-established notion for behavior change. But the problem is that things — in the upper-right corner there — personalized data, it's been pretty hard to come by. It's a difficult and expensive commodity, until now. So I'm going to give you an example, a very simple example of how this works. So we've all seen these. These are the "your speed limit" signs. You've seen them all around, especially these days as radars are cheaper. And here's how they work in the feedback loop. So you start with the personalized data where the speed limit on the road that you are at that point is 25, and, of course, you're going faster than that. We always are. We're always going above the speed limit. The choice in this case is pretty simple. We either keep going fast, or we slow down. We should probably slow down, and that point of action is probably now. We should take our foot off the pedal right now, and generally we do. These things are shown to be pretty effective in terms of getting people to slow down. They reduce speeds by about five to 10 percent. They last for about five miles, in which case we put our foot back on the pedal. But it works, and it even has some health repercussions. Your blood pressure might drop a little bit. Maybe there's fewer accidents, so there's public health benefits. But by and large, this is a feedback loop that's so nifty and too rare. Because in health care, most health care, the data is very removed from the action. It's very difficult to line things up so neatly. But we have an opportunity. So I want to talk about, I want to shift now to think about how we deliver health information in this country, how we actually get information. This is a pharmaceutical ad. Actually, it's a spoof. It's not a real pharmaceutical ad. Nobody's had the brilliant idea of calling their drug Havidol quite yet. But it looks completely right. So it's exactly the way we get health information and pharmaceutical information, and it just sounds perfect. And then we turn the page of the magazine, and we see this — now this is the page the FDA requires pharmaceutical companies to put into their ads, or to follow their ads, and to me, this is one of the most cynical exercises in medicine. Because we know. Who among us would actually say that people read this? And who among us would actually say that people who do try to read this actually get anything out of it? This is a bankrupt effort at communicating health information. There is no good faith in this. So this is a different approach. This is an approach that has been developed by a couple researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin. And they created this thing called the "drug facts box." They took inspiration from, of all things, Cap'n Crunch. They went to the nutritional information box and saw that what works for cereal, works for our food, actually helps people understand what's in their food. God forbid we should use that same standard that we make Cap'n Crunch live by and bring it to drug companies. So let me just walk through this quickly. It says very clearly what the drug is for, specifically who it is good for, so you can start to personalize your understanding of whether the information is relevant to you or whether the drug is relevant to you. You can understand exactly what the benefits are. It isn't this kind of vague promise that it's going to work no matter what, but you get the statistics for how effective it is. And finally, you understand what those choices are. You can start to unpack the choices involved because of the side effects. Every time you take a drug, you're walking into a possible side effect. So it spells those out in very clean terms, and that works. So I love this. I love that drug facts box. And so I was thinking about, what's an opportunity that I could have to help people understand information? What's another latent body of information that's out there that people are really not putting to use? And so I came up with this: lab test results. Blood test results are this great source of information. They're packed with information. They're just not for us. They're not for people. They're not for patients. They go right to doctors. And God forbid — I think many doctors, if you really asked them, they don't really understand all this stuff either. This is the worst presented information. You ask Tufte, and he would say, "Yes, this is the absolute worst presentation of information possible." What we did at Wired was we went, and I got our graphic design department to re-imagine these lab reports. So that's what I want to walk you through. So this is the general blood work before, and this is the after, this is what we came up with. The after takes what was four pages — that previous slide was actually the first of four pages of data that's just the general blood work. It goes on and on and on, all these values, all these numbers you don't know. This is our one-page summary. We use the notion of color. It's an amazing notion that color could be used. So on the top-level you have your overall results, the things that might jump out at you from the fine print. Then you can drill down and understand how actually we put your level in context, and we use color to illustrate exactly where your value falls. In this case, this patient is slightly at risk of diabetes because of their glucose level. Likewise, you can go over your lipids and, again, understand what your overall cholesterol level is and then break down into the HDL and the LDL if you so choose. But again, always using color and personalized proximity to that information. All those other values, all those pages and pages of values that are full of nothing, we summarize. We tell you that you're okay, you're normal. But you don't have to wade through it. You don't have to go through the junk. And then we do two other very important things that kind of help fill in this feedback loop: we help people understand in a little more detail what these values are and what they might indicate. And then we go a further step — we tell them what they can do. We give them some insight into what choices they can make, what actions they can take. So that's our general blood work test. Then we went to CRP test. In this case, it's a sin of omission. They have this huge amount of space, and they don't use it for anything, so we do. Now the CRP test is often done following a cholesterol test, or in conjunction with a cholesterol test. So we take the bold step of putting the cholesterol information on the same page, which is the way the doctor is going to evaluate it. So we thought the patient might actually want to know the context as well. It's a protein that shows up when your blood vessels might be inflamed, which might be a risk for heart disease. What you're actually measuring is spelled out in clean language. Then we use the information that's already in the lab report. We use the person's age and their gender to start to fill in the personalized risks. So we start to use the data we have to run a very simple calculation that's on all sorts of online calculators to get a sense of what the actual risk is. The last one I'll show you is a PSA test. Here's the before, and here's the after. Now a lot of our effort on this one — as many of you probably know, a PSA test is a very controversial test. It's used to test for prostate cancer, but there are all sorts of reasons why your prostate might be enlarged. And so we spent a good deal of our time indicating that. We again personalized the risks. So this patient is in their 50s, so we can actually give them a very precise estimate of what their risk for prostate cancer is. In this case it's about 25 percent, based on that. And then again, the follow-up actions. So our cost for this was less than 10,000 dollars, all right. That's what Wired magazine spent on this. Why is Wired magazine doing this? (Laughter) Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, the two largest lab testing companies — last year, they made profits of over 700 million dollars and over 500 million dollars respectively. Now this is not a problem of resources; this is a problem of incentives. We need to recognize that the target of this information should not be the doctor, should not be the insurance company. It should be the patient. It's the person who actually, in the end, is going to be having to change their lives and then start adopting new behaviors. This is information that is incredibly powerful. It's an incredibly powerful catalyst to change. But we're not using it. It's just sitting there. It's being lost. So I want to just offer four questions that every patient should ask, because I don't actually expect people to start developing these lab test reports. But you can create your own feedback loop. Anybody can create their feedback loop by asking these simple questions: Can I have my results? And the only acceptable answer is — (Audience: Yes.) — yes. What does this mean? Help me understand what the data is. What are my options? What choices are now on the table? And then, what's next? How do I integrate this information into the longer course of my life? So I want to wind up by just showing that people have the capacity to understand this information. This is not beyond the grasp of ordinary people. You do not need to have the education level of people in this room. Ordinary people are capable of understanding this information, if we only go to the effort of presenting it to them in a form that they can engage with. And engagement is essential here, because it's not just giving them information; it's giving them an opportunity to act. That's what engagement is. It's different from compliance. It works totally different from the way we talk about behavior in medicine today. And this information is out there. I've been talking today about latent information, all this information that exists in the system that we're not putting to use. But there are all sorts of other bodies of information that are coming online, and we need to recognize the capacity of this information to engage people, to help people and to change the course of their lives. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Drawing on humor for change

{0: 'New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly tackles global issues with humor, intelligence and sarcasm. Her latest project supports the United Nations initiative Cartooning For Peace. '}

TEDWomen 2010

(Laughter) I was afraid of womanhood. Not that I'm not afraid now, but I've learned to pretend. I've learned to be flexible. In fact, I've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear. Let me explain. Back in the '50s and '60s, when I was growing up, little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft, and we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy — really not quite clear what we were supposed to be. (Laughter) There were plenty of role models all around us. We had our mothers, our aunts, our cousins, our sisters, and of course, the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words, telling us how to be. Now my mother was different. She was a homemaker, but she and I didn't go out and do girlie things together, and she didn't buy me pink outfits. Instead, she knew what I needed, and she bought me a book of cartoons. And I just ate it up. I drew, and I drew, and since I knew that humor was acceptable in my family, I could draw, do what I wanted to do, and not have to perform, not have to speak — I was very shy — and I could still get approval. I was launched as a cartoonist. Now when we're young, we don't always know. We know there are rules out there, but we don't always know — we don't perform them right, even though we are imprinted at birth with these things, and we're told what the most important color in the world is. We're told what shape we're supposed to be in. (Laughter) We're told what to wear — (Laughter) — and how to do our hair — (Laughter) — and how to behave. Now the rules that I'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture. We're being corrected, and the primary policemen are women, because we are the carriers of the tradition. We pass it down from generation to generation. Not only that — we always have this vague notion that something's expected of us. And on top of all off these rules, they keep changing. (Laughter) We don't know what's going on half the time, so it puts us in a very tenuous position. (Laughter) Now if you don't like these rules, and many of us don't — I know I didn't, and I still don't, even though I follow them half the time, not quite aware that I'm following them — what better way than to change them [than] with humor? Humor relies on the traditions of a society. It takes what we know, and it twists it. It takes the codes of behavior and the codes of dress, and it makes it unexpected, and that's what elicits a laugh. Now what if you put together women and humor? I think you can get change. Because women are on the ground floor, and we know the traditions so well, we can bring a different voice to the table. Now I started drawing in the middle of a lot of chaos. I grew up not far from here in Washington D.C. during the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations, the Watergate hearings and then the feminist movement, and I think I was drawing, trying to figure out what was going on. And then also my family was in chaos, and I drew to try to bring my family together — (Laughter) — try to bring my family together with laughter. It didn't work. My parents got divorced, and my sister was arrested. But I found my place. I found that I didn't have to wear high heels, I didn't have to wear pink, and I could feel like I fit in. Now when I was a little older, in my 20s, I realized there are not many women in cartooning. And I thought, "Well, maybe I can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning," and so I did. I became a cartoonist. And then I thought — in my 40s I started thinking, "Well, why don't I do something? I always loved political cartoons, so why don't I do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we're following as well as laugh?" Now my perspective is a particularly — (Laughter) — my perspective is a particularly American perspective. I can't help it. I live here. Even though I've traveled a lot, I still think like an American woman. But I believe that the rules that I'm talking about are universal, of course — that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions, and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the U.S. Consequently, we have. Women, because we're on the ground, we know the tradition. We have amazing antennae. Now my work lately has been to collaborate with international cartoonists, which I so enjoy, and it's given me a greater appreciation for the power of cartoons to get at the truth, to get at the issues quickly and succinctly. And not only that, it can get to the viewer through not only the intellect, but through the heart. My work also has allowed me to collaborate with women cartoonists from across the world — countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Argentina, France — and we have sat together and laughed and talked and shared our difficulties. And these women are working so hard to get their voices heard in some very difficult circumstances. But I feel blessed to be able to work with them. And we talk about how women have such strong perceptions, because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers, that we can have the great potential to be change-agents. And I think, I truly believe, that we can change this thing one laugh at a time. Thank you. (Applause)

Know thyself, with a brain scanner

{0: 'As CEO of InteraXon, Ariel Garten works to close the gap between science, art, business and technology.'}

TEDxToronto 2011

The maxim, "Know thyself" has been around since the ancient Greeks. Some attribute this golden world knowledge to Plato, others to Pythagoras. But the truth is it doesn't really matter which sage said it first, because it's still sage advice, even today. "Know thyself." It's pithy almost to the point of being meaningless, but it rings familiar and true, doesn't it? "Know thyself." I understand this timeless dictum as a statement about the problems, or more exactly, the confusions, of consciousness. I've always been fascinated with knowing the self. This fascination led me to submerge myself in art, study neuroscience, and later, to become a psychotherapist. Today I combine all my passions as the CEO of InteraXon, a thought-controlled computing company. My goal, quite simply, is to help people become more in tune with themselves. I take it from this little dictum, "Know thyself." If you think about it, this imperative is kind of the defining characteristic of our species, isn't it? I mean, it's self-awareness that separates Homo sapiens from earlier instances of our mankind. Today we're often too busy tending to our iPhones and iPods to really stop and get to know ourselves. Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, e-mails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and Tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: Ourselves. Much of the time we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves out into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves. We've cluttered ourselves up with all this. And we feel like we have to get far, far away to a secluded retreat, leaving it all behind. So we go far away to the top of a mountain, assuming that perching ourselves on a piece is bound to give us the respite we need to sort the clutter, the chaotic everyday, and find ourselves again. But on that mountain where we gain that beautiful peace of mind, what are we really achieving? It's really only a successful escape. Think of the term we use, "Retreat." This is the term that armies use when they've lost a battle. It means we've got to get out of here. Is this how we feel about the pressures of our world, that in order to get inside ourselves, you have to run for the hills? And the problem with escaping your day-to-day life is that you have to come home, eventually. So when you think about it, we're almost like a tourist visiting ourselves over there. And eventually, that vacation's got to come to an end. So my question to you is, can we find ways to know ourselves without the escape? Can we redefine our relationship with the technologized world in order to have the heightened sense of self-awareness that we seek? Can we live here and now in our wired web and still follow those ancient instructions, "Know thyself?" I say the answer is yes. And I'm here today to share a new way that we're working with technology to this end, to get familiar with our inner self like never before — humanizing technology and furthering that age-old quest of ours to more fully know the self. It's called thought-controlled computing. You may or may not have noticed that I'm wearing a tiny electrode on my forehead. This is actually a brainwave sensor that's reading the electrical activity of my brain as I give this talk. These brainwaves are being analyzed and we can see them as a graph. Let me show you what it looks like. That blue line there is my brainwave. It's the direct signal being recorded from my head, rendered in real time. The green and red bars show that same signal displayed by frequency, with lower frequencies here and higher frequencies up here. You're actually looking inside my head as I speak. These graphs are compelling, they're undulating, but from a human's perspective, they're actually not very useful. That's why we've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this data meaningful to the people who use it. For instance, what if I could use this data to find out how relaxed I am at any moment? Or what if I can take that information and put it into an organic shape up on the screen? The shape on the right over here has become an indicator of what's going on in my head. The more relaxed I am, the more the energy's going to fall through it. I may also be interested in knowing how focused I am, so I can put my level of attention into the circuit board on the other side. And the more focused my brain is, the more the circuit board is going to surge with energy. Ordinarily, I would have no way of knowing how focused or relaxed I was in any tangible way. As we know, our feelings about how we're feeling are notoriously unreliable. We've all had stress creep up on us without even noticing it until we lost it on someone who didn't deserve it, and then we realize that we probably should have checked in with ourselves a little earlier. This new awareness opens up vast possibilities for applications that help improve our lives and ourselves. We're trying to create technology that uses the insights to make our work more efficient, our breaks more relaxing and our connections deeper and more fulfilling than ever. I'm going to share some of these visions with you in a bit, but first I want to take a look at how we got here. By the way, feel free to check in on my head at any time. (Laughter) My team at InteraXon and I have been developing thought-controlled application for almost a decade now. In the first phase of development, we were really enthused by all the things we could control with our mind. We were making things activate, light up and work just by thinking. We were transcending the space between the mind and the device. We brought to life a vast array of prototypes and products that you could control with your mind, like thought-controlled home appliances or slot-car games or video games or a levitating chair. We created technology and applications that engaged people's imaginations, and it was really exciting. And then we were asked to do something really big for the Olympics. We were invited to create a massive installation at the Vancouver 2010 winter Olympics, were used in Vancouver, got to control the lighting on the CN Tower, the Canadian Parliament buildings and Niagara Falls from all the way across the country using their minds. Over 17 days at the Olympics, 7,000 visitors from all over the world actually got to individually control the light from the CN Tower, parliament and Niagara in real time with their minds from across the country, 3,000 km away. So controlling stuff with your mind is pretty cool. But we're always interested in multitiered levels of human interaction. And so we began looking into inventing thought-controlled applications in a more complex frame than just control. And that was responsiveness. We realized that we had a system that allowed technology to know something about you. And it could join into the relationship with you. We created the responsive room where the lights, music and blinds adjusted to your state. They followed these little shifts in your mental activity. So as you settled into relaxation at the end of a hard day, on the couch in our office, the music would mellow with you. When you read, the desk lamp would get brighter. If you nod off, the system would know, dimming to darkness as you do. We then realized that if technology could know something about you and use it to help you, there's an even more valuable application than that. That you could know something about yourself. We could know sides of ourselves that were all but invisible and come to see things that were previously hidden. Let me show you an example of what I'm talking about here. Here's an application that I created for the iPad. So the goal of the original game Zen Bound is to wrap a rope around a wooden form. So you use it with your headset. The headset connects wirelessly to an iPad or a smartphone. In that headset, you have fabric sensors on your forehead and above the ear. In the original Zen Bound game, you play it by scrolling your fingers over the pad. In the game that we created, of course, you control the wooden form that's on the screen there with your mind. As you focus on the wooden form, it rotates. The more you focus, the faster the rotation. This is for real. This is not a fake. What's really interesting to me though is at the end of the game, you get stats and feedback about how you did. You have graphs and charts that tell you how your brain was doing — not just how much rope you used or what your high score is, but what was going on inside of your mind. And this is valuable feedback that we can use to understand what's going on inside of ourselves. I like to call this "intra-active." Normally, we think about technology as interactive. This technology is intra-active. It understands what's inside of you and builds a sort of responsive relationship between you and your technology so that you can use this information to move you forward. So you can use this information to understand you in a responsive loop. At InteraXon — intra-active technology is one of our really defining mandates. It's how we understand the world inside and reflect it outside into this tight loop. For example, thought-controlled computing can teach children with ADD how to improve their focus. With ADD, children have a low proportion of beta waves for focus states and a high proportion of theta states. So you can create applications that reward focused brain states. So you can imagine kids playing video games with their brain waves and improving their ADD symptoms as they do it. This can be as effective as Ritalin. Perhaps even more importantly, thought-controlled computing can give children with ADD insights into their own fluctuating mental states, so they can better understand themselves and their learning needs. The way these children will be able to use their new awareness to improve themselves will upend many of the damaging and widespread social stigmas that people who are diagnosed as different are challenged with. We can peer inside our heads and interact with what was once locked away from us, what once mystified and separated us. Brainwave technology can understand us, anticipate our emotions and find the best solutions for our needs. Imagine this collected awareness of the individual computed and reflected across an entire lifespan. Imagine the insights that you can gain from this kind of second sight. It would be like plugging into your own personal Google. On the subject of Google, today you can search and tag images based on the thoughts and feelings you had while you watched them. You can tag pictures of baby animals as happy, or whatever baby animals are to you, and then you can search that database, navigating with your feelings, rather than the keywords that just hint at them. Or you could tag Facebook photos with the emotions that you had associated with those memories and then instantly prioritize the streams that catch your attention, just like this. Humanizing technology is about taking what's already natural about the human-tech experience and building technology seamlessly in tandem with it. As it aligns with our human behaviors, it can allow us to make better sense of what we do and, more importantly, why. Creating a big picture out of all the important little details that make up who we are. With humanized technology we can monitor the quality of your sleep cycles. When our productivity starts to slacken, we can go back to that data and see how we can make more effective balance between work and play. Do you know what causes fatigue in you or what brings out your energetic self, what triggers cause you to be depressed or what fun things are going to bring you out of that funk? Imagine if you had access to data that allowed you to rank on a scale of overall happiness which people in your life made you the happiest, or what activities brought you joy. Would you make more time for those people? Would you prioritize? Would you get a divorce? (Laughter) What thought-controlled computing can allow you to do is build colorful layered pictures of our lives. And with this, we can get the skinny on our psychological happenings and build a story of our behaviors over time. We can begin to see the underlying narratives that propel us forward and tell us about what's going on. And from this, we can learn how to change the plot, the outcome and the character of our personal stories. Two millennia ago, those Greeks had some powerful insights. They knew that a fundamental piece falls into place when you start to live out their little phrase, when you come into contact with yourself. They understood the power of human narrative and the value that we place on humans as changing, evolving and growing. But they understood something more fundamental — the sheer joy in discovery, the delight and fascination that we get from the world and being ourselves in it; the richness that we get from seeing, feeling and knowing the lives that we are. My mom's an artist, and as a child, I'd often see her bring things to life with the stroke of a brush. One moment, it was all white space, pure possibility. The next, it was alive with her colorful ideas and expressions. As I sat easel-side, watching her transform canvas after canvas, I learned that you could create your own world. I learned that our own inner worlds — our ideas, emotions and imaginations — were, in fact, not bound by our brains and bodies. If you could think it, if you could discover it, you could bring it to life. To me, thought-controlled computing is as simple and powerful as a paintbrush — one more tool to unlock and enliven the hidden worlds within us. I look forward to the day that I can sit beside you, easel-side, watching the world that we can create with our new toolboxes and the discoveries that we can make about ourselves. Thank you. (Applause)

The council of dads

{0: 'Bruce Feiler is the author of "The Secrets of Happy Families," and the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries "Walking the Bible."'}

TEDMED 2010

My story actually began when I was four years old and my family moved to a new neighborhood in our hometown of Savannah, Georgia. And this was the 1960s when actually all the streets in this neighborhood were named after Confederate war generals. We lived on Robert E. Lee Boulevard. And when I was five, my parents gave me an orange Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle. It had a swooping banana seat and those ape hanger handlebars that made the rider look like an orangutan. That's why they were called ape hangers. They were actually modeled on hotrod motorcycles of the 1960s, which I'm sure my mom didn't know. And one day I was exploring this cul-de-sac hidden away a few streets away. And I came back, and I wanted to turn around and get back to that street more quickly, so I decided to turn around in this big street that intersected our neighborhood, and wham! I was hit by a passing sedan. My mangled body flew in one direction, my mangled bike flew in the other. And I lay on the pavement stretching over that yellow line, and one of my neighbors came running over. "Andy, Andy, how are you doing?" she said, using the name of my older brother. (Laughter) "I'm Bruce," I said, and promptly passed out. I broke my left femur that day — it's the largest bone in your body — and spent the next two months in a body cast that went from my chin to the tip of my toe to my right knee, and a steel bar went from my right knee to my left ankle. And for the next 38 years, that accident was the only medically interesting thing that ever happened to me. In fact, I made a living by walking. I traveled around the world, entered different cultures, wrote a series of books about my travels, including "Walking the Bible." I hosted a television show by that name on PBS. I was, for all the world, the "walking guy." Until, in May 2008, a routine visit to my doctor and a routine blood test produced evidence in the form of an alkaline phosphatase number that something might be wrong with my bones. And my doctor, on a whim, sent me to get a full-body bone scan, which showed that there was some growth in my left leg. That sent me to an X-ray, then to an MRI. And one afternoon, I got a call from my doctor. "The tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor." I stopped walking, and it took my mind a second to convert that double negative into a much more horrifying negative. I have cancer. And to think that the tumor was in the same bone, in the same place in my body as the accident 38 years earlier — it seemed like too much of a coincidence. So that afternoon, I went back to my house, and my three year-old identical twin daughters, Eden and Tybee Feiler, came running to meet me. They'd just turned three, and they were into all things pink and purple. In fact, we called them Pinkalicious and Purplicious — although I must say, our favorite nickname occurred on their birthday, April 15th. When they were born at 6:14 and 6:46 on April 15, 2005, our otherwise grim, humorless doctor looked at his watch, and was like, "Hmm, April 15th — tax day. Early filer and late filer." (Laughter) The next day I came to see him. I was like, "Doctor, that was a really good joke." And he was like, "You're the writer, kid." Anyway — so they had just turned three, and they came and they were doing this dance they had just made up where they were twirling faster and faster until they tumbled to the ground, laughing with all the glee in the world. I crumbled. I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them, the art projects I might not mess up, the boyfriends I might not scowl at, the aisles I might not walk down. Would they wonder who I was, I thought. Would they yearn for my approval, my love, my voice? A few days later, I woke with an idea of how I might give them that voice. I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to be present in the passages of my daughters' lives. "I believe my girls will have plenty of opportunities in their lives," I wrote these men. "They'll have loving families and welcoming homes, but they may not have me. They may not have their dad. Will you help be their dad?" And I said to myself I would call this group of men "the Council of Dads." Now as soon as I had this idea, I decided I wouldn't tell my wife. Okay. She's a very upbeat, naturally excited person. There's this idea in this culture — I don't have to tell you — that you sort of "happy" your way through a problem. We should focus on the positive. My wife, as I said, she grew up outside of Boston. She's got a big smile. She's got a big personality. She's got big hair — although, she told me recently, I can't say she has big hair, because if I say she has big hair, people will think she's from Texas. And it's apparently okay to marry a boy from Georgia, but not to have hair from Texas. And actually, in her defense, if she were here right now, she would point out that, when we got married in Georgia, there were three questions on the marriage certificate license, the third of which was, "Are you related?" (Laughter) I said, "Look, in Georgia at least we want to know. In Arkansas they don't even ask." What I didn't tell her is, if she said, "Yes," you could jump. You don't need the 30-day waiting period. Because you don't need the get-to-know-you session at that point. So I wasn't going to tell her about this idea, but the next day I couldn't control myself, I told her. And she loved the idea, but she quickly started rejecting my nominees. She was like, "Well, I love him, but I would never ask him for advice." So it turned out that starting a council of dads was a very efficient way to find out what my wife really thought of my friends. (Laughter) So we decided that we needed a set of rules, and we came up with a number. And the first one was no family, only friends. We thought our family would already be there. Second, men only. We were trying to fill the dad-space in the girls' lives. And then third, sort of a dad for every side. We kind of went through my personality and tried to get a dad who represented each different thing. So what happened was I wrote a letter to each of these men. And rather than send it, I decided to read it to them in person. Linda, my wife, joked that it was like having six different marriage proposals. I sort of friend-married each of these guys. And the first of these guys was Jeff Schumlin. Now Jeff led this trip I took to Europe when I graduated from high school in the early 1980s. And on that first day we were in this youth hostel in a castle. And I snuck out behind, and there was a moat, a fence and a field of cows. And Jeff came up beside me and said, "So, have you ever been cow tipping?" I was like, "Cow tipping? He was like, "Yeah. Cows sleep standing up. So if you approach them from behind, down wind, you can push them over and they go thud in the mud." So before I had a chance to determine whether this was right or not, we had jumped the moat, we had climbed the fence, we were tiptoeing through the dung and approaching some poor, dozing cow. So a few weeks after my diagnosis, we went up to Vermont, and I decided to put Jeff as the first person in the Council of Dads. And we went to this apple orchard, and I read him this letter. "Will you help be their dad?" And I got to the end — he was crying and I was crying — and then he looked at me, and he said, "Yes." I was like, "Yes?" I kind of had forgotten there was a question at the heart of my letter. And frankly, although I keep getting asked this, it never occurred to me that anybody would turn me down under the circumstances. And then I asked him a question, which I ended up asking to all the dads and ended up really encouraging me to write this story down in a book. And that was, "What's the one piece of advice you would give to my girls?" And Jeff's advice was, "Be a traveller, not a tourist. Get off the bus. Seek out what's different. Approach the cow." "So it's 10 years from now," I said, "and my daughters are about to take their first trip abroad, and I'm not here. What would you tell them?" He said, "I would approach this journey as a young child might approach a mud puddle. You can bend over and look at your reflection in the mirror and maybe run your finger and make a small ripple, or you can jump in and thrash around and see what it feels like, what it smells like." And as he talked he had that glint in his eye that I first saw back in Holland — the glint that says, "Let's go cow tipping," even though we never did tip the cow, even though no one tips the cow, even though cows don't sleep standing up. He said, "I want to see you back here girls, at the end of this experience, covered in mud." Two weeks after my diagnosis, a biopsy confirmed I had a seven-inch osteosarcoma in my left femur. Six hundred Americans a year get an osteosarcoma. Eighty-five percent are under 21. Only a hundred adults a year get one of these diseases. Twenty years ago, doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped, and there was a 15 percent survival rate. And then in the 1980's, they determined that one particular cocktail of chemo could be effective, and within weeks I had started that regimen. And since we are in a medical room, I went through four and a half months of chemo. Actually I had Cisplatin, Doxorubicin and very high-dose Methotrexate. And then I had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon, Dr. John Healey at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium. And if you did see the Sanjay special, you saw these enormous screws that they screwed into my pelvis. Then he took my fibula from my calf, cut it out and then relocated it to my thigh, where it now lives. And what he actually did was he de-vascularized it from my calf and re-vascularized it in my thigh and then connected it to the good parts of my knee and my hip. And then he took out a third of my quadriceps muscle. This is a surgery so rare only two human beings have survived it before me. And my reward for surviving it was to go back for four more months of chemo. It was, as we said in my house, a lost year. Because in those opening weeks, we all had nightmares. And one night I had a nightmare that I was walking through my house, sat at my desk and saw photographs of someone else's children sitting on my desk. And I remember a particular one night that, when you told that story of — I don't know where you are Dr. Nuland — of William Sloane Coffin — it made me think of it. Because I was in the hospital after, I think it was my fourth round of chemo when my numbers went to zero, and I had basically no immune system. And they put me in an infectious disease ward at the hospital. And anybody who came to see me had to cover themselves in a mask and cover all of the extraneous parts of their body. And one night I got a call from my mother-in-law that my daughters, at that time three and a half, were missing me and feeling my absence. And I hung up the phone, and I put my face in my hands, and I screamed this silent scream. And what you said, Dr. Nuland — I don't know where you are — made me think of this today. Because the thought that came to my mind was that the feeling that I had was like a primal scream. And what was so striking — and one of the messages I want to leave you here with today — is the experience. As I became less and less human — and at this moment in my life, I was probably 30 pounds less than I am right now. Of course, I had no hair and no immune system. They were actually putting blood inside my body. At that moment I was less and less human, I was also, at the same time, maybe the most human I've ever been. And what was so striking about that time was, instead of repulsing people, I was actually proving to be a magnet for people. People were incredibly drawn. When my wife and I had kids, we thought it would be all-hands-on-deck. Instead, it was everybody running the other way. And when I had cancer, we thought it'd be everybody running the other way. Instead, it was all-hands-on-deck. And when people came to me, rather than being incredibly turned off by what they saw — I was like a living ghost — they were incredibly moved to talk about what was going on in their own lives. Cancer, I found, is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to, but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed when we do. And this also happened to my girls as they began to see, and, we thought, maybe became an ounce more compassionate. One day, my daughter Tybee, Tybee came to me, and she said, "I have so much love for you in my body, daddy, I can't stop giving you hugs and kisses. And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that's where love comes from." (Laughter) And one night my daughter Eden came to me. And as I lifted my leg out of bed, she reached for my crutches and handed them to me. In fact, if I cling to one memory of this year, it would be walking down a darkened hallway with five spongy fingers grasping the handle underneath my hand. I didn't need the crutch anymore, I was walking on air. And one of the profound things that happened was this act of actually connecting to all these people. And it made me think — and I'll just note for the record — one word that I've only heard once actually was when we were all doing Tony Robbins yoga yesterday — the one word that has not been mentioned in this seminar actually is the word "friend." And yet from everything we've been talking about — compliance, or addiction, or weight loss — we now know that community is important, and yet it's one thing we don't actually bring in. And there was something incredibly profound about sitting down with my closest friends and telling them what they meant to me. And one of the things that I learned is that over time, particularly men, who used to be non-communicative, are becoming more and more communicative. And that particularly happened — there was one in my life — is this Council of Dads that Linda said, what we were talking about, it's like what the moms talk about at school drop-off. And no one captures this modern manhood to me more than David Black. Now David is my literary agent. He's about five-foot three and a half on a good day, standing fully upright in cowboy boots. And on kind of the manly-male front, he answers the phone — I can say this I guess because you've done it here — he answers the phone, "Yo, motherfucker." He gives boring speeches about obscure bottles of wine, and on his 50th birthday he bought a convertible sports car — although, like a lot of men, he's impatient; he bought it on his 49th. But like a lot of modern men, he hugs, he bakes, he leaves work early to coach Little League. Someone asked me if he cried when I asked him to be in the council of dads. I was like, "David cries when you invite him to take a walk." (Laughter) But he's a literary agent, which means he's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams don't come true. And this is what we wanted him to capture — what it means to have setbacks and then aspirations. And I said, "What's the most valuable thing you can give to a dreamer?" And he said, "A belief in themselves." "But when I came to see you," I said, "I didn't believe in myself. I was at a wall." He said, "I don't see the wall," and I'm telling you the same, Don't see the wall. You may encounter one from time to time, but you've got to find a way to get over it, around it, or through it. But whatever you do, don't succumb to it. Don't give in to the wall. My home is not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, and during the year and a half I was on crutches, it became a sort of symbol to me. So one day near the end of my journey, I said, "Come on girls, let's take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge." We set out on crutches. I was on crutches, my wife was next to me, my girls were doing these rockstar poses up ahead. And because walking was one of the first things I lost, I spent most of that year thinking about this most elemental of human acts. Walking upright, we are told, is the threshold of what made us human. And yet, for the four million years humans have been walking upright, the act is essentially unchanged. As my physical therapist likes to say, "Every step is a tragedy waiting to happen." You nearly fall with one leg, then you catch yourself with the other. And the biggest consequence of walking on crutches — as I did for a year and a half — is that you walk slower. You hurry, you get where you're going, but you get there alone. You go slow, you get where you're going, but you get there with this community you built along the way. At the risk of admission, I was never nicer than the year I was on crutches. 200 years ago, a new type of pedestrian appeared in Paris. He was called a "flaneur," one who wanders the arcades. And it was the custom of those flaneurs to show they were men of leisure by taking turtles for walks and letting the reptile set the pace. And I just love this ode to slow moving. And it's become my own motto for my girls. Take a walk with a turtle. Behold the world in pause. And this idea of pausing may be the single biggest lesson I took from my journey. There's a quote from Moses on the side of the Liberty Bell, and it comes from a passage in the book of Leviticus, that every seven years you should let the land lay fallow. And every seven sets of seven years, the land gets an extra year of rest during which time all families are reunited and people surrounded with the ones they love. That 50th year is called the jubilee year, and it's the origin of that term. And though I'm shy of 50, it captures my own experience. My lost year was my jubilee year. By laying fallow, I planted the seeds for a healthier future and was reunited with the ones I love. Come the one year anniversary of my journey, I went to see my surgeon, Dr. John Healey — and by the way, Healey, great name for a doctor. He's the president of the International Society of Limb Salvage, which is the least euphemistic term I've ever heard. And I said, "Dr. Healey, if my daughters come to you one day and say, 'What should I learn from my daddy's story?' what would you tell them?" He said, "I would tell them what I know, and that is everybody dies, but not everybody lives. I want you to live." I wrote a letter to my girls that appears at the end of my book, "The Council of Dads," and I listed these lessons, a few of which you've heard here today: Approach the cow, pack your flipflops, don't see the wall, live the questions, harvest miracles. As I looked at this list — to me it was sort of like a psalm book of living — I realized, we may have done it for our girls, but it really changed us. And that is, the secret of the Council of Dads, is that my wife and I did this in an attempt to help our daughters, but it really changed us. So I stand here today as you see now, walking without crutches or a cane. And last week I had my 18-month scans. And as you all know, anybody with cancer has to get follow-up scans. In my case it's quarterly. And all the collective minds in this room, I dare say, can never find a solution for scan-xiety. As I was going there, I was wondering, what would I say depending on what happened here. I got good news that day, and I stand here today cancer-free, walking without aid and hobbling forward. And I just want to mention briefly in passing — I'm past my time limit — but I just want to briefly mention in passing that one of the nice things that can come out of a conference like this is, at a similar meeting, back in the spring, Anne Wojcicki heard about our story and very quickly — in a span of three weeks — put the full resources of 23andMe, and we announced an initiative in July to get to decode the genome of anybody, a living person with a heart tissue, bone sarcoma. And she told me last night, in the three months since we've done it, we've gotten 300 people who've contributed to this program. And the epidemiologists here will tell you, that's half the number of people who get the disease in one year in the United States. So if you go to 23andMe, or if you go to councilofdads.com, you can click on a link. And we encourage anybody to join this effort. But I'll just close what I've been talking about by leaving you with this message: May you find an excuse to reach out to some long-lost pal, or to that college roommate, or to some person you may have turned away from. May you find a mud puddle to jump in someplace, or find a way to get over, around, or through any wall that stands between you and one of your dreams. And every now and then, find a friend, find a turtle, and take a long, slow walk. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Reviving New York's rivers -- with oysters!

{0: 'Kate Orff asks us to rethink “landscape”—to use urban greenspaces and blue spaces in fresh ways to mediate between humankind and nature.'}

TEDWomen 2010

I am passionate about the American landscape and how the physical form of the land, from the great Central Valley of California to the bedrock of Manhattan, has really shaped our history and our character. But one thing is clear. In the last 100 years alone, our country — and this is a sprawl map of America — our country has systematically flattened and homogenized the landscape to the point where we've forgotten our relationship with the plants and animals that live alongside us and the dirt beneath our feet. And so, how I see my work contributing is sort of trying to literally re-imagine these connections and physically rebuild them. This graph represents what we're dealing with now in the built environment. And it's really a conflux of urban population rising, biodiversity plummeting and also, of course, sea levels rising and climate changing. So when I also think about design, I think about trying to rework and re-engage the lines on this graph in a more productive way. And you can see from the arrow here indicating "you are here," I'm trying to sort of blend and meld these two very divergent fields of urbanism and ecology, and sort of bring them together in an exciting new way. So the era of big infrastructure is over. I mean, these sort of top-down, mono-functional, capital-intensive solutions are really not going to cut it. We need new tools and new approaches. Similarly, the idea of architecture as this sort of object in the field, devoid of context, is really not the — excuse me, it's fairly blatant — is really not the approach that we need to take. So we need new stories, new heroes and new tools. So now I want to introduce you to my new hero in the global climate change war, and that is the eastern oyster. So, albeit a very small creature and very modest, this creature is incredible, because it can agglomerate into these mega-reef structures. It can grow; you can grow it; and — did I mention? — it's quite tasty. So the oyster was the basis for a manifesto-like urban design project that I did about the New York Harbor called "oyster-tecture." And the core idea of oyster-tecture is to harness the biological power of mussels, eelgrass and oysters — species that live in the harbor — and, at the same time, harness the power of people who live in the community towards making change now. Here's a map of my city, New York City, showing inundation in red. And what's circled is the site that I'm going to talk about, the Gowanus Canal and Governors Island. If you look here at this map, showing everything in blue is out in the water, and everything in yellow is upland. But you can see, even just intuit, from this map, that the harbor has dredged and flattened, and went from a rich, three-dimensional mosaic to flat muck in really a matter of years. Another set of views of actually the Gowanus Canal itself. Now the Gowanus is particularly smelly — I will admit it. There are problems of sewage overflow and contamination, but I would also argue that almost every city has this exact condition, and it's a condition that we're all facing. And here's a map of that condition, showing the contaminants in yellow and green, exacerbated by this new flow of storm-surge and sea-level rise. So we really had a lot to deal with. When we started this project, one of the core ideas was to look back in history and try to understand what was there. And you can see from this map, there's this incredible geographical signature of a series of islands that were out in the harbor and a matrix of salt marshes and beaches that served as natural wave attenuation for the upland settlement. We also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the Gowanus Canal itself. So our concept is really this back-to-the-future concept, harnessing the intelligence of that land settlement pattern. And the idea has two core stages. One is to develop a new artificial ecology, a reef out in the harbor, that would then protect new settlement patterns inland and the Gowanus. Because if you have cleaner water and slower water, you can imagine a new way of living with that water. So the project really addresses these three core issues in a new and exciting way, I think. Here we are, back to our hero, the oyster. And again, it's this incredibly exciting animal. It accepts algae and detritus in one end, and through this beautiful, glamorous set of stomach organs, out the other end comes cleaner water. And one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. Oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days. They were key in our culture and our economy. Basically, New York was built on the backs of oystermen, and our streets were literally built over oyster shells. This image is an image of an oyster cart, which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today. So again, we got the short end of the deal there. (Laughter) Finally, oysters can attenuate and agglomerate onto each other and form these amazing natural reef structures. They really become nature's wave attenuators. And they become the bedrock of any harbor ecosystem. Many, many species depend on them. So we were inspired by the oyster, but I was also inspired by the life cycle of the oyster. It can move from a fertilized egg to a spat, which is when they're floating through the water, and when they're ready to attach onto another oyster, to an adult male oyster or female oyster, in a number of weeks. We reinterpreted this life cycle on the scale of our sight and took the Gowanus as a giant oyster nursery where oysters would be grown up in the Gowanus, then paraded down in their spat stage and seeded out on the Bayridge Reef. And so the core idea here was to hit the reset button and regenerate an ecology over time that was regenerative and cleaning and productive. How does the reef work? Well, it's very, very simple. A core concept here is that climate change isn't something that — the answers won't land down from the Moon. And with a $20 billion price tag, we should simply start and get to work with what we have now and what's in front of us. So this image is simply showing — it's a field of marine piles interconnected with this woven fuzzy rope. What is fuzzy rope, you ask? It's just that; it's this very inexpensive thing, available practically at your hardware store, and it's very cheap. So we imagine that we would actually potentially even host a bake sale to start our new project. (Laughter) So in the studio, rather than drawing, we began to learn how to knit. The concept was to really knit this rope together and develop this new soft infrastructure for the oysters to grow on. You can see in the diagram how it grows over time from an infrastructural space into a new public urban space. And that grows over time dynamically with the threat of climate change. It also creates this incredibly interesting, I think, new amphibious public space, where you can imagine working, you can imagine recreating in a new way. In the end, what we realized we were making was a new blue-green watery park for the next watery century — an amphibious park, if you will. So get your Tevas on. So you can imagine scuba diving here. This is an image of high school students, scuba divers that we worked with on our team. So you can imagine a sort of new manner of living with a new relationship with the water, and also a hybridizing of recreational and science programs in terms of monitoring. Another new vocabulary word for the brave new world: this is the word "flupsy" — it's short for "floating upwelling system." And this glorious, readily available device is basically a floating raft with an oyster nursery below. So the water is churned through this raft. You can see the eight chambers on the side host little baby oysters and essentially force-feed them. So rather than having 10 oysters, you have 10,000 oysters. And then those spat are then seeded. Here's the Gowanus future with the oyster rafts on the shorelines — the flupsification of the Gowanus. New word. And also showing oyster gardening for the community along its edges. And finally, how much fun it would be to watch the flupsy parade and cheer on the oyster spats as they go down to the reef. I get asked two questions about this project. One is: why isn't it happening now? And the second one is: when can we eat the oysters? And the answer is: not yet, they're working. But we imagine, with our calculations, that by 2050, you might be able to sink your teeth into a Gowanus oyster. To conclude, this is just one cross-section of one piece of city, but my dream is, my hope is, that when you all go back to your own cities that we can start to work together and collaborate on remaking and reforming a new urban landscape towards a more sustainable, a more livable and a more delicious future. Thank you. (Applause)

We are makers

{0: "A technology and publishing enthusiast, Dale Dougherty founded MAKE magazine and created the world's largest DIY festival, Maker Faire."}

TED@MotorCity

I'm going to have a pretty simple idea that I'm just going to tell you over and over until I get you to believe it, and that is all of us are makers. I really believe that. All of us are makers. We're born makers. We have this ability to make things, to grasp things with our hands. We use words like "grasp" metaphorically to also think about understanding things. We don't just live, but we make. We create things. Well I'm going to show you a group of makers from Maker Faire and various places. It doesn't come out particularly well, but that's a particularly tall bicycle. It's a scraper bike; it's called — from Oakland. And this is a particularly small scooter for a gentleman of this size. But he's trying to power it, or motorize it, with a drill. (Laughter) And the question he had is, "Can I do it? Can it be done?" Apparently it can. So makers are enthusiasts; they're amateurs; they're people who love doing what they do. They don't always even know why they're doing it. We have begun organizing makers at our Maker Faire. There was one held in Detroit here last summer, and it will be held again next summer, at the Henry Ford. But we hold them in San Francisco — (Applause) — and in New York. And it's a fabulous event to just meet and talk to these people who make things and are there to just show them to you and talk about them and have a great conversation. (Video) Guy: I might get one of those. Dale Dougherty: These are electric muffins. Guy: Where did you guys get those? Muffin: Will you glide with us? (Guy: No.) DD: I know Ford has new electric vehicles coming out. We got there first. Lady: Will you glide with us? DD: This is something I call "swinging in the rain." And you can barely see it, but it's — a controller at top cycles the water to fall just before and after you pass through the bottom of the arc. So imagine a kid: "Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet? No, I didn't get wet. Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet?" That's the experience of a clever ride. And of course, we have fashion. People are remaking things into fashion. I don't know if this is called a basket-bra, but it ought to be something like that. We have art students getting together, taking old radiator parts and doing an iron-pour to make something new out of it. They did that in the summer, and it was very warm. Now this one takes a little bit of explaining. You know what those are, right? Billy-Bob, or Billy Bass, or something like that. Now the background is — the guy who did this is a physicist. And here he'll explain a little bit about what it does. (Video) Richard Carter: I'm Richard Carter, and this is the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir. Choir: ♫ When you hold me in your arms ♫ DD: This is all computer-controlled in an old Volvo. Choir: ♫ I'm hooked on a feelin' ♫ ♫ I'm high on believin' ♫ ♫ That you're in love with me ♫ DD: So Richard came up from Houston last year to visit us in Detroit here and show the wonderful Sashimi Tabernacle Choir. So, are you a maker? How many people here would say you're a maker, if you raise your hand? That's a pretty good — but there's some of you out there that won't admit that you're makers. And again, think about it. You're makers of food; you're makers of shelter; you're makers of lots of different things, and partly what interests me today is you're makers of your own world, and particularly the role that technology has in your life. You're really a driver or a passenger — to use a Volkswagen phrase. Makers are in control. That's what fascinates them. That's why they do what they do. They want to figure out how things work; they want to get access to it; and they want to control it. They want to use it to their own purpose. Makers today, to some degree, are out on the edge. They're not mainstream. They're a little bit radical. They're a bit subversive in what they do. But at one time, it was fairly commonplace to think of yourself as a maker. It was not something you'd even remark upon. And I found this old video. And I'll tell you more about it, but just ... (Music) (Video) Narrator: Of all things Americans are, we are makers. With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form, and we fashion. Makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers. DD: So it goes on to show you people making things out of wood, a grandfather making a ship in a bottle, a woman making a pie — somewhat standard fare of the day. But it was a sense of pride that we made things, that the world around us was made by us. It didn't just exist. We made it, and we were connected to it that way. And I think that's tremendously important. Now I'm going to tell you one funny thing about this. This particular reel — it's an industrial video — but it was shown in drive-in theaters in 1961 — in the Detroit area, in fact — and it preceded Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho." (Laughter) So I like to think there was something going on there of the new generation of makers coming out of this, plus "Psycho." This is Andrew Archer. I met Andrew at one of our community meetings putting together Maker Faire. Andrew had moved to Detroit from Duluth, Minnesota. And I talked to his mom, and I ended up doing a story on him for a magazine called Kidrobot. He's just a kid that grew up playing with tools instead of toys. He liked to take things apart. His mother gave him a part of the garage, and he collected things from yard sales, and he made stuff. And then he didn't particularly like school that much, but he got involved in robotics competitions, and he realized he had a talent, and, more importantly, he had a real passion for it. And he began building robots. And when I sat down next to him, he was telling me about a company he formed, and he was building some robots for automobile factories to move things around on the factory floor. And that's why he moved to Michigan. But he also moved here to meet other people doing what he's doing. And this kind of gets to this important idea today. This is Jeff and Bilal and several others here in a hackerspace. And there's about three hackerspaces or more in Detroit. And there's probably even some new ones since I've been here last. But these are like clubs — they're sharing tools, sharing space, sharing expertise in what to make. And so it's a very interesting phenomenon that's going across the world. But essentially these are people that are playing with technology. Let me say that again: playing. They don't necessarily know what they're doing or why they're doing it. They're playing to discover what the technology can do, and probably to discover what they can do themselves, what their own capabilities are. Now the other thing that I think is taking off, another reason making is taking off today, is there's some great new tools out there. And you can't see this very well on the screen, but Arduino — Arduino is an open-source hardware platform. It's a micro-controller. If you don't know what those are, they're just the "brains." So they're the brains of maker projects, and here's an example of one. And I don't know if you can see it that well, but that's a mailbox — so an ordinary mailbox and an Arduino. So you figure out how to program this, and you put this in your mailbox. And when someone opens your mailbox, you get a notification, an alert message goes to your iPhone. Now that could be a dog door, it could be someone going somewhere where they shouldn't, like a little brother into a little sister's room. There's all kinds of different things that you can imagine for that. Now here's something — a 3D printer. That's another tool that's really taken off — really, really interesting. This is Makerbot. And there are industrial versions of this — about 20,000 dollars. These guys came up with a kit version for 750 dollars, and that means that hobbyists and ordinary folks can get a hold of this and begin playing with 3D printers. Now they don't know what they want to do with it, but they're going to figure it out. They will only figure it out by getting their hands on it and playing with it. One of the coolest things is, Makerbot sent out an upgrade, some new brackets for the box. Well you printed out the brackets and then replaced the old brackets with the new ones. Isn't that cool? So makers harvest technology from all the places around us. This is a radar speed detector that was developed from a Hot Wheels toy. And they do interesting things. They're really creating new areas and exploring areas that you might only think — the military is doing drones — well, there is a whole community of people building autonomous airplanes, or vehicles — something that you could program to fly on its own, without a stick or anything, to figure out what path it's going. Fascinating work they're doing. We just had an issue on space exploration, DIY space exploration. This is probably the best time in the history of mankind to love space. You could build your own satellite and get it into space for like 8,000 dollars. Think how much money and how many years it took NASA to get satellites into space. In fact, these guys actually work for NASA, and they're trying to pioneer using off-the-shelf components, cheap things that aren't specialized that they can combine and send up into space. Makers are a source of innovation, and I think it relates back to something like the birth of the personal computer industry. This is Steve Wozniak. Where does he learn about computers? It's the Homebrew Computer Club — just like a hackerspace. And he says, "I could go there all day long and talk to people and share ideas for free." Well he did a little bit better than free. But it's important to understand that a lot of the origins of our industries — even like Henry Ford — come from this idea of playing and figuring things out in groups. Well, if I haven't convinced you that you're a maker, I hope I could convince you that our next generation should be makers, that kids are particularly interested in this, in this ability to control the physical world and be able to use things like micro-controllers and build robots. And we've got to get this into schools, or into communities in many, many ways — the ability to tinker, to shape and reshape the world around us. There's a great opportunity today — and that's what I really care about the most. An the answer to the question: what will America make? It's more makers. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Social media and the end of gender

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

TEDWomen 2010

I'm going to make an argument today that may seem a little bit crazy: social media and the end of gender. Let me connect the dots. I'm going to argue today that the social media applications that we all know and love, or love to hate, are actually going to help free us from some of the absurd assumptions that we have as a society about gender. I think that social media is actually going to help us dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that we see in media and advertising about gender. If you hadn't noticed, our media climate generally provides a very distorted mirror of our lives and of our gender, and I think that's going to change. Now most media companies — television, radio, publishing, games, you name it — they use very rigid segmentation methods in order to understand their audiences. It's old-school demographics. They come up with these very restrictive labels to define us. Now the crazy thing is that media companies believe that if you fall within a certain demographic category then you are predictable in certain ways — you have certain taste, that you like certain things. And so the bizarre result of this is that most of our popular culture is actually based on these presumptions about our demographics. Age demographics: the 18 to 49 demo has had a huge impact on all mass media programming in this country since the 1960s, when the baby boomers were still young. Now they've aged out of that demographic, but it's still the case that powerful ratings companies like Nielson don't even take into account viewers of television shows over age 54. In our media environment, it's as if they don't even exist. Now, if you watch "Mad Men," like I do — it's a popular TV show in the States — Dr. Faye Miller does something called psychographics, which first came about in the 1960s, where you create these complex psychological profiles of consumers. But psychographics really haven't had a huge impact on the media business. It's really just been basic demographics. So I'm at the Norman Lear Center at USC, and we've done a lot of research over the last seven, eight years on demographics and how they affect media and entertainment in this country and abroad. And in the last three years, we've been looking specifically at social media to see what has changed, and we've discovered some very interesting things. All the people who participate in social media networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used in order to understand them. But those categories mean even less now than they did before, because with online networking tools, it's much easier for us to escape some of our demographic boxes. We're able to connect with people quite freely and to redefine ourselves online. And we can lie about our age online, too, pretty easily. We can also connect with people based on our very specific interests. We don't need a media company to help do this for us. So the traditional media companies, of course, are paying very close attention to these online communities. They know this is the mass audience of the future; they need to figure it out. But they're having a hard time doing it because they're still trying to use demographics in order to understand them, because that's how ad rates are still determined. When they're monitoring your clickstream — and you know they are — they have a really hard time figuring out your age, your gender and your income. They can make some educated guesses. But they get a lot more information about what you do online, what you like, what interests you. That's easier for them to find out than who you are. And even though that's still sort of creepy, there is an upside to having your taste monitored. Suddenly our taste is being respected in a way that it hasn't been before. It had been presumed before. So when you look online at the way people aggregate, they don't aggregate around age, gender and income. They aggregate around the things they love, the things that they like, and if you think about it, shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories. I'd much rather know whether you like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" rather than how old you are. That would tell me something more substantial about you. Now there's something else that we've discovered about social media that's actually quite surprising. It turns out that women are really driving the social media revolution. If you look at the statistics — these are worldwide statistics — in every single age category, women actually outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies. And then if you look at the amount of time that they spend on these sites, they truly dominate the social media space, which is a space that's having a huge impact on old media. The question is: what sort of impact is this going to have on our culture, and what's it going to mean for women? If the case is that social media is dominating old media and women are dominating social media, then does that mean that women are going to take over global media? Are we suddenly going to see a lot more female characters in cartoons and in games and on TV shows? Will the next big-budget blockbuster movies actually be chick flicks? Could this be possible, that suddenly our media landscape will become a feminist landscape? Well, I actually don't think that's going to be the case. I think that media companies are going to hire a lot more women, because they realize this is important for their business, and I think that women are also going to continue to dominate the social media sphere. But I think women are actually going to be — ironically enough — responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre categories like the "chick flick" and all these other genre categories that presume that certain demographic groups like certain things — that Hispanics like certain things, that young people like certain things. This is far too simplistic. The future entertainment media that we're going to see is going to be very data-driven, and it's going to be based on the information that we ascertain from taste communities online, where women are really driving the action. So you may be asking, well why is it important that I know what entertains people? Why should I know this? Of course, old media companies and advertisers need to know this. But my argument is that, if you want to understand the global village, it's probably a good idea that you figure out what they're passionate about, what amuses them, what they choose to do in their free time. This is a very important thing to know about people. I've spent most of my professional life researching media and entertainment and its impact on people's lives. And I do it not just because it's fun — though actually, it is really fun — but also because our research has shown over and over again that entertainment and play have a huge impact on people's lives — for instance, on their political beliefs and on their health. And so, if you have any interest in understanding the world, looking at how people amuse themselves is a really good way to start. So imagine a media atmosphere that isn't dominated by lame stereotypes about gender and other demographic characteristics. Can you even imagine what that looks like? I can't wait to find out what it looks like. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Are we born to run?

{0: 'Christopher McDougall is the author of "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen."'}

TEDxPennQuarter

Running: it's basically just right, left, right, left, yeah? I mean, we've been doing it for two million years, so it's kind of arrogant to assume that I've got something to say that hasn't been said and performed better a long time ago. But the cool thing about running, as I've discovered, is that something bizarre happens in this activity all the time. Case in point: A couple months ago, if you saw the New York City Marathon, I guarantee you, you saw something that no one has ever seen before. An Ethiopian woman named Derartu Tulu turns up at the starting line. She's 37 years old. She hasn't won a marathon of any kind in eight years, and a few months previously, she had almost died in childbirth. Derartu Tulu was ready to hang it up and retire from the sport, but she decided she'd go for broke and try for one last big payday in the marquee event, the New York City Marathon. Except — bad news for Derartu Tulu — some other people had the same idea, including the Olympic gold medalist, and Paula Radcliffe, who is a monster, the fastest woman marathoner in history by far. Only 10 minutes off the men's world record, Paula Radcliffe is essentially unbeatable. That's her competition. The gun goes off, and — I mean, she's not even an underdog; she's, like, under the underdogs. But the under-underdog hangs tough, and 22 miles into a 26-mile race, there is Derartu Tulu, up there with the lead pack. Now, this is when something really bizarre happens. Paula Radcliffe, the one person who is sure to snatch the big paycheck from Derartu Tulu's under-underdog hands, suddenly grabs her leg and starts to fall back. So we all know what to do in this situation, right? You give her a quick crack in the teeth with your elbow and blaze for the finish line. Derartu Tulu ruins the script. Instead of taking off, she falls back and she grabs Paula Radcliffe, and says, "Come on. Come with us. You can do it." So Paula Radcliffe, unfortunately, does it. She catches up with the lead pack and is pushing toward the finish line. But then she falls back again. The second time, Derartu Tulu grabs her and tries to pull her. And Paula Radcliffe, at that point, says, "I'm done. Go." So that's a fantastic story, and we all know how it ends. She loses the check, but she goes home with something bigger and more important. Except Derartu Tulu ruins the script again. Instead of losing, she blazes past the lead pack and wins. Wins the New York City Marathon, goes home with a big fat check. It's a heartwarming story, but if you drill a little bit deeper, you've got to sort of wonder about what exactly was going on there. When you have two outliers in one organism, it's not a coincidence. When you have someone who is more competitive and more compassionate than anybody else in the race, again, it's not a coincidence. You show me a creature with webbed feet and gills; somehow water's involved. Someone with that kind of heart, there's some kind of connection there. And the answer to it, I think, can be found down in the Copper Canyons of Mexico, where there's a reclusive tribe, called the Tarahumara Indians. Now, the Tarahumara are remarkable for three things. Number one is: they have been living essentially unchanged for the past 400 years. When the conquistadors arrived in North America you had two choices: you either fight back and engage or you could take off. The Mayans and Aztecs engaged, which is why there are very few Mayans and Aztecs. The Tarahumara had a different strategy. They took off and hid in this labyrinthine, networking, spider-webbing system of canyons called the Copper Canyons. And there they've remained since the 1600s, essentially the same way they've always been. The second thing remarkable about the Tarahumara is: deep into old age — 70 to 80 years old — these guys aren't running marathons; they're running mega-marathons. They're not doing 26 miles, they're doing 100, 150 miles at a time, and apparently without injury, without problems. The last thing that's remarkable about the Tarahumara is: all the things we're going to be talking about today, all the things we're trying to use all of our technology and brain power to solve — things like heart disease and cholesterol and cancer; crime, warfare and violence; clinical depression — all this stuff — the Tarahumara don't know what you're talking about. They are free from all of these modern ailments. So what's the connection? Again, we're talking about outliers; there's got to be some kind of cause and effect. Well, there are teams of scientists at Harvard and the University of Utah that are bending their brains and trying to figure out what the Tarahumara have known forever. They're trying to solve those same kinds of mysteries. And once again, a mystery wrapped inside of a mystery — perhaps the key to Derartu Tulu and the Tarahumara is wrapped in three other mysteries, which go like this: Three things — if you have the answer, come up and take the microphone, because nobody else knows the answer. If you know it, you're smarter than anybody on planet Earth. Mystery number one is this: Two million years ago, the human brain exploded in size. Australopithecus had a tiny little pea brain. Suddenly humans show up, Homo erectus, big old melon head. To have a brain of that size, you need to have a source of condensed caloric energy. In other words, early humans are eating dead animals — no argument, that's a fact. The only problem is, the first edged weapons only appeared about 200,000 years ago. So somehow, for nearly two million years, we are killing animals without any weapons. Now, we're not using our strength, because we are the biggest sissies in the jungle. Every other animal is stronger than we are, they have fangs, they have claws, they have nimbleness, they have speed. We think Usain Bolt is fast. Usain Bolt can get his ass kicked by a squirrel. We're not fast. That would be an Olympic event: turn a squirrel loose, whoever catches it gets a gold medal. (Laughter) So no weapons, no speed, no strength, no fangs, no claws. How were we killing these animals? Mystery number one. Mystery number two: Women have been in the Olympics for quite some time now, but one thing that's remarkable about all women sprinters: they all suck; they're terrible. There's not a fast woman on the planet and there never has been. The fastest woman to ever run a mile did it in 4:15. I could throw a rock and hit a high-school boy who can run faster than 4:15. For some reason, you guys are just really slow. But — (Laughter) But, you get to the marathon we were just talking about — you've only been allowed to run the marathon for 20 years, because prior to the 1980s, medical science said if a woman tried to run 26 miles — does anyone know what would happen if you tried to run 26 miles? Why you were banned from the marathon before the 1980s? Audience Member: Her uterus would be torn. Christopher McDougall: Her uterus would be torn, yes. Torn reproductive organs. The uterus would literally fall out of the body. (Laughter) Now, I've been to a lot of marathons, and I've yet to see any ... (Laughter) So it's only been 20 years that women have been allowed to run the marathon. In that very short learning curve, you've gone from broken organs up to the fact that you're only 10 minutes off the male world record. Then you go beyond 26 miles, into the distance that medical science also told us would be fatal to humans — remember Pheidippides died when he ran 26 miles — you get to 50 and 100 miles, and suddenly, it's a different game. You take a runner like Ann Trason or Nikki Kimball or Jenn Shelton, put them in a race of 50 or 100 miles against anybody in the world, and it's a coin toss who's going to win. I'll give you an example. A couple years ago, Emily Baer signed up for a race called the Hardrock 100, which tells you all you need to know about the race. They give you 48 hours to finish this race. Well, Emily Baer — 500 runners — she finishes in eighth place, in the top 10, even though she stopped at all the aid stations to breastfeed her baby during the race. (Laughter) And yet, she beat 492 other people. The last mystery: Why is it that women get stronger as distances get longer? The third mystery is this: At the University of Utah, they started tracking finishing times for people running the marathon. What they found is that if you start running the marathon at age 19, you'll get progressively faster, year by year, until you reach your peak at age 27. And then after that, you succumb to the rigors of time. And you'll get slower and slower, until eventually you're back to running the same speed you were at age 19. So about seven, eight years to reach your peak, and then gradually you fall off your peak, until you go back to the starting point. You'd think it might take eight years to go back to the same speed, maybe 10 years — no, it's 45 years. 64-year-old men and women are running as fast as they were at age 19. Now, I defy you to come up with any other physical activity — and please don't say golf — something that's actually hard — (Laughter) where geriatrics are performing as well as they did as teenagers. So you have these three mysteries. Is there one piece in the puzzle which might wrap all these things up? You've got to be careful anytime someone looks back in prehistory and tries to give you a global answer because, it being prehistory, you can say whatever the hell you want and get away with it. But I'll submit this to you: If you put one piece in the middle of this jigsaw puzzle, suddenly it all starts to form a coherent picture. If you're wondering why the Tarahumara don't fight and don't die of heart disease, why a poor Ethiopian woman named Derartu Tulu can be the most compassionate and yet the most competitive, and why we somehow were able to find food without weapons, perhaps it's because humans, as much as we like to think of ourselves as masters of the universe, actually evolved as nothing more than a pack of hunting dogs. Maybe we evolved as a hunting pack animal. Because the one advantage we have in the wilderness — again, it's not our fangs, our claws or our speed — the only thing we do really well is sweat. We're really good at being sweaty and smelly. Better than any other mammal on Earth, we can sweat really well. But the advantage of that little bit of social discomfort is the fact that, when it comes to running under hot heat for long distances, we're superb — the best on the planet. You take a horse on a hot day, and after about five or six miles, that horse has a choice: it's either going to breathe or it's going to cool off. But it ain't doing both. We can. So what if we evolved as hunting pack animals? What if the only natural advantage we had in the world was the fact that we could get together as a group, go out there on that African savanna, pick out an antelope, go out as a pack, and run that thing to death? That's all we could do. We could run really far on a hot day. Well, if that's true, a couple other things had to be true as well. The key to being part of a hunting pack is the word "pack." If you go out by yourself and try to chase an antelope, I guarantee there will be two cadavers out in the savanna. You need a pack to pull together. You need to have those 64- and 65-year-olds who have been doing this for a long time to understand which antelope you're trying to catch. The herd explodes and it gathers back again. Those expert trackers have to be part of the pack. They can't be 10 miles behind. You need the women and the adolescents there, because the two times in your life you most benefit from animal protein is when you're a nursing mother and a developing adolescent. It makes no sense to have the antelope over there, dead, and the people who want to eat it 50 miles away. They need to be part of the pack. You need those 27-year-old studs at the peak of their powers ready to drop the kill, and you need those teenagers who are learning the whole thing involved. The pack stays together. Another thing that has to be true: this pack cannot be materialistic. You can't be hauling all your crap around, trying to chase the antelope. You can't be a pissed-off pack. You can't be bearing grudges, like, "I'm not chasing that guy's antelope. He pissed me off. Let him go chase his own antelope." The pack has got to be able to swallow its ego, be cooperative, and pull together. What you end up with, in other words, is a culture remarkably similar to the Tarahumara, a tribe that has remained unchanged since the Stone Age. It's a really compelling argument that maybe the Tarahumara are doing exactly what all of us had done for two million years, that it's us in modern times who have sort of gone off the path. You know, we look at running as this kind of alien, foreign thing, this punishment you've got to do because you ate pizza the night before. But maybe it's something different. Maybe we're the ones who have taken this natural advantage we had and we spoiled it. How do we spoil it? Well, how do we spoil anything? We try to cash in on it. Right? We try to can it and package it and make it "better" and then sell it to people. And then what happened was, we started creating these fancy cushioned things which can make running "better," called running shoes. The reason I get personally pissed-off about running shoes is because I bought a million of them and I kept getting hurt. And I think if anybody in here runs — I just had a conversation with Carol. We talked for two minutes backstage, and she talked about plantar fasciitis. You talk to a runner, I guarantee within 30 seconds, the conversation turns to injury. So if humans evolved as runners, if that's our one natural advantage, then why are we so bad at it? Why do we keep getting hurt? A curious thing about running and running injuries is that the running injury is new to our time. If you read folklore and mythology, any kind of myths, any kind of tall tales, running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor. It's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain. Geronimo used to say, "My only friends are my legs. I only trust my legs." That's because an Apache triathlon used to be you'd run 50 miles across the desert, engage in hand-to-hand combat, steal a bunch of horses, and slap leather for home. Geronimo was never saying, "You know something, my Achilles — I'm tapering. I've got to take this week off." Or, "I need to cross-train. I didn't do yoga. I'm not ready." (Laughter) Humans ran and ran all the time. We are here today. We have our digital technology. All of our science comes from the fact that our ancestors were able to do something extraordinary every day, which was just rely on their naked feet and legs to run long distances. So how do we get back to that again? Well, I would submit to you the first thing is: get rid of all packaging, all the sales, all the marketing. Get rid of all the stinking running shoes. Stop focusing on urban marathons, which, if you do four hours, you suck, and if you do 3:59:59, you're awesome, because you qualified for another race. We need to get back to that sense of playfulness and joyfulness and, I would say, nakedness, that has made the Tarahumara one of the healthiest and serene cultures in our time. So what's the benefit? So what? So you burn off the Häagen-Dazs from the night before. But maybe there's another benefit there as well. Without getting too extreme about this, imagine a world where everybody could go out the door and engage in the kind of exercise that's going to make them more relaxed, more serene, more healthy, burn off stress — where you don't come back into your office a raging maniac anymore, or go home with a lot of stress on top of you again. Maybe there's something between what we are today and what the Tarahumara have always been. I don't say let's go back to the Copper Canyons and live on corn and maize, which is the Tarahumara's preferred diet, but maybe there's somewhere in between. And if we find that thing, maybe there is a big fat Nobel Prize out there. Because if somebody could find a way to restore that natural ability that we all enjoyed for most of our existence up until the 1970s or so, the benefits — social and physical and political and mental — could be astounding. What I've been seeing today is there is a growing subculture of barefoot runners, people who've gotten rid of their shoes. And what they have found uniformly is, you get rid of the shoes, you get rid of the stress, you get rid of the injuries and the ailments. And what you find is something the Tarahumara have known for a very long time: that this can be a whole lot of fun. I've experienced it personally myself. I was injured all my life; then in my early 40s, I got rid of my shoes and my running ailments have gone away, too. So hopefully it's something we can all benefit from. I appreciate your listening to this story. Thanks very much. (Applause)

Poems of war, peace, women, power

{0: 'In her poems and plays, Suheir Hammad blends the stories and sounds of her Palestinian-American heritage with the vibrant language of Brooklyn to create a passionately modern voice.'}

TEDWomen 2010

"What I Will" I will not dance to your war drum. I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum. I will not dance to that beating. I know that beat. It is lifeless. I know intimately that skin you are hitting. It was alive once, hunted, stolen, stretched. I will not dance to your drummed-up war. I will not pop, spin, break for you. I will not hate for you or even hate you. I will not kill for you. Especially I will not die for you. I will not mourn the dead with murder nor suicide. I will not side with you or dance to bombs because everyone is dancing. Everyone can be wrong. Life is a right, not collateral or casual. I will not forget where I come from. I will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved near, and our chanting will be dancing. Our humming will be drumming. I will not be played. I will not lend my name nor my rhythm to your beat. I will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than death. Your war drum ain't louder than this breath. Haaa. What's up TED people? Let me hear you make some noise. (Applause) A bunch of pacifists. Confused, aspiring pacifists. I understand. I've been wrong a lot lately. Like a lot. So I couldn't figure out what to read today. I mean, I've been saying I've been prepping. What that means is prepping my outfit, (Laughter) prepping options, trying to figure out what I'm coming behind and going in front of. Poetry does that. It preps you. It aims you. So I am going to read a poem that was chosen just now. But I'm going to need you to just sit for like 10 minutes and hold a woman who is not here. Hold her now with you. You don't need to say her name out loud, you can just hold her. Are you holding her? This is "Break Clustered." All holy history banned. Unwritten books predicted the future, projected the past. But my head unwraps around what appears limitless, man's creative violence. Whose son shall it be? Which male child will perish a new day? Our boys' deaths galvanize. We cherish corpses. We mourn women, complicated. Bitches get beat daily. Profits made, prophets ignored. War and tooth, enameled salted lemon childhoods. All colors run, none of us solid. Don't look for shadow behind me. I carry it within. I live cycles of light and darkness. Rhythm is half silence. I see now, I never was one and not the other. Sickness, health, tender violence. I think now I never was pure. Before form I was storm, blind, ign'ant — still am. Human contracted itself blind, malignant. I never was pure. Girl spoiled before ripened. Language can't math me. I experience exponentially. Everything is everything. One woman loses 15, maybe 20, members of her family. One woman loses six. One woman loses her head. One woman searches rubble. One woman feeds on trash. One woman shoots her face. One woman shoots her husband. One woman straps herself. One woman gives birth to a baby. One woman gives birth to borders. One woman no longer believes love will ever find her. One woman never did. Where do refugee hearts go? Broken, dissed, placed where they're not from, don't want to be missed. Faced with absence. We mourn each one or we mean nothing at all. My spine curves spiral. Precipice running to and running from human beings. Cluster bombs left behind. De facto landmines. A smoldering grief. Harvest contaminated tobacco. Harvest bombs. Harvest baby teeth. Harvest palms, smoke. Harvest witness, smoke. Resolutions, smoke. Salvation, smoke. Redemption, smoke. Breathe. Do not fear what has blown up. If you must, fear the unexploded. Thank you. (Applause)

How to make work-life balance work

{0: 'Nigel Marsh presents and writes on business and personal life -- and how the two interact. He is the author of "Fat, Forty and Fired."'}

TEDxSydney

What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request. I'd like all of you to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence. (Laughter) Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century. It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40. Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior — I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family. And I decided that I would try and turn my life around. In particular, I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance. So I stepped back from the workforce, and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children. But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work. (Laughter) Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out. So I went back to work, and I've spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance. And I have four observations I'd like to share with you today. The first is: if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance. All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in. And the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like. (Laughter) (Applause) It's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and [a] T-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue. (Laughter) The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us. We should stop looking outside. It's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. It's particularly important — this isn't on the World Wide Web, is it? I'm about to get fired — it's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. Now I'm not talking here just about the bad companies — the "abattoirs of the human soul," as I call them. (Laughter) I'm talking about all companies. Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you [as] they can get away with. It's in their nature; it's in their DNA; it's what they do — even the good, well-intentioned companies. On the one hand, putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened. On the other hand, it's a nightmare — it just means you spend more time at the bloody office. We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life. The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance. Before I went back to work after my year at home, I sat down and I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to. And it went like this: wake up well rested after a good night's sleep. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have breakfast with my wife and children. Have sex again. (Laughter) Drive the kids to school on the way to the office. Do three hours' work. Play a sport with a friend at lunchtime. Do another three hours' work. Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink. Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids. Meditate for half an hour. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have sex again. Go to bed. (Applause) How often do you think I have that day? (Laughter) We need to be realistic. You can't do it all in one day. We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the "I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I've got no mates or interests left." (Laughter) A day is too short; "after I retire" is too long. There's got to be a middle way. A fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way. A friend came to see me last year — and she doesn't mind me telling this story — a friend came to see me last year and said, "Nigel, I've read your book. And I realize that my life is completely out of balance. It's totally dominated by work. I work 10 hours a day; I commute two hours a day. All of my relationships have failed. There's nothing in my life apart from my work. So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out. So I joined a gym." (Laughter) Now I don't mean to mock, but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat isn't more balanced; it's more fit. (Laughter) Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life — there's the intellectual side; there's the emotional side; there's the spiritual side. And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas — not just do 50 stomach crunches. Now that can be daunting. Because people say, "Bloody hell mate, I haven't got time to get fit. You want me to go to church and call my mother." And I understand. I truly understand how that can be daunting. But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective. My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today, called me up at the office and said, "Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son" — Harry — "up from school." Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening. So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates. We walked down to the local park, messed around on the swings, played some silly games. I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe, and we shared a pizza for two, then walked down the hill to our home, and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas. I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach." I then put him to bed, tucked him in, gave him a kiss on his forehead and said, "Goodnight, mate," and walked out of his bedroom. As I was walking out of his bedroom, he said, "Dad?" I went, "Yes, mate?" He went, "Dad, this has been the best day of my life, ever." I hadn't done anything, hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation. Now my point is the small things matter. Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think, it can transform society. Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like. And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading. (Applause)

The rise of personal robots

{0: 'At MIT, Cynthia Breazeal and her team are building robots with social intelligence that communicate and learn the same way people do. \r\n'}

TEDWomen 2010

Ever since I was a little girl seeing "Star Wars" for the first time, I've been fascinated by this idea of personal robots. And as a little girl, I loved the idea of a robot that interacted with us much more like a helpful, trusted sidekick — something that would delight us, enrich our lives and help us save a galaxy or two. I knew robots like that didn't really exist, but I knew I wanted to build them. So 20 years pass — I am now a graduate student at MIT studying artificial intelligence, the year is 1997, and NASA has just landed the first robot on Mars. But robots are still not in our home, ironically. And I remember thinking about all the reasons why that was the case. But one really struck me. Robotics had really been about interacting with things, not with people — certainly not in a social way that would be natural for us and would really help people accept robots into our daily lives. For me, that was the white space; that's what robots could not do yet. And so that year, I started to build this robot, Kismet, the world's first social robot. Three years later — a lot of programming, working with other graduate students in the lab — Kismet was ready to start interacting with people. (Video) Scientist: I want to show you something. Kismet: (Nonsense) Scientist: This is a watch that my girlfriend gave me. Kismet: (Nonsense) Scientist: Yeah, look, it's got a little blue light in it too. I almost lost it this week. Cynthia Breazeal: So Kismet interacted with people like kind of a non-verbal child or pre-verbal child, which I assume was fitting because it was really the first of its kind. It didn't speak language, but it didn't matter. This little robot was somehow able to tap into something deeply social within us — and with that, the promise of an entirely new way we could interact with robots. So over the past several years I've been continuing to explore this interpersonal dimension of robots, now at the media lab with my own team of incredibly talented students. And one of my favorite robots is Leonardo. We developed Leonardo in collaboration with Stan Winston Studio. And so I want to show you a special moment for me of Leo. This is Matt Berlin interacting with Leo, introducing Leo to a new object. And because it's new, Leo doesn't really know what to make of it. But sort of like us, he can actually learn about it from watching Matt's reaction. (Video) Matt Berlin: Hello, Leo. Leo, this is Cookie Monster. Can you find Cookie Monster? Leo, Cookie Monster is very bad. He's very bad, Leo. Cookie Monster is very, very bad. He's a scary monster. He wants to get your cookies. (Laughter) CB: All right, so Leo and Cookie might have gotten off to a little bit of a rough start, but they get along great now. So what I've learned through building these systems is that robots are actually a really intriguing social technology, where it's actually their ability to push our social buttons and to interact with us like a partner that is a core part of their functionality. And with that shift in thinking, we can now start to imagine new questions, new possibilities for robots that we might not have thought about otherwise. But what do I mean when I say "push our social buttons?" Well, one of the things that we've learned is that, if we design these robots to communicate with us using the same body language, the same sort of non-verbal cues that people use — like Nexi, our humanoid robot, is doing here — what we find is that people respond to robots a lot like they respond to people. People use these cues to determine things like how persuasive someone is, how likable, how engaging, how trustworthy. It turns out it's the same for robots. It's turning out now that robots are actually becoming a really interesting new scientific tool to understand human behavior. To answer questions like, how is it that, from a brief encounter, we're able to make an estimate of how trustworthy another person is? Mimicry's believed to play a role, but how? Is it the mimicking of particular gestures that matters? It turns out it's really hard to learn this or understand this from watching people because when we interact we do all of these cues automatically. We can't carefully control them because they're subconscious for us. But with the robot, you can. And so in this video here — this is a video taken from David DeSteno's lab at Northeastern University. He's a psychologist we've been collaborating with. There's actually a scientist carefully controlling Nexi's cues to be able to study this question. And the bottom line is — the reason why this works is because it turns out people just behave like people even when interacting with a robot. So given that key insight, we can now start to imagine new kinds of applications for robots. For instance, if robots do respond to our non-verbal cues, maybe they would be a cool, new communication technology. So imagine this: What about a robot accessory for your cellphone? You call your friend, she puts her handset in a robot, and, bam! You're a MeBot — you can make eye contact, you can talk with your friends, you can move around, you can gesture — maybe the next best thing to really being there, or is it? To explore this question, my student, Siggy Adalgeirsson, did a study where we brought human participants, people, into our lab to do a collaborative task with a remote collaborator. The task involved things like looking at a set of objects on the table, discussing them in terms of their importance and relevance to performing a certain task — this ended up being a survival task — and then rating them in terms of how valuable and important they thought they were. The remote collaborator was an experimenter from our group who used one of three different technologies to interact with the participants. The first was just the screen. This is just like video conferencing today. The next was to add mobility — so, have the screen on a mobile base. This is like, if you're familiar with any of the telepresence robots today — this is mirroring that situation. And then the fully expressive MeBot. So after the interaction, we asked people to rate their quality of interaction with the technology, with a remote collaborator through this technology, in a number of different ways. We looked at psychological involvement — how much empathy did you feel for the other person? We looked at overall engagement. We looked at their desire to cooperate. And this is what we see when they use just the screen. It turns out, when you add mobility — the ability to roll around the table — you get a little more of a boost. And you get even more of a boost when you add the full expression. So it seems like this physical, social embodiment actually really makes a difference. Now let's try to put this into a little bit of context. Today we know that families are living further and further apart, and that definitely takes a toll on family relationships and family bonds over distance. For me, I have three young boys, and I want them to have a really good relationship with their grandparents. But my parents live thousands of miles away, so they just don't get to see each other that often. We try Skype, we try phone calls, but my boys are little — they don't really want to talk; they want to play. So I love the idea of thinking about robots as a new kind of distance-play technology. I imagine a time not too far from now — my mom can go to her computer, open up a browser and jack into a little robot. And as grandma-bot, she can now play, really play, with my sons, with her grandsons, in the real world with his real toys. I could imagine grandmothers being able to do social-plays with their granddaughters, with their friends, and to be able to share all kinds of other activities around the house, like sharing a bedtime story. And through this technology, being able to be an active participant in their grandchildren's lives in a way that's not possible today. Let's think about some other domains, like maybe health. So in the United States today, over 65 percent of people are either overweight or obese, and now it's a big problem with our children as well. And we know that as you get older in life, if you're obese when you're younger, that can lead to chronic diseases that not only reduce your quality of life, but are a tremendous economic burden on our health care system. But if robots can be engaging, if we like to cooperate with robots, if robots are persuasive, maybe a robot can help you maintain a diet and exercise program, maybe they can help you manage your weight. Sort of like a digital Jiminy — as in the well-known fairy tale — a kind of friendly, supportive presence that's always there to be able to help you make the right decision in the right way at the right time to help you form healthy habits. So we actually explored this idea in our lab. This is a robot, Autom. Cory Kidd developed this robot for his doctoral work. And it was designed to be a robot diet-and-exercise coach. It had a couple of simple non-verbal skills it could do. It could make eye contact with you. It could share information looking down at a screen. You'd use a screen interface to enter information, like how many calories you ate that day, how much exercise you got. And then it could help track that for you. And the robot spoke with a synthetic voice to engage you in a coaching dialogue modeled after trainers and patients and so forth. And it would build a working alliance with you through that dialogue. It could help you set goals and track your progress, and it would help motivate you. So an interesting question is, does the social embodiment really matter? Does it matter that it's a robot? Is it really just the quality of advice and information that matters? To explore that question, we did a study in the Boston area where we put one of three interventions in people's homes for a period of several weeks. One case was the robot you saw there, Autom. Another was a computer that ran the same touch-screen interface, ran exactly the same dialogues. The quality of advice was identical. And the third was just a pen and paper log, because that's the standard intervention you typically get when you start a diet-and-exercise program. So one of the things we really wanted to look at was not how much weight people lost, but really how long they interacted with the robot. Because the challenge is not losing weight, it's actually keeping it off. And the longer you could interact with one of these interventions, well that's indicative, potentially, of longer-term success. So the first thing I want to look at is how long, how long did people interact with these systems. It turns out that people interacted with the robot significantly more, even though the quality of the advice was identical to the computer. When it asked people to rate it on terms of the quality of the working alliance, people rated the robot higher and they trusted the robot more. (Laughter) And when you look at emotional engagement, it was completely different. People would name the robots. They would dress the robots. (Laughter) And even when we would come up to pick up the robots at the end of the study, they would come out to the car and say good-bye to the robots. They didn't do this with a computer. The last thing I want to talk about today is the future of children's media. We know that kids spend a lot of time behind screens today, whether it's television or computer games or whatnot. My sons, they love the screen. They love the screen. But I want them to play; as a mom, I want them to play, like, real-world play. And so I have a new project in my group I wanted to present to you today called Playtime Computing that's really trying to think about how we can take what's so engaging about digital media and literally bring it off the screen into the real world of the child, where it can take on many of the properties of real-world play. So here's the first exploration of this idea, where characters can be physical or virtual, and where the digital content can literally come off the screen into the world and back. I like to think of this as the Atari Pong of this blended-reality play. But we can push this idea further. What if — (Game) Nathan: Here it comes. Yay! CB: — the character itself could come into your world? It turns out that kids love it when the character becomes real and enters into their world. And when it's in their world, they can relate to it and play with it in a way that's fundamentally different from how they play with it on the screen. Another important idea is this notion of persistence of character across realities. So changes that children make in the real world need to translate to the virtual world. So here, Nathan has changed the letter A to the number 2. You can imagine maybe these symbols give the characters special powers when it goes into the virtual world. So they are now sending the character back into that world. And now it's got number power. And then finally, what I've been trying to do here is create a really immersive experience for kids, where they really feel like they are part of that story, a part of that experience. And I really want to spark their imaginations the way mine was sparked as a little girl watching "Star Wars." But I want to do more than that. I actually want them to create those experiences. I want them to be able to literally build their imagination into these experiences and make them their own. So we've been exploring a lot of ideas in telepresence and mixed reality to literally allow kids to project their ideas into this space where other kids can interact with them and build upon them. I really want to come up with new ways of children's media that foster creativity and learning and innovation. I think that's very, very important. So this is a new project. We've invited a lot of kids into this space, and they think it's pretty cool. But I can tell you, the thing that they love the most is the robot. What they care about is the robot. Robots touch something deeply human within us. And so whether they're helping us to become creative and innovative, or whether they're helping us to feel more deeply connected despite distance, or whether they are our trusted sidekick who's helping us attain our personal goals in becoming our highest and best selves, for me, robots are all about people. Thank you. (Applause)

Mother and daughter doctor-heroes

{0: 'Dr. Hawa Abdi and her daughters, Dr. Deqo Mohamed and Dr. Amina Mohamed, treat Somali refugee women and children, often for free.'}

TEDWomen 2010

Hawa Abdi: Many people — 20 years for Somalia — [were] fighting. So there was no job, no food. Children, most of them, became very malnourished, like this. Deqo Mohamed: So as you know, always in a civil war, the ones affected most [are] the women and children. So our patients are women and children. And they are in our backyard. It's our home. We welcome them. That's the camp that we have in now 90,000 people, where 75 percent of them are women and children. Pat Mitchell: And this is your hospital. This is the inside. HA: We are doing C-sections and different operations because people need some help. There is no government to protect them. DM: Every morning we have about 400 patients, maybe more or less. But sometimes we are only five doctors and 16 nurses, and we are physically getting exhausted to see all of them. But we take the severe ones, and we reschedule the other ones the next day. It is very tough. And as you can see, it's the women who are carrying the children; it's the women who come into the hospitals; it's the women [are] building the houses. That's their house. And we have a school. This is our bright — we opened [in the] last two years [an] elementary school where we have 850 children, and the majority are women and girls. (Applause) PM: And the doctors have some very big rules about who can get treated at the clinic. Would you explain the rules for admission? HA: The people who are coming to us, we are welcoming. We are sharing with them whatever we have. But there are only two rules. First rule: there is no clan distinguished and political division in Somali society. [Whomever] makes those things we throw out. The second: no man can beat his wife. If he beat, we will put [him] in jail, and we will call the eldest people. Until they identify this case, we'll never release him. That's our two rules. (Applause) The other thing that I have realized, that the woman is the most strong person all over the world. Because the last 20 years, the Somali woman has stood up. They were the leaders, and we are the leaders of our community and the hope of our future generations. We are not just the helpless and the victims of the civil war. We can reconcile. We can do everything. (Applause) DM: As my mother said, we are the future hope, and the men are only killing in Somalia. So we came up with these two rules. In a camp with 90,000 people, you have to come up with some rules or there is going to be some fights. So there is no clan division, and no man can beat his wife. And we have a little storage room where we converted a jail. So if you beat your wife, you're going to be there. (Applause) So empowering the women and giving the opportunity — we are there for them. They are not alone for this. PM: You're running a medical clinic. It brought much, much needed medical care to people who wouldn't get it. You're also running a civil society. You've created your own rules, in which women and children are getting a different sense of security. Talk to me about your decision, Dr. Abdi, and your decision, Dr. Mohamed, to work together — for you to become a doctor and to work with your mother in these circumstances. HA: My age — because I was born in 1947 — we were having, at that time, government, law and order. But one day, I went to the hospital — my mother was sick — and I saw the hospital, how they [were] treating the doctors, how they [are] committed to help the sick people. I admired them, and I decided to become a doctor. My mother died, unfortunately, when I was 12 years [old]. Then my father allowed me to proceed [with] my hope. My mother died in [a] gynecology complication, so I decided to become a gynecology specialist. That's why I became a doctor. So Dr. Deqo has to explain. DM: For me, my mother was preparing [me] when I was a child to become a doctor, but I really didn't want to. Maybe I should become an historian, or maybe a reporter. I loved it, but it didn't work. When the war broke out — civil war — I saw how my mother was helping and how she really needed the help, and how the care is essential to the woman to be a woman doctor in Somalia and help the women and children. And I thought, maybe I can be a reporter and doctor gynecologist. (Laughter) So I went to Russia, and my mother also, [during the] time of [the] Soviet Union. So some of our character, maybe we will come with a strong Soviet background of training. So that's how I decided [to do] the same. My sister was different. She's here. She's also a doctor. She graduated in Russia also. (Applause) And to go back and to work with our mother is just what we saw in the civil war — when I was 16, and my sister was 11, when the civil war broke out. So it was the need and the people we saw in the early '90s — that's what made us go back and work for them. PM: So what is the biggest challenge working, mother and daughter, in such dangerous and sometimes scary situations? HA: Yes, I was working in a tough situation, very dangerous. And when I saw the people who needed me, I was staying with them to help, because I [could] do something for them. Most people fled abroad. But I remained with those people, and I was trying to do something — [any] little thing I [could] do. I succeeded in my place. Now my place is 90,000 people who are respecting each other, who are not fighting. But we try to stand on our feet, to do something, little things, we can for our people. And I'm thankful for my daughters. When they come to me, they help me to treat the people, to help. They do everything for them. They have done what I desire to do for them. PM: What's the best part of working with your mother, and the most challenging part for you? DM: She's very tough; it's most challenging. She always expects us to do more. And really when you think [you] cannot do it, she will push you, and I can do it. That's the best part. She shows us, trains us how to do and how to be better [people] and how to do long hours in surgery — 300 patients per day, 10, 20 surgeries, and still you have to manage the camp — that's how she trains us. It is not like beautiful offices here, 20 patients, you're tired. You see 300 patients, 20 surgeries and 90,000 people to manage. PM: But you do it for good reasons. (Applause) Wait. Wait. HA: Thank you. DM: Thank you. (Applause) HA: Thank you very much. DM: Thank you very much.

Using nature's genius in architecture

{0: 'Michael Pawlyn takes cues from nature to make new, sustainable architectural environments.'}

TEDSalon London 2010

I'd like to start with a couple of quick examples. These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider. They produce six different types of silk, which is spun together into a fiber, tougher than any fiber humans have ever made. The nearest we've come is with aramid fiber. And to make that, it involves extremes of temperature, extremes of pressure and loads of pollution. And yet the spider manages to do it at ambient temperature and pressure with raw materials of dead flies and water. It does suggest we've still got a bit to learn. This beetle can detect a forest fire at 80 kilometers away. That's roughly 10,000 times the range of man-made fire detectors. And what's more, this guy doesn't need a wire connected all the way back to a power station burning fossil fuels. So these two examples give a sense of what biomimicry can deliver. If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use. And if we're to make progress with the sustainability revolution, I believe there are three really big changes we need to bring about. Firstly, radical increases in resource efficiency. Secondly, shifting from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a closed-loop model. And thirdly, changing from a fossil fuel economy to a solar economy. And for all three of these, I believe, biomimicry has a lot of the solutions that we're going to need. You could look at nature as being like a catalog of products, and all of those have benefited from a 3.8-billion-year research and development period. And given that level of investment, it makes sense to use it. So I'm going to talk about some projects that have explored these ideas. And let's start with radical increases in resource efficiency. When we were working on the Eden Project, we had to create a very large greenhouse in a site that was not only irregular, but it was continually changing because it was still being quarried. It was a hell of a challenge, and it was actually examples from biology that provided a lot of the clues. So for instance, it was soap bubbles that helped us generate a building form that would work regardless of the final ground levels. Studying pollen grains and radiolaria and carbon molecules helped us devise the most efficient structural solution using hexagons and pentagons. The next move was that we wanted to try and maximize the size of those hexagons. And to do that we had to find an alternative to glass, which is really very limited in terms of its unit sizes. And in nature there are lots of examples of very efficient structures based on pressurized membranes. So we started exploring this material called ETFE. It's a high-strength polymer. And what you do is you put it together in three layers, you weld it around the edge, and then you inflate it. And the great thing about this stuff is you can make it in units of roughly seven times the size of glass, and it was only one percent of the weight of double-glazing. So that was a factor-100 saving. And what we found is that we got into a positive cycle in which one breakthrough facilitated another. So with such large, lightweight pillows, we had much less steel. With less steel we were getting more sunlight in, which meant we didn't have to put as much extra heat in winter. And with less overall weight in the superstructure, there were big savings in the foundations. And at the end of the project we worked out that the weight of that superstructure was actually less than the weight of the air inside the building. So I think the Eden Project is a fairly good example of how ideas from biology can lead to radical increases in resource efficiency — delivering the same function, but with a fraction of the resource input. And actually there are loads of examples in nature that you could turn to for similar solutions. So for instance, you could develop super-efficient roof structures based on giant Amazon water lilies, whole buildings inspired by abalone shells, super-lightweight bridges inspired by plant cells. There's a world of beauty and efficiency to explore here using nature as a design tool. So now I want to go onto talking about the linear-to-closed-loop idea. The way we tend to use resources is we extract them, we turn them into short-life products and then dispose of them. Nature works very differently. In ecosystems, the waste from one organism becomes the nutrient for something else in that system. And there are some examples of projects that have deliberately tried to mimic ecosystems. And one of my favorites is called the Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles. And in their area they had a lot of shops and restaurants that were producing lots of food, cardboard and plastic waste. It was ending up in landfills. Now the really clever bit is what they did with the cardboard waste. And I'm just going to talk through this animation. So they were paid to collect it from the restaurants. They then shredded the cardboard and sold it to equestrian centers as horse bedding. When that was soiled, they were paid again to collect it. They put it into worm recomposting systems, which produced a lot of worms, which they fed to Siberian sturgeon, which produced caviar, which they sold back to the restaurants. So it transformed a linear process into a closed-loop model, and it created more value in the process. Graham Wiles has continued to add more and more elements to this, turning waste streams into schemes that create value. And just as natural systems tend to increase in diversity and resilience over time, there's a real sense with this project that the number of possibilities just continue increasing. And I know it's a quirky example, but I think the implications of this are quite radical, because it suggests that we could actually transform a big problem — waste — into a massive opportunity. And particularly in cities — we could look at the whole metabolism of cities, and look at those as opportunities. And that's what we're doing on the next project I'm going to talk about, the Mobius Project, where we're trying to bring together a number of activities, all within one building, so that the waste from one can be the nutrient for another. And the kind of elements I'm talking about are, firstly, we have a restaurant inside a productive greenhouse, a bit like this one in Amsterdam called De Kas. Then we would have an anaerobic digester, which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area, turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid. We'd have a water treatment system treating wastewater, turning that into fresh water and generating energy from the solids using just plants and micro-organisms. We'd have a fish farm fed with vegetable waste from the kitchen and worms from the compost and supplying fish back to the restaurant. And we'd also have a coffee shop, and the waste grains from that could be used as a substrate for growing mushrooms. So you can see that we're bringing together cycles of food, energy and water and waste all within one building. And just for fun, we've proposed this for a roundabout in central London, which at the moment is a complete eyesore. Some of you may recognize this. And with just a little bit of planning, we could transform a space dominated by traffic into one that provides open space for people, reconnects people with food and transforms waste into closed loop opportunities. So the final project I want to talk about is the Sahara Forest Project, which we're working on at the moment. It may come as a surprise to some of you to hear that quite large areas of what are currently desert were actually forested a fairly short time ago. So for instance, when Julius Caesar arrived in North Africa, huge areas of North Africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests. And during the evolution of life on the Earth, it was the colonization of the land by plants that helped create the benign climate we currently enjoy. The converse is also true. The more vegetation we lose, the more that's likely to exacerbate climate change and lead to further desertification. And this animation, this shows photosynthetic activity over the course of a number of years, and what you can see is that the boundaries of those deserts shift quite a lot, and that raises the question of whether we can intervene at the boundary conditions to halt, or maybe even reverse, desertification. And if you look at some of the organisms that have evolved to live in deserts, there are some amazing examples of adaptations to water scarcity. This is the Namibian fog-basking beetle, and it's evolved a way of harvesting its own fresh water in a desert. The way it does this is it comes out at night, crawls to the top of a sand dune, and because it's got a matte black shell, is able to radiate heat out to the night sky and become slightly cooler than its surroundings. So when the moist breeze blows in off the sea, you get these droplets of water forming on the beetle's shell. Just before sunrise, he tips his shell up, the water runs down into his mouth, has a good drink, goes off and hides for the rest of the day. And the ingenuity, if you could call it that, goes even further. Because if you look closely at the beetle's shell, there are lots of little bumps on that shell. And those bumps are hydrophilic; they attract water. Between them there's a waxy finish which repels water. And the effect of this is that as the droplets start to form on the bumps, they stay in tight, spherical beads, which means they're much more mobile than they would be if it was just a film of water over the whole beetle's shell. So even when there's only a small amount of moisture in the air, it's able to harvest that very effectively and channel it down to its mouth. So amazing example of an adaptation to a very resource-constrained environment — and in that sense, very relevant to the kind of challenges we're going to be facing over the next few years, next few decades. We're working with the guy who invented the Seawater Greenhouse. This is a greenhouse designed for arid coastal regions, and the way it works is that you have this whole wall of evaporator grills, and you trickle seawater over that so that wind blows through, it picks up a lot of moisture and is cooled in the process. So inside it's cool and humid, which means the plants need less water to grow. And then at the back of the greenhouse, it condenses a lot of that humidity as freshwater in a process that is effectively identical to the beetle. And what they found with the first Seawater Greenhouse that was built was it was producing slightly more freshwater than it needed for the plants inside. So they just started spreading this on the land around, and the combination of that and the elevated humidity had quite a dramatic effect on the local area. This photograph was taken on completion day, and just one year later, it looked like that. So it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land — and in that sense, going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design. So we were keen to scale this up and apply biomimicry ideas to maximize the benefits. And when you think about nature, often you think about it as being all about competition. But actually in mature ecosystems, you're just as likely to find examples of symbiotic relationships. So an important biomimicry principle is to find ways of bringing technologies together in symbiotic clusters. And the technology that we settled on as an ideal partner for the Seawater Greenhouse is concentrated solar power, which uses solar-tracking mirrors to focus the sun's heat to create electricity. And just to give you some sense of the potential of CSP, consider that we receive 10,000 times as much energy from the sun every year as we use in energy from all forms — 10,000 times. So our energy problems are not intractable. It's a challenge to our ingenuity. And the kind of synergies I'm talking about are, firstly, both these technologies work very well in hot, sunny deserts. CSP needs a supply of demineralized freshwater. That's exactly what the Seawater Greenhouse produces. CSP produces a lot of waste heat. We'll be able to make use of all that to evaporate more seawater and enhance the restorative benefits. And finally, in the shade under the mirrors, it's possible to grow all sorts of crops that would not grow in direct sunlight. So this is how this scheme would look. The idea is we create this long hedge of greenhouses facing the wind. We'd have concentrated solar power plants at intervals along the way. Some of you might be wondering what we would do with all the salts. And with biomimicry, if you've got an underutilized resource, you don't think, "How am I going to dispose of this?" You think, "What can I add to the system to create more value?" And it turns out that different things crystallize out at different stages. When you evaporate seawater, the first thing to crystallize out is calcium carbonate. And that builds up on the evaporators — and that's what that image on the left is — gradually getting encrusted with the calcium carbonate. So after a while, we could take that out, use it as a lightweight building block. And if you think about the carbon in that, that would have come out of the atmosphere, into the sea and then locked away in a building product. The next thing is sodium chloride. You can also compress that into a building block, as they did here. This is a hotel in Bolivia. And then after that, there are all sorts of compounds and elements that we can extract, like phosphates, that we need to get back into the desert soils to fertilize them. And there's just about every element of the periodic table in seawater. So it should be possible to extract valuable elements like lithium for high-performance batteries. And in parts of the Arabian Gulf, the seawater, the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants. And it's pushing the ecosystem close to collapse. Now we would be able to make use of all that waste brine. We could evaporate it to enhance the restorative benefits and capture the salts, transforming an urgent waste problem into a big opportunity. Really the Sahara Forest Project is a model for how we could create zero-carbon food, abundant renewable energy in some of the most water-stressed parts of the planet as well as reversing desertification in certain areas. So returning to those big challenges that I mentioned at the beginning: radical increases in resource efficiency, closing loops and a solar economy. They're not just possible; they're critical. And I firmly believe that studying the way nature solves problems will provide a lot of the solutions. But perhaps more than anything, what this thinking provides is a really positive way of talking about sustainable design. Far too much of the talk about the environment uses very negative language. But here it's about synergies and abundance and optimizing. And this is an important point. Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said, "If you want to build a flotilla of ships, you don't sit around talking about carpentry. No, you need to set people's souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores." And that's what we need to do, so let's be positive, and let's make progress with what could be the most exciting period of innovation we've ever seen. Thank you. (Applause)

A whistleblower you haven't heard

{0: "It all started as a practical joke: Geert Chatrou's sister-in-law entered him in the International Whistler's Convention in Louisburg, NC. To save face, he went … and won!"}

TEDxRotterdam 2010

(Whistling) (Whistling ends) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. That was whistling. I'm trying to do this in English. What is a chubby, curly-haired guy from Holland — why is he whistling? Well actually, I've been whistling since the age of four, about four. My dad was always whistling around the house, and I just thought that's part of communication in my family. So I whistled along with him. And actually, until I was 34, I always annoyed and irritated people with whistling, because, to be honest, my whistling is a kind of deviant behavior. I whistled alone, I whistled in the classroom, I whistled on bike, I whistled everywhere. And I also whistled at a Christmas Eve party with my family-in-law. And they had some, in my opinion, terrible Christmas music. And when I hear music that I don't like, I try to make it better. (Laughter) So when "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" — you know it? (Whistling) But it can also sound like this. (Whistling) But during a Christmas party — at dinner, actually — it's very annoying. So my sister-in-law asked me a few times, "Please stop whistling." And I just couldn't. And at one point — and I had some wine, I have to admit that — at one point I said, "If there was a contest, I would join." And two weeks later, I received a text message: "You're going to America." (Laughter) So, OK, I'm going to America. I would love to, but why? So I immediately called her up, of course. She googled, and she found this World Whistling Championship in America, of course. (Laughter) She didn't expect me to go there. And I would have lost my face. I don't know if that's correct English. But the Dutch people here will understand what I mean. (Laughter) I lost my face. (Applause) And she thought, "He will never go there." But actually, I did. So I went to Louisburg, North Carolina, southeast of the United States, and I entered the world of whistling. And I also entered the World Championship, and I won there, in 2004. (Applause) That was great fun, of course. And to defend my title — like judokas do and sportsmen — I thought, well let's go back in 2005 — and I won again. (Laughter) Then I couldn't participate for a few years. And in 2008, I entered again in Japan, Tokyo, and I won again. So what happened now is I'm standing here in Rotterdam, in the beautiful city, on a big stage, and I'm talking about whistling. And actually, I earn my money whistling, at the moment. So I quit my day job as a nurse. (Applause) And I try to live my dream — well, actually, it was never my dream, but it sounds so good. (Laughter) OK, I'm not the only one whistling here. You say, "Huh, what do you mean?" Well actually, you are going to whistle along. And then always the same thing happens: people are watching each other and think, "Oh, my God. Why? Can I go away?" No, you can't. (Laughter) Actually, it's very simple. The track that I will whistle is called "Fête de la Belle." It's about 80 minutes long. (Laughter) No, no, no. It's four minutes long. And I want to first rehearse with you your whistling. Yes, so I whistle the tone. (Whistling) (Laughter) Sorry, I forgot one thing — you whistle the same tone as me. (Laughter) I heard a wide variety of tones. (Geert Chatrou and audience whistling) (Whistling ends) This is very promising. (Laughter) This is very promising. I'll ask the technicians to start the music. And if it's started, I just point where you whistle along, and we will see what happens. (Laughter) Oh, I'm so sorry, technicians. (Laughter) I'm so used to that. (Laughter) I start it myself. (Laughter) OK, here it is. (Laughter) (Music) (Whistling) (Whistling ends) (Music) OK. (Whistling) It's easy, isn't it? (Whistling) Now comes the solo, I propose I do that myself, OK? (Music) (Whistling) (Applause) Max Westerman: Geert Chatrou, the World Champion of Whistling. Geert Chatrou: Thank you. Thank you.

Reconnecting with compassion

{0: 'Krista Tippett hosts the national public radio program "On Being," which takes up the great, animating questions of human life: What does it mean to be human? And how do we want to live?'}

TEDPrize@UN

We're here to celebrate compassion. But compassion, from my vantage point, has a problem. As essential as it is across our traditions, as real as so many of us know it to be in particular lives, the word "compassion" is hollowed out in our culture, and it is suspect in my field of journalism. It's seen as a squishy kumbaya thing, or it's seen as potentially depressing. Karen Armstrong has told what I think is an iconic story of giving a speech in Holland and, after the fact, the word "compassion" was translated as "pity." Now compassion, when it enters the news, too often comes in the form of feel-good feature pieces or sidebars about heroic people you could never be like or happy endings or examples of self-sacrifice that would seem to be too good to be true most of the time. Our cultural imagination about compassion has been deadened by idealistic images. And so what I'd like to do this morning for the next few minutes is perform a linguistic resurrection. And I hope you'll come with me on my basic premise that words matter, that they shape the way we understand ourselves, the way we interpret the world and the way we treat others. When this country first encountered genuine diversity in the 1960s, we adopted tolerance as the core civic virtue with which we would approach that. Now the word "tolerance," if you look at it in the dictionary, connotes "allowing," "indulging" and "enduring." In the medical context that it comes from, it is about testing the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment. Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it's more of a cerebral ascent. And it's too cerebral to animate guts and hearts and behavior when the going gets rough. And the going is pretty rough right now. I think that without perhaps being able to name it, we are collectively experiencing that we've come as far as we can with tolerance as our only guiding virtue. Compassion is a worthy successor. It is organic, across our religious, spiritual and ethical traditions, and yet it transcends them. Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others, both in our private and in our civic spaces. So what is it, three-dimensionally? What are its kindred and component parts? What's in its universe of attendant virtues? To start simply, I want to say that compassion is kind. Now "kindness" might sound like a very mild word, and it's prone to its own abundant cliche. But kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues. And it is a most edifying form of instant gratification. Compassion is also curious. Compassion cultivates and practices curiosity. I love a phrase that was offered me by two young women who are interfaith innovators in Los Angeles, Aziza Hasan and Malka Fenyvesi. They are working to create a new imagination about shared life among young Jews and Muslims, and as they do that, they cultivate what they call "curiosity without assumptions." Well that's going to be a breeding ground for compassion. Compassion can be synonymous with empathy. It can be joined with the harder work of forgiveness and reconciliation, but it can also express itself in the simple act of presence. It's linked to practical virtues like generosity and hospitality and just being there, just showing up. I think that compassion also is often linked to beauty — and by that I mean a willingness to see beauty in the other, not just what it is about them that might need helping. I love it that my Muslim conversation partners often speak of beauty as a core moral value. And in that light, for the religious, compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery — encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other. I'm not sure if I can show you what tolerance looks like, but I can show you what compassion looks like — because it is visible. When we see it, we recognize it and it changes the way we think about what is doable, what is possible. It is so important when we're communicating big ideas — but especially a big spiritual idea like compassion — to root it as we present it to others in space and time and flesh and blood — the color and complexity of life. And compassion does seek physicality. I first started to learn this most vividly from Matthew Sanford. And I don't imagine that you will realize this when you look at this photograph of him, but he's paraplegic. He's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13, in a car crash that killed his father and his sister. Matthew's legs don't work, and he'll never walk again, and — and he does experience this as an "and" rather than a "but" — and he experiences himself to be healed and whole. And as a teacher of yoga, he brings that experience to others across the spectrum of ability and disability, health, illness and aging. He says that he's just at an extreme end of the spectrum we're all on. He's doing some amazing work now with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. And Matthew has made this remarkable observation that I'm just going to offer you and let it sit. I can't quite explain it, and he can't either. But he says that he has yet to experience someone who became more aware of their body, in all its frailty and its grace, without, at the same time, becoming more compassionate towards all of life. Compassion also looks like this. This is Jean Vanier. Jean Vanier helped found the L'Arche communities, which you can now find all over the world, communities centered around life with people with mental disabilities — mostly Down syndrome. The communities that Jean Vanier founded, like Jean Vanier himself, exude tenderness. "Tender" is another word I would love to spend some time resurrecting. We spend so much time in this culture being driven and aggressive, and I spend a lot of time being those things too. And compassion can also have those qualities. But again and again, lived compassion brings us back to the wisdom of tenderness. Jean Vanier says that his work, like the work of other people — his great, beloved, late friend Mother Teresa — is never in the first instance about changing the world; it's in the first instance about changing ourselves. He's says that what they do with L'Arche is not a solution, but a sign. Compassion is rarely a solution, but it is always a sign of a deeper reality, of deeper human possibilities. And compassion is unleashed in wider and wider circles by signs and stories, never by statistics and strategies. We need those things too, but we're also bumping up against their limits. And at the same time that we are doing that, I think we are rediscovering the power of story — that as human beings, we need stories to survive, to flourish, to change. Our traditions have always known this, and that is why they have always cultivated stories at their heart and carried them forward in time for us. There is, of course, a story behind the key moral longing and commandment of Judaism to repair the world — tikkun olam. And I'll never forget hearing that story from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who told it to me as her grandfather told it to her, that in the beginning of the Creation something happened and the original light of the universe was shattered into countless pieces. It lodged as shards inside every aspect of the Creation. And that the highest human calling is to look for this light, to point at it when we see it, to gather it up, and in so doing, to repair the world. Now this might sound like a fanciful tale. Some of my fellow journalists might interpret it that way. Rachel Naomi Remen says this is an important and empowering story for our time, because this story insists that each and every one of us, frail and flawed as we may be, inadequate as we may feel, has exactly what's needed to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch. Stories like this, signs like this, are practical tools in a world longing to bring compassion to abundant images of suffering that can otherwise overwhelm us. Rachel Naomi Remen is actually bringing compassion back to its rightful place alongside science in her field of medicine in the training of new doctors. And this trend of what Rachel Naomi Remen is doing, how these kinds of virtues are finding a place in the vocabulary of medicine — the work Fred Luskin is doing — I think this is one of the most fascinating developments of the 21st century — that science, in fact, is taking a virtue like compassion definitively out of the realm of idealism. This is going to change science, I believe, and it will change religion. But here's a face from 20th century science that might surprise you in a discussion about compassion. We all know about the Albert Einstein who came up with E = mc2. We don't hear so much about the Einstein who invited the African American opera singer, Marian Anderson, to stay in his home when she came to sing in Princeton because the best hotel there was segregated and wouldn't have her. We don't hear about the Einstein who used his celebrity to advocate for political prisoners in Europe or the Scottsboro boys in the American South. Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions. But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century. He once said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old. And Einstein foresaw that as we grow more modern and technologically advanced, we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more, not less. He liked to talk about the spiritual geniuses of the ages. Some of his favorites were Moses, Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi — he adored his contemporary, Gandhi. And Einstein said — and I think this is a quote, again, that has not been passed down in his legacy — that "these kinds of people are geniuses in the art of living, more necessary to the dignity, security and joy of humanity than the discoverers of objective knowledge." Now invoking Einstein might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us, but actually it is. I want to show you the rest of this photograph, because this photograph is analogous to what we do to the word "compassion" in our culture — we clean it up and we diminish its depths and its grounding in life, which is messy. So in this photograph you see a mind looking out a window at what might be a cathedral — it's not. This is the full photograph, and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigar. And by the look of that paunch, he hasn't been doing enough yoga. We put these two photographs side-by-side on our website, and someone said, "When I look at the first photo, I ask myself, what was he thinking? And when I look at the second, I ask, what kind of person was he? What kind of man is this?" Well, he was complicated. He was incredibly compassionate in some of his relationships and terribly inadequate in others. And it is much harder, often, to be compassionate towards those closest to us, which is another quality in the universe of compassion, on its dark side, that also deserves our serious attention and illumination. Gandhi, too, was a real flawed human being. So was Martin Luther King, Jr. So was Dorothy Day. So was Mother Teresa. So are we all. And I want to say that it is a liberating thing to realize that that is no obstacle to compassion — following on what Fred Luskin says — that these flaws just make us human. Our culture is obsessed with perfection and with hiding problems. But what a liberating thing to realize that our problems, in fact, are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion, towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others. Rachel Naomi Remen is a better doctor because of her life-long struggle with Crohn's disease. Einstein became a humanitarian, not because of his exquisite knowledge of space and time and matter, but because he was a Jew as Germany grew fascist. And Karen Armstrong, I think you would also say that it was some of your very wounding experiences in a religious life that, with a zigzag, have led to the Charter for Compassion. Compassion can't be reduced to sainthood any more than it can be reduced to pity. So I want to propose a final definition of compassion — this is Einstein with Paul Robeson by the way — and that would be for us to call compassion a spiritual technology. Now our traditions contain vast wisdom about this, and we need them to mine it for us now. But compassion is also equally at home in the secular as in the religious. So I will paraphrase Einstein in closing and say that humanity, the future of humanity, needs this technology as much as it needs all the others that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race. Thank you. (Applause)

The linguistic genius of babies

{0: 'Patricia Kuhl studies how we learn language as babies, looking at the ways our brains form around language acquisition.'}

TEDxRainier

I want you to take a look at this baby. What you're drawn to are her eyes and the skin you love to touch. But today I'm going to talk to you about something you can't see. What's going on up in that little brain of hers. The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us that what's going on up there is nothing short of rocket science. And what we're learning is going to shed some light on what the romantic writers and poets described as the "celestial openness" of the child's mind. What we see here is a mother in India, and she's speaking Koro, which is a newly discovered language. And she's talking to her baby. What this mother — and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world — understands is that, to preserve this language, they need to speak it to the babies. And therein lies a critical puzzle. Why is it that you can't preserve a language by speaking to you and I, to the adults? Well, it's got to do with your brain. What we see here is that language has a critical period for learning. The way to read this slide is to look at your age on the horizontal axis. (Laughter) And you'll see on the vertical your skill at acquiring a second language. The babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there's a systematic decline. After puberty, we fall off the map. No scientists dispute this curve, but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out why it works this way. Work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development, and that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language. We think, by studying how the sounds are learned, we'll have a model for the rest of language, and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development. So we've been studying the babies using a technique that we're using all over the world and the sounds of all languages. The baby sits on a parent's lap, and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes — like from "ah" to "ee." If they do so at the appropriate time, the black box lights up and a panda bear pounds a drum. A six-monther adores the task. What have we learned? Well, babies all over the world are what I like to describe as "citizens of the world." They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, no matter what country we're testing and what language we're using, and that's remarkable because you and I can't do that. We're culture-bound listeners. We can discriminate the sounds of our own language, but not those of foreign languages. So the question arises: When do those citizens of the world turn into the language-bound listeners that we are? And the answer: before their first birthdays. What you see here is performance on that head-turn task for babies tested in Tokyo and the United States, here in Seattle, as they listened to "ra" and "la" — sounds important to English, but not to Japanese. So at six to eight months, the babies are totally equivalent. Two months later, something incredible occurs. The babies in the United States are getting a lot better, babies in Japan are getting a lot worse, but both of those groups of babies are preparing for exactly the language that they are going to learn. So the question is: What's happening during this critical two-month period? This is the critical period for sound development, but what's going on up there? So there are two things going on. The first is that the babies are listening intently to us, and they're taking statistics as they listen to us talk — they're taking statistics. So listen to two mothers speaking motherese — the universal language we use when we talk to kids — first in English and then in Japanese. (Video) Ah, I love your big blue eyes — so pretty and nice. (Japanese) Patricia Kuhl: During the production of speech, when babies listen, what they're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear. And those distributions grow. And what we've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics, and the statistics of Japanese and English are very, very different. English has a lot of Rs and Ls. The distribution shows. And the distribution of Japanese is totally different, where we see a group of intermediate sounds, which is known as the Japanese "R." So babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are. But we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics. We are governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development. So what we're seeing here is changing our models of what the critical period is about. We're arguing from a mathematical standpoint that the learning of language material may slow down when our distributions stabilize. It's raising lots of questions about bilingual people. Bilinguals must keep two sets of statistics in mind at once and flip between them, one after the other, depending on who they're speaking to. So we asked ourselves, can the babies take statistics on a brand new language? And we tested this by exposing American babies who'd never heard a second language to Mandarin for the first time during the critical period. We knew that, when monolinguals were tested in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin sounds, they showed the same pattern. Six to eight months, they're totally equivalent. Two months later, something incredible happens. But the Taiwanese babies are getting better, not the American babies. What we did was expose American babies, during this period, to Mandarin. It was like having Mandarin relatives come and visit for a month and move into your house and talk to the babies for 12 sessions. Here's what it looked like in the laboratory. (Mandarin) PK: So what have we done to their little brains? (Laughter) We had to run a control group to make sure that coming into the laboratory didn't improve your Mandarin skills. So a group of babies came in and listened to English. And we can see from the graph that exposure to English didn't improve their Mandarin. But look at what happened to the babies exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions. They were as good as the babies in Taiwan who'd been listening for 10 and a half months. What it demonstrated is that babies take statistics on a new language. Whatever you put in front of them, they'll take statistics on. But we wondered what role the human being played in this learning exercise. So we ran another group of babies in which the kids got the same dosage, the same 12 sessions, but over a television set. And another group of babies who had just audio exposure and looked at a teddy bear on the screen. What did we do to their brains? What you see here is the audio result — no learning whatsoever — and the video result — no learning whatsoever. It takes a human being for babies to take their statistics. The social brain is controlling when the babies are taking their statistics. We want to get inside the brain and see this thing happening as babies are in front of televisions, as opposed to in front of human beings. Thankfully, we have a new machine, magnetoencephalography, that allows us to do this. It looks like a hair dryer from Mars. But it's completely safe, completely noninvasive and silent. We're looking at millimeter accuracy with regard to spatial and millisecond accuracy using 306 SQUIDs — these are superconducting quantum interference devices — to pick up the magnetic fields that change as we do our thinking. We're the first in the world to record babies in an MEG machine while they are learning. So this is little Emma. She's a six-monther. And she's listening to various languages in the earphones that are in her ears. You can see, she can move around. We're tracking her head with little pellets in a cap, so she's free to move completely unconstrained. It's a technical tour de force. What are we seeing? We're seeing the baby brain. As the baby hears a word in her language, the auditory areas light up, and then subsequently areas surrounding it that we think are related to coherence, getting the brain coordinated with its different areas, and causality, one brain area causing another to activate. We are embarking on a grand and golden age of knowledge about child's brain development. We're going to be able to see a child's brain as they experience an emotion, as they learn to speak and read, as they solve a math problem, as they have an idea. And we're going to be able to invent brain-based interventions for children who have difficulty learning. Just as the poets and writers described, we're going to be able to see, I think, that wondrous openness, utter and complete openness, of the mind of a child. In investigating the child's brain, we're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human, and in the process, we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives. Thank you. (Applause)

Inspiring a life of immersion

{0: 'Jacqueline Novogratz works to enable human flourishing. Her organization, Acumen, invests in people, companies and ideas that see capital and networks as means, not ends, to solving the toughest issues of poverty.'}

TEDWomen 2010

I've been spending a lot of time traveling around the world these days, talking to groups of students and professionals, and everywhere I'm finding that I hear similar themes. On the one hand, people say, "The time for change is now." They want to be part of it. They talk about wanting lives of purpose and greater meaning. But on the other hand, I hear people talking about fear, a sense of risk-aversion. They say, "I really want to follow a life of purpose, but I don't know where to start. I don't want to disappoint my family or friends." I work in global poverty. And they say, "I want to work in global poverty, but what will it mean about my career? Will I be marginalized? Will I not make enough money? Will I never get married or have children?" And as a woman who didn't get married until I was a lot older — and I'm glad I waited — (Laughter) — and has no children, I look at these young people and I say, "Your job is not to be perfect. Your job is only to be human. And nothing important happens in life without a cost." These conversations really reflect what's happening at the national and international level. Our leaders and ourselves want everything, but we don't talk about the costs. We don't talk about the sacrifice. One of my favorite quotes from literature was written by Tillie Olsen, the great American writer from the South. In a short story called "Oh Yes," she talks about a white woman in the 1950s who has a daughter who befriends a little African American girl, and she looks at her child with a sense of pride, but she also wonders, what price will she pay? "Better immersion than to live untouched." But the real question is, what is the cost of not daring? What is the cost of not trying? I've been so privileged in my life to know extraordinary leaders who have chosen to live lives of immersion. One woman I knew who was a fellow at a program that I ran at the Rockefeller Foundation was named Ingrid Washinawatok. She was a leader of the Menominee tribe, a Native American peoples. And when we would gather as fellows, she would push us to think about how the elders in Native American culture make decisions. And she said they would literally visualize the faces of children for seven generations into the future, looking at them from the Earth, and they would look at them, holding them as stewards for that future. Ingrid understood that we are connected to each other, not only as human beings, but to every living thing on the planet. And tragically, in 1999, when she was in Colombia working with the U'wa people, focused on preserving their culture and language, she and two colleagues were abducted and tortured and killed by the FARC. And whenever we would gather the fellows after that, we would leave a chair empty for her spirit. And more than a decade later, when I talk to NGO fellows, whether in Trenton, New Jersey or the office of the White House, and we talk about Ingrid, they all say that they're trying to integrate her wisdom and her spirit and really build on the unfulfilled work of her life's mission. And when we think about legacy, I can think of no more powerful one, despite how short her life was. And I've been touched by Cambodian women — beautiful women, women who held the tradition of the classical dance in Cambodia. And I met them in the early '90s. In the 1970s, under the Pol Pot regime, the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people, and they focused and targeted the elites and the intellectuals, the artists, the dancers. And at the end of the war, there were only 30 of these classical dancers still living. And the women, who I was so privileged to meet when there were three survivors, told these stories about lying in their cots in the refugee camps. They said they would try so hard to remember the fragments of the dance, hoping that others were alive and doing the same. And one woman stood there with this perfect carriage, her hands at her side, and she talked about the reunion of the 30 after the war and how extraordinary it was. And these big tears fell down her face, but she never lifted her hands to move them. And the women decided that they would train not the next generation of girls, because they had grown too old already, but the next generation. And I sat there in the studio watching these women clapping their hands — beautiful rhythms — as these little fairy pixies were dancing around them, wearing these beautiful silk colors. And I thought, after all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray. Because they're focused on honoring what is most beautiful about our past and building it into the promise of our future. And what these women understood is sometimes the most important things that we do and that we spend our time on are those things that we cannot measure. I also have been touched by the dark side of power and leadership. And I have learned that power, particularly in its absolute form, is an equal opportunity provider. In 1986, I moved to Rwanda, and I worked with a very small group of Rwandan women to start that country's first microfinance bank. And one of the women was Agnes — there on your extreme left — she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in Rwanda, and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of Rwanda. We built this institution based on social justice, gender equity, this idea of empowering women. But Agnes cared more about the trappings of power than she did principle at the end. And though she had been part of building a liberal party, a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance, about three months before the genocide, she switched parties and joined the extremist party, Hutu Power, and she became the Minister of Justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women. She was convicted of category one crimes of genocide. And I would visit her in the prisons, sitting side-by-side, knees touching, and I would have to admit to myself that monsters exist in all of us, but that maybe it's not monsters so much, but the broken parts of ourselves, sadnesses, secret shame, and that ultimately it's easy for demagogues to prey on those parts, those fragments, if you will, and to make us look at other beings, human beings, as lesser than ourselves — and in the extreme, to do terrible things. And there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men. I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male. And so in a gathering where we're focused on women, while it is so critical that we invest in our girls and we even the playing field and we find ways to honor them, we have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide. And that, when they sit on those street corners and all they can think of in the future is no job, no education, no possibility, well then it's easy to understand how the greatest source of status can come from a uniform and a gun. Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us. One of the Acumen Fund fellows at my organization, Suraj Sudhakar, has what we call moral imagination — the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and lead from that perspective. And he's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world, Kibera. And they're incredible guys. And together they started a book club for a hundred people in the slums, and they're reading many TED authors and liking it. And then they created a business plan competition. Then they decided that they would do TEDx's. And I have learned so much from Chris and Kevin and Alex and Herbert and all of these young men. Alex, in some ways, said it best. He said, "We used to feel like nobodies, but now we feel like somebodies." And I think we have it all wrong when we think that income is the link. What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other. And the reason these young guys told me that they're doing these TEDx's is because they were sick and tired of the only workshops coming to the slums being those workshops focused on HIV, or at best, microfinance. And they wanted to celebrate what's beautiful about Kibera and Mathare — the photojournalists and the creatives, the graffiti artists, the teachers and the entrepreneurs. And they're doing it. And my hat's off to you in Kibera. My own work focuses on making philanthropy more effective and capitalism more inclusive. At Acumen Fund, we take philanthropic resources and we invest what we call patient capital — money that will invest in entrepreneurs who see the poor not as passive recipients of charity, but as full-bodied agents of change who want to solve their own problems and make their own decisions. We leave our money for 10 to 15 years, and when we get it back, we invest in other innovations that focus on change. I know it works. We've invested more than 50 million dollars in 50 companies, and those companies have brought another 200 million dollars into these forgotten markets. This year alone, they've delivered 40 million services like maternal health care and housing, emergency services, solar energy, so that people can have more dignity in solving their problems. Patient capital is uncomfortable for people searching for simple solutions, easy categories, because we don't see profit as a blunt instrument. But we find those entrepreneurs who put people and the planet before profit. And ultimately, we want to be part of a movement that is about measuring impact, measuring what is most important to us. And my dream is we'll have a world one day where we don't just honor those who take money and make more money from it, but we find those individuals who take our resources and convert it into changing the world in the most positive ways. And it's only when we honor them and celebrate them and give them status that the world will really change. Last May I had this extraordinary 24-hour period where I saw two visions of the world living side-by-side — one based on violence and the other on transcendence. I happened to be in Lahore, Pakistan on the day that two mosques were attacked by suicide bombers. And the reason these mosques were attacked is because the people praying inside were from a particular sect of Islam who fundamentalists don't believe are fully Muslim. And not only did those suicide bombers take a hundred lives, but they did more, because they created more hatred, more rage, more fear and certainly despair. But less than 24 hours, I was 13 miles away from those mosques, visiting one of our Acumen investees, an incredible man, Jawad Aslam, who dares to live a life of immersion. Born and raised in Baltimore, he studied real estate, worked in commercial real estate, and after 9/11 decided he was going to Pakistan to make a difference. For two years, he hardly made any money, a tiny stipend, but he apprenticed with this incredible housing developer named Tasneem Saddiqui. And he had a dream that he would build a housing community on this barren piece of land using patient capital, but he continued to pay a price. He stood on moral ground and refused to pay bribes. It took almost two years just to register the land. But I saw how the level of moral standard can rise from one person's action. Today, 2,000 people live in 300 houses in this beautiful community. And there's schools and clinics and shops. But there's only one mosque. And so I asked Jawad, "How do you guys navigate? This is a really diverse community. Who gets to use the mosque on Fridays?" He said, "Long story. It was hard, it was a difficult road, but ultimately the leaders of the community came together, realizing we only have each other. And we decided that we would elect the three most respected imams, and those imams would take turns, they would rotate who would say Friday prayer. But the whole community, all the different sects, including Shi'a and Sunni, would sit together and pray." We need that kind of moral leadership and courage in our worlds. We face huge issues as a world — the financial crisis, global warming and this growing sense of fear and otherness. And every day we have a choice. We can take the easier road, the more cynical road, which is a road based on sometimes dreams of a past that never really was, a fear of each other, distancing and blame. Or we can take the much more difficult path of transformation, transcendence, compassion and love, but also accountability and justice. I had the great honor of working with the child psychologist Dr. Robert Coles, who stood up for change during the Civil Rights movement in the United States. And he tells this incredible story about working with a little six-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges, the first child to desegregate schools in the South — in this case, New Orleans. And he said that every day this six-year-old, dressed in her beautiful dress, would walk with real grace through a phalanx of white people screaming angrily, calling her a monster, threatening to poison her — distorted faces. And every day he would watch her, and it looked like she was talking to the people. And he would say, "Ruby, what are you saying?" And she'd say, "I'm not talking." And finally he said, "Ruby, I see that you're talking. What are you saying?" And she said, "Dr. Coles, I am not talking; I'm praying." And he said, "Well, what are you praying?" And she said, "I'm praying, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.'" At age six, this child was living a life of immersion, and her family paid a price for it. But she became part of history and opened up this idea that all of us should have access to education. My final story is about a young, beautiful man named Josephat Byaruhanga, who was another Acumen Fund fellow, who hails from Uganda, a farming community. And we placed him in a company in Western Kenya, just 200 miles away. And he said to me at the end of his year, "Jacqueline, it was so humbling, because I thought as a farmer and as an African I would understand how to transcend culture. But especially when I was talking to the African women, I sometimes made these mistakes — it was so hard for me to learn how to listen." And he said, "So I conclude that, in many ways, leadership is like a panicle of rice. Because at the height of the season, at the height of its powers, it's beautiful, it's green, it nourishes the world, it reaches to the heavens." And he said, "But right before the harvest, it bends over with great gratitude and humility to touch the earth from where it came." We need leaders. We ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe we can, ourselves, extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every man, woman and child on this planet. And we need to have the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone. Robert Kennedy once said that "few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events." And it is in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written. Our lives are so short, and our time on this planet is so precious, and all we have is each other. So may each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives, but in the end, it is all that will sustain us. Thank you. (Applause)

The future of business is the "mesh"

{0: 'Lisa Gansky is the author of "The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing," and the instigator behind the Mesh Directory (www.meshing.it).'}

TED@MotorCity

I'm speaking to you about what I call the "mesh." It's essentially a fundamental shift in our relationship with stuff, with the things in our lives. And it's starting to look at — not always and not for everything — but in certain moments of time, access to certain kinds of goods and service will trump ownership of them. And so it's the pursuit of better things, easily shared. And we come from a long tradition of sharing. We've shared transportation. We've shared wine and food and other sorts of fabulous experiences in coffee bars in Amsterdam. We've also shared other sorts of entertainment — sports arenas, public parks, concert halls, libraries, universities. All these things are share-platforms, but sharing ultimately starts and ends with what I refer to as the "mother of all share-platforms." And as I think about the mesh and I think about, well, what's driving it, how come it's happening now, I think there's a number of vectors that I want to give you as background. One is the recession — that the recession has caused us to rethink our relationship with the things in our lives relative to the value — so starting to align the value with the true cost. Secondly, population growth and density into cities. More people, smaller spaces, less stuff. Climate change: we're trying to reduce the stress in our personal lives and in our communities and on the planet. Also, there's been this recent distrust of big brands, global big brands, in a bunch of different industries, and that's created an opening. Research is showing here, in the States, and in Canada and Western Europe, that most of us are much more open to local companies, or brands that maybe we haven't heard of. Whereas before, we went with the big brands that we were sure we trusted. And last is that we're more connected now to more people on the planet than ever before — except for if you're sitting next to someone. (Laughter) The other thing that's worth considering is that we've made a huge investment over decades and decades, and tens of billions of dollars have gone into this investment that now is our inheritance. It's a physical infrastructure that allows us to get from point A to point B and move things that way. It's also — Web and mobile allow us to be connected and create all kinds of platforms and systems, and the investment of those technologies and that infrastructure is really our inheritance. It allows us to engage in really new and interesting ways. And so for me, a mesh company, the "classic" mesh company, brings together these three things: our ability to connect to each other — most of us are walking around with these mobile devices that are GPS-enabled and Web-enabled — allows us to find each other and find things in time and space. And third is that physical things are readable on a map — so restaurants, a variety of venues, but also with GPS and other technology like RFID and it continues to expand beyond that, we can also track things that are moving, like a car, a taxicab, a transit system, a box that's moving through time and space. And so that sets up for making access to get goods and services more convenient and less costly in many cases than owning them. For example, I want to use Zipcar. How many people here have experienced car-sharing or bike-sharing? Wow, that's great. Okay, thank you. Basically Zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world. They did not invent car-sharing. Car-sharing was actually invented in Europe. One of the founders went to Switzerland, saw it implemented someplace, said, "Wow, that looks really cool. I think we can do that in Cambridge," brought it to Cambridge and they started — two women — Robin Chase being the other person who started it. Zipcar got some really important things right. First, they really understood that a brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir. And so they were very clever about the way that they packaged car-sharing. They made it sexy. They made it fresh. They made it aspirational. If you were a member of the club, when you're a member of a club, you're a Zipster. The cars they picked didn't look like ex-cop cars that were hollowed out or something. They picked these sexy cars. They targeted to universities. They made sure that the demographic for who they were targeting and the car was all matching. It was a very nice experience, and the cars were clean and reliable, and it all worked. And so from a branding perspective, they got a lot right. But they understood fundamentally that they are not a car company. They understand that they are an information company. Because when we buy a car we go to the dealer once, we have an interaction, and we're chow — usually as quickly as possible. But when you're sharing a car and you have a car-share service, you might use an E.V. to commute, you get a truck because you're doing a home project. When you pick your aunt up at the airport, you get a sedan. And you're going to the mountains to ski, you get different accessories put on the car for doing that sort of thing. Meanwhile, these guys are sitting back, collecting all sorts of data about our behavior and how we interact with the service. And so it's not only an option for them, but I believe it's an imperative for Zipcar and other mesh companies to actually just wow us, to be like a concierge service. Because we give them so much information, and they are entitled to really see how it is that we're moving. They're in really good shape to anticipate what we're going to want next. And so what percent of the day do you think the average person uses a car? What percentage of the time? Any guesses? Those are really very good. I was imagining it was like 20 percent when I first started. The number across the U.S. and Western Europe is eight percent. And so basically even if you think it's 10 percent, 90 percent of the time, something that costs us a lot of money — personally, and also we organize our cities around it and all sorts of things — 90 percent of the time it's sitting around. So for this reason, I think one of the other themes with the mesh is essentially that, if we squeeze hard on things that we've thrown away, there's a lot of value in those things. What set up with Zipcar — Zipcar started in 2000. In the last year, 2010, two car companies started, one that's in the U.K. called WhipCar, and the other one, RelayRides, in the U.S. They're both peer-to-peer car-sharing services, because the two things that really work for car-sharing is, one, the car has to be available, and two, it's within one or two blocks of where you stand. Well the car that's one or two blocks from your home or your office is probably your neighbor's car, and it's probably also available. So people have created this business. Zipcar started a decade earlier, in 2000. It took them six years to get 1,000 cars in service. WhipCar, which started April of last year, it took them six months to get 1,000 cars in the service. So, really interesting. People are making anywhere between 200 and 700 dollars a month letting their neighbors use their car when they're not using it. So it's like vacation rentals for cars. Since I'm here — and I hope some people in the audience are in the car business — (Laughter) — I'm thinking that, coming from the technology side of things — we saw cable-ready TVs and WiFi-ready Notebooks — it would be really great if, any minute now, you guys could start rolling share-ready cars off. Because it just creates more flexibility. It allows us as owners to have other options. And I think we're going there anyway. The opportunity and the challenge with mesh businesses — and those are businesses like Zipcar or Netflix that are full mesh businesses, or other ones where you have a lot of the car companies, car manufacturers, who are beginning to offer their own car-share services as well as a second flanker brand, or as really a test, I think — is to make sharing irresistible. We have experiences in our lives, certainly, when sharing has been irresistible. It's just, how do we make that recurrent and scale it? We know also, because we're connected in social networks, that it's easy to create delight in one little place. It's contagious because we're all connected to each other. So if I have a terrific experience and I tweet it, or I tell five people standing next to me, news travels. The opposite, as we know, is also true, often more true. So here we have LudoTruck, which is in L.A., doing the things that gourmet food trucks do, and they've gathered quite a following. In general, and maybe, again, it's because I'm a tech entrepreneur, I look at things as platforms. Platforms are invitations. So creating Craigslist or iTunes and the iPhone developer network, there are all these networks — Facebook as well. These platforms invite all sorts of developers and all sorts of people to come with their ideas and their opportunity to create and target an application for a particular audience. And honestly, it's full of surprises. Because I don't think any of us in this room could have predicted the sorts of applications that have happened at Facebook, around Facebook, for example, two years ago, when Mark announced that they were going to go with a platform. So in this way, I think that cities are platforms, and certainly Detroit is a platform. The invitation of bringing makers and artists and entrepreneurs — it really helps stimulate this fiery creativity and helps a city to thrive. It's inviting participation, and cities have, historically, invited all sorts of participation. Now we're saying that there's other options as well. So, for example, city departments can open up transit data. Google has made available transit data API. And so there's about seven or eight cities already in the U.S. that have provided the transit data, and different developers are building applications. So I was having a coffee in Portland, and half-of-a-latte in and the little board in the cafe all of a sudden starts showing me that the next bus is coming in three minutes and the train is coming in 16 minutes. And so it's reliable, real data that's right in my face, where I am, so I can finish the latte. There's this fabulous opportunity we have across the U.S. now: about 21 percent of vacant commercial and industrial space. That space is not vital. The areas around it lack vitality and vibrancy and engagement. There's this thing — how many people here have heard of pop-up stores or pop-up shops? Oh, great. So I'm a big fan of this. And this is a very mesh-y thing. Essentially, there are all sorts of restaurants in Oakland, near where I live. There's a pop-up general store every three weeks, and they do a fantastic job of making a very social event happening for foodies. Super fun, and it happens in a very transitional neighborhood. Subsequent to that, after it's been going for about a year now, they actually started to lease and create and extend. An area that was edgy-artsy is now starting to become much cooler and engage a lot more people. So this is an example. The Crafty Fox is this woman who's into crafts, and she does these pop-up crafts fairs around London. But these sorts of things are happening in many different environments. From my perspective, one of the things pop-up stores do is create perishability and urgency. It creates two of the favorite words of any businessperson: sold out. And the opportunity to really focus trust and attention is a wonderful thing. So a lot of what we see in the mesh, and a lot of what we have in the platform that we built allows us to define, refine and scale. It allows us to test things as an entrepreneur, to go to market, to be in conversation with people, listen, refine something and go back. It's very cost-effective, and it's very mesh-y. The infrastructure enables that. In closing, and as we're moving towards the end, I just also want to encourage — and I'm willing to share my failures as well, though not from the stage. (Laughter) I would just like to say that one of the big things, when we look at waste and when we look at ways that we can really be generous and contribute to each other, but also move to create a better economic situation and a better environmental situation, is by sharing failures. And one quick example is Velib, in 2007, came forward in Paris with a very bold proposition, a very big bike-sharing service. They made a lot of mistakes. They had some number of big successes. But they were very transparent, or they had to be, in the way that they exposed what worked and didn't work. And so B.C. in Barcelona and B-cycle and Boris Bikes in London — no one has had to repeat the version 1.0 screw-ups and expensive learning exercises that happened in Paris. So the opportunity when we're connected is also to share failures and successes. We're at the very beginning of something that, what we're seeing and the way that mesh companies are coming forward, is inviting, it's engaging, but it's very early. I have a website — it's a directory — and it started with about 1,200 companies, and in the last two-and-a-half months it's up to about 3,300 companies. And it grows on a very regular daily basis. But it's very much at the beginning. So I just want to welcome all of you onto the ride. And thank you very much. (Applause)

On being a woman and a diplomat

{0: 'Since leaving office as US Secretary of State in 2001, Madeleine Albright has continued her distinguished career in foreign affairs as a businesswoman, political adviser and professor. '}

TEDWomen 2010

Pat Mitchell: What is the story of this pin? Madeleine Albright: This is "Breaking the Glass Ceiling." PM: Oh. That was well chosen, I would say, for TEDWomen. MA: Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen. And none of this pin stuff would have happened if it hadn't been for Saddam Hussein. I'll tell you what happened. I went to the United Nations as an ambassador, and it was after the Gulf War, and I was an instructed ambassador. And the cease-fire had been translated into a series of sanctions resolutions, and my instructions were to say perfectly terrible things about Saddam Hussein constantly, which he deserved — he had invaded another country. And so all of a sudden, a poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things, but among them an "unparalleled serpent." And so I happened to have a snake pin. So I wore it when we talked about Iraq. (Laughter) And when I went out to meet the press, they zeroed in, said, "Why are you wearing that snake pin?" I said, "Because Saddam Hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent." And then I thought, well this is fun. So I went out and I bought a lot of pins that would, in fact, reflect what I thought we were going to do on any given day. So that's how it all started. PM: So how large is the collection? MA: Pretty big. It's now traveling. At the moment it's in Indianapolis, but it was at the Smithsonian. And it goes with a book that says, "Read My Pins." (Laughter) PM: So is this a good idea. I remember when you were the first woman as Secretary of State, and there was a lot of conversation always about what you were wearing, how you looked — the thing that happens to a lot of women, especially if they're the first in a position. So how do you feel about that — the whole — MA: Well, it's pretty irritating actually because nobody ever describes what a man is wearing. But people did pay attention to what clothes I had. What was interesting was that, before I went up to New York as U.N. ambassador, I talked to Jeane Kirkpatrick, who'd been ambassador before me, and she said, "You've got to get rid of your professor clothes. Go out and look like a diplomat." So that did give me a lot of opportunities to go shopping. But still, there were all kinds of questions about — "did you wear a hat?" "How short was your skirt?" And one of the things — if you remember Condoleezza Rice was at some event and she wore boots, and she got criticized over that. And no guy ever gets criticized. But that's the least of it. PM: It is, for all of us, men and women, finding our ways of defining our roles, and doing them in ways that make a difference in the world and shape the future. How did you handle that balance between being the tough diplomatic and strong voice of this country to the rest of the world and also how you felt about yourself as a mother, a grandmother, nurturing ... and so how did you handle that? MA: Well the interesting part was I was asked what it was like to be the first woman Secretary of State a few minutes after I'd been named. And I said, "Well I've been a woman for 60 years, but I've only been Secretary of State for a few minutes." So it evolved. (Laughter) But basically I love being a woman. And so what happened — and I think there will probably be some people in the audience that will identify with this — I went to my first meeting, first at the U.N., and that's when this all started, because that is a very male organization. And I'm sitting there — there are 15 members of the Security Council — so 14 men sat there staring at me, and I thought — well you know how we all are. You want to get the feeling of the room, and "do people like me?" and "will I really say something intelligent?" And all of a sudden I thought, "Well, wait a minute. I am sitting behind a sign that says 'The United States,' and if I don't speak today then the voice of the United States will not be heard," and it was the first time that I had that feeling that I had to step out of myself in my normal, reluctant female mode and decide that I had to speak on behalf of our country. And so that happened more at various times, but I really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman. I think we are a lot better at personal relationships, and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it's necessary. But I have to tell you, I have my youngest granddaughter, when she turned seven last year, said to her mother, my daughter, "So what's the big deal about Grandma Maddie being Secretary of State? Only girls are Secretary of State." (Laughter) (Applause) PM: Because in her lifetime — MA: That would be so. PM: What a change that is. As you travel now all over the world, which you do frequently, how do you assess this global narrative around the story of women and girls? Where are we? MA: I think we're slowly changing, but obviously there are whole pockets in countries where nothing is different. And therefore it means that we have to remember that, while many of us have had huge opportunities — and Pat, you have been a real leader in your field — is that there are a lot of women that are not capable of worrying and taking care of themselves and understanding that women have to help other women. And so what I have felt — and I have looked at this from a national security issue — when I was Secretary of State, I decided that women's issues had to be central to American foreign policy, not just because I'm a feminist, but because I believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered, that values are passed down, the health situation is better, education is better, there is greater economic prosperity. So I think that it behooves us — those of us that live in various countries where we do have economic and political voice — that we need to help other women. And I really dedicated myself to that, both at the U.N. and then as Secretary of State. PM: And did you get pushback from making that a central tenant of foreign policy? MA: From some people. I think that they thought that it was a soft issue. The bottom line that I decided was actually women's issues are the hardest issues, because they are the ones that have to do with life and death in so many aspects, and because, as I said, it is really central to the way that we think about things. Now for instance, some of the wars that took place when I was in office, a lot of them, the women were the main victims of it. For instance, when I started, there were wars in the Balkans. The women in Bosnia were being raped. We then managed to set up a war crimes tribunal to deal specifically with those kinds of issues. And by the way, one of the things that I did at that stage was, I had just arrived at the U.N., and when I was there, there were 183 countries in the U.N. Now there are 192. But it was one of the first times that I didn't have to cook lunch myself. So I said to my assistant, "Invite the other women permanent representatives." And I thought when I'd get to my apartment that there'd be a lot of women there. I get there, and there are six other women, out of 183. So the countries that had women representatives were Canada, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Trinidad Tobago, Jamaica, Lichtenstein and me. So being an American, I decided to set up a caucus. (Laughter) And so we set it up, and we called ourselves the G7. (Laughter) PM: Is that "Girl 7?" MA: Girl 7. And we lobbied on behalf of women's issues. So we managed to get two women judges on this war crimes tribunal. And then what happened was that they were able to declare that rape was a weapon of war, that it was against humanity. (Applause) PM: So when you look around the world and you see that, in many cases — certainly in the Western world — women are evolving into more leadership positions, and even other places some barriers are being brought down, but there's still so much violence, still so many problems, and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables. Now you were at those negotiating tables when they weren't, when there was maybe you — one voice, maybe one or two others. Do you believe, and can you tell us why, there is going to be a significant shift in things like violence and peace and conflict and resolution on a sustainable basis? MA: Well I do think, when there are more women, that the tone of the conversation changes, and also the goals of the conversation change. But it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women. If you think that, you've forgotten high school. (Laughter) But the bottom line is that there is a way, when there are more women at the table, that there's an attempt to develop some understanding. So for instance, what I did when I went to Burundi, we'd got Tutsi and Hutu women together to talk about some of the problems that had taken place in Rwanda. And so I think the capability of women to put themselves — I think we're better about putting ourselves into the other guy's shoes and having more empathy. I think it helps in terms of the support if there are other women in the room. When I was Secretary of State, there were only 13 other women foreign ministers. And so it was nice when one of them would show up. For instance, she is now the president of Finland, but Tarja Halonen was the foreign minister of Finland and, at a certain stage, head of the European Union. And it was really terrific. Because one of the things I think you'll understand. We went to a meeting, and the men in my delegation, when I would say, "Well I feel we should do something about this," and they'd say, "What do you mean, you feel?" And so then Tarja was sitting across the table from me. And all of a sudden we were talking about arms control, and she said, "Well I feel we should do this." And my male colleagues kind of got it all of a sudden. But I think it really does help to have a critical mass of women in a series of foreign policy positions. The other thing that I think is really important: A lot of national security policy isn't just about foreign policy, but it's about budgets, military budgets, and how the debts of countries work out. So if you have women in a variety of foreign policy posts, they can support each other when there are budget decisions being made in their own countries. PM: So how do we get this balance we're looking for, then, in the world? More women's voices at the table? More men who believe that the balance is best? MA: Well I think one of the things — I'm chairman of the board of an organization called the National Democratic Institute that works to support women candidates. I think that we need to help in other countries to train women to be in political office, to figure out how they can in fact develop political voices. I think we also need to be supportive when businesses are being created and just make sure that women help each other. Now I have a saying that I feel very strongly about, because I am of a certain age where, when I started in my career, believe it or not, there were other women who criticized me: "Why aren't you in the carpool line?" or "Aren't your children suffering because you're not there all the time?" And I think we have a tendency to make each other feel guilty. In fact, I think "guilt" is every woman's middle name. And so I think what needs to happen is we need to help each other. And my motto is that there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other. (Applause) PM: Well Secretary Albright, I guess you'll be going to heaven. Thank you for joining us today. MA: Thank you all. Thanks Pat. (Applause)

How to use experts -- and when not to

{0: 'Noreena Hertz looks at global culture -- financial and otherwise -- using an approach that combines traditional economic analysis with foreign policy trends, psychology, behavioural economics, anthropology, history and sociology.'}

TEDSalon London 2010

It's Monday morning. In Washington, the president of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office, assessing whether or not to strike Al Qaeda in Yemen. At Number 10 Downing Street, David Cameron is trying to work out whether to cut more public sector jobs in order to stave off a double-dip recession. In Madrid, Maria Gonzalez is standing at the door, listening to her baby crying and crying, trying to work out whether she should let it cry until it falls asleep or pick it up and hold it. And I am sitting by my father's bedside in hospital, trying to work out whether I should let him drink the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water that his doctors just came in and said, "You must make him drink today," — my father's been nil by mouth for a week — or whether, by giving him this bottle, I might actually kill him. We face momentous decisions with important consequences throughout our lives, and we have strategies for dealing with these decisions. We talk things over with our friends, we scour the Internet, we search through books. But still, even in this age of Google and TripAdvisor and Amazon Recommends, it's still experts that we rely upon most — especially when the stakes are high and the decision really matters. Because in a world of data deluge and extreme complexity, we believe that experts are more able to process information than we can — that they are able to come to better conclusions than we could come to on our own. And in an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do. But I believe that this is a big problem, a problem with potentially dangerous consequences for us as a society, as a culture and as individuals. It's not that experts have not massively contributed to the world — of course they have. The problem lies with us: we've become addicted to experts. We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom. We've surrendered our power, trading off our discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they provide. This is no exaggeration. In a recent experiment, a group of adults had their brains scanned in an MRI machine as they were listening to experts speak. The results were quite extraordinary. As they listened to the experts' voices, the independent decision-making parts of their brains switched off. It literally flat-lined. And they listened to whatever the experts said and took their advice, however right or wrong. But experts do get things wrong. Did you know that studies show that doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10? Did you know that if you file your tax returns yourself, you're statistically more likely to be filing them correctly than if you get a tax adviser to do it for you? And then there's, of course, the example that we're all too aware of: financial experts getting it so wrong that we're living through the worst recession since the 1930s. For the sake of our health, our wealth and our collective security, it's imperative that we keep the independent decision-making parts of our brains switched on. And I'm saying this as an economist who, over the past few years, has focused my research on what it is we think and who it is we trust and why, but also — and I'm aware of the irony here — as an expert myself, as a professor, as somebody who advises prime ministers, heads of big companies, international organizations, but an expert who believes that the role of experts needs to change, that we need to become more open-minded, more democratic and be more open to people rebelling against our points of view. So in order to help you understand where I'm coming from, let me bring you into my world, the world of experts. Now there are, of course, exceptions, wonderful, civilization-enhancing exceptions. But what my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps, that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition, that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus. Alan Greenspan's proclamations that the years of economic growth would go on and on, not challenged by his peers, until after the crisis, of course. You see, we also learn that experts are located, are governed, by the social and cultural norms of their times — whether it be the doctors in Victorian England, say, who sent women to asylums for expressing sexual desire, or the psychiatrists in the United States who, up until 1973, were still categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness. And what all this means is that paradigms take far too long to shift, that complexity and nuance are ignored and also that money talks — because we've all seen the evidence of pharmaceutical companies funding studies of drugs that conveniently leave out their worst side effects, or studies funded by food companies of their new products, massively exaggerating the health benefits of the products they're about to bring by market. The study showed that food companies exaggerated typically seven times more than an independent study. And we've also got to be aware that experts, of course, also make mistakes. They make mistakes every single day — mistakes born out of carelessness. A recent study in the Archives of Surgery reported surgeons removing healthy ovaries, operating on the wrong side of the brain, carrying out procedures on the wrong hand, elbow, eye, foot, and also mistakes born out of thinking errors. A common thinking error of radiologists, for example — when they look at CT scans — is that they're overly influenced by whatever it is that the referring physician has said that he suspects the patient's problem to be. So if a radiologist is looking at the scan of a patient with suspected pneumonia, say, what happens is that, if they see evidence of pneumonia on the scan, they literally stop looking at it — thereby missing the tumor sitting three inches below on the patient's lungs. I've shared with you so far some insights into the world of experts. These are, of course, not the only insights I could share, but I hope they give you a clear sense at least of why we need to stop kowtowing to them, why we need to rebel and why we need to switch our independent decision-making capabilities on. But how can we do this? Well for the sake of time, I want to focus on just three strategies. First, we've got to be ready and willing to take experts on and dispense with this notion of them as modern-day apostles. This doesn't mean having to get a Ph.D. in every single subject, you'll be relieved to hear. But it does mean persisting in the face of their inevitable annoyance when, for example, we want them to explain things to us in language that we can actually understand. Why was it that, when I had an operation, my doctor said to me, "Beware, Ms. Hertz, of hyperpyrexia," when he could have just as easily said, "Watch out for a high fever." You see, being ready to take experts on is about also being willing to dig behind their graphs, their equations, their forecasts, their prophecies, and being armed with the questions to do that — questions like: What are the assumptions that underpin this? What is the evidence upon which this is based? What has your investigation focused on? And what has it ignored? It recently came out that experts trialing drugs before they come to market typically trial drugs first, primarily on male animals and then, primarily on men. It seems that they've somehow overlooked the fact that over half the world's population are women. And women have drawn the short medical straw because it now turns out that many of these drugs don't work nearly as well on women as they do on men — and the drugs that do work well work so well that they're actively harmful for women to take. Being a rebel is about recognizing that experts' assumptions and their methodologies can easily be flawed. Second, we need to create the space for what I call "managed dissent." If we are to shift paradigms, if we are to make breakthroughs, if we are to destroy myths, we need to create an environment in which expert ideas are battling it out, in which we're bringing in new, diverse, discordant, heretical views into the discussion, fearlessly, in the knowledge that progress comes about, not only from the creation of ideas, but also from their destruction — and also from the knowledge that, by surrounding ourselves by divergent, discordant, heretical views. All the research now shows us that this actually makes us smarter. Encouraging dissent is a rebellious notion because it goes against our very instincts, which are to surround ourselves with opinions and advice that we already believe or want to be true. And that's why I talk about the need to actively manage dissent. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a practical practitioner of this philosophy. In meetings, he looks out for the person in the room — arms crossed, looking a bit bemused — and draws them into the discussion, trying to see if they indeed are the person with a different opinion, so that they have dissent within the room. Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference. But we need to go even further. We need to fundamentally redefine who it is that experts are. The conventional notion is that experts are people with advanced degrees, fancy titles, diplomas, best-selling books — high-status individuals. But just imagine if we were to junk this notion of expertise as some sort of elite cadre and instead embrace the notion of democratized expertise — whereby expertise was not just the preserve of surgeons and CEO's, but also shop-girls — yeah. Best Buy, the consumer electronics company, gets all its employees — the cleaners, the shop assistants, the people in the back office, not just its forecasting team — to place bets, yes bets, on things like whether or not a product is going to sell well before Christmas, on whether customers' new ideas are going to be or should be taken on by the company, on whether a project will come in on time. By leveraging and by embracing the expertise within the company, Best Buy was able to discover, for example, that the store that it was going to open in China — its big, grand store — was not going to open on time. Because when it asked its staff, all its staff, to place their bets on whether they thought the store would open on time or not, a group from the finance department placed all their chips on that not happening. It turned out that they were aware, as no one else within the company was, of a technological blip that neither the forecasting experts, nor the experts on the ground in China, were even aware of. The strategies that I have discussed this evening — embracing dissent, taking experts on, democratizing expertise, rebellious strategies — are strategies that I think would serve us all well to embrace as we try to deal with the challenges of these very confusing, complex, difficult times. For if we keep our independent decision-making part of our brains switched on, if we challenge experts, if we're skeptical, if we devolve authority, if we are rebellious, but also if we become much more comfortable with nuance, uncertainty and doubt, and if we allow our experts to express themselves using those terms too, we will set ourselves up much better for the challenges of the 21st century. For now, more than ever, is not the time to be blindly following, blindly accepting, blindly trusting. Now is the time to face the world with eyes wide open — yes, using experts to help us figure things out, for sure — I don't want to completely do myself out of a job here — but being aware of their limitations and, of course, also our own. Thank you. (Applause)

Saving faces: A facial surgeon's craft

{0: 'Iain Hutchison is a pioneering oral and facial surgeon; his foundation, Saving Faces, explores the nature of our expressions.'}

TEDGlobal 2010

Our face is hugely important because it's the external, visual part that everybody else sees. Let's not forget it's a functional entity. We have strong skull bones that protect the most important organ in our body: the brain. It's where our senses are located, our special senses — our vision, our speech, our hearing, our smell, our taste. And this bone is peppered, as you can see, with the light shining through the skull with cavities, the sinuses, which warm and moisten the air we breathe. But also imagine if they were filled with solid bone — our head would be dead weight, we wouldn't be able to hold it erect, we wouldn't be able to look at the world around us. This woman is slowly dying because the benign tumors in her facial bones have completely obliterated her mouth and her nose so she can't breathe and eat. Attached to the facial bones that define our face's structure are the muscles that deliver our facial expression, our universal language of expression, our social-signaling system. And overlying this is the skin drape, which is a hugely complex three-dimensional structure — taking right-angled bends here and there, having thin areas like the eyelids, thick areas like the cheek, different colors. And then we have the sensual factor of the face. Where do we like to kiss people? On the lips. Nibble the ears maybe. It's the face where we're attracted to with that. But let's not forget the hair. You're looking at the image on your left-hand side — that's my son with his eyebrows present. Look how odd he looks with the eyebrows missing. There's a definite difference. And imagine if he had hair sprouting from the middle of his nose, he'd look even odder still. Dysmorphophobia is an extreme version of the fact that we don't see ourselves as others see us. It's a shocking truth that we only see mirror images of ourselves, and we only see ourselves in freeze-frame photographic images that capture a mere fraction of the time that we live. Dysmorphophobia is a perversion of this where people who may be very good looking regard themselves as hideously ugly and are constantly seeking surgery to correct their facial appearance. They don't need this. They need psychiatric help. Max has kindly donated his photograph to me. He doesn't have dysmorphophobia, but I'm using his photograph to illustrate the fact that he looks exactly like a dysmorphophobic. In other words, he looks entirely normal. Age is another thing when our attitude toward our appearance changes. So children judge themselves, learn to judge themselves, by the behavior of adults around them. Here's a classic example: Rebecca has a benign blood vessel tumor that's growing out through her skull, has obliterated her nose, and she's having difficulty seeing. As you can see, it's blocking her vision. She's also in danger, when she damages this, of bleeding profusely. Our research has shown that the parents and close loved ones of these children adore them. They've grown used to their face; they think they're special. Actually, sometimes the parents argue about whether these children should have the lesion removed. And occasionally they suffer intense grief reactions because the child they've grown to love has changed so dramatically and they don't recognize them. But other adults say incredibly painful things. They say, "How dare you take this child out of the house and terrify other people. Shouldn't you be doing something about this? Why haven't you had it removed?" And other children in curiosity come up and poke the lesion, because — a natural curiosity. And that obviously alerts the child to their unusual nature. After surgery, everything normalizes. The adults behave more naturally, and the children play more readily with other children. As teenagers — just think back to your teenage years — we're going through a dramatic and often disproportionate change in our facial appearance. We're trying to struggle to find our identity. We crave the approval of our peers. So our facial appearance is vital to us as we're trying to project ourselves to the world. Just remember that single acne spot that crippled you for several days. How long did you spend looking in the mirror every day, practicing your sardonic look, practicing your serious look, trying to look like Sean Connery, as I did, trying to raise one eyebrow? It's a crippling time. I've chosen to show this profile view of Sue because what it shows is her lower jaw jutting forward and her lower lip jutting forward. I'd like you all in the audience now to push your lower jaw forward. Turn to the person next to you, push your lower jaws forward. Turn to the person next to you and look at them — they look miserable. That's exactly what people used to say to Sue. She wasn't miserable at all. But people used to say to her, "Why are you so miserable?" People were making misjudgments all the time on her mood. Teachers and peers were underestimating her; she was teased at school. So she chose to have facial surgery. After the facial surgery, she said, "My face now reflects my personality. People know now that I'm enthusiastic, that I'm a happy person." And that's the change that can be achieved for teenagers. Is this change, though, a real change, or is it a figment of the imagination of the patient themselves? Well we studied teenagers' attitudes to photographs of patients having this corrective facial surgery. And what we found was — we jumbled up the photographs so they couldn't recognize the before and after — what we found was that the patients were regarded as being more attractive after the surgery. Well that's not surprising, but we also asked them to judge them on honesty, intelligence, friendliness, violence. They were all perceived as being less than normal in all those characteristics — more violent, etc. — before the surgery. After the surgery, they were perceived as being more intelligent, more friendly, more honest, less violent — and yet we hadn't operated on their intellect or their character. When people get older, they don't necessarily choose to follow this kind of surgery. Their presence in the consultation suite is a result of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. What happens to them is that they may have suffered cancer or trauma. So this is a photograph of Henry, two weeks after he had a malignant cancer removed from the left side of his face — his cheekbone, his upper jaw, his eye-socket. He looks pretty good at this stage. But over the course of the next 15 years he had 14 more operations, as the disease ravaged his face and destroyed my reconstruction regularly. I learned a huge amount from Henry. Henry taught me that you can carry on working. He worked as an advocate. He continued to play cricket. He enjoyed life to the full, and this was probably because he had a successful, fulfilling job and a caring family and was able to participate socially. He maintained a calm insouciance. I don't say he overcame this; he didn't overcome it. This was something more than that. He ignored it. He ignored the disfigurement that was happening in his life and carried on oblivious to it. And that's what these people can do. Henriapi illustrates this phenomenon as well. This is a man in his 20s whose first visit out of Nigeria was with this malignant cancer that he came to the United Kingdom to have operated on. It was my longest operation. It took 23 hours. I did it with my neurosurgeon. We removed all the bones at the right side of his face — his eye, his nose, the skull bones, the facial skin — and reconstructed him with tissue from the back. He continued to work as a psychiatric nurse. He got married. He had a son called Jeremiah. And again, he said, "This painting of me with my son Jeremiah shows me as the successful man that I feel that I am." His facial disfigurement did not affect him because he had the support of a family; he had a successful, fulfilling job. So we've seen that we can change people's faces. But when we change people's faces, are we changing their identity — for better or for worse? For instance, there are two different types of facial surgery. We can categorize it like that. We can say there are patients who choose to have facial surgery — like Sue. When they have facial surgery, they feel their lives have changed because other people perceive them as better people. They don't feel different. They feel that they've actually gained what they never had, that their face now reflects their personality. And actually that's probably the difference between cosmetic surgery and this kind of surgery. Because you might say, "Well, this type of surgery might be regarded as cosmetic." If you do cosmetic surgery, patients are often less happy. They're trying to achieve difference in their lives. Sue wasn't trying to achieve difference in her life. She was just trying to achieve the face that matched her personality. But then we have other people who don't choose to have facial surgery. They're people who have their face shot off. I'll move it off, and we'll have a blank slide for those who are squeamish amongst you. They have it forced upon them. And again, as I told you, if they have a caring family and good work life, then they can lead normal and fulfilled lives. Their identity doesn't change. Is this business about appearance and preoccupation with it a Western phenomenon? Muzetta's family give the lie to this. This is a little Bangladeshi girl from the east end of London who's got a huge malignant tumor on the right side of her face, which has already made her blind and which is rapidly growing and is going to kill her shortly. After she had surgery to remove the tumor, her parents dressed her in this beautiful green velvet dress, a pink ribbon in her hair, and they wanted the painting to be shown around the world, despite the fact that they were orthodox Muslims and the mother wore a full burqa. So it's not simply a Western phenomenon. We make judgments on people's faces all the time. It's been going on since we can think of Lombroso and the way he would define criminal faces. He said you could see criminal faces, judging them just on the photographs that were showed. Good-looking people are always judged as being more friendly. We look at O.J. — he's a good-looking guy. We'd like to spend time with him. He looks friendly. Now we know that he's a convicted wife-batterer, and actually he's not the good guy. And beauty doesn't equate to goodness, and certainly doesn't equate to contentment. So we've talked about the static face and judging the static face, but actually, we're more comfortable with judging the moving face. We think we can judge people on their expressions. U.K. jurors in the U.K. justice system like to see a live witness to see whether they can pick up the telltale signs of mendacity — the blink, the hesitation. And so they want to see live witnesses. Todorov tells us that, in a tenth of a second, we can make a judgment on somebody's face. Are we uncomfortable with this image? Yes, we are. Would we be happy if our doctor's face, our lawyer's face, our financial adviser's face was covered? We'd be pretty uncomfortable. But are we good at making the judgments on facial appearance and movement? The truth is that there's a five-minute rule, not the tenth-of-a-second rule like Todorov, but a five-minute rule. If you spend five minutes with somebody, you start looking beyond their facial appearance, and the people who you're initially attracted to may seem boring and you lose interest in them, and the people who you didn't immediately seek out, because you didn't find them particularly attractive, become attractive people because of their personality. So we've talked a lot about facial appearance. I now want to share a little bit of the surgery that we do — where we're at and where we're going. This is an image of Ann who's had her right jaw removed and the base of her skull removed. And you can see in the images afterward, we've managed to reconstruct her successfully. But that's not good enough. This is what Ann wants. She wants to be out kayaking, she wants to be out climbing mountains. And that's what she achieved, and that's what we have to get to. This is a horrific image, so I'm putting my hand up now. This is a photograph of Adi, a Nigerian bank manager who had his face shot off in an armed robbery. And he lost his lower jaw, his lip, his chin and his upper jaw and teeth. This is the bar that he set for us. "I want to look like this. This is how I looked before." So with modern technology, we used computers to make models. We made a model of the jaw without bone in it. We then bent a plate up to it. We put it in place so we knew it was an accurate position. We then put bone and tissue from the back. Here you can see the plate holding it, and you can see the implants being put in — so that in one operation we achieve this and this. So the patient's life is restored. That's the good news. However, his chin skin doesn't look the same as it did before. It's skin from his back. It's thicker, it's darker, it's coarser, it doesn't have the contours. And that's where we're failing, and that's where we need the face transplant. The face transplant has a role probably in burns patients to replace the skin. We can replace the underlying skeletal structure, but we're still not good at replacing the facial skin. So it's very valuable to have that tool in our armamentarium. But the patients are going to have to take drugs that suppress their immune system for the rest of their lives. What does that mean? They have an increased risk of infection, an increased risk of malignancy. This is not a life-saving transplant — like a heart, or liver, or lung transplant — it is a quality-of-life transplant, and as a result, are the patients going to say, if they get a malignant cancer 10 or 15 years on, "I wish I'd had conventional reconstructive techniques rather than this because I'm now dying of a malignant cancer"? We don't know yet. We also don't know what they feel about recognition and identity. Bernard Devauchelle and Sylvie Testelin, who did the first operation, are studying that. Donors are going to be short on the ground, because how many people want to have their loved one's face removed at the point of death? So there are going to be problems with face transplantation. So the better news is the future's almost here — and the future is tissue engineering. Just imagine, I can make a biologically-degradable template. I can put it in place where it's meant to be. I can sprinkle a few cells, stem cells from the patient's own hip, a little bit of genetically engineered protein, and lo and behold, leave it for four months and the face is grown. This is a bit like a Julia Child recipe. But we've still got problems. We've got mouth cancer to solve. We're still not curing enough patients — it's the most disfiguring cancer. We're still not reconstructing them well enough. In the U.K. we have an epidemic of facial injuries among young people. We still can't get rid of scars. We need to do research. And the best news of all is that surgeons know that we need to do research. And we've set up charities that will help us fund the clinical research to determine the best treatment practice now and better treatment into the future, so we don't just sit on our laurels and say, "Okay, we're doing okay. Let's leave it as it is." Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)

Curating humanity's heritage

{0: 'Elizabeth Lindsey is a fellow of the National Geographic Society. Her mission: to keep ancestral voices alive by recording indigenous wisdom and traditions.'}

TEDWomen 2010

As a child, I was raised by native Hawaiian elders — three old women who took care of me while my parents worked. The year is 1963. We're at the ocean. It's twilight. We're watching the rising of the stars and the shifting of the tides. It's a stretch of beach we know so well. The smooth stones on the sand are familiar to us. If you saw these women on the street in their faded clothes, you might dismiss them as poor and simple. That would be a mistake. These women are descendants of Polynesian navigators, trained in the old ways by their elders, and now they're passing it on to me. They teach me the names of the winds and the rains, of astronomy according to a genealogy of stars. There's a new moon on the horizon. Hawaiians say it's a good night for fishing. They begin to chant. [Hawaiian chant] When they finish, they sit in a circle and ask me to come to join them. They want to teach me about my destiny. I thought every seven-year-old went through this. (Laughter) "Baby girl, someday the world will be in trouble. People will forget their wisdom. It will take elders' voices from the far corners of the world to call the world into balance. You will go far away. It will sometimes be a lonely road. We will not be there. But you will look into the eyes of seeming strangers, and you will recognize your ohana, your family. And it will take all of you. It will take all of you." These words, I hold onto all my life. Because the idea of doing it alone terrifies me. The year is 2007. I'm on a remote island in Micronesia. Satawal is one half-mile long by one mile wide. It's the home of my mentor. His name is Pius Mau Piailug. Mau is a palu, a navigator priest. He's also considered the greatest wave finder in the world. There are fewer than a handful of palu left on this island. Their tradition is so extraordinary that these mariners sailed three million square miles across the Pacific without the use of instruments. They could synthesize patterns in nature using the rising and setting of stars, the sequence and direction of waves, the flight patterns of certain birds. Even the slightest hint of color on the underbelly of a cloud would inform them and help them navigate with the keenest accuracy. When Western scientists would join Mau on the canoe and watch him go into the hull, it appeared that an old man was going to rest. In fact, the hull of the canoe is the womb of the vessel. It is the most accurate place to feel the rhythm and sequence and direction of waves. Mau was, in fact, gathering explicit data using his entire body. It's what he had been trained to do since he was five years old. Now science may dismiss this methodology, but Polynesian navigators use it today because it provides them an accurate determination of the angle and direction of their vessel. The palu also had an uncanny ability to forecast weather conditions days in advance. Sometimes I'd be with Mau on a cloud-covered night and we'd sit at the easternmost coast of the island, and he would look out, and then he would say, "Okay, we go." He saw that first glint of light — he knew what the weather was going to be three days from now. Their achievements, intellectually and scientifically, are extraordinary, and they are so relevant for these times that we are in when we are riding out storms. We are in such a critical moment of our collective history. They have been compared to astronauts — these elder navigators who sail vast open oceans in double-hulled canoes thousands of miles from a small island. Their canoes, our rockets; their sea, our space. The wisdom of these elders is not a mere collection of stories about old people in some remote spot. This is part of our collective narrative. It's humanity's DNA. We cannot afford to lose it. The year is 2010. Just as the women in Hawaii that raised me predicted, the world is in trouble. We live in a society bloated with data, yet starved for wisdom. We're connected 24/7, yet anxiety, fear, depression and loneliness is at an all-time high. We must course-correct. An African shaman said, "Your society worships the jester while the king stands in plain clothes." The link between the past and the future is fragile. This I know intimately, because even as I travel throughout the world to listen to these stories and record them, I struggle. I am haunted by the fact that I no longer remember the names of the winds and the rains. Mau passed away five months ago, but his legacy and lessons live on. And I am reminded that throughout the world there are cultures with vast sums of knowledge in them, as potent as the Micronesian navigators, that are going dismissed, that this is a testament to brilliant, brilliant technology and science and wisdom that is vanishing rapidly. Because when an elder dies a library is burned, and throughout the world, libraries are ablaze. I am grateful for the fact that I had a mentor like Mau who taught me how to navigate. And I realize through a lesson that he shared that we continue to find our way. And this is what he said: "The island is the canoe; the canoe, the island." And what he meant was, if you are voyaging and far from home, your very survival depends on everyone aboard. You cannot make the voyage alone, you were never meant to. This whole notion of every man for himself is completely unsustainable. It always was. So in closing I would offer you this: The planet is our canoe, and we are the voyagers. True navigation begins in the human heart. It's the most important map of all. Together, may we journey well. (Applause)

Understanding cancer through proteomics

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

TEDMED 2010

I admit that I'm a little bit nervous here because I'm going to say some radical things, about how we should think about cancer differently, to an audience that contains a lot of people who know a lot more about cancer than I do. But I will also contest that I'm not as nervous as I should be because I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. (Laughter) And that this, in fact, will be the way that we treat cancer in the future. In order to talk about cancer, I'm going to actually have to — let me get the big slide here. First, I'm going to try to give you a different perspective of genomics. I want to put it in perspective of the bigger picture of all the other things that are going on — and then talk about something you haven't heard so much about, which is proteomics. Having explained those, that will set up for what I think will be a different idea about how to go about treating cancer. So let me start with genomics. It is the hot topic. It is the place where we're learning the most. This is the great frontier. But it has its limitations. And in particular, you've probably all heard the analogy that the genome is like the blueprint of your body, and if that were only true, it would be great, but it's not. It's like the parts list of your body. It doesn't say how things are connected, what causes what and so on. So if I can make an analogy, let's say that you were trying to tell the difference between a good restaurant, a healthy restaurant and a sick restaurant, and all you had was the list of ingredients that they had in their larder. So it might be that, if you went to a French restaurant and you looked through it and you found they only had margarine and they didn't have butter, you could say, "Ah, I see what's wrong with them. I can make them healthy." And there probably are special cases of that. You could certainly tell the difference between a Chinese restaurant and a French restaurant by what they had in a larder. So the list of ingredients does tell you something, and sometimes it tells you something that's wrong. If they have tons of salt, you might guess they're using too much salt, or something like that. But it's limited, because really to know if it's a healthy restaurant, you need to taste the food, you need to know what goes on in the kitchen, you need the product of all of those ingredients. So if I look at a person and I look at a person's genome, it's the same thing. The part of the genome that we can read is the list of ingredients. And so indeed, there are times when we can find ingredients that [are] bad. Cystic fibrosis is an example of a disease where you just have a bad ingredient and you have a disease, and we can actually make a direct correspondence between the ingredient and the disease. But most things, you really have to know what's going on in the kitchen, because, mostly, sick people used to be healthy people — they have the same genome. So the genome really tells you much more about predisposition. So what you can tell is you can tell the difference between an Asian person and a European person by looking at their ingredients list. But you really for the most part can't tell the difference between a healthy person and a sick person — except in some of these special cases. So why all the big deal about genetics? Well first of all, it's because we can read it, which is fantastic. It is very useful in certain circumstances. It's also the great theoretical triumph of biology. It's the one theory that the biologists ever really got right. It's fundamental to Darwin and Mendel and so on. And so it's the one thing where they predicted a theoretical construct. So Mendel had this idea of a gene as an abstract thing, and Darwin built a whole theory that depended on them existing, and then Watson and Crick actually looked and found one. So this happens in physics all the time. You predict a black hole, and you look out the telescope and there it is, just like you said. But it rarely happens in biology. So this great triumph — it's so good, there's almost a religious experience in biology. And Darwinian evolution is really the core theory. So the other reason it's been very popular is because we can measure it, it's digital. And in fact, thanks to Kary Mullis, you can basically measure your genome in your kitchen with a few extra ingredients. So for instance, by measuring the genome, we've learned a lot about how we're related to other kinds of animals by the closeness of our genome, or how we're related to each other — the family tree, or the tree of life. There's a huge amount of information about the genetics just by comparing the genetic similarity. Now of course, in medical application, that is very useful because it's the same kind of information that the doctor gets from your family medical history — except probably, your genome knows much more about your medical history than you do. And so by reading the genome, we can find out much more about your family than you probably know. And so we can discover things that probably you could have found by looking at enough of your relatives, but they may be surprising. I did the 23andMe thing and was very surprised to discover that I am fat and bald. (Laughter) But sometimes you can learn much more useful things about that. But mostly what you need to know, to find out if you're sick, is not your predispositions, but it's actually what's going on in your body right now. So to do that, what you really need to do, you need to look at the things that the genes are producing and what's happening after the genetics, and that's what proteomics is about. Just like genome mixes the study of all the genes, proteomics is the study of all the proteins. And the proteins are all of the little things in your body that are signaling between the cells — actually, the machines that are operating — that's where the action is. Basically, a human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die, and when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation. And so the trick is — unfortunately, we don't have an easy way to measure these like we can measure the genome. So the problem is that measuring — if you try to measure all the proteins, it's a very elaborate process. It requires hundreds of steps, and it takes a long, long time. And it matters how much of the protein it is. It could be very significant that a protein changed by 10 percent, so it's not a nice digital thing like DNA. And basically our problem is somebody's in the middle of this very long stage, they pause for just a moment, and they leave something in an enzyme for a second, and all of a sudden all the measurements from then on don't work. And so then people get very inconsistent results when they do it this way. People have tried very hard to do this. I tried this a couple of times and looked at this problem and gave up on it. I kept getting this call from this oncologist named David Agus. And Applied Minds gets a lot of calls from people who want help with their problems, and I didn't think this was a very likely one to call back, so I kept on giving him to the delay list. And then one day, I get a call from John Doerr, Bill Berkman and Al Gore on the same day saying return David Agus's phone call. (Laughter) So I was like, "Okay. This guy's at least resourceful." (Laughter) So we started talking, and he said, "I really need a better way to measure proteins." I'm like, "Looked at that. Been there. Not going to be easy." He's like, "No, no. I really need it. I mean, I see patients dying every day because we don't know what's going on inside of them. We have to have a window into this." And he took me through specific examples of when he really needed it. And I realized, wow, this would really make a big difference, if we could do it, and so I said, "Well, let's look at it." Applied Minds has enough play money that we can go and just work on something without getting anybody's funding or permission or anything. So we started playing around with this. And as we did it, we realized this was the basic problem — that taking the sip of coffee — that there were humans doing this complicated process and that what really needed to be done was to automate this process like an assembly line and build robots that would measure proteomics. And so we did that, and working with David, we made a little company called Applied Proteomics eventually, which makes this robotic assembly line, which, in a very consistent way, measures the protein. And I'll show you what that protein measurement looks like. Basically, what we do is we take a drop of blood out of a patient, and we sort out the proteins in the drop of blood according to how much they weigh, how slippery they are, and we arrange them in an image. And so we can look at literally hundreds of thousands of features at once out of that drop of blood. And we can take a different one tomorrow, and you will see your proteins tomorrow will be different — they'll be different after you eat or after you sleep. They really tell us what's going on there. And so this picture, which looks like a big smudge to you, is actually the thing that got me really thrilled about this and made me feel like we were on the right track. So if I zoom into that picture, I can just show you what it means. We sort out the proteins — from left to right is the weight of the fragments that we're getting, and from top to bottom is how slippery they are. So we're zooming in here just to show you a little bit of it. And so each of these lines represents some signal that we're getting out of a piece of a protein. And you can see how the lines occur in these little groups of bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. And that's because we're measuring the weight so precisely that — carbon comes in different isotopes, so if it has an extra neutron on it, we actually measure it as a different chemical. So we're actually measuring each isotope as a different one. And so that gives you an idea of how exquisitely sensitive this is. So seeing this picture is sort of like getting to be Galileo and looking at the stars and looking through the telescope for the first time, and suddenly you say, "Wow, it's way more complicated than we thought it was." But we can see that stuff out there and actually see features of it. So this is the signature out of which we're trying to get patterns. So what we do with this is, for example, we can look at two patients, one that responded to a drug and one that didn't respond to a drug, and ask, "What's going on differently inside of them?" And so we can make these measurements precisely enough that we can overlay two patients and look at the differences. So here we have Alice in green and Bob in red. We overlay them. This is actual data. And you can see, mostly it overlaps and it's yellow, but there's some things that just Alice has and some things that just Bob has. And if we find a pattern of things of the responders to the drug, we see that in the blood, they have the condition that allows them to respond to this drug. We might not even know what this protein is, but we can see it's a marker for the response to the disease. So this already, I think, is tremendously useful in all kinds of medicine. But I think this is actually just the beginning of how we're going to treat cancer. So let me move to cancer. The thing about cancer — when I got into this, I really knew nothing about it, but working with David Agus, I started watching how cancer was actually being treated and went to operations where it was being cut out. And as I looked at it, to me it didn't make sense how we were approaching cancer, and in order to make sense of it, I had to learn where did this come from. We're treating cancer almost like it's an infectious disease. We're treating it as something that got inside of you that we have to kill. So this is the great paradigm. This is another case where a theoretical paradigm in biology really worked — was the germ theory of disease. So what doctors are mostly trained to do is diagnose — that is, put you into a category and apply a scientifically proven treatment for that diagnosis — and that works great for infectious diseases. So if we put you in the category of you've got syphilis, we can give you penicillin. We know that that works. If you've got malaria, we give you quinine or some derivative of it. And so that's the basic thing doctors are trained to do, and it's miraculous in the case of infectious disease — how well it works. And many people in this audience probably wouldn't be alive if doctors didn't do this. But now let's apply that to systems diseases like cancer. The problem is that, in cancer, there isn't something else that's inside of you. It's you; you're broken. That conversation inside of you got mixed up in some way. So how do we diagnose that conversation? Well, right now what we do is we divide it by part of the body — you know, where did it appear? — and we put you in different categories according to the part of the body. And then we do a clinical trial for a drug for lung cancer and one for prostate cancer and one for breast cancer, and we treat these as if they're separate diseases and that this way of dividing them had something to do with what actually went wrong. And of course, it really doesn't have that much to do with what went wrong because cancer is a failure of the system. And in fact, I think we're even wrong when we talk about cancer as a thing. I think this is the big mistake. I think cancer should not be a noun. We should talk about cancering as something we do, not something we have. And so those tumors, those are symptoms of cancer. And so your body is probably cancering all the time, but there are lots of systems in your body that keep it under control. And so to give you an idea of an analogy of what I mean by thinking of cancering as a verb, imagine we didn't know anything about plumbing, and the way that we talked about it, we'd come home and we'd find a leak in our kitchen and we'd say, "Oh, my house has water." We might divide it — the plumber would say, "Well, where's the water?" "Well, it's in the kitchen." "Oh, you must have kitchen water." That's kind of the level at which it is. "Kitchen water, well, first of all, we'll go in there and we'll mop out a lot of it. And then we know that if we sprinkle Drano around the kitchen, that helps. Whereas living room water, it's better to do tar on the roof." And it sounds silly, but that's basically what we do. And I'm not saying you shouldn't mop up your water if you have cancer, but I'm saying that's not really the problem; that's the symptom of the problem. What we really need to get at is the process that's going on, and that's happening at the level of the proteonomic actions, happening at the level of why is your body not healing itself in the way that it normally does? Because normally, your body is dealing with this problem all the time. So your house is dealing with leaks all the time, but it's fixing them. It's draining them out and so on. So what we need is to have a causative model of what's actually going on, and proteomics actually gives us the ability to build a model like that. David got me invited to give a talk at National Cancer Institute and Anna Barker was there. And so I gave this talk and said, "Why don't you guys do this?" And Anna said, "Because nobody within cancer would look at it this way. But what we're going to do, is we're going to create a program for people outside the field of cancer to get together with doctors who really know about cancer and work out different programs of research." So David and I applied to this program and created a consortium at USC where we've got some of the best oncologists in the world and some of the best biologists in the world, from Cold Spring Harbor, Stanford, Austin — I won't even go through and name all the places — to have a research project that will last for five years where we're really going to try to build a model of cancer like this. We're doing it in mice first, and we will kill a lot of mice in the process of doing this, but they will die for a good cause. And we will actually try to get to the point where we have a predictive model where we can understand, when cancer happens, what's actually happening in there and which treatment will treat that cancer. So let me just end with giving you a little picture of what I think cancer treatment will be like in the future. So I think eventually, once we have one of these models for people, which we'll get eventually — I mean, our group won't get all the way there — but eventually we'll have a very good computer model — sort of like a global climate model for weather. It has lots of different information about what's the process going on in this proteomic conversation on many different scales. And so we will simulate in that model for your particular cancer — and this also will be for ALS, or any kind of system neurodegenerative diseases, things like that — we will simulate specifically you, not just a generic person, but what's actually going on inside you. And in that simulation, what we could do is design for you specifically a sequence of treatments, and it might be very gentle treatments, very small amounts of drugs. It might be things like, don't eat that day, or give them a little chemotherapy, maybe a little radiation. Of course, we'll do surgery sometimes and so on. But design a program of treatments specifically for you and help your body guide back to health — guide your body back to health. Because your body will do most of the work of fixing it if we just sort of prop it up in the ways that are wrong. We put it in the equivalent of splints. And so your body basically has lots and lots of mechanisms for fixing cancer, and we just have to prop those up in the right way and get them to do the job. And so I believe that this will be the way that cancer will be treated in the future. It's going to require a lot of work, a lot of research. There will be many teams like our team that work on this. But I think eventually, we will design for everybody a custom treatment for cancer. So thank you very much. (Applause)

A modern take on piano, violin, cello

{0: 'With cello, piano and violin, sisters Maria, Lucia and Angella Ahn are constantly redefining the art and architecture of chamber music. '}

TEDWomen 2010

(Applause) (Music) (Applause) Angella Ahn: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you so much. We are so honored to be here at TEDWomen, sharing our music with you. What an exciting and inspiring event. What you just heard is "Skylife" by David Balakrishnan. We want to play you one more selection. It's by Astor Piazzolla, an Argentine composer. And we talk about different ideas — he had this idea that he thought music should be from the heart. This was in the middle of the 20th century when music from the heart, beautiful music, wasn't the most popular thing in the classical music world. It was more atonal and twelve-tone. And he insisted on beautiful music. So this is "Oblivion" by Astor Piazzolla. Thank you. (Music) (Applause)

A historic moment in the Arab world

{0: 'As the Director General of Al Jazeera from 2003-2011, Wadah Khanfar worked to bring rare liberties like information, transparency and dissenting voices to repressive states and political hot zones.'}

TED2011

Ten years ago exactly, I was in Afghanistan. I was covering the war in Afghanistan, and I witnessed, as a reporter for Al Jazeera, the amount of suffering and destruction that emerged out of a war like that. Then, two years later, I covered another war — the war in Iraq. I was placed at the center of that war because I was covering the war from the northern part of Iraq. And the war ended with a regime change, like the one in Afghanistan. And that regime that we got rid of was actually a dictatorship, an authoritarian regime, that for decades created a great sense of paralysis within the nation, within the people themselves. However, the change that came through foreign intervention created even worse circumstances for the people and deepened the sense of paralysis and inferiority in that part of the world. For decades, we have lived under authoritarian regimes — in the Arab world, in the Middle East. These regimes created something within us during this period. I'm 43 years old right now. For the last 40 years, I have seen almost the same faces for kings and presidents ruling us — old, aged, authoritarian, corrupt situations — regimes that we have seen around us. And for a moment I was wondering, are we going to live in order to see real change happening on the ground, a change that does not come through foreign intervention, through the misery of occupation, through nations invading our land and deepening the sense of inferiority sometimes? The Iraqis: yes, they got rid of Saddam Hussein, but when they saw their land occupied by foreign forces they felt very sad, they felt that their dignity had suffered. And this is why they revolted. This is why they did not accept. And actually other regimes, they told their citizens, "Would you like to see the situation of Iraq? Would you like to see civil war, sectarian killing? Would you like to see destruction? Would you like to see foreign troops on your land?" And the people thought for themselves, "Maybe we should live with this kind of authoritarian situation that we find ourselves in, instead of having the second scenario." That was one of the worst nightmares that we have seen. For 10 years, unfortunately we have found ourselves reporting images of destruction, images of killing, of sectarian conflicts, images of violence, emerging from a magnificent piece of land, a region that one day was the source of civilizations and art and culture for thousands of years. Now I am here to tell you that the future that we were dreaming for has eventually arrived. A new generation, well-educated, connected, inspired by universal values and a global understanding, has created a new reality for us. We have found a new way to express our feelings and to express our dreams: these young people who have restored self-confidence in our nations in that part of the world, who have given us new meaning for freedom and empowered us to go down to the streets. Nothing happened. No violence. Nothing. Just step out of your house, raise your voice and say, "We would like to see the end of the regime." This is what happened in Tunisia. Over a few days, the Tunisian regime that invested billions of dollars in the security agencies, billions of dollars in maintaining, trying to maintain, its prisons, collapsed, disappeared, because of the voices of the public. People who were inspired to go down to the streets and to raise their voices, they tried to kill. The intelligence agencies wanted to arrest people. They found something called Facebook. They found something called Twitter. They were surprised by all of these kinds of issues. And they said, "These kids are misled." Therefore, they asked their parents to go down to the streets and collect them, bring them back home. This is what they were telling. This is their propaganda. "Bring these kids home because they are misled." But yes, these youth who have been inspired by universal values, who are idealistic enough to imagine a magnificent future and, at the same time, realistic enough to balance this kind of imagination and the process leading to it — not using violence, not trying to create chaos — these young people, they did not go home. Parents actually went to the streets and they supported them. And this is how the revolution was born in Tunisia. We in Al Jazeera were banned from Tunisia for years, and the government did not allow any Al Jazeera reporter to be there. But we found that these people in the street, all of them are our reporters, feeding our newsroom with pictures, with videos and with news. And suddenly that newsroom in Doha became a center that received all this kind of input from ordinary people — people who are connected and people who have ambition and who have liberated themselves from the feeling of inferiority. And then we took that decision: We are unrolling the news. We are going to be the voice for these voiceless people. We are going to spread the message. Yes, some of these young people are connected to the Internet, but the connectivity in the Arab world is very little, is very small, because of many problems that we are suffering from. But Al Jazeera took the voice from these people and we amplified [it]. We put it in every sitting room in the Arab world — and internationally, globally, through our English channel. And then people started to feel that there's something new happening. And then Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali decided to leave. And then Egypt started, and Hosni Mubarak decided to leave. And now Libya as you see it. And then you have Yemen. And you have many other countries trying to see and to rediscover that feeling of, "How do we imagine a future which is magnificent and peaceful and tolerant?" I want to tell you something, that the Internet and connectivity has created [a] new mindset. But this mindset has continued to be faithful to the soil and to the land that it emerged from. And while this was the major difference between many initiatives before to create change, before we thought, and governments told us — and even sometimes it was true — that change was imposed on us, and people rejected that, because they thought that it is alien to their culture. Always, we believed that change will spring from within, that change should be a reconciliation with culture, cultural diversity, with our faith in our tradition and in our history, but at the same time, open to universal values, connected with the world, tolerant to the outside. And this is the moment that is happening right now in the Arab world. This is the right moment, and this is the actual moment that we see all of these meanings meet together and then create the beginning of this magnificent era that will emerge from the region. How did the elite deal with that — the so-called political elite? In front of Facebook, they brought the camels in Tahrir Square. In front of Al Jazeera, they started creating tribalism. And then when they failed, they started speaking about conspiracies that emerged from Tel Aviv and Washington in order to divide the Arab world. They started telling the West, "Be aware of Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is taking over our territories. These are Islamists trying to create new Imaras. Be aware of these people who [are] coming to you in order to ruin your great civilization." Fortunately, people right now cannot be deceived. Because this corrupt elite in that region has lost even the power of deception. They could not, and they cannot, imagine how they could really deal with this reality. They have lost. They have been detached from their people, from the masses, and now we are seeing them collapsing one after the other. Al Jazeera is not a tool of revolution. We do not create revolutions. However, when something of that magnitude happens, we are at the center of the coverage. We were banned from Egypt, and our correspondents, some of them were arrested. But most of our camera people and our journalists, they went underground in Egypt — voluntarily — to report what happened in Tahrir Square. For 18 days, our cameras were broadcasting, live, the voices of the people in Tahrir Square. I remember one night when someone phoned me on my cellphone — ordinary person who I don't know — from Tahrir Square. He told me, "We appeal to you not to switch off the cameras. If you switch off the cameras tonight, there will be a genocide. You are protecting us by showing what is happening at Tahrir Square." I felt the responsibility to phone our correspondents there and to phone our newsroom and to tell them, "Make your best not to switch off the cameras at night, because the guys there really feel confident when someone is reporting their story — and they feel protected as well." So we have a chance to create a new future in that part of the world. We have a chance to go and to think of the future as something which is open to the world. Let us not repeat the mistake of Iran, of [the] Mosaddeq revolution. Let us free ourselves — especially in the West — from thinking about that part of the world based on oil interest, or based on interests of the illusion of stability and security. The stability and security of authoritarian regimes cannot create but terrorism and violence and destruction. Let us accept the choice of the people. Let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future. The future should be ruled by people themselves, even sometimes if they are voices that might now scare us. But the values of democracy and the freedom of choice that is sweeping the Middle East at this moment in time is the best opportunity for the world, for the West and the East, to see stability and to see security and to see friendship and to see tolerance emerging from the Arab world, rather than the images of violence and terrorism. Let us support these people. Let us stand for them. And let us give up our narrow selfishness in order to embrace change, and in order to celebrate with the people of that region a great future and hope and tolerance. The future has arrived, and the future is now. I thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I just have a couple of questions for you. Thank you for coming here. How would you characterize the historical significance of what's happened? Is this a story-of-the-year, a story-of-the-decade or something more? Wadah Khanfar: Actually, this may be the biggest story that we have ever covered. We have covered many wars. We have covered a lot of tragedies, a lot of problems, a lot of conflict zones, a lot of hot spots in the region, because we were centered at the middle of it. But this is a story — it is a great story; it is beautiful. It is not something that you only cover because you have to cover a great incident. You are witnessing change in history. You are witnessing the birth of a new era. And this is what the story's all about. CA: There are a lot of people in the West who are still skeptical, or think this may just be an intermediate stage before much more alarming chaos. You really believe that if there are democratic elections in Egypt now, that a government could emerge that espouses some of the values you've spoken about so inspiringly? WK: And people actually, after the collapse of the Hosni Mubarak regime, the youth who have organized themselves in certain groups and councils, they are guarding the transformation and they are trying to put it on a track in order to satisfy the values of democracy, but at the same time also to make it reasonable and to make it rational, not to go out of order. In my opinion, these people are much more wiser than, not only the political elite, even the intellectual elite, even opposition leaders including political parties. At this moment in time, the youth in the Arab world are much more wiser and capable of creating the change than the old — including the political and cultural and ideological old regimes. (Applause) CA: We are not to get involved politically and interfere in that way. What should people here at TED, here in the West, do if they want to connect or make a difference and they believe in what's happening here? WK: I think we have discovered a very important issue in the Arab world — that people care, people care about this great transformation. Mohamed Nanabhay who's sitting with us, the head of Aljazeera.net, he told me that a 2,500 percent increase of accessing our website from various parts of the world. Fifty percent of it is coming from America. Because we discovered that people care, and people would like to know — they are receiving the stream through our Internet. Unfortunately in the United States, we are not covering but Washington D.C. at this moment in time for Al Jazeera English. But I can tell you, this is the moment to celebrate through connecting ourselves with those people in the street and expressing our support to them and expressing this kind of feeling, universal feeling, of supporting the weak and the oppressed to create a much better future for all of us. CA: Well Wadah, a group of members of the TED community, TEDxCairo, are meeting as we speak. They've had some speakers there. I believe they've heard your talk. Thank you for inspiring them and for inspiring all of us. Thank you so much. (Applause)

My wish: Use art to turn the world inside out

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

TED2011

Two weeks ago I was in my studio in Paris, and the phone rang and I heard, "Hey, JR, you won the TED Prize 2011. You have to make a wish to save the world." I was lost. I mean, I can't save the world. Nobody can. The world is fucked up. Come on, you have dictators ruling the world, population is growing by millions, there's no more fish in the sea, the North Pole is melting and as the last TED Prize winner said, we're all becoming fat. (Laughter) Except maybe French people. Whatever. So I called back and I told her, "Look, Amy, tell the TED guys I just won't show up. I can't do anything to save the world." She said, "Hey, JR, your wish is not to save the world, but to change the world." "Oh, all right." (Laughter) "That's cool." I mean, technology, politics, business do change the world — not always in a good way, but they do. What about art? Could art change the world? I started when I was 15 years old. And at that time, I was not thinking about changing the world. I was doing graffiti — writing my name everywhere, using the city as a canvas. I was going in the tunnels of Paris, on the rooftops with my friends. Each trip was an excursion, was an adventure. It was like leaving our mark on society, to say, "I was here," on the top of a building. So when I found a cheap camera on the subway, I started documenting those adventures with my friends and gave them back as photocopies — really small photos just that size. That's how, at 17 years old, I started pasting them. And I did my first "expo de rue," which means sidewalk gallery. And I framed it with color so you would not confuse it with advertising. I mean, the city's the best gallery I could imagine. I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. I would control it directly with the public in the streets. So that's Paris. I would change — depending on the places I would go — the title of the exhibition. That's on the Champs-Elysees. I was quite proud of that one. Because I was just 18 and I was just up there on the top of the Champs-Elysees. Then when the photo left, the frame was still there. (Laughter) November 2005: the streets are burning. A large wave of riots had broken into the first projects of Paris. Everyone was glued to the TV, watching disturbing, frightening images taken from the edge of the neighborhood. I mean, these kids, without control, throwing Molotov cocktails, attacking the cops and the firemen, looting everything they could in the shops. These were criminals, thugs, dangerous, destroying their own environment. And then I saw it — could it be possible? — my photo on a wall revealed by a burning car — a pasting I'd done a year earlier — an illegal one — still there. I mean, these were the faces of my friends. I know those guys. All of them are not angels, but they're not monsters either. So it was kind of weird to see those images and those eyes stare back at me through a television. So I went back there with a 28 mm lens. It was the only one I had at that time. But with that lens, you have to be as close as 10 inches from the person. So you can do it only with their trust. So I took full portraits of people from Le Bosquet. They were making scary faces to play the caricature of themselves. And then I pasted huge posters everywhere in the bourgeois area of Paris with the name, age, even building number of these guys. A year later, the exhibition was displayed in front of the city hall of Paris. And we go from thug images, who've been stolen and distorted by the media, who's now proudly taking over his own image. That's where I realized the power of paper and glue. So could art change the world? A year later, I was listening to all the noise about the Middle East conflict. I mean, at that time, trust me, they were only referring to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. So with my friend Marco, we decided to go there and see who are the real Palestinians and who are the real Israelis. Are they so different? When we got there, we just went in the street, started talking with people everywhere, and we realized that things were a bit different from the rhetoric we heard in the media. So we decided to take portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same jobs — taxi-driver, lawyer, cooks. Asked them to make a face as a sign of commitment. Not a smile — that really doesn't tell about who you are and what you feel. They all accepted to be pasted next to the other. I decided to paste in eight Israeli and Palestinian cities and on both sides of the wall. We launched the biggest illegal art exhibition ever. We called the project Face 2 Face. The experts said, "No way. The people will not accept. The army will shoot you, and Hamas will kidnap you." We said, "Okay, let's try and push as far as we can." I love the way that people will ask me, "How big will my photo be?" "It will be as big as your house." When we did the wall, we did the Palestinian side. So we arrived with just our ladders and we realized that they were not high enough. And so Palestinians guys say, "Calm down. No wait. I'm going to find you a solution." So he went to the Church of Nativity and brought back an old ladder that was so old that it could have seen Jesus being born. (Laughter) We did Face 2 Face with only six friends, two ladders, two brushes, a rented car, a camera and 20,000 square feet of paper. We had all sorts of help from all walks of life. Okay, for example, that's Palestine. We're in Ramallah right now. We're pasting portraits — so both portraits in the streets in a crowded market. People come around us and start asking, "What are you doing here?" "Oh, we're actually doing an art project and we are pasting an Israeli and a Palestinian doing the same job. And those ones are actually two taxi-drivers." And then there was always a silence. "You mean you're pasting an Israeli face — doing a face — right here?" "Well, yeah, yeah, that's part of the project." And I would always leave that moment, and we would ask them, "So can you tell me who is who?" And most of them couldn't say. (Applause) We even pasted on Israeli military towers, and nothing happened. When you paste an image, it's just paper and glue. People can tear it, tag on it, or even pee on it — some are a bit high for that, I agree — but the people in the street, they are the curator. The rain and the wind will take them off anyway. They are not meant to stay. But exactly four years after, the photos, most of them are still there. Face 2 Face demonstrated that what we thought impossible was possible — and, you know what, even easy. We didn't push the limit; we just showed that they were further than anyone thought. In the Middle East, I experienced my work in places without [many] museums. So the reactions in the street were kind of interesting. So I decided to go further in this direction and go in places where there were zero museums. When you go in these developing societies, women are the pillars of their community, but the men are still the ones holding the streets. So we were inspired to create a project where men will pay tribute to women by posting their photos. I called that project Women Are Heroes. When I listened to all the stories everywhere I went on the continents, I couldn't always understand the complicated circumstances of their conflict. I just observed. Sometimes there was no words, no sentence, just tears. I just took their pictures and pasted them. Women Are Heroes took me around the world. Most of the places I went to, I decided to go there because I've heard about it through the media. So for example, in June 2008, I was watching TV in Paris, and then I heard about this terrible thing that happened in Rio de Janeiro — the first favela of Brazil named Providencia. Three kids — that was three students — were [detained] by the army because they were not carrying their papers. And the army took them, and instead of bringing them to the police station, they brought them to an enemy favela where they get chopped into pieces. I was shocked. All Brazil was shocked. I heard it was one of the most violent favelas, because the largest drug cartel controls it. So I decided to go there. When I arrived — I mean, I didn't have any contact with any NGO. There was none in place — no association, no NGOs, nothing — no eyewitnesses. So we just walked around, and we met a woman, and I showed her my book. And she said, "You know what? We're hungry for culture. We need culture out there." So I went out and I started with the kids. I just took a few photos of the kids, and the next day I came with the posters and we pasted them. The day after, I came back and they were already scratched. But that's okay. I wanted them to feel that this art belongs to them. Then the next day, I held a meeting on the main square and some women came. They were all linked to the three kids that got killed. There was the mother, the grandmother, the best friend — they all wanted to shout the story. After that day, everyone in the favela gave me the green light. I took more photos, and we started the project. The drug lords were kind of worried about us filming in the place, so I told them, "You know what? I'm not interested in filming the violence and the weapons. You see that enough in the media. What I want to show is the incredible life and energy. I've been seeing it around me the last few days." So that's a really symbolic pasting, because that's the first one we did that you couldn't see from the city. And that's where the three kids got arrested, and that's the grandmother of one of them. And on that stairs, that's where the traffickers always stand and there's a lot of exchange of fire. Everyone there understood the project. And then we pasted everywhere — the whole hill. (Applause) What was interesting is that the media couldn't get in. I mean, you should see that. They would have to film us from a really long distance by helicopter and then have a really long lens, and we would see ourselves, on TV, pasting. And they would put a number: "Please call this number if you know what's going on in Providencia." We just did a project and then left so the media wouldn't know. So how can we know about the project? So they had to go and find the women and get an explanation from them. So you create a bridge between the media and the anonymous women. We kept traveling. We went to Africa, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya. In war-torn places like Monrovia, people come straight to you. I mean, they want to know what you're up to. They kept asking me, "What is the purpose of your project? Are you an NGO? Are you the media?" Art. Just doing art. Some people question, "Why is it in black and white? Don't you have color in France?" (Laughter) Or they tell you, "Are these people all dead?" Some who understood the project would explain it to others. And to a man who did not understand, I heard someone say, "You know, you've been here for a few hours trying to understand, discussing with your fellows. During that time, you haven't thought about what you're going to eat tomorrow. This is art." I think it's people's curiosity that motivates them to come into the projects. And then it becomes more. It becomes a desire, a need, an armor. On this bridge that's in Monrovia, ex-rebel soldiers helped us pasting a portrait of a woman that might have been raped during the war. Women are always the first ones targeted during conflict. This is Kibera, Kenya, one of the largest slums of Africa. You might have seen images about the post-election violence that happened there in 2008. This time we covered the roofs of the houses, but we didn't use paper, because paper doesn't prevent the rain from leaking inside the house — vinyl does. Then art becomes useful. So the people kept it. You know what I love is, for example, when you see the biggest eye there, there are so [many] houses inside. And I went there a few months ago — photos are still there — and it was missing a piece of the eye. So I asked the people what happened. "Oh, that guy just moved." (Laughter) When the roofs were covered, a woman said as a joke, "Now God can see me." When you look at Kibera now, they look back. Okay, India. Before I start that, just so you know, each time we go to a place, we don't have authorization, so we set up like commandos — we're a group of friends who arrive there, and we try to paste on the walls. But there are places where you just can't paste on a wall. In India it was just impossible to paste. I heard culturally and because of the law, they would just arrest us at the first pasting. So we decided to paste white, white on the walls. So imagine white guys pasting white papers. So people would come to us and ask us, "Hey, what are you up to?" "Oh, you know, we're just doing art." "Art?" Of course, they were confused. But you know how India has a lot of dust in the streets, and the more dust you would have going up in the air, on the white paper you can almost see, but there is this sticky part like when you reverse a sticker. So the more dust you have, the more it will reveal the photo. So we could just walk in the street during the next days and the photos would get revealed by themselves. (Applause) Thank you. So we didn't get caught this time. Each project — that's a film from Women Are Heroes. (Music) Okay. For each project we do a film. And most of what you see — that's a trailer from "Women Are Heroes" — its images, photography, taken one after the other. And the photos kept traveling even without us. (Laughter) (Applause) Hopefully, you'll see the film, and you'll understand the scope of the project and what the people felt when they saw those photos. Because that's a big part of it. There's layers behind each photo. Behind each image is a story. Women Are Heroes created a new dynamic in each of the communities, and the women kept that dynamic after we left. For example, we did books — not for sale — that all the community would get. But to get it, they would have to [get] it signed by one of the women. We did that in most of the places. We go back regularly. And so in Providencia, for example, in the favela, we have a cultural center running there. In Kibera, each year we cover more roofs. Because of course, when we left, the people who were just at the edge of the project said, "Hey, what about my roof?" So we decided to come the year after and keep doing the project. A really important point for me is that I don't use any brand or corporate sponsors. So I have no responsibility to anyone but myself and the subjects. (Applause) And that is for me one of the more important things in the work. I think, today, as important as the result is the way you do things. And that has always been a central part of the work. And what's interesting is that fine line that I have with images and advertising. We just did some pasting in Los Angeles on another project in the last weeks. And I was even invited to cover the MOCA museum. But yesterday the city called them and said, "Look, you're going to have to tear it down. Because this can be taken for advertising, and because of the law, it has to be taken down." But tell me, advertising for what? The people I photograph were proud to participate in the project and to have their photo in the community. But they asked me for a promise basically. They asked me, "Please, make our story travel with you." So I did. That's Paris. That's Rio. In each place, we built exhibitions with a story, and the story traveled. You understand the full scope of the project. That's London. New York. And today, they are with you in Long Beach. All right, recently I started a public art project where I don't use my artwork anymore. I use Man Ray, Helen Levitt, Giacomelli, other people's artwork. It doesn't matter today if it's your photo or not. The importance is what you do with the images, the statement it makes where it's pasted. So for example, I pasted the photo of the minaret in Switzerland a few weeks after they voted the law forbidding minarets in the country. (Applause) This image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in Chernobyl originally, and I pasted it in Southern Italy, where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground. In some ways, art can change the world. Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions. Art can change the way we see the world. Art can create an analogy. Actually the fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions, and then enables you to change the world. When I do my work, I have two kinds of reactions. People say, "Oh, why don't you go in Iraq or Afghanistan. They would be really useful." Or, "How can we help?" I presume that you belong to the second category, and that's good, because for that project, I'm going to ask you to take the photos and paste them. So now my wish is: (mock drum roll) (Laughter) I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world inside out. And this starts right now. Yes, everyone in the room. Everyone watching. I wanted that wish to actually start now. So a subject you're passionate about, a person who you want to tell their story or even your own photos — tell me what you stand for. Take the photos, the portraits, upload it — I'll give you all the details — and I'll send you back your poster. Join by groups and reveal things to the world. The full data is on the website — insideoutproject.net — that is launching today. What we see changes who we are. When we act together, the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts. So I hope that, together, we'll create something that the world will remember. And this starts right now and depends on you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Inside the Egyptian revolution

{0: 'Wael Ghonim believes that the Internet can be the most powerful platform for connecting humanity, if we can bring civility and thoughtful conversations back to it.'}

TED2011

This is Revolution 2.0. No one was a hero. No one was a hero. Because everyone was a hero. Everyone has done something. We all use Wikipedia. If you think of the concept of Wikipedia where everyone is collaborating on content, and at the end of the day you've built the largest encyclopedia in the world. From just an idea that sounded crazy, you have the largest encyclopedia in the world. And in the Egyptian revolution, the Revolution 2.0, everyone has contributed something, small or big. They contributed something — to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions. It was actually really inspiring to see all these Egyptians completely changing. If you look at the scene, Egypt, for 30 years, had been in a downhill — going into a downhill. Everything was going bad. Everything was going wrong. We only ranked high when it comes to poverty, corruption, lack of freedom of speech, lack of political activism. Those were the achievements of our great regime. Yet, nothing was happening. And it's not because people were happy or people were not frustrated. In fact, people were extremely frustrated. But the reason why everyone was silent is what I call the psychological barrier of fear. Everyone was scared. Not everyone. There were actually a few brave Egyptians that I have to thank for being so brave — going into protests as a couple of hundred, getting beaten up and arrested. But in fact, the majority were scared. Everyone did not want really to get in trouble. A dictator cannot live without the force. They want to make people live in fear. And that psychological barrier of fear had worked for so many years, and here comes the Internet, technology, BlackBerry, SMS. It's helping all of us to connect. Platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were helping us a lot because it basically gave us the impression that, "Wow, I'm not alone. There are a lot of people who are frustrated." There are lots of people who are frustrated. There are lots of people who actually share the same dream. There are lots of people who care about their freedom. They probably have the best life in the world. They are living in happiness. They are living in their villas. They are happy. They don't have problems. But they are still feeling the pain of the Egyptian. A lot of us, we're not really happy when we see a video of an Egyptian man who's eating the trash while others are stealing billions of Egyptian pounds from the wealth of the country. The Internet has played a great role, helping these people to speak up their minds, to collaborate together, to start thinking together. It was an educational campaign. Khaled Saeed was killed in June 2010. I still remember the photo. I still remember every single detail of that photo. The photo was horrible. He was tortured, brutally tortured to death. But then what was the answer of the regime? "He choked on a pile of hash" — that was their answer: "He's a criminal. He's someone who escaped from all these bad things." But people did not relate to this. People did not believe this. Because of the Internet, the truth prevailed and everyone knew the truth. And everyone started to think that "this guy could be my brother." He was a middle-class guy. His photo was remembered by all of us. A page was created. An anonymous administrator was basically inviting people to join the page, and there was no plan. "What are we going to do?" "I don't know." In a few days, tens of thousands of people there — angry Egyptians who were asking the ministry of interior affairs, "Enough. Get those who killed this guy. To just bring them to justice." But of course, they don't listen. It was an amazing story — how everyone started feeling the ownership. Everyone was an owner in this page. People started contributing ideas. In fact, one of the most ridiculous ideas was, "Hey, let's have a silent stand. Let's get people to go in the street, face the sea, their back to the street, dressed in black, standing up silently for one hour, doing nothing and then just leaving, going back home." For some people, that was like, "Wow, silent stand. And next time it's going to be vibration." People were making fun of the idea. But actually when people went to the street — the first time it was thousands of people in Alexandria — it felt like — it was amazing. It was great because it connected people from the virtual world, bringing them to the real world, sharing the same dream, the same frustration, the same anger, the same desire for freedom. And they were doing this thing. But did the regime learn anything? Not really. They were actually attacking them. They were actually abusing them, despite the fact of how peaceful these guys were — they were not even protesting. And things had developed until the Tunisian revolution. This whole page was, again, managed by the people. In fact, the anonymous admin job was to collect ideas, help people to vote on them and actually tell them what they are doing. People were taking shots and photos; people were reporting violations of human rights in Egypt; people were suggesting ideas, they were actually voting on ideas, and then they were executing the ideas; people were creating videos. Everything was done by the people to the people, and that's the power of the Internet. There was no leader. The leader was everyone on that page. The Tunisian experiment, as Amir was saying, inspired all of us, showed us that there is a way. Yes we can. We can do it. We have the same problems; we can just go in the streets. And when I saw the street on the 25th, I went back and said, "Egypt before the 25th is never going to be Egypt after the 25th. The revolution is happening. This is not the end, this is the beginning of the end." I was detained on the 27th night. Thank God I announced the locations and everything. But they detained me. And I'm not going to talk about my experience, because this is not about me. I was detained for 12 days, blindfolded, handcuffed. And I did not really hear anything. I did not know anything. I was not allowed to speak with anyone. And I went out. The next day I was in Tahrir. Seriously, with the amount of change I had noticed in this square, I thought it was 12 years. I never had in my mind to see this Egyptian, the amazing Egyptian. The fear is no longer fear. It's actually strength — it's power. People were so empowered. It was amazing how everyone was so empowered and now asking for their rights. Completely opposite. Extremism became tolerance. Who would [have] imagined before the 25th, if I tell you that hundreds of thousands of Christians are going to pray and tens of thousands of Muslims are going to protect them, and then hundreds of thousands of Muslims are going to pray and tens of thousands of Christians are going to protect them — this is amazing. All the stereotypes that the regime was trying to put on us through their so-called propaganda, or mainstream media, are proven wrong. This whole revolution showed us how ugly such a regime was and how great and amazing the Egyptian man, the Egyptian woman, how simple and amazing these people are whenever they have a dream. When I saw that, I went back and I wrote on Facebook. And that was a personal belief, regardless of what's going on, regardless of the details. I said that, "We are going to win. We are going to win because we don't understand politics. We're going to win because we don't play their dirty games. We're going to win because we don't have an agenda. We're going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts. We're going to win because we have dreams. We're going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams." And that's actually what happened. We won. And that's not because of anything, but because we believed in our dream. The winning here is not the whole details of what's going to happen in the political scene. The winning is the winning of the dignity of every single Egyptian. Actually, I had this taxi driver telling me, "Listen, I am breathing freedom. I feel that I have dignity that I have lost for so many years." For me that's winning, regardless of all the details. My last word to you is a statement I believe in, which Egyptians have proven to be true, that the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power. Thanks a lot. (Applause)

How state budgets are breaking US schools

{0: "A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation."}

TED2011

Well, this is about state budgets. This is probably the most boring topic of the whole morning. But I want to tell you, I think it's an important topic that we need to care about. State budgets are big, big money — I'll show you the numbers — and they get very little scrutiny. The understanding is very low. Many of the people involved have special interests or short-term interests that get them not thinking about what the implications of the trends are. And these budgets are the key for our future; they're the key for our kids. Most education funding — whether it's K through 12, or the great universities or community colleges — most of the money for those things is coming out of these state budgets. But we have a problem. Here's the overall picture. U.S. economy is big — 14.7 trillion. Now out of that pie, the government spends 36 percent. So this is combining the federal level, which is the largest, the state level and the local level. And it's really in this combined way that you get an overall sense of what's going on, because there's a lot of complex things like Medicaid and research money that flow across those boundaries. But we're spending 36 percent. Well what are we taking in? Simple business question. Answer is 26 percent. Now this leaves 10 percent deficit, sort of a mind-blowing number. And some of that, in fact, is due to the fact that we've had an economic recession. Receipts go down, some spending programs go up, but most of it is not because of that. Most of it is because of ways that the liabilities are building up and the trends, and that creates a huge challenge. In fact, this is the forecast picture. There are various things in here: I could say we might raise more revenue, or medical innovation will make the spending even higher. It is an increasingly difficult picture, even assuming the economy does quite well — probably better than it will do. This is what you see at this overall level. Now how did we get here? How could you have a problem like this? After all, at least on paper, there's this notion that these state budgets are balanced. Only one state says they don't have to balance the budget. But what this means actually is that there's a pretense. There's no real, true balancing going on, and in a sense, the games they play to hide that actually obscure the topic so much that people don't see things that are actually pretty straight-forward challenges. When Jerry Brown was elected, this was the challenge that was put to him. That is, through various gimmicks and things, a so-called balanced budget had led him to have 25 billion missing out of the 76 billion in proposed spending. Now he's put together some thoughts: About half of that he'll cut, another half, perhaps in a very complex set of steps, taxes will be approved. But even so, as you go out into those future years, various pension costs, health costs go up enough, and the revenue does not go up enough. So you get a big squeeze. What were those things that allowed us to hide this? Well, some really nice little tricks. And these were somewhat noticed. The paper said, "It's not really balanced. It's got holes. It perpetuates deficit spending. It's riddled with gimmicks." And really when you get down to it, the guys at Enron never would have done this. This is so blatant, so extreme. Is anyone paying attention to some of the things these guys do? They borrow money. They're not supposed to, but they figure out a way. They make you pay more in withholding just to help their cash flow out. They sell off the assets. They defer the payments. They sell off the revenues from tobacco. And California's not unique. In fact, there's about five states that are worse and only really four states that don't face this big challenge. So it's systemic across the entire country. It really comes from the fact that certain long-term obligations — health care, where innovation makes it more expensive, early retirement and pension, where the age structure gets worse for you, and just generosity — that these mis-accounting things allow to develop over time, that you've got a problem. This is the retiree health care benefits. Three million set aside, 62 billion dollar liability — much worse than the car companies. And everybody looked at that and knew that that was headed toward a huge problem. The forecast for the medical piece alone is to go from 26 percent of the budget to 42 percent. Well what's going to give? Well in order to accommodate that, you would have to cut education spending in half. It really is this young versus the old to some degree. If you don't change that revenue picture, if you don't solve what you're doing in health care, you're going to be deinvesting in the young. The great University of California university system, the great things that have gone on, won't happen. So far it's meant layoffs, increased class sizes. Within the education community there's this discussion of, "Should it just be the young teachers who get laid off, or the less good teachers who get laid off?" And there's a discussion: if you're going to increase class sizes, where do you do that? How much effect does that have? And unfortunately, as you get into that, people get confused and think, well maybe you think that's okay. In fact, no, education spending should not be cut. There's ways, if it's temporary, to minimize the impact, but it's a problem. It's also really a problem for where we need to go. Technology has a role to play. Well we need money to experiment with that, to get those tools in there. There's the idea of paying teachers for effectiveness, measuring them, giving them feedback, taking videos in the classroom. That's something I think is very, very important. Well you have to allocate dollars for that system and for that incentive pay. In a situation where you have growth, you put the new money into this. Or even if you're flat, you might shift money into it. But with the type of cuts we're talking about, it will be far, far harder to get these incentives for excellence, or to move over to use technology in the new way. So what's going on? Where's the brain trust that's in error here? Well there really is no brain trust. (Laughter) It's sort of the voters. It's sort of us showing up. Just look at this spending. California will spend over 100 billion, Microsoft, 38, Google, about 19. The amount of IQ in good numeric analysis, both inside Google and Microsoft and outside, with analysts and people of various opinions — should they have spent on that? No, they wasted their money on this. What about this thing? — it really is quite phenomenal. Everybody has an opinion. There's great feedback. And the numbers are used to make decisions. If you go over the education spending and the health care spending — particularly these long-term trends — you don't have that type of involvement on a number that's more important in terms of equity, in terms of learning. So what do we need to do? We need better tools. We can get some things out on the Internet. I'm going to use my website to put up some things that will give the basic picture. We need lots more. There's a few good books, one about school spending and where the money comes from — how that's changed over time, and the challenge. We need better accounting. We need to take the fact that the current employees, the future liabilities they create, that should come out of the current budget. We need to understand why they've done the pension accounting the way they have. It should be more like private accounting. It's the gold standard. And finally, we need to really reward politicians. Whenever they say there's these long-term problems, we can't say, "Oh, you're the messenger with bad news? We just shot you." In fact, there are some like these: Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson and others, who have gone through and given proposals for this overall federal health-spending state-level problem. But in fact, their work was sort of pushed off. In fact, the week afterwards, some tax cuts were done that made the situation even worse than their assumptions. So we need these pieces. Now I think this is a solvable problem. It's a great country with lots of people. But we have to draw those people in, because this is about education. And just look at what happened with the tuitions with the University of California and project that out for another three, four, five years — it's unaffordable. And that's the kind of thing — the investment in the young — that makes us great, allows us to contribute. It allows us to do the art, the biotechnology, the software and all those magic things. And so the bottom line is we need to care about state budgets because they're critical for our kids and our future. Thank you. (Applause)

Printing a human kidney

{0: 'Anthony Atala asks, "Can we grow organs instead of transplanting them?" His lab at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is doing just that -- engineering over 30 tissues and whole organs.'}

TED2011

There's actually a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs. The fact is that we're living longer. Medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer, and the problem is, as we age, our organs tend to fail more, and so currently there are not enough organs to go around. In fact, in the last 10 years, the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled, while in the same time, the actual number of transplants has barely gone up. So this is now a public health crisis. So that's where this field comes in that we call the field of regenerative medicine. It really involves many different areas. You can use, actually, scaffolds, biomaterials — they're like the piece of your blouse or your shirt — but specific materials you can actually implant in patients and they will do well and help you regenerate. Or we can use cells alone, either your very own cells or different stem cell populations. Or we can use both. We can use, actually, biomaterials and the cells together. And that's where the field is today. But it's actually not a new field. Interestingly, this is a book that was published back in 1938. It's titled "The Culture of Organs." The first author, Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize winner. He actually devised some of the same technologies used today for suturing blood vessels, and some of the blood vessel grafts we use today were actually designed by Alexis. But I want you to note his co-author: Charles Lindbergh. That's the same Charles Lindbergh who actually spent the rest of his life working with Alexis at the Rockefeller Institute in New York in the area of the culture of organs. So if the field's been around for so long, why so few clinical advances? And that really has to do to many different challenges. But if I were to point to three challenges, the first one is actually the design of materials that could go in your body and do well over time. And many advances now, we can do that fairly readily. The second challenge was cells. We could not get enough of your cells to grow outside of your body. Over the last 20 years, we've basically tackled that. Many scientists can now grow many different types of cells. Plus we have stem cells. But even now, 2011, there's still certain cells that we just can't grow from the patient. Liver cells, nerve cells, pancreatic cells — we still can't grow them even today. And the third challenge is vascularity, the actual supply of blood to allow those organs or tissues to survive once we regenerate them. So we can actually use biomaterials now. This is actually a biomaterial. We can weave them, knit them, or we can make them like you see here. This is actually like a cotton candy machine. You saw the spray going in. That was like the fibers of the cotton candy creating this structure, this tubularized structure, which is a biomaterial that we can then use to help your body regenerate using your very own cells to do so. And that's exactly what we did here. This is actually a patient who [was] presented with a deceased organ, and we then created one of these smart biomaterials, and then we then used that smart biomaterial to replace and repair that patient's structure. What we did was we actually used the biomaterial as a bridge so that the cells in the organ could walk on that bridge, if you will, and help to bridge the gap to regenerate that tissue. And you see that patient now six months after with an X-ray showing you the regenerated tissue, which is fully regenerated when you analyze it under the microscope. We can also use cells alone. These are actually cells that we obtained. These are stem cells that we create from specific sources, and we can drive them to become heart cells, and they start beating in culture. So they know what to do. The cells genetically know what to do, and they start beating together. Now today, many clinical trials are using different kinds of stem cells for heart disease. So that's actually now in patients. Or if we're going to use larger structures to replace larger structures, we can then use the patient's own cells, or some cell population, and the biomaterials, the scaffolds, together. So the concept here: so if you do have a deceased or injured organ, we take a very small piece of that tissue, less than half the size of a postage stamp. We then tease the cells apart, we grow the cells outside the body. We then take a scaffold, a biomaterial — again, looks very much like a piece of your blouse or your shirt — we then shape that material, and we then use those cells to coat that material one layer at a time — very much like baking a layer cake, if you will. We then place it in an oven-like device, and we're able to create that structure and bring it out. This is actually a heart valve that we've engineered, and you can see here, we have the structure of the heart valve and we've seeded that with cells, and then we exercise it. So you see the leaflets opening and closing — of this heart valve that's currently being used experimentally to try to get it to further studies. Another technology that we have used in patients actually involves bladders. We actually take a very small piece of the bladder from the patient — less than half the size of a postage stamp. We then grow the cells outside the body, take the scaffold, coat the scaffold with the cells — the patient's own cells, two different cell types. We then put it in this oven-like device. It has the same conditions as the human body — 37 degrees centigrade, 95 percent oxygen. A few weeks later, you have your engineered organ that we're able to implant back into the patient. For these specific patients, we actually just suture these materials. We use three-dimensional imagining analysis, but we actually created these biomaterials by hand. But we now have better ways to create these structures with the cells. We use now some type of technologies, where for solid organs, for example, like the liver, what we do is we take discard livers. As you know, a lot of organs are actually discarded, not used. So we can take these liver structures, which are not going to be used, and we then put them in a washing machine-like structure that will allow the cells to be washed away. Two weeks later, you have something that looks like a liver. You can hold it like a liver, but it has no cells; it's just a skeleton of the liver. And we then can re-perfuse the liver with cells, preserving the blood vessel tree. So we actually perfuse first the blood vessel tree with the patient's own blood vessel cells, and we then infiltrate the parenchyma with the liver cells. And we now have been able just to show the creation of human liver tissue just this past month using this technology. Another technology that we've used is actually that of printing. This is actually a desktop inkjet printer, but instead of using ink, we're using cells. And you can actually see here the printhead going through and printing this structure, and it takes about 40 minutes to print this structure. And there's a 3D elevator that then actually goes down one layer at a time each time the printhead goes through. And then finally you're able to get that structure out. You can pop that structure out of the printer and implant it. And this is actually a piece of bone that I'm going to show you in this slide that was actually created with this desktop printer and implanted as you see here. That was all new bone that was implanted using these techniques. Another more advanced technology we're looking at right now, our next generation of technologies, are more sophisticated printers. This particular printer we're designing now is actually one where we print right on the patient. So what you see here — I know it sounds funny, but that's the way it works. Because in reality, what you want to do is you actually want to have the patient on the bed with the wound, and you have a scanner, basically like a flatbed scanner. That's what you see here on the right side. You see a scanner technology that first scans the wound on the patient and then it comes back with the printheads actually printing the layers that you require on the patients themselves. This is how it actually works. Here's the scanner going through, scanning the wound. Once it's scanned, it sends information in the correct layers of cells where they need to be. And now you're going to see here a demo of this actually being done in a representative wound. And we actually do this with a gel so that you can lift the gel material. So once those cells are on the patient they will stick where they need to be. And this is actually new technology still under development. We're also working on more sophisticated printers. Because in reality, our biggest challenge are the solid organs. I don't know if you realize this, but 90 percent of the patients on the transplant list are actually waiting for a kidney. Patients are dying every day because we don't have enough of those organs to go around. So this is more challenging — large organ, vascular, a lot of blood vessel supply, a lot of cells present. So the strategy here is — this is actually a CT scan, an X-ray — and we go layer by layer, using computerized morphometric imaging analysis and 3D reconstruction to get right down to those patient's own kidneys. We then are able to actually image those, do 360 degree rotation to analyze the kidney in its full volumetric characteristics, and we then are able to actually take this information and then scan this in a printing computerized form. So we go layer by layer through the organ, analyzing each layer as we go through the organ, and we then are able to send that information, as you see here, through the computer and actually design the organ for the patient. This actually shows the actual printer. And this actually shows that printing. In fact, we actually have the printer right here. So while we've been talking today, you can actually see the printer back here in the back stage. That's actually the actual printer right now, and that's been printing this kidney structure that you see here. It takes about seven hours to print a kidney, so this is about three hours into it now. And Dr. Kang's going to walk onstage right now, and we're actually going to show you one of these kidneys that we printed a little bit earlier today. Put a pair of gloves here. Thank you. Go backwards. So, these gloves are a little bit small on me, but here it is. You can actually see that kidney as it was printed earlier today. (Applause) Has a little bit of consistency to it. This is Dr. Kang who's been working with us on this project, and part of our team. Thank you, Dr. Kang. I appreciate it. (Applause) So this is actually a new generation. This is actually the printer that you see here onstage. And this is actually a new technology we're working on now. In reality, we now have a long history of doing this. I'm going to share with you a clip in terms of technology we have had in patients now for a while. And this is actually a very brief clip — only about 30 seconds — of a patient who actually received an organ. (Video) Luke Massella: I was really sick. I could barely get out of bed. I was missing school. It was pretty much miserable. I couldn't go out and play basketball at recess without feeling like I was going to pass out when I got back inside. I felt so sick. I was facing basically a lifetime of dialysis, and I don't even like to think about what my life would be like if I was on that. So after the surgery, life got a lot better for me. I was able to do more things. I was able to wrestle in high school. I became the captain of the team, and that was great. I was able to be a normal kid with my friends. And because they used my own cells to build this bladder, it's going to be with me. I've got it for life, so I'm all set. (Applause) Juan Enriquez: These experiments sometimes work, and it's very cool when they do. Luke, come up please. (Applause) So Luke, before last night, when's the last time you saw Tony? LM: Ten years ago, when I had my surgery — and it's really great to see him. (Laughter) (Applause) JE: And tell us a little bit about what you're doing. LM: Well right now I'm in college at the University of Connecticut. I'm a sophomore and studying communications, TV and mass media, and basically trying to live life like a normal kid, which I always wanted growing up. But it was hard to do that when I was born with spina bifida and my kidneys and bladder weren't working. I went through about 16 surgeries, and it seemed impossible to do that when I was in kidney failure when I was 10. And this surgery came along and basically made me who I am today and saved my life. (Applause) JE: And Tony's done hundreds of these? LM: What I know from, he's working really hard in his lab and coming up with crazy stuff. I know I was one of the first 10 people to have this surgery. And when I was 10, I didn't realize how amazing it was. I was a little kid, and I was like, "Yeah. I'll have that. I'll have that surgery." (Laughter) All I wanted to do was to get better, and I didn't realize how amazing it really was until now that I'm older and I see the amazing things that he's doing. JE: When you got this call out of the blue — Tony's really shy, and it took a lot of convincing to get somebody as modest as Tony to allow us to bring Luke. So Luke, you go to your communications professors — you're majoring in communications — and you ask them for permission to come to TED, which might have a little bit to do with communications, and what was their reaction? LM: Most of my professors were all for it, and they said, "Bring pictures and show me the clips online," and "I'm happy for you." There were a couple that were a little stubborn, but I had to talk to them. I pulled them aside. JE: Well, it's an honor and a privilege to meet you. Thank you so much. (LM: Thank you so much.) JE: Thank you, Tony. (Applause)

This isn't her mother's feminism

{0: 'Courtney E. Martin’s work has two obsessions at its core: storytelling and solutions. '}

TEDWomen 2010

So I was born on the last day of the last year of the '70s. I was raised on "Free to be you and me" — (cheering) hip-hop — not as many woohoos for hip-hop in the house. Thank you. Thank you for hip-hop — and Anita Hill. (Cheering) My parents were radicals — (Laughter) who became, well, grown-ups. My dad facetiously says, "We wanted to save the world, and instead we just got rich." We actually just got "middle class" in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but you get the picture. I was raised with a very heavy sense of unfinished legacy. At this ripe old age of 30, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow up in this horrible, beautiful time, and I've decided, for me, it's been a real journey and paradox. The first paradox is that growing up is about rejecting the past and then promptly reclaiming it. Feminism was the water I grew up in. When I was just a little girl, my mom started what is now the longest-running women's film festival in the world. So while other kids were watching sitcoms and cartoons, I was watching very esoteric documentaries made by and about women. You can see how this had an influence. But she was not the only feminist in the house. My dad actually resigned from the male-only business club in my hometown because he said he would never be part of an organization that would one day welcome his son, but not his daughter. (Applause) He's actually here today. (Applause) The trick here is my brother would become an experimental poet, not a businessman, but the intention was really good. (Laughter) In any case, I didn't readily claim the feminist label, even though it was all around me, because I associated it with my mom's women's groups, her swishy skirts and her shoulder pads — none of which had much cachet in the hallways of Palmer High School where I was trying to be cool at the time. But I suspected there was something really important about this whole feminism thing, so I started covertly tiptoeing into my mom's bookshelves and picking books off and reading them — never, of course, admitting that I was doing so. I didn't actually claim the feminist label until I went to Barnard College and I heard Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner speak for the first time. They were the co-authors of a book called "Manifesta." So what very profound epiphany, you might ask, was responsible for my feminist click moment? Fishnet stockings. Jennifer Baumgardner was wearing them. I thought they were really hot. I decided, okay, I can claim the feminist label. Now I tell you this — I tell you this at the risk of embarrassing myself, because I think part of the work of feminism is to admit that aesthetics, that beauty, that fun do matter. There are lots of very modern political movements that have caught fire in no small part because of cultural hipness. Anyone heard of these two guys as an example? So my feminism is very indebted to my mom's, but it looks very different. My mom says, "patriarchy." I say, "intersectionality." So race, class, gender, ability, all of these things go into our experiences of what it means to be a woman. Pay equity? Yes. Absolutely a feminist issue. But for me, so is immigration. (Applause) Thank you. My mom says, "Protest march." I say, "Online organizing." I co-edit, along with a collective of other super-smart, amazing women, a site called Feministing.com. We are the most widely read feminist publication ever, and I tell you this because I think it's really important to see that there's a continuum. Feminist blogging is basically the 21st century version of consciousness raising. But we also have a straightforward political impact. Feministing has been able to get merchandise pulled off the shelves of Walmart. We got a misogynist administrator sending us hate-mail fired from a Big Ten school. And one of our biggest successes is we get mail from teenage girls in the middle of Iowa who say, "I Googled Jessica Simpson and stumbled on your site. I realized feminism wasn't about man-hating and Birkenstocks." So we're able to pull in the next generation in a totally new way. My mom says, "Gloria Steinem." I say, "Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Miriam Perez, Ann Friedman, Jessica Valenti, Vanessa Valenti, and on and on and on and on." We don't want one hero. We don't want one icon. We don't want one face. We are thousands of women and men across this country doing online writing, community organizing, changing institutions from the inside out — all continuing the incredible work that our mothers and grandmothers started. Thank you. (Applause) Which brings me to the second paradox: sobering up about our smallness and maintaining faith in our greatness all at once. Many in my generation — because of well-intentioned parenting and self-esteem education — were socialized to believe that we were special little snowflakes — (Laughter) who were going to go out and save the world. These are three words many of us were raised with. We walk across graduation stages, high on our overblown expectations, and when we float back down to earth, we realize we don't know what the heck it means to actually save the world anyway. The mainstream media often paints my generation as apathetic, and I think it's much more accurate to say we are deeply overwhelmed. And there's a lot to be overwhelmed about, to be fair — an environmental crisis, wealth disparity in this country unlike we've seen since 1928, and globally, a totally immoral and ongoing wealth disparity. Xenophobia's on the rise. The trafficking of women and girls. It's enough to make you feel very overwhelmed. I experienced this firsthand myself when I graduated from Barnard College in 2002. I was fired up; I was ready to make a difference. I went out and I worked at a non-profit, I went to grad school, I phone-banked, I protested, I volunteered, and none of it seemed to matter. And on a particularly dark night of December of 2004, I sat down with my family, and I said that I had become very disillusioned. I admitted that I'd actually had a fantasy — kind of a dark fantasy — of writing a letter about everything that was wrong with the world and then lighting myself on fire on the White House steps. My mom took a drink of her signature Sea Breeze, her eyes really welled with tears, and she looked right at me and she said, "I will not stand for your desperation." She said, "You are smarter, more creative and more resilient than that." Which brings me to my third paradox. Growing up is about aiming to succeed wildly and being fulfilled by failing really well. (Laughter) (Applause) There's a writer I've been deeply influenced by, Parker Palmer, and he writes that many of us are often whiplashed "between arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves." You may have guessed by now, I did not light myself on fire. I did what I know to do in desperation, which is write. I wrote the book I needed to read. I wrote a book about eight incredible people all over this country doing social justice work. I wrote about Nia Martin-Robinson, the daughter of Detroit and two civil rights activists, who's dedicating her life to environmental justice. I wrote about Emily Apt who initially became a caseworker in the welfare system because she decided that was the most noble thing she could do, but quickly learned, not only did she not like it, but she wasn't really good at it. Instead, what she really wanted to do was make films. So she made a film about the welfare system and had a huge impact. I wrote about Maricela Guzman, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, who joined the military so she could afford college. She was actually sexually assaulted in boot camp and went on to co-organize a group called the Service Women's Action Network. What I learned from these people and others was that I couldn't judge them based on their failure to meet their very lofty goals. Many of them are working in deeply intractable systems — the military, congress, the education system, etc. But what they managed to do within those systems was be a humanizing force. And at the end of the day, what could possibly be more important than that? Cornel West says, "Of course it's a failure. But how good a failure is it?" This isn't to say we give up our wildest, biggest dreams. It's to say we operate on two levels. On one, we really go after changing these broken systems of which we find ourselves a part. But on the other, we root our self-esteem in the daily acts of trying to make one person's day more kind, more just, etc. So when I was a little girl, I had a couple of very strange habits. One of them was I used to lie on the kitchen floor of my childhood home, and I would suck the thumb of my left hand and hold my mom's cold toes with my right hand. (Laughter) I was listening to her talk on the phone, which she did a lot. She was talking about board meetings, she was founding peace organizations, she was coordinating carpools, she was consoling friends — all these daily acts of care and creativity. And surely, at three and four years old, I was listening to the soothing sound of her voice, but I think I was also getting my first lesson in activist work. The activists I interviewed had nothing in common, literally, except for one thing, which was that they all cited their mothers as their most looming and important activist influences. So often, particularly at a young age, we look far afield for our models of the meaningful life, and sometimes they're in our own kitchens, talking on the phone, making us dinner, doing all that keeps the world going around and around. My mom and so many women like her have taught me that life is not about glory, or certainty, or security even. It's about embracing the paradox. It's about acting in the face of overwhelm. And it's about loving people really well. And at the end of the day, these things make for a lifetime of challenge and reward. Thank you. (Applause)

Let's use video to reinvent education

{0: 'In 2004, Sal Khan, a hedge fund analyst, began making math tutorials for his cousins. Twelve years later, Khan Academy has more than 42 million registered users from 190 countries, with tutorials on subjects from basic math through economics, art history, computer science, health, medicine and more.'}

TED2011

Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage. (Video) Salman Khan: So the hypotenuse is now going to be five. This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America — a nice clean band here — and this part of Africa. We can integrate over the surface, and the notation usually is a capital sigma. National Assembly: They create the Committee of Public Safety, which sounds like a very nice committee. Notice, this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol. Start differentiating into effector and memory cells. A galaxy. Hey! There's another galaxy. Oh, look! There's another galaxy. And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer. If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion. (Laughter) (Applause) (Live) SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos, covering everything from basic arithmetic, all the way to vector calculus, and some of the stuff that you saw up there. We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. But what we're going to talk about in this is how we're going to the next level. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started. And some of you all might know, about five years ago, I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston, and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely. And I started putting the first YouTube videos up, really just as a kind of nice-to-have, just kind of a supplement for my cousins, something that might give them a refresher or something. And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened. Actually, a bunch of interesting things happened. The first was the feedback from my cousins. They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. (Laughter) And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first it's very unintuitive, but when you think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they're wasting my time. If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin. They can just watch those videos; if they're bored, they can go ahead. They can watch at their own time and pace. Probably the least-appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room. The other thing that happened is — I put them on YouTube just — I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world. These are just a few. This is actually from one of the original calculus videos. Someone wrote it on YouTube, it was a YouTube comment: "First time I smiled doing a derivative." (Laughter) Let's pause here. This person did a derivative, and then they smiled. (Laughter) In response to that same comment — this is on the thread, you can go on YouTube and look at the comments — someone else wrote: "Same thing here. I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day, since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.'" (Laughter) We get a lot of feedback along those lines. This clearly was helping people. But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was more than just a nice-to-have. This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: "My 12 year-old son has autism, and has had a terrible time with math. We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through. Then we went on to the dreaded fractions. Again, he got it. We could not believe it. He is so excited." And so you can imagine, here I was, an analyst at a hedge fund — it was very strange for me to do something of social value. (Laughter) (Applause) But I was excited, so I kept going. And then a few other things started to dawn on me; that not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who were sending letters, but that this content will never grow old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to. (Laughter) Assuming he was good. We don't know. (Laughter) The other thing that happened — and even at this point, I said, "OK, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home-schoolers." But I didn't think it would somehow penetrate the classroom. Then I started getting letters from teachers, and the teachers would write, saying, "We've used your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do —" And this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow — "what I do is I assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom." And I want to pause here — (Applause) I want to pause here, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit — the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did, they can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing — and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom — by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom, and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience — 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students — blank faces, slightly antagonistic — and now it's a human experience, now they're actually interacting with each other. So once the Khan Academy — I quit my job, and we turned into a real organization — we're a not-for-profit — the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers were doing to its natural conclusion? And so, what I'm showing over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need, until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. The paradigm here seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now. In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student — what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zeroth power. Then you build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to — imagine learning to ride a bicycle. Maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you a bicycle for two weeks, then I come back after two weeks, and say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big "C" stamp on your forehead — (Laughter) and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." (Laughter) But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of the sudden, and start failing calculus all of the sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is: learn math the way you'd learn anything, like riding a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary, until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to fail. But we do expect mastery. This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. You can go to the site right now, it's all free, not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single-digit addition, it's like one plus one is equal to two. The paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. Further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything — well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine — and this is what we are working on — from this knowledge map, you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table. But what we want to do is use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes, and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, or getting one-size-fits-all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, that software, for roughly half of their math class. I want to be clear: we don't view this as a complete math education. What it does is — this is what's happening in Los Altos — it frees up time — it's the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot-building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow. And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace — this is actually a live dashboard from the Los Altos school district — and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it — no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids, who are already proficient in that concept, to be the first line of attack, and actually tutor their peer." (Applause) Now, I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "What don't you understand? What do you understand?" and all the rest. So our paradigm is to arm teachers with as much data as possible — data that, in any other field, is expected, in finance, marketing, manufacturing — so the teachers can diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. Now teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they've spent each day, what videos they've watched, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows the videos they're focused on. The data gets pretty granular, so you can see the exact problems the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first one the student attempted. They watched the video over there. And you can see, eventually they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster — the height is how long it took them. When you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone — in education-speak, "differentiated learning" — but it's kind of crazy, what happens when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and a group who are a little bit slower. In a traditional model, in a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let students work at their own pace — we see it over and over again — you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over again. It makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time. Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And that brings up an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is: student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent doing lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is sitting next to students and working with them. Now, 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10. As valuable as that is in Los Altos, imagine what it does to the adult learner, who's embarrassed to go back and learn stuff they should have known before going back to college. Imagine what it does to a street kid in Calcutta, who has to help his family during the day, and that's the reason he or she can't go to school. Now they can spend two hours a day and remediate, or get up to speed and not feel embarrassed about what they do or don't know. Now imagine what happens where — we talked about the peers teaching each other inside of a classroom. But this is all one system. There's no reason why you can't have that peer-to-peer tutoring beyond that one classroom. Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of the sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta. And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom. And that's essentially what we're trying to build. Thank you. (Applause) Bill Gates: I'll ask about two or three questions. Salman Khan: Oh, OK. (Applause continues) (Applause ends) BG: I've seen some things you're doing in the system, that have to do with motivation and feedback — energy points, merit badges. Tell me what you're thinking there. SK: Oh yeah. No, we have an awesome team working on it. I have to be clear, it's not just me anymore. I'm still doing all the videos, but we have a rock-star team doing the software. We've put a bunch of game mechanics in there, where you get badges, we're going to start having leader boards by area, you get points. It's actually been pretty interesting. Just the wording of the badging, or how many points you get for doing something, we see on a system-wide basis, like tens of thousands of fifth-graders or sixth-graders going one direction or another, depending what badge you give them. (Laughter) BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about? SK: Los Altos, it was kind of crazy. Once again, I didn't expect it to be used in classrooms. Someone from their board came and said, "What would you do if you had carte Blanche in a classroom?" I said, "Well, every student would work at their own pace, on something like this, we'd give a dashboard." They said, "This is kind of radical. We have to think about it." Me and the rest of the team were like, "They're never going to want to do this." But literally the next day they were like, "Can you start in two weeks?" (Laughter) BG: So fifth-grade math is where that's going on right now? SK: It's two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes. They're doing it at the district level. I think what they're excited about is they can follow these kids, not only in school; on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing it. We can track everything, track them as they go through the entire district. Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level, they can see. BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids. So you're getting feedback on those teacher views to see what they think they need? SK: Oh yeah. Most of those were specs by the teachers. We made some of those for students so they could see their data, but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves. And they're saying, "Hey, this is nice, but —" Like that focus graph, a lot of the teachers said, "I have a feeling a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic." So we made that focus diagram. So it's all been teacher-driven. It's been pretty crazy. BG: Is this ready for prime time? Do you think a lot of classes next school year should try this thing out? SK: Yeah, it's ready. We've got a million people on the site already, so we can handle a few more. (Laughter) No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow. BG: And the vision of the tutoring thing. The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface, I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people? SK: Absolutely. And this is something I recommend everyone in this audience do. Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor, a tutor, really immediately. But yeah, it's all there. BG: Well, it's amazing. I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education. BG: Thank you. SK: Thank you. (Applause)

The birth of a word

{0: "Deb Roy studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. On sabbatical from MIT Media Lab, he's working with the AI company Bluefin Labs."}

TED2011

Imagine if you could record your life — everything you said, everything you did, available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips, so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them, or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered. Well that's exactly the journey that my family began five and a half years ago. This is my wife and collaborator, Rupal. And on this day, at this moment, we walked into the house with our first child, our beautiful baby boy. And we walked into a house with a very special home video recording system. (Video) Man: Okay. Deb Roy: This moment and thousands of other moments special for us were captured in our home because in every room in the house, if you looked up, you'd see a camera and a microphone, and if you looked down, you'd get this bird's-eye view of the room. Here's our living room, the baby bedroom, kitchen, dining room and the rest of the house. And all of these fed into a disc array that was designed for a continuous capture. So here we are flying through a day in our home as we move from sunlit morning through incandescent evening and, finally, lights out for the day. Over the course of three years, we recorded eight to 10 hours a day, amassing roughly a quarter-million hours of multi-track audio and video. So you're looking at a piece of what is by far the largest home video collection ever made. (Laughter) And what this data represents for our family at a personal level, the impact has already been immense, and we're still learning its value. Countless moments of unsolicited natural moments, not posed moments, are captured there, and we're starting to learn how to discover them and find them. But there's also a scientific reason that drove this project, which was to use this natural longitudinal data to understand the process of how a child learns language — that child being my son. And so with many privacy provisions put in place to protect everyone who was recorded in the data, we made elements of the data available to my trusted research team at MIT so we could start teasing apart patterns in this massive data set, trying to understand the influence of social environments on language acquisition. So we're looking here at one of the first things we started to do. This is my wife and I cooking breakfast in the kitchen, and as we move through space and through time, a very everyday pattern of life in the kitchen. In order to convert this opaque, 90,000 hours of video into something that we could start to see, we use motion analysis to pull out, as we move through space and through time, what we call space-time worms. And this has become part of our toolkit for being able to look and see where the activities are in the data, and with it, trace the pattern of, in particular, where my son moved throughout the home, so that we could focus our transcription efforts, all of the speech environment around my son — all of the words that he heard from myself, my wife, our nanny, and over time, the words he began to produce. So with that technology and that data and the ability to, with machine assistance, transcribe speech, we've now transcribed well over seven million words of our home transcripts. And with that, let me take you now for a first tour into the data. So you've all, I'm sure, seen time-lapse videos where a flower will blossom as you accelerate time. I'd like you to now experience the blossoming of a speech form. My son, soon after his first birthday, would say "gaga" to mean water. And over the course of the next half-year, he slowly learned to approximate the proper adult form, "water." So we're going to cruise through half a year in about 40 seconds. No video here, so you can focus on the sound, the acoustics, of a new kind of trajectory: gaga to water. (Audio) Baby: Gagagagagaga Gaga gaga gaga guga guga guga wada gaga gaga guga gaga wader guga guga water water water water water water water water water. DR: He sure nailed it, didn't he. (Applause) So he didn't just learn water. Over the course of the 24 months, the first two years that we really focused on, this is a map of every word he learned in chronological order. And because we have full transcripts, we've identified each of the 503 words that he learned to produce by his second birthday. He was an early talker. And so we started to analyze why. Why were certain words born before others? This is one of the first results that came out of our study a little over a year ago that really surprised us. The way to interpret this apparently simple graph is, on the vertical is an indication of how complex caregiver utterances are based on the length of utterances. And the [horizontal] axis is time. And all of the data, we aligned based on the following idea: Every time my son would learn a word, we would trace back and look at all of the language he heard that contained that word. And we would plot the relative length of the utterances. And what we found was this curious phenomena, that caregiver speech would systematically dip to a minimum, making language as simple as possible, and then slowly ascend back up in complexity. And the amazing thing was that bounce, that dip, lined up almost precisely with when each word was born — word after word, systematically. So it appears that all three primary caregivers — myself, my wife and our nanny — were systematically and, I would think, subconsciously restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language. And the implications of this — there are many, but one I just want to point out, is that there must be amazing feedback loops. Of course, my son is learning from his linguistic environment, but the environment is learning from him. That environment, people, are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now. But that's looking at the speech context. What about the visual context? We're not looking at — think of this as a dollhouse cutaway of our house. We've taken those circular fish-eye lens cameras, and we've done some optical correction, and then we can bring it into three-dimensional life. So welcome to my home. This is a moment, one moment captured across multiple cameras. The reason we did this is to create the ultimate memory machine, where you can go back and interactively fly around and then breathe video-life into this system. What I'm going to do is give you an accelerated view of 30 minutes, again, of just life in the living room. That's me and my son on the floor. And there's video analytics that are tracking our movements. My son is leaving red ink. I am leaving green ink. We're now on the couch, looking out through the window at cars passing by. And finally, my son playing in a walking toy by himself. Now we freeze the action, 30 minutes, we turn time into the vertical axis, and we open up for a view of these interaction traces we've just left behind. And we see these amazing structures — these little knots of two colors of thread we call "social hot spots." The spiral thread we call a "solo hot spot." And we think that these affect the way language is learned. What we'd like to do is start understanding the interaction between these patterns and the language that my son is exposed to to see if we can predict how the structure of when words are heard affects when they're learned — so in other words, the relationship between words and what they're about in the world. So here's how we're approaching this. In this video, again, my son is being traced out. He's leaving red ink behind. And there's our nanny by the door. (Video) Nanny: You want water? (Baby: Aaaa.) Nanny: All right. (Baby: Aaaa.) DR: She offers water, and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water. And what we've done is use the word "water" to tag that moment, that bit of activity. And now we take the power of data and take every time my son ever heard the word water and the context he saw it in, and we use it to penetrate through the video and find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water. And what this data leaves in its wake is a landscape. We call these wordscapes. This is the wordscape for the word water, and you can see most of the action is in the kitchen. That's where those big peaks are over to the left. And just for contrast, we can do this with any word. We can take the word "bye" as in "good bye." And we're now zoomed in over the entrance to the house. And we look, and we find, as you would expect, a contrast in the landscape where the word "bye" occurs much more in a structured way. So we're using these structures to start predicting the order of language acquisition, and that's ongoing work now. In my lab, which we're peering into now, at MIT — this is at the media lab. This has become my favorite way of videographing just about any space. Three of the key people in this project, Philip DeCamp, Rony Kubat and Brandon Roy are pictured here. Philip has been a close collaborator on all the visualizations you're seeing. And Michael Fleischman was another Ph.D. student in my lab who worked with me on this home video analysis, and he made the following observation: that "just the way that we're analyzing how language connects to events which provide common ground for language, that same idea we can take out of your home, Deb, and we can apply it to the world of public media." And so our effort took an unexpected turn. Think of mass media as providing common ground and you have the recipe for taking this idea to a whole new place. We've started analyzing television content using the same principles — analyzing event structure of a TV signal — episodes of shows, commercials, all of the components that make up the event structure. And we're now, with satellite dishes, pulling and analyzing a good part of all the TV being watched in the United States. And you don't have to now go and instrument living rooms with microphones to get people's conversations, you just tune into publicly available social media feeds. So we're pulling in about three billion comments a month, and then the magic happens. You have the event structure, the common ground that the words are about, coming out of the television feeds; you've got the conversations that are about those topics; and through semantic analysis — and this is actually real data you're looking at from our data processing — each yellow line is showing a link being made between a comment in the wild and a piece of event structure coming out of the television signal. And the same idea now can be built up. And we get this wordscape, except now words are not assembled in my living room. Instead, the context, the common ground activities, are the content on television that's driving the conversations. And what we're seeing here, these skyscrapers now, are commentary that are linked to content on television. Same concept, but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere. And so fundamentally, rather than, for example, measuring content based on how many people are watching, this gives us the basic data for looking at engagement properties of content. And just like we can look at feedback cycles and dynamics in a family, we can now open up the same concepts and look at much larger groups of people. This is a subset of data from our database — just 50,000 out of several million — and the social graph that connects them through publicly available sources. And if you put them on one plain, a second plain is where the content lives. So we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials, and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph. And then the important third dimension. Each of the links that you're seeing rendered here is an actual connection made between something someone said and a piece of content. And there are, again, now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content. And we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways. So if we, for example, trace the path of one piece of content that drives someone to comment on it, and then we follow where that comment goes, and then look at the entire social graph that becomes activated and then trace back to see the relationship between that social graph and content, a very interesting structure becomes visible. We call this a co-viewing clique, a virtual living room if you will. And there are fascinating dynamics at play. It's not one way. A piece of content, an event, causes someone to talk. They talk to other people. That drives tune-in behavior back into mass media, and you have these cycles that drive the overall behavior. Another example — very different — another actual person in our database — and we're finding at least hundreds, if not thousands, of these. We've given this person a name. This is a pro-amateur, or pro-am media critic who has this high fan-out rate. So a lot of people are following this person — very influential — and they have a propensity to talk about what's on TV. So this person is a key link in connecting mass media and social media together. One last example from this data: Sometimes it's actually a piece of content that is special. So if we go and look at this piece of content, President Obama's State of the Union address from just a few weeks ago, and look at what we find in this same data set, at the same scale, the engagement properties of this piece of content are truly remarkable. A nation exploding in conversation in real time in response to what's on the broadcast. And of course, through all of these lines are flowing unstructured language. We can X-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation, real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content. So, to summarize, the idea is this: As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they're saying it in, what's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen. It's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication. And I think the implications here are profound, whether it's for science, for commerce, for government, or perhaps most of all, for us as individuals. And so just to return to my son, when I was preparing this talk, he was looking over my shoulder, and I showed him the clips I was going to show to you today, and I asked him for permission — granted. And then I went on to reflect, "Isn't it amazing, this entire database, all these recordings, I'm going to hand off to you and to your sister" — who arrived two years later — "and you guys are going to be able to go back and re-experience moments that you could never, with your biological memory, possibly remember the way you can now?" And he was quiet for a moment. And I thought, "What am I thinking? He's five years old. He's not going to understand this." And just as I was having that thought, he looked up at me and said, "So that when I grow up, I can show this to my kids?" And I thought, "Wow, this is powerful stuff." So I want to leave you with one last memorable moment from our family. This is the first time our son took more than two steps at once — captured on film. And I really want you to focus on something as I take you through. It's a cluttered environment; it's natural life. My mother's in the kitchen, cooking, and, of all places, in the hallway, I realize he's about to do it, about to take more than two steps. And so you hear me encouraging him, realizing what's happening, and then the magic happens. Listen very carefully. About three steps in, he realizes something magic is happening, and the most amazing feedback loop of all kicks in, and he takes a breath in, and he whispers "wow" and instinctively I echo back the same. And so let's fly back in time to that memorable moment. (Video) DR: Hey. Come here. Can you do it? Oh, boy. Can you do it? Baby: Yeah. DR: Ma, he's walking. (Laughter) (Applause) DR: Thank you. (Applause)

How to keep rivers and streams flowing

{0: 'Rob Harmon is an expert on energy and natural resources policy -- looking at smart ways to manage carbon, water and the energy we use every day.'}

TEDxRainier

This is a river. This is a stream. This is a river. This is happening all over the country. There are tens of thousands of miles of dewatered streams in the United States. On this map, the colored areas represent water conflicts. Similar problems are emerging in the East as well. The reasons vary state to state, but mostly in the details. There are 4,000 miles of dewatered streams in Montana alone. They would ordinarily support fish and other wildlife. They're the veins of the ecosystem, and they're often empty veins. I want to tell you the story of just one of these streams, because it's an archetype for the larger story. This is Prickly Pear Creek. It runs through a populated area from East Helena to Lake Helena. It supports wild fish including cutthroat, brown and rainbow trout. Nearly every year for more than a hundred years ... it looked like this in the summer. How did we get here? Well, it started back in the late 1800s when people started settling in places like Montana. In short, there was a lot of water and there weren't very many people. But as more people showed up wanting water, the folks who were there first got a little concerned, and in 1865, Montana passed its first water law. It basically said, everybody near the stream can share in the stream. Oddly, a lot of people showed up wanting to share the stream, and the folks who were there first got concerned enough to bring out their lawyers. There were precedent-setting suits in 1870 and 1872, both involving Prickly Pear Creek. And in 1921, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in a case involving Prickly Pear that the folks who were there first had the first, or "senior water rights." These senior water rights are key. The problem is that all over the West now it looks like this. Some of these creeks have claims for 50 to 100 times more water than is actually in the stream. And the senior water rights holders, if they don't use their water right, they risk losing their water right — along with the economic value that goes with it. So they have no incentive to conserve. So it's not just about the number of people; the system itself creates a disincentive to conserve because you can lose your water right if you don't use it. So after decades of lawsuits and 140 years, now, of experience, we still have this. It's a broken system. There's a disincentive to conserve, because if you don't use your water right, you can lose your water right. And I'm sure you all know, this has created significant conflicts between the agricultural and environmental communities. OK, now I'm going to change gears here. Most of you will be happy to know that the rest of the presentation's free ... (Laughter) and some of you'll be happy to know that it involves beer. (Laughter) There's another thing happening around the country, which is that companies are starting to get concerned about their water footprint. They're concerned about securing an adequate supply of water, they're trying to be really efficient with their water use, and they're concerned about how their water use affects the image of their brand. Well, it's a national problem, but I'm going to tell you another story from Montana ... and it involves beer. I bet you didn't know, it takes about 5 pints of water to make a pint of beer. If you include all the drain, it takes more than a hundred pints of water to make a pint of beer. Now the brewers in Montana have already done a lot to reduce their water consumption, but they still use millions of gallons of water. I mean, there's water in beer. So what can they do about this remaining water footprint that can have serious effects on the ecosystem? These ecosystems are really important to the Montana brewers and their customers. After all, there's a strong correlation between water and fishing, and for some, there's a strong correlation between fishing and beer. (Laughter) So the Montana brewers and their customers are concerned and they're looking for some way to address the problem. So how can they address this remaining water footprint? Remember Prickly Pear. Up until now, business water stewardship has been limited to measuring and reducing, and we're suggesting that the next step is to restore. Remember Prickly Pear. It's a broken system. You've got a disincentive to conserve, because if you don't use your water right, you risk losing your water right. Well, we decided to connect these two worlds — the world of the companies with their water footprints and the world of the farmers with their senior water rights on these creeks. In some states, senior water rights holders can leave their water in the stream while legally protecting it from others, and maintaining their water right. After all, it is their water right, and if they want to use that water right to help the fish grow in the stream, it's their right to do so. But they have no incentive to do so. So, working with local water trusts, we created an incentive to do so. We pay them to leave their water in stream. That's what's happening here. This individual has made the choice and is closing this water diversion, leaving the water in the stream. He doesn't lose the water right, he just chooses to apply that right, or some portion of it, to the stream, instead of to the land. Because he's the senior water-rights holder, he can protect the water from other users in the stream. OK? He gets paid to leave the water in the stream. This guy's measuring the water that this leaves in the stream. We then take the measured water, we divide it into thousand-gallon increments. Each increment gets a serial number and a certificate, and then the brewers and others buy those certificates as a way to return water to these degraded ecosystems. The brewers pay to restore water to the stream. It provides a simple, inexpensive and measurable way to return water to these degraded ecosystems, while giving farmers an economic choice and giving businesses concerned about their water footprints an easy way to deal with them. After 140 years of conflict and 100 years of dry streams, a circumstance that litigation and regulation has not solved, we put together a market-based, willing buyer, willing seller solution — a solution that does not require litigation. It's about giving folks concerned about their water footprints a real opportunity to put water where it's critically needed, into these degraded ecosystems, while at the same time providing farmers a meaningful economic choice about how their water is used. These transactions create allies, not enemies. They connect people rather than dividing them. And they provide needed economic support for rural communities. And most importantly, it's working. We've returned more than four billion gallons of water to degraded ecosystems. We've connected senior water-rights holders with brewers in Montana, with hotels and tea companies in Oregon, and with high-tech companies that use a lot of water in the Southwest. And when we make these connections, we can and we do turn this ... into this. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause)

The social animal

{0: 'Writer and thinker David Brooks has covered business, crime and politics over a long career in journalism. '}

TED2011

When I got my current job, I was given a good piece of advice, which was to interview three politicians every day. And from that much contact with politicians, I can tell you they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They have what I called "logorrhea dementia," which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane. (Laughter) But what they do have is incredible social skills. When you meet them, they lock into you, they look you in the eye, they invade your personal space, they massage the back of your head. I had dinner with a Republican senator several months ago who kept his hand on my inner thigh throughout the whole meal — squeezing it. I once — this was years ago — I saw Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in the well of the Senate. And they were friends, and they hugged each other and they were laughing, and their faces were like this far apart. And they were moving and grinding and moving their arms up and down each other. And I was like, "Get a room. I don't want to see this." But they have those social skills. Another case: Last election cycle, I was following Mitt Romney around New Hampshire, and he was campaigning with his five perfect sons: Bip, Chip, Rip, Zip, Lip and Dip. (Laughter) And he's going into a diner. And he goes into the diner, introduces himself to a family and says, "What village are you from in New Hampshire?" And then he describes the home he owned in their village. And so he goes around the room, and then as he's leaving the diner, he first-names almost everybody he's just met. I was like, "Okay, that's social skill." But the paradox is, when a lot of these people slip into the policy-making mode, that social awareness vanishes and they start talking like accountants. So in the course of my career, I have covered a series of failures. We sent economists in the Soviet Union with privatization plans when it broke up, and what they really lacked was social trust. We invaded Iraq with a military oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities. We had a financial regulatory regime based on the assumptions that traders were rational creatures who wouldn't do anything stupid. For 30 years, I've been covering school reform and we've basically reorganized the bureaucratic boxes — charters, private schools, vouchers — but we've had disappointing results year after year. And the fact is, people learn from people they love. And if you're not talking about the individual relationship between a teacher and a student, you're not talking about that reality. But that reality is expunged from our policy-making process. And so that's led to a question for me: Why are the most socially-attuned people on earth completely dehumanized when they think about policy? And I came to the conclusion, this is a symptom of a larger problem. That, for centuries, we've inherited a view of human nature based on the notion that we're divided selves, that reason is separated from the emotions and that society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions. And it's led to a view of human nature that we're rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives, and it's led to ways of seeing the world where people try to use the assumptions of physics to measure how human behavior is. And it's produced a great amputation, a shallow view of human nature. We're really good at talking about material things, but we're really bad at talking about emotions. We're really good at talking about skills and safety and health; we're really bad at talking about character. Alasdair MacIntyre, the famous philosopher, said that, "We have the concepts of the ancient morality of virtue, honor, goodness, but we no longer have a system by which to connect them." And so this has led to a shallow path in politics, but also in a whole range of human endeavors. You can see it in the way we raise our young kids. You go to an elementary school at three in the afternoon and you watch the kids come out, and they're wearing these 80-pound backpacks. If the wind blows them over, they're like beetles stuck there on the ground. You see these cars that drive up — usually it's Saabs and Audis and Volvos, because in certain neighborhoods it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car, so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy — that's fine. They get picked up by these creatures I've called uber-moms, who are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard. And you can usually tell the uber-moms because they actually weigh less than their own children. (Laughter) So at the moment of conception, they're doing little butt exercises. Babies flop out, they're flashing Mandarin flashcards at the things. Driving them home, and they want them to be enlightened, so they take them to Ben & Jerry's ice cream company with its own foreign policy. In one of my books, I joke that Ben & Jerry's should make a pacifist toothpaste — doesn't kill germs, just asks them to leave. It would be a big seller. (Laughter) And they go to Whole Foods to get their baby formula, and Whole Foods is one of those progressive grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International. (Laughter) They buy these seaweed-based snacks there called Veggie Booty with Kale, which is for kids who come home and say, "Mom, mom, I want a snack that'll help prevent colon-rectal cancer." (Laughter) And so the kids are raised in a certain way, jumping through achievement hoops of the things we can measure — SAT prep, oboe, soccer practice. They get into competitive colleges, they get good jobs, and sometimes they make a success of themselves in a superficial manner, and they make a ton of money. And sometimes you can see them at vacation places like Jackson Hole or Aspen. And they've become elegant and slender — they don't really have thighs; they just have one elegant calve on top of another. (Laughter) They have kids of their own, and they've achieved a genetic miracle by marrying beautiful people, so their grandmoms look like Gertrude Stein, their daughters looks like Halle Berry — I don't know how they've done that. They get there and they realize it's fashionable now to have dogs a third as tall as your ceiling heights. So they've got these furry 160-pound dogs — all look like velociraptors, all named after Jane Austen characters. And then when they get old, they haven't really developed a philosophy of life, but they've decided, "I've been successful at everything; I'm just not going to die." And so they hire personal trainers; they're popping Cialis like breath mints. You see them on the mountains up there. They're cross-country skiing up the mountain with these grim expressions that make Dick Cheney look like Jerry Lewis. (Laughter) And as they whiz by you, it's like being passed by a little iron Raisinet going up the hill. (Laughter) And so this is part of what life is, but it's not all of what life is. And over the past few years, I think we've been given a deeper view of human nature and a deeper view of who we are. And it's not based on theology or philosophy, it's in the study of the mind, across all these spheres of research, from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, psychologists, sociology, we're developing a revolution in consciousness. And when you synthesize it all, it's giving us a new view of human nature. And far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature, it's a new humanism, it's a new enchantment. And I think when you synthesize this research, you start with three key insights. The first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the work. And so one way to formulate that is the human mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, of which it can be consciously aware of about 40. And this leads to oddities. One of my favorite is that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, people named Lawrence become lawyers, because unconsciously we gravitate toward things that sound familiar, which is why I named my daughter President of the United States Brooks. (Laughter) Another finding is that the unconscious, far from being dumb and sexualized, is actually quite smart. So one of the most cognitively demanding things we do is buy furniture. It's really hard to imagine a sofa, how it's going to look in your house. And the way you should do that is study the furniture, let it marinate in your mind, distract yourself, and then a few days later, go with your gut, because unconsciously you've figured it out. The second insight is that emotions are at the center of our thinking. People with strokes and lesions in the emotion-processing parts of the brain are not super smart, they're actually sometimes quite helpless. And the "giant" in the field is in the room tonight and is speaking tomorrow morning — Antonio Damasio. And one of the things he's really shown us is that emotions are not separate from reason, but they are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value. And so reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom. Now I'm a middle-aged guy. I'm not exactly comfortable with emotions. One of my favorite brain stories described these middle-aged guys. They put them into a brain scan machine — this is apocryphal by the way, but I don't care — and they had them watch a horror movie, and then they had them describe their feelings toward their wives. And the brain scans were identical in both activities. It was just sheer terror. So me talking about emotion is like Gandhi talking about gluttony, but it is the central organizing process of the way we think. It tells us what to imprint. The brain is the record of the feelings of a life. And the third insight is that we're not primarily self-contained individuals. We're social animals, not rational animals. We emerge out of relationships, and we are deeply interpenetrated, one with another. And so when we see another person, we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds. When we watch a car chase in a movie, it's almost as if we are subtly having a car chase. When we watch pornography, it's a little like having sex, though probably not as good. And we see this when lovers walk down the street, when a crowd in Egypt or Tunisia gets caught up in an emotional contagion, the deep interpenetration. And this revolution in who we are gives us a different way of seeing, I think, politics, a different way, most importantly, of seeing human capital. We are now children of the French Enlightenment. We believe that reason is the highest of the faculties. But I think this research shows that the British Enlightenment, or the Scottish Enlightenment, with David Hume, Adam Smith, actually had a better handle on who we are — that reason is often weak, our sentiments are strong, and our sentiments are often trustworthy. And this work corrects that bias in our culture, that dehumanizing bias. It gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life. When we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily — things like grades, SAT's, degrees, the number of years in schooling. What it really takes to do well, to lead a meaningful life, are things that are deeper, things we don't really even have words for. And so let me list just a couple of the things I think this research points us toward trying to understand. The first gift, or talent, is mindsight — the ability to enter into other people's minds and learn what they have to offer. Babies come with this ability. Meltzoff, who's at the University of Washington, leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes old. He wagged his tongue at the baby. The baby wagged her tongue back. Babies are born to interpenetrate into Mom's mind and to download what they find — their models of how to understand reality. In the United States, 55 percent of babies have a deep two-way conversation with Mom and they learn models to how to relate to other people. And those people who have models of how to relate have a huge head start in life. Scientists at the University of Minnesota did a study in which they could predict with 77 percent accuracy, at age 18 months, who was going to graduate from high school, based on who had good attachment with mom. Twenty percent of kids do not have those relationships. They are what we call avoidantly attached. They have trouble relating to other people. They go through life like sailboats tacking into the wind — wanting to get close to people, but not really having the models of how to do that. And so this is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge, one from another. A second skill is equipoise, the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind. So for example, we are overconfidence machines. Ninety-five percent of our professors report that they are above-average teachers. Ninety-six percent of college students say they have above-average social skills. Time magazine asked Americans, "Are you in the top one percent of earners?" Nineteen percent of Americans are in the top one percent of earners. (Laughter) This is a gender-linked trait, by the way. Men drown at twice the rate of women, because men think they can swim across that lake. But some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases, their own overconfidence. They have epistemological modesty. They are open-minded in the face of ambiguity. They are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence. They are curious. And these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ. The third trait is metis, what we might call street smarts — it's a Greek word. It's a sensitivity to the physical environment, the ability to pick out patterns in an environment — derive a gist. One of my colleagues at the Times did a great story about soldiers in Iraq who could look down a street and detect somehow whether there was an IED, a landmine, in the street. They couldn't tell you how they did it, but they could feel cold, they felt a coldness, and they were more often right than wrong. The third is what you might call sympathy, the ability to work within groups. And that comes in tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals. And face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically, because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal. And the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group; it's determined by how well they communicate, how often they take turns in conversation. Then you could talk about a trait like blending. Any child can say, "I'm a tiger," pretend to be a tiger. It seems so elementary. But in fact, it's phenomenally complicated to take a concept "I" and a concept "tiger" and blend them together. But this is the source of innovation. What Picasso did, for example, was take the concept "Western art" and the concept "African masks" and blend them together — not only the geometry, but the moral systems entailed in them. And these are skills, again, we can't count and measure. And then the final thing I'll mention is something you might call limerence. And this is not an ability; it's a drive and a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige. The unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence, when the skull line disappears and we are lost in a challenge or a task — when a craftsman feels lost in his craft, when a naturalist feels at one with nature, when a believer feels at one with God's love. That is what the unconscious mind hungers for. And many of us feel it in love when lovers feel fused. And one of the most beautiful descriptions I've come across in this research of how minds interpenetrate was written by a great theorist and scientist named Douglas Hofstadter at the University of Indiana. He was married to a woman named Carol, and they had a wonderful relationship. When their kids were five and two, Carol had a stroke and a brain tumor and died suddenly. And Hofstadter wrote a book called "I Am a Strange Loop." In the course of that book, he describes a moment — just months after Carol has died — he comes across her picture on the mantel, or on a bureau in his bedroom. And here's what he wrote: "I looked at her face, and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes. And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me.' And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit — the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized that, though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but had lived on very determinedly in my brain." The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom. Through his suffering, Hofstadter understood how deeply interpenetrated we are. Through the policy failures of the last 30 years, we have come to acknowledge, I think, how shallow our view of human nature has been. And now as we confront that shallowness and the failures that derive from our inability to get the depths of who we are, comes this revolution in consciousness — these people in so many fields exploring the depth of our nature and coming away with this enchanted, this new humanism. And when Freud discovered his sense of the unconscious, it had a vast effect on the climate of the times. Now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious, of who we are deep inside, and it's going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture. Thank you. (Applause)

The sound the universe makes

{0: 'Janna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard, where she studies the early universe, chaos, and black holes. She\'s the author of “How the Universe Got Its Spots" and the novel “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.”'}

TED2011

I want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that, by far, most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light. We can stand on the Earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes. The Sun burns our peripheral vision. We see light reflected off the Moon. And in the time since Galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies, the known universe has come to us through light, across vast eras in cosmic history. And with all of our modern telescopes, we've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe — these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the Big Bang. And yet, the universe is not a silent movie because the universe isn't silent. I'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself, because space can wobble like a drum. It can ring out a kind of recording throughout the universe of some of the most dramatic events as they unfold. Now we'd like to be able to add to a kind of glorious visual composition that we have of the universe — a sonic composition. And while we've never heard the sounds from space, we really should, in the next few years, start to turn up the volume on what's going on out there. So in this ambition to capture songs from the universe, we turn our focus to black holes and the promise they have, because black holes can bang on space-time like mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song, which I'd like to play for you — some of our predictions for what that song will be like. Now black holes are dark against a dark sky. We can't see them directly. They're not brought to us with light, at least not directly. We can see them indirectly, because black holes wreak havoc on their environment. They destroy stars around them. They churn up debris in their surroundings. But they won't come to us directly through light. We might one day see a shadow a black hole can cast on a very bright background, but we haven't yet. And yet black holes may be heard even if they're not seen, and that's because they bang on space-time like a drum. Now we owe the idea that space can ring like a drum to Albert Einstein — to whom we owe so much. Einstein realized that if space were empty, if the universe were empty, it would be like this picture, except for maybe without the helpful grid drawn on it. But if we were freely falling through the space, even without this helpful grid, we might be able to paint it ourselves, because we would notice that we traveled along straight lines, undeflected straight paths through the universe. Einstein also realized — and this is the real meat of the matter — that if you put energy or mass in the universe, it would curve space, and a freely falling object would pass by, let's say, the Sun and it would be deflected along the natural curves in the space. It was Einstein's great general theory of relativity. Now even light will be bent by those paths. And you can be bent so much that you're caught in orbit around the Sun, as the Earth is, or the Moon around the Earth. These are the natural curves in space. What Einstein did not realize was that, if you took our Sun and you crushed it down to six kilometers — so you took a million times the mass of the Earth and you crushed it to six kilometers across, you would make a black hole, an object so dense that if light veered too close, it would never escape — a dark shadow against the universe. It wasn't Einstein who realized this, it was Karl Schwarzschild who was a German Jew in World War I — joined the German army already an accomplished scientist, working on the Russian front. I like to imagine Schwarzschild in the war in the trenches calculating ballistic trajectories for cannon fire, and then, in between, calculating Einstein's equations — as you do in the trenches. And he was reading Einstein's recently published general theory of relativity, and he was thrilled by this theory. And he quickly surmised an exact mathematical solution that described something very extraordinary: curves so strong that space would rain down into them, space itself would curve like a waterfall flowing down the throat of a hole. And even light could not escape this current. Light would be dragged down the hole as everything else would be, and all that would be left would be a shadow. Now he wrote to Einstein, and he said, "As you will see, the war has been kind to me enough. Despite the heavy gunfire, I've been able to get away from it all and walk through the land of your ideas." And Einstein was very impressed with his exact solution, and I should hope also the dedication of the scientist. This is the hardworking scientist under harsh conditions. And he took Schwarzschild's idea to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the next week. But Einstein always thought black holes were a mathematical oddity. He did not believe they existed in nature. He thought nature would protect us from their formation. It was decades before the term "black hole" was coined and people realized that black holes are real astrophysical objects — in fact they're the death state of very massive stars that collapse catastrophically at the end of their lifetime. Now our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. It's actually not massive enough. But if we did a little thought experiment — as Einstein was very fond of doing — we could imagine putting the Sun crushed down to six kilometers, and putting a tiny little Earth around it in orbit, maybe 30 kilometers outside of the black-hole sun. And it would be self-illuminated, because now the Sun's gone, we have no other source of light — so let's make our little Earth self-illuminated. And you would realize you could put the Earth in a happy orbit even 30 km outside of this crushed black hole. This crushed black hole actually would fit inside Manhattan, more or less. It might spill off into the Hudson a little bit before it destroyed the Earth. But basically that's what we're talking about. We're talking about an object that you could crush down to half the square area of Manhattan. So we move this Earth very close — 30 kilometers outside — and we notice it's perfectly fine orbiting around the black hole. There's a sort of myth that black holes devour everything in the universe, but you actually have to get very close to fall in. But what's very impressive is that, from our vantage point, we can always see the Earth. It cannot hide behind the black hole. The light from the Earth, some of it falls in, but some of it gets lensed around and brought back to us. So you can't hide anything behind a black hole. If this were Battlestar Galactica and you're fighting the Cylons, don't hide behind the black hole. They can see you. Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole — it's not massive enough — but there are tens of thousands of black holes in our galaxy. And if one were to eclipse the Milky Way, this is what it would look like. We would see a shadow of that black hole against the hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and its luminous dust lanes. And if we were to fall towards this black hole, we would see all of that light lensed around it, and we could even start to cross into that shadow and really not notice that anything dramatic had happened. It would be bad if we tried to fire our rockets and get out of there because we couldn't, anymore than light can escape. But even though the black hole is dark from the outside, it's not dark on the inside, because all of the light from the galaxy can fall in behind us. And even though, due to a relativistic effect known as time dilation, our clocks would seem to slow down relative to galactic time, it would look as though the evolution of the galaxy had been sped up and shot at us, right before we were crushed to death by the black hole. It would be like a near-death experience where you see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a total death experience. (Laughter) And there's no way of telling anybody about the light at the end of the tunnel. Now we've never seen a shadow like this of a black hole, but black holes can be heard, even if they're not seen. Imagine now taking an astrophysically realistic situation — imagine two black holes that have lived a long life together. Maybe they started as stars and collapsed to two black holes — each one 10 times the mass of the Sun. So now we're going to crush them down to 60 kilometers across. They can be spinning hundreds of times a second. At the end of their lives, they're going around each other very near the speed of light. So they're crossing thousands of kilometers in a fraction of a second, and as they do so, they not only curve space, but they leave behind in their wake a ringing of space, an actual wave on space-time. Space squeezes and stretches as it emanates out from these black holes banging on the universe. And they travel out into the cosmos at the speed of light. This computer simulation is due to a relativity group at NASA Goddard. It took almost 30 years for anyone in the world to crack this problem. This was one of the groups. It shows two black holes in orbit around each other, again, with these helpfully painted curves. And if you can see — it's kind of faint — but if you can see the red waves emanating out, those are the gravitational waves. They're literally the sounds of space ringing, and they will travel out from these black holes at the speed of light as they ring down and coalesce to one spinning, quiet black hole at the end of the day. If you were standing near enough, your ear would resonate with the squeezing and stretching of space. You would literally hear the sound. Now of course, your head would be squeezed and stretched unhelpfully, so you might have trouble understanding what's going on. But I'd like to play for you the sound that we predict. This is from my group — a slightly less glamorous computer modeling. Imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole. The sound you're hearing is the light black hole banging on space each time it gets close. If it gets far away, it's a little too quiet. But it comes in like a mallet, and it literally cracks space, wobbling it like a drum. And we can predict what the sound will be. We know that, as it falls in, it gets faster and it gets louder. And eventually, we're going to hear the little guy just fall into the bigger guy. (Thumping) Then it's gone. Now I've never heard it that loud — it's actually more dramatic. At home it sounds kind of anticlimactic. It's sort of like ding, ding, ding. This is another sound from my group. No, I'm not showing you any images, because black holes don't leave behind helpful trails of ink, and space is not painted, showing you the curves. But if you were to float by in space on a space holiday and you heard this, you want to get moving. (Laughter) Want to get away from the sound. Both black holes are moving. Both black holes are getting closer together. In this case, they're both wobbling quite a lot. And then they're going to merge. (Thumping) Now it's gone. Now that chirp is very characteristic of black holes merging — that it chirps up at the end. Now that's our prediction for what we'll see. Luckily we're at this safe distance in Long Beach, California. And surely, somewhere in the universe two black holes have merged. And surely, the space around us is ringing after traveling maybe a million light years, or a million years, at the speed of light to get to us. But the sound is too quiet for any of us to ever hear. There are very industrious experiments being built on Earth — one called LIGO — which will detect deviations in the squeezing and stretching of space at less than the fraction of a nucleus of an atom over four kilometers. It's a remarkably ambitious experiment, and it's going to be at advanced sensitivity within the next few years — to pick this up. There's also a mission proposed for space, which hopefully will launch in the next ten years, called LISA. And LISA will be able to see super-massive black holes — black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. In this Hubble image, we see two galaxies. They look like they're frozen in some embrace. And each one probably harbors a super-massive black hole at its core. But they're not frozen; they're actually merging. These two black holes are colliding, and they will merge over a billion-year time scale. It's beyond our human perception to pick up a song of that duration. But LISA could see the final stages of two super-massive black holes earlier in the universe's history, the last 15 minutes before they fall together. And it's not just black holes, but it's also any big disturbance in the universe — and the biggest of them all is the Big Bang. When that expression was coined, it was derisive — like, "Oh, who would believe in a Big Bang?" But now it actually might be more technically accurate because it might bang. It might make a sound. This animation from my friends at Proton Studios shows looking at the Big Bang from the outside. We don't ever want to do that actually. We want to be inside the universe because there's no such thing as standing outside the universe. So imagine you're inside the Big Bang. It's everywhere, it's all around you, and the space is wobbling chaotically. Fourteen billion years pass and this song is still ringing all around us. Galaxies form, and generations of stars form in those galaxies, and around one star, at least one star, is a habitable planet. And here we are frantically building these experiments, doing these calculations, writing these computer codes. Imagine a billion years ago, two black holes collided. That song has been ringing through space for all that time. We weren't even here. It gets closer and closer — 40,000 years ago, we're still doing cave paintings. It's like hurry, build your instruments. It's getting closer and closer, and in 20 ... whatever year it will be when our detectors are finally at advanced sensitivity — we'll build them, we'll turn on the machines and, bang, we'll catch it — the first song from space. If it was the Big Bang we were going to pick up, it would sound like this. (Static) It's a terrible sound. It's literally the definition of noise. It's white noise; it's such a chaotic ringing. But it's around us everywhere, presumably, if it hasn't been wiped out by some other process in the universe. And if we pick it up, it will be music to our ears because it will be the quiet echo of that moment of our creation, of our observable universe. So within the next few years, we'll be able to turn up the soundtrack a little bit, render the universe in audio. But if we detect those earliest moments, it'll bring us that much closer to an understanding of the Big Bang, which brings us that much closer to asking some of the hardest, most elusive, questions. If we run the movie of our universe backwards, we know that there was a Big Bang in our past, and we might even hear the cacophonous sound of it, but was our Big Bang the only Big Bang? I mean we have to ask, has it happened before? Will it happen again? I mean, in the spirit of rising to TED's challenge to reignite wonder, we can ask questions, at least for this last minute, that honestly might evade us forever. But we have to ask: Is it possible that our universe is just a plume off of some greater history? Or, is it possible that we're just a branch off of a multiverse — each branch with its own Big Bang in its past — maybe some of them with black holes playing drums, maybe some without — maybe some with sentient life, and maybe some without — not in our past, not in our future, but somehow fundamentally connected to us? So we have to wonder, if there is a multiverse, in some other patch of that multiverse, are there creatures? Here's my multiverse creatures. Are there other creatures in the multiverse, wondering about us and wondering about their own origins? And if they are, I can imagine them as we are, calculating, writing computer code, building instruments, trying to detect that faintest sound of their origins and wondering who else is out there. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

A life lesson from a volunteer firefighter

{0: 'Mark Bezos works at Robin Hood, a poverty-fighting charity in New York City, and the assistant captain of a volunteer fire company in suburban New York.'}

TED2011

Back in New York, I am the head of development for a non-profit called Robin Hood. When I'm not fighting poverty, I'm fighting fires as the assistant captain of a volunteer fire company. Now in our town, where the volunteers supplement a highly skilled career staff, you have to get to the fire scene pretty early to get in on any action. I remember my first fire. I was the second volunteer on the scene, so there was a pretty good chance I was going to get in. But still it was a real footrace against the other volunteers to get to the captain in charge to find out what our assignments would be. When I found the captain, he was having a very engaging conversation with the homeowner, who was surely having one of the worst days of her life. Here it was, the middle of the night, she was standing outside in the pouring rain, under an umbrella, in her pajamas, barefoot, while her house was in flames. The other volunteer who had arrived just before me — let's call him Lex Luther — (Laughter) got to the captain first and was asked to go inside and save the homeowner's dog. The dog! I was stunned with jealousy. Here was some lawyer or money manager who, for the rest of his life, gets to tell people that he went into a burning building to save a living creature, just because he beat me by five seconds. Well, I was next. The captain waved me over. He said, "Bezos, I need you to go into the house. I need you to go upstairs, past the fire, and I need you to get this woman a pair of shoes." (Laughter) I swear. So, not exactly what I was hoping for, but off I went — up the stairs, down the hall, past the 'real' firefighters, who were pretty much done putting out the fire at this point, into the master bedroom to get a pair of shoes. Now I know what you're thinking, but I'm no hero. (Laughter) I carried my payload back downstairs where I met my nemesis and the precious dog by the front door. We took our treasures outside to the homeowner, where, not surprisingly, his received much more attention than did mine. A few weeks later, the department received a letter from the homeowner thanking us for the valiant effort displayed in saving her home. The act of kindness she noted above all others: someone had even gotten her a pair of shoes. (Laughter) In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis. And you know what I've learned? They all matter. So as I look around this room at people who either have achieved, or are on their way to achieving, remarkable levels of success, I would offer this reminder: don't wait. Don't wait until you make your first million to make a difference in somebody's life. If you have something to give, give it now. Serve food at a soup kitchen. Clean up a neighborhood park. Be a mentor. Not every day is going to offer us a chance to save somebody's life, but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one. So get in the game. Save the shoes. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Mark, Mark, come back. (Applause) Mark Bezos: Thank you.

Why light needs darkness

{0: 'Rogier van der Heide creates architectural spaces with light.'}

TEDxAmsterdam

There's a beautiful statement on the screen that says, "Light creates ambiance, light makes the feel of a space, and light is also the expression of structure." Well, that was not by me. That was, of course, by Le Corbusier, the famous architect. And here you can see what he meant in one of his beautiful buildings — the chapel Notre Dame Du Haut De Ronchamp — where he creates this light that he could only make because there's also dark. And I think that is the quintessence of this 18-minute talk — that there is no good lighting that is healthy and for our well-being without proper darkness. So this is how we normally would light our offices. We have codes and standards that tell us that the lights should be so much Lux and of great uniformity. This is how we create uniform lighting from one wall to the other in a regular grid of lamps. And that is quite different from what I just showed you from Le Corbusier. If we would apply these codes and standards to the Pantheon in Rome, it would never have looked like this, because this beautiful light feature that goes around there all by itself can only appear because there is also darkness in that same building. And the same is more or less what Santiago Calatrava said when he said, "Light: I make it in my buildings for comfort." And he didn't mean the comfort of a five-course dinner as opposed to a one-course meal, but he really meant the comfort of the quality of the building for the people. He meant that you can see the sky and that you can experience the sun. And he created these gorgeous buildings where you can see the sky, and where you can experience the sun, that give us a better life in the built environment, just because of the relevance of light in its brightness and also in its shadows. And what it all boils down to is, of course, the sun. And this image of the Sun may suggest that the Sun is something evil and aggressive, but we should not forget that all energy on this planet actually comes from the Sun, and light is only a manifestation of that energy. The sun is for dynamics, for color changes. The sun is for beauty in our environment, like in this building — the High Museum in Atlanta, which has been created by Renzo Piano from Italy, together with Arup Lighting, a brilliant team of lighting designers, who created a very subtle modulation of light across the space, responding to what the sun does outside, just because of all these beautiful openings in the roof. So in an indirect way, you can see the sun. And what they did is they created an integral building element to improve the quality of the space that surrounds the visitors of the museum. They created this shade that you can see here, which actually covers the sun, but opens up to the good light from the sky. And here you can see how they really crafted a beautiful design process with physical models, with quantitative as well as qualitative methods, to come to a final solution that is truly integrated and completely holistic with the architecture. They allowed themselves a few mistakes along the way. As you can see here, there's some direct light on the floor, but they could easily figure out where that comes from. And they allow people in that building to really enjoy the sun, the good part of the sun. And enjoying the sun can be in many different ways, of course. It can be just like this, or maybe like this, which is rather peculiar, but this is in 1963 — the viewing of a sun eclipse in the United States. And it's just a bit bright up there, so these people have found a very intriguing solution. This is, I think, a very illustrative image of what I try to say — that the beautiful dynamics of sun, bringing these into the building, creates a quality of our built environment that truly enhances our lives. And this is all about darkness as much as it is about lightness, of course, because otherwise you don't see these dynamics. As opposed to the first office that I showed you in the beginning of the talk, this is a well-known office, which is the Weidt Group. They are in green energy consulting, or something like that. And they really practice what they preach because this office doesn't have any electric lighting at all. It has only, on one side, this big, big glass window that helps to let the sunlight enter deep into the space and create a beautiful quality there and a great dynamic range. So it can be very dim over there, and you do your work, and it can be very bright over there, and you do your work. But actually, the human eye turns out to be remarkably adaptable to all these different light conditions that together create an environment that is never boring and that is never dull, and therefore helps us to enhance our lives. I really owe a short introduction of this man to you. This is Richard Kelly who was born 100 years ago, which is the reason I bring him up now, because it's kind of an anniversary year. In the 1930s, Richard Kelly was the first person to really describe a methodology of modern lighting design. And he coined three terms, which are "focal glow," "ambient luminescence" and "play of the brilliants" — three very distinctly different ideas about light in architecture that all together make up this beautiful experience. So to begin with, focal glow. He meant something like this — where the light gives direction to the space and helps you to get around. Or something like this, which is the lighting design he did for General Motors, for the car showroom. And you enter that space, and you feel like, "Wow! This is so impressive," just because of this focal point, this huge light source in the middle. To me, it is something from theater, and I will get back to that a little bit later. It's the spotlight on the artist that helps you to focus. It could also be the sunlight that breaks through the clouds and lights up a patch of the land, highlighting it compared to the dim environment. Or it can be in today's retail, in the shopping environment — lighting the merchandise and creating accents that help you to get around. Ambient luminescence is something very different. Richard Kelly saw it as something infinite, something without any focus, something where all details actually dissolve in infinity. And I see it as a very comfortable kind of light that really helps us to relax and to contemplate. It could also be something like this: the National Museum of Science in London, where this blue is embracing all the exhibitions and galleries in one large gesture. And then finally, Kelly's play of brilliants added to that really some play, I think, of the skyline of Hong Kong, or perhaps the chandelier in the opera house, or in the theater here, which is the decoration, the icing on the cake, something playful, something that is just an addition to the architectural environment, I would say. These three distinct elements, together, make a lighting environment that helps us to feel better. And we can only create these out of darkness. And I will explain that further. And I guess that is something that Richard Kelly, here on the left, was explaining to Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe. And behind them, you see that Seagram Building that later turned into an icon of modern lighting design. Those times, there were some early attempts also for light therapy already. You can see here a photo from the United States Library of Medicine, where people are put in the sun to get better. It's a little bit of a different story, this health aspect of light, than what I'm telling you today. In today's modern medicine, there is a real understanding of light in an almost biochemical way. And there is the idea that, when we look at things, it is the yellow light that helps us the most, that we are the most sensitive for. But our circadian rhythms, which are the rhythms that help us to wake and sleep and be alert and relaxed and so forth and so on, they are much more triggered by blue light. And by modulating the amount of blue in our environment, we can help people to relax, or to be alert, to fall asleep, or to stay awake. And that is how, maybe in the near future, light can help hospitals to make people better sooner, recover them quicker. Maybe in the airplane, we can overcome jet lag like that. Perhaps in school, we can help children to learn better because they concentrate more on their work. And you can imagine a lot more applications. But I would like to talk further about the combination of light and darkness as a quality in our life. So light is, of course, for social interaction also — to create relationships with all the features around us. It is the place where we gather around when we have to say something to each other. And it is all about this planet. But when you look at this planet at night, it looks like this. And I think this is the most shocking image in my talk today. Because all this light here goes up to the sky. It never reaches the ground where it was meant for. It never is to the benefit of people. It only spoils the darkness. So at a global scale, it looks like this. And, I mean, that is quite amazing, what you see here — how much light goes up into the sky and never reaches the ground. Because if we look at the Earth the way it should be, it would be something like this very inspiring image where darkness is for our imagination and for contemplation and to help us to relate to everything. The world is changing though, and urbanization is a big driver of everything. I took this photo two weeks ago in Guangzhou, and I realized that 10 years ago, there was nothing like this, of these buildings. It was just a much smaller city, and the pace of urbanization is incredible and enormous. And we have to understand these main questions: How do people move through these new urban spaces? How do they share their culture? How do we tackle things like mobility? And how can light help there? Because the new technologies, they seem to be in a really interesting position to contribute to the solutions of urbanization and to provide us with better environments. It's not that long ago that our lighting was just done with these kinds of lamps. And of course, we had the metal-halide lamps and fluorescent lamps and things like that. Now we have LED, but here you see the latest one, and you see how incredibly small it is. And this is exactly what offers us a unique opportunity, because this tiny, tiny size allows us to put the light wherever we really need it. And we can actually leave it out where it's not needed at all and where we can preserve darkness. So that is a really interesting proposition, I think, and a new way of lighting the architectural environment with our well-being in mind. The problem is, though, that I wanted to explain to you how this really works — but I can have four of these on my finger, so you would not be able to really see them. So I asked our laboratory to do something about it, and they said, "Well, we can do something." They created for me the biggest LED in the world especially for TEDx in Amsterdam. So here it is. It's the same thing as you can see over there — just 200 times bigger. And I will very quickly show you how it works. So just to explain. Now, every LED that is made these days gives blue light. Now, this is not very pleasant and comfortable. And for that reason, we cover the LED with a phosphor cap. And the phosphor is excited by the blue and makes the light white and warm and pleasant. And then when you add the lens to that, you can bundle the light and send it wherever you need it without any need to spill any light to the sky or anywhere else. So you can preserve the darkness and make the light. I just wanted to show that to you so you understand how this works. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) We can go further. So we have to rethink the way we light our cities. We have to think again about light as a default solution. Why are all these motorways permanently lit? Is it really needed? Can we maybe be much more selective and create better environments that also benefit from darkness? Can we be much more gentle with light? Like here — this is a very low light level actually. Can we engage people more in the lighting projects that we create, so they really want to connect with it, like here? Or can we create simply sculptures that are very inspiring to be in and to be around? And can we preserve the darkness? Because to find a place like this today on Earth is really very, very challenging. And to find a starry sky like this is even more difficult. Even in the oceans, we are creating a lot of light that we could actually ban also for animal life to have a much greater well-being. And it's known that migrating birds, for example, get very disoriented because of these offshore platforms. And we discovered that when we make those lights green, the birds, they actually go the right way. They are not disturbed anymore. And it turns out once again that spectral sensitivity is very important here. In all of these examples, I think, we should start making the light out of darkness, and use the darkness as a canvas — like the visual artists do, like Edward Hopper in this painting. I think that there is a lot of suspense in this painting. I think, when I see it, I start to think, who are those people? Where have they come from? Where are they going? What just happened? What will be happening in the next five minutes? And it only embodies all these stories and all this suspense because of the darkness and the light. Edward Hopper was a real master in creating the narration by working with light and dark. And we can learn from that and create more interesting and inspiring architectural environments. We can do that in commercial spaces like this. And you can still also go outside and enjoy the greatest show in the universe, which is, of course, the universe itself. So I give you this wonderful, informative image of the sky, ranging from the inner city, where you may see one or two stars and nothing else, all the way to the rural environments, where you can enjoy this great and gorgeous and beautiful performance of the constellations and the stars. In architecture, it works just the same. By appreciating the darkness when you design the light, you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives. This is the most well-known example, Tadao Ando's Church of the Light. But I also think of Peter Zumthor's spa in Vals, where light and dark, in very gentle combinations, alter each other to define the space. Or Richard MacCormac's Southwark tube station in London, where you can really see the sky, even though you are under the ground. And finally, I want to point out that a lot of this inspiration comes from theater. And I think it's fantastic that we are today experiencing TEDx in a theater for the first time because I think we really owe to the theater a big thanks. It wouldn't be such an inspiring scenography without this theater. And I think the theater is a place where we truly enhance life with light. Thank you very much. (Applause)

If I should have a daughter ...

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

TED2011

If I should have a daughter, instead of "Mom," she's going to call me "Point B," because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "Oh, I know that like the back of my hand." And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry. So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself, because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I've tried. "And, baby," I'll tell her, don't keep your nose up in the air like that. I know that trick; I've done it a million times. You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him. But I know she will anyway, so instead I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix. Okay, there's a few that chocolate can't fix. But that's what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything, if you let it. I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that's the way my mom taught me. That there'll be days like this. (Singing) There'll be days like this, my momma said. When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape; when your boots will fill with rain, and you'll be up to your knees in disappointment. And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you. Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away. You will put the wind in win some, lose some. You will put the star in starting over, and over. And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it. "Baby," I'll tell her, "remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more." Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things. Always apologize when you've done something wrong, but don't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining. Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing. And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true. They can be about whatever you want — technology, entertainment, design, your family, what you had for breakfast. The only rule is don't think too hard. Okay, ready? Go. Okay. So here are three things I know to be true. I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, "A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order." I know that I'm incredibly nervous and excited to be up here, which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool. (Laughter) And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke. (Laughter) Why was the scarecrow invited to TED? Because he was out standing in his field. (Laughter) I'm sorry. Okay, so these are three things I know to be true. But there are plenty of things I have trouble understanding. So I write poems to figure things out. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. Sometimes I get to the end of the poem, look back and go, "Oh, that's what this is all about," and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it. Spoken-word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person. When I was a freshman in high school, I was a live wire of nervous hormones. And I was underdeveloped and over-excitable. And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken-word poetry. I felt that my two secret loves, poetry and theater, had come together, had a baby, a baby I needed to get to know. So I decided to give it a try. My first spoken-word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken-word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that's what was expected of me. The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking. I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand, but instead she just nodded at me and said, "Hey, I really felt that. Thanks." And lightning struck. I was hooked. I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open Mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could. I was the youngest by at least a decade, but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about. In fact, they welcomed me. And it was here, listening to these poets share their stories, that I learned that spoken-word poetry didn't have to be indignant, it could be fun or painful or serious or silly. The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom and my home, and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well. Never mind the fact that I was 14. They told me, "Write about being 14." So I did and stood amazed every week when these brilliant, grown-up poets laughed with me and groaned their sympathy and clapped and told me, "Hey, I really felt that too." Now I can divide my spoken-word journey into three steps. Step one was the moment I said, "I can. I can do this." And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie. Step two was the moment I said, "I will. I will continue. I love spoken word. I will keep coming back week after week." And step three began when I realized I didn't have to write indignant poems, if that's not what I was. There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine. It's not just the adage "Write what you know." It's about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you've collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don't know. I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been. When I got to university, I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken-word poetry. And actually, Phil Kaye and I coincidentally also share the same last name. When I was in high school I had created Project V.O.I.C.E. as a way to encourage my friends to do spoken word with me. But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project V.O.I.C.E., this time changing the mission to using spoken-word poetry as a way to entertain, educate and inspire. We stayed full-time students, but in between we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates, from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus. And we saw over and over the way that spoken-word poetry cracks open locks. But it turns out sometimes, poetry can be really scary. Turns out sometimes, you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry. So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists. And the first list that I assign is "10 Things I Know to be True." And here's what happens, you would discover it too if we all started sharing our lists out loud. At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing, or one thing very similar, to something on your list. And then someone else has something the complete opposite of yours. Third, someone has something you've never even heard of before. Fourth, someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they're introducing a new angle of looking at it. And I tell people that this is where great stories start from — these four intersections of what you're passionate about and what others might be invested in. And most people respond really well to this exercise. But one of my students, a freshman named Charlotte, was not convinced. Charlotte was very good at writing lists, but she refused to write any poems. "Miss," she'd say, "I'm just not interesting. I don't have anything interesting to say." So I assigned her list after list, and one day I assigned the list "10 Things I Should Have Learned by Now." Number three on Charlotte's list was, "I should have learned not to crush on guys three times my age." I asked her what that meant, and she said, "Miss, it's kind of a long story." And I said, "Charlotte, it sounds pretty interesting to me." And so she wrote her first poem, a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before. And the poem began, "Anderson Cooper is a gorgeous man." (Laughter) "Did you see him on 60 Minutes, racing Michael Phelps in a pool — nothing but swim trunks on — diving in the water, determined to beat this swimming champion? After the race, he tossed his wet, cloud-white hair and said, 'You're a god.' No, Anderson, you're the god." (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. Somebody once told me it's like walking through life like this. You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up. But I try to walk through life like this. And yes, that means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things just fall out of the sky, I'm ready to catch them. I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it. It's not that I think that spoken-word poetry is the ideal art form. I'm always trying to find the best way to tell each story. I write musicals; I make short films alongside my poems. But I teach spoken-word poetry because it's accessible. Not everyone can read music or owns a camera, but everyone can communicate in some way, and everyone has stories that the rest of us can learn from. Plus, spoken-word poetry allows for immediate connection. It's not uncommon to feel like you're alone or that nobody understands you, but spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions, you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers, or your community, who will listen. And maybe even a giant girl in a hoodie who will connect with what you've shared. And that is an amazing realization to have, especially when you're 14. Plus, now with YouTube, that connection's not even limited to the room we're in. I'm so lucky that there's this archive of performances that I can share with my students. It allows for even more opportunities for them to find a poet or a poem that they connect to. Once you've figured this out, it is tempting to keep writing the same poem, or keep telling the same story, over and over, once you've figured out that it will gain you applause. It's not enough to just teach that you can express yourself. You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself. And that is step three: infusing the work you're doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing. Because step three never ends. But you don't get to start on step three, until you take step one first: "I can." I travel a lot while I'm teaching, and I don't always get to watch all of my students reach their step three, but I was very lucky with Charlotte, that I got to watch her journey unfold the way it did. I watched her realize that, by putting the things that she knows to be true into the work she's doing, she can create poems that only Charlotte can write, about eyeballs and elevators and Dora the Explorer. And I'm trying to tell stories only I can tell — like this story. I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story, and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint, a short film — And where exactly was the beginning, the middle or the end? I wondered whether I'd get to the end of this talk and finally have figured it all out, or not. And I always thought that my beginning was at the Bowery Poetry Club, but it's possible that it was much earlier. In preparing for TED, I discovered this diary page in an old journal. I think December 54th was probably supposed to be 24th. It's clear that when I was a child, I definitely walked through life like this. I think that we all did. I would like to help others rediscover that wonder — to want to engage with it, to want to learn, to want to share what they've learned, what they've figured out to be true and what they're still figuring out. So I'd like to close with this poem. When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini-supernova, so every living animal, human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash. And what was left of the city soon followed. The long-lasting damage of nuclear radiation caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder. When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, "This? I've done this before." She says I have old eyes. When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby." And yet, for someone who's apparently done this already, I still haven't figured anything out yet. My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed. My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name. In the original story, God told Sarah she could do something impossible, and — she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible. And me? Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk — they hear you. They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth — that impossible connection. There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone. The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But in that instant, I get to share your present. And you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible — I'll probably laugh at you. I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it — and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I'll share. But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

The magic washing machine

{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.'}

TEDWomen 2010

I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. That was a great day for my mother. My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine, and the first day it was going to be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine. (Laughter) And Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life, she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand-washed laundry for seven children. And now, she was going to watch electricity do that work. My mother carefully opened the door, and she loaded the laundry into the machine, like this. And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, "No, no, no, no! Let me! Let me push the button!" (Laughter) And Grandma pushed the button, and she said, "Oh, fantastic! I want to see this! Give me a chair! Give me a chair! I want to see it," and she sat down in front of the machine, and she watched the entire washing program. (Laughter) She was mesmerized. To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle. Today, in Sweden and other rich countries, people are using so many different machines. Look — the homes are full of machines. I can't even name them all. And they also, when they want to travel, they use flying machines that can take them to remote destinations. And yet, in the world, there are so many people who still heat the water on fire, and they cook their food on fire. Sometimes they don't even have enough food. And they live below the poverty line. There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than two dollars a day. And the richest people over there — there's one billion people, and they live above what I call the "air line" — (Laughter) because they spend more than 80 dollars a day on their consumption. But this is just one, two, three billion people, and obviously, there are seven billion people in the world, so there must be one, two, three, four billion people more who live in between the poverty and the air line. They have electricity, but the question is: How many have washing machines? I've done the scrutiny of market data, and I've found that, indeed, the washing machine has penetrated below the air line, and today, there's an additional one billion people out there who live above the "wash line." (Laughter) And they consume for more than 40 dollars per day. So two billion have access to washing machines. And the remaining five billion — how do they wash? Or, to be more precise, how do most of the women in the world wash? Because it remains the hard work for women to wash. They wash like this: by hand. It's hard, time-consuming labor, which they have to do for hours every week. And sometimes they also have to bring water from far away to do the laundry at home, or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off. And they want the washing machine. They don't want to spend such a large part of their life doing this hard work with so relatively low productivity. And there's nothing different in their wish than it was for my grandma. Look here, two generations ago in Sweden — picking water from the stream, heating with firewood and washing like that. They want the washing machine in exactly the same way. But when I lecture to environmentally concerned students, they tell me, "No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines." How can we tell this woman that she isn't going to have a washing machine? And then I ask my students — over the last two years, I've asked — "How many of you don't use a car?" And some of them proudly raise their hand and say, "I don't use a car." And then I put the really tough question: "How many of you hand-wash your jeans and your bedsheets?" And no one raised their hand. Even the hardcore in the green movement use washing machines. (Laughter) So how come [this is] something that everyone uses and they think others will not stop it? What is special with this? I had to do an analysis about the energy use in the world. Here we are. Look here. You see the seven billion people up there? The air people, the wash people, the bulb people and the fire people. One unit like this is an energy unit of fossil fuel — oil, coal or gas. That's what most of the electricity and the energy in the world is. And it's 12 units used in the entire world, and the richest one billion, they use six of them. Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world population. And these ones, who have washing machines but not a house full of other machines, they use two. This group uses three, one each. And they also have electricity. And over there, they don't even use one each. That makes 12 of them. But the main concern for the environmentally interested students — and they are right — is about the future. What are the trends? If we just prolong the trends, without any real advanced analysis, to 2050, there are two things that can increase the energy use: first, population growth; second, economic growth. Population growth will mainly occur among the poorest people here, because they have high child mortality and they have many children per woman. And that will get you two extra, but that won't change the energy use very much. What will happen is economic growth. The best of here in the emerging economies — I call them "the New East" — they will jump the air line. "Wopp!" they will say. And they will start to use as much as the Old West are doing already. (Laughter) And these people, they want the washing machine. I told you. They'll go there. And they will double their energy use. And we hope that the poor people will get into the electric light. And they'll get a two-child family without a stop in population growth. But the total energy consumption will increase to 22 units. And these 22 units — still, the richest people use most of them. So what needs to be done? Because the risk, the high probability of climate change is real. It's real. Of course, they must be more energy efficient. They must change their behavior in some way. They must also start to produce green energy, much more green energy. But until they have the same energy consumption per person, they shouldn't give advice to others — what to do and what not to do. (Laughter) (Applause) Here, we can get more green energy all over. This is what we hope might happen. It's a real challenge in the future. But I can assure you that this woman in the favela in Rio, she wants a washing machine. She's very happy about her minister of energy that provided electricity to everyone — so happy that she even voted for her. And she became Dilma Rousseff, the president-elect of one of the biggest democracies in the world, moving from minister of energy to president. If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They love them! (Laughter) And what's the magic with them? My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, "Now, Hans. We have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library." Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children's books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the "ABC's" — this is why I started my career as a professor, when my mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for herself. She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. And we really, we really loved this machine. (Laughter) And what we said, my mother and me, "Thank you, industrialization. Thank you, steel mill. Thank you, power station. And thank you, chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books." Thank you very much. (Laughter) (Applause)

Evolution's gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans

{0: 'Isabel Behncke applies an evolutionary lens to human questions like: Why do we play?'}

TED2011

I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival. It's a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello, and play rules the day — where fun is serious business. And no, this isn't Burning Man or San Francisco. (Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, meet your cousins. This is the world of wild bonobos in the jungles of Congo. Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your living closest relative. That means we all share a common ancestor, an evolutionary grandmother, who lived around six million years ago. Now, chimpanzees are well-known for their aggression. (Laughter) But unfortunately, we have made too much of an emphasis of this aspect in our narratives of human evolution. But bonobos show us the other side of the coin. While chimpanzees are dominated by big, scary guys, bonobo society is run by empowered females. These guys have really worked something out, since this leads to a highly tolerant society where fatal violence has not been observed yet. But unfortunately, bonobos are the least understood of the great apes. They live in the depths of the Congolese jungle, and it has been very difficult to study them. The Congo is a paradox — a land of extraordinary biodiversity and beauty, but also the heart of darkness itself — the scene of a violent conflict that has raged for decades and claimed nearly as many lives as the First World War. Not surprisingly, this destruction also endangers bonobo survival. Bushmeat trades and forest loss means we couldn't fill a small stadium with all the bonobos that are left in the world — and we're not even sure of that to be honest. Yet, in this land of violence and chaos, you can hear hidden laughter swaying the trees. Who are these cousins? We know them as the "make love, not war" apes since they have frequent, promiscuous and bisexual sex to manage conflict and solve social issues. Now, I'm not saying this is the solution to all of humanity's problems — since there's more to bonobo life than the Kama Sutra. Bonobos, like humans, love to play throughout their entire lives. Play is not just child's games. For us and them, play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance. It's where we learn to trust and where we learn about the rules of the game. Play increases creativity and resilience, and it's all about the generation of diversity — diversity of interactions, diversity of behaviors, diversity of connections. And when you watch bonobo play, you're seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter, dance and ritual. Play is the glue that binds us together. Now, I don't know how you play, but I want to show you a couple of unique clips fresh from the wild. First, it's a ball game bonobo-style — and I do not mean football. So here, we have a young female and a male engaged in a chase game. Have a look what she's doing. It might be the evolutionary origin of the phrase, "she's got him by the balls." (Laughter) Only I think that he's rather loving it here, right? Yeah. (Laughter) So sex play is common in both bonobos and humans. And this video is really interesting because it shows — this video's really interesting because it shows the inventiveness of bringing unusual elements into play — such as testicles — and also how play both requires trust and fosters trust — while at the same time being tremendous fun. But play's a shapeshifter. (Laughter) Play's a shapeshifter, and it can take many forms, some of which are more quiet, imaginative, curious — maybe where wonder is discovered anew. And I want you to see, this is Fuku, a young female, and she is quietly playing with water. I think, like her, we sometimes play alone, and we explore the boundaries of our inner and our outer worlds. And it's that playful curiosity that drives us to explore, drives us to interact, and then the unexpected connections we form are the real hotbed for creativity. So these are just small tasters into the insights that bonobo give us to our past and present. But they also hold a secret for our future, a future where we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation. The secret is that play is the key to these capacities. In other words, play is our adaptive wildcard. In order to adapt successfully to a changing world, we need to play. But will we make the most of our playfulness? Play is not frivolous. Play's essential. For bonobos and humans alike, life is not just red in tooth and claw. In times when it seems least appropriate to play, it might be the times when it is most urgent. And so, my fellow primates, let us embrace this gift from evolution and play together, as we rediscover creativity, fellowship and wonder. Thank you. (Applause)

It's time to question bio-engineering

{0: "Paul Root Wolpe examines the ethical implications of new science -- genetic modification, neuroscience and other breakthroughs that stretch our current philosophy to the breaking point. He's the chief bioethicist at NASA, among other appointments."}

TEDxPeachtree

Today I want to talk about design, but not design as we usually think about it. I want to talk about what is happening now in our scientific, biotechnological culture, where, for really the first time in history, we have the power to design bodies, to design animal bodies, to design human bodies. In the history of our planet, there have been three great waves of evolution. The first wave of evolution is what we think of as Darwinian evolution. So, as you all know, species lived in particular ecological niches and particular environments, and the pressures of those environments selected which changes, through random mutation in species, were going to be preserved. Then human beings stepped out of the Darwinian flow of evolutionary history and created the second great wave of evolution, which was we changed the environment in which we evolved. We altered our ecological niche by creating civilization. And that has been the second great — couple 100,000 years, 150,000 years — flow of our evolution. By changing our environment, we put new pressures on our bodies to evolve. Whether it was through settling down in agricultural communities, all the way through modern medicine, we have changed our own evolution. Now we're entering a third great wave of evolutionary history, which has been called many things: "intentional evolution," "evolution by design" — very different than intelligent design — whereby we are actually now intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planet. So I want to take you through a kind of whirlwind tour of that and then at the end talk a little bit about what some of the implications are for us and for our species, as well as our cultures, because of this change. Now we actually have been doing it for a long time. We started selectively breeding animals many, many thousands of years ago. And if you think of dogs for example, dogs are now intentionally-designed creatures. There isn't a dog on this earth that's a natural creature. Dogs are the result of selectively breeding traits that we like. But we had to do it the hard way in the old days by choosing offspring that looked a particular way and then breeding them. We don't have to do it that way anymore. This is a beefalo. A beefalo is a buffalo-cattle hybrid. And they are now making them, and someday, perhaps pretty soon, you will have beefalo patties in your local supermarket. This is a geep, a goat-sheep hybrid. The scientists that made this cute little creature ended up slaughtering it and eating it afterwards. I think they said it tasted like chicken. This is a cama. A cama is a camel-llama hybrid, created to try to get the hardiness of a camel with some of the personality traits of a llama. And they are now using these in certain cultures. Then there's the liger. This is the largest cat in the world — the lion-tiger hybrid. It's bigger than a tiger. And in the case of the liger, there actually have been one or two that have been seen in the wild. But these were created by scientists using both selective breeding and genetic technology. And then finally, everybody's favorite, the zorse. None of this is Photoshopped. These are real creatures. And so one of the things we've been doing is using genetic enhancement, or genetic manipulation, of normal selective breeding pushed a little bit through genetics. And if that were all this was about, then it would be an interesting thing. But something much, much more powerful is happening now. These are normal mammalian cells genetically engineered with a bioluminescent gene taken out of deep-sea jellyfish. We all know that some deep-sea creatures glow. Well, they've now taken that gene, that bioluminescent gene, and put it into mammal cells. These are normal cells. And what you see here is these cells glowing in the dark under certain wavelengths of light. Once they could do that with cells, they could do it with organisms. So they did it with mouse pups, kittens. And by the way, the reason the kittens here are orange and these are green is because that's a bioluminescent gene from coral, while this is from jellyfish. They did it with pigs. They did it with puppies. And, in fact, they did it with monkeys. And if you can do it with monkeys — though the great leap in trying to genetically manipulate is actually between monkeys and apes — if they can do it in monkeys, they can probably figure out how to do it in apes, which means they can do it in human beings. In other words, it is theoretically possible that before too long we will be biotechnologically capable of creating human beings that glow in the dark. Be easier to find us at night. And in fact, right now in many states, you can go out and you can buy bioluminescent pets. These are zebra fish. They're normally black and silver. These are zebra fish that have been genetically engineered to be yellow, green, red, and they are actually available now in certain states. Other states have banned them. Nobody knows what to do with these kinds of creatures. There is no area of the government — not the EPA or the FDA — that controls genetically-engineered pets. And so some states have decided to allow them, some states have decided to ban them. Some of you may have read about the FDA's consideration right now of genetically-engineered salmon. The salmon on top is a genetically engineered Chinook salmon, using a gene from these salmon and from one other fish that we eat, to make it grow much faster using a lot less feed. And right now the FDA is trying to make a final decision on whether, pretty soon, you could be eating this fish — it'll be sold in the stores. And before you get too worried about it, here in the United States, the majority of food you buy in the supermarket already has genetically-modified components to it. So even as we worry about it, we have allowed it to go on in this country — much different in Europe — without any regulation, and even without any identification on the package. These are all the first cloned animals of their type. So in the lower right here, you have Dolly, the first cloned sheep — now happily stuffed in a museum in Edinburgh; Ralph the rat, the first cloned rat; CC the cat, for cloned cat; Snuppy, the first cloned dog — Snuppy for Seoul National University puppy — created in South Korea by the very same man that some of you may remember had to end up resigning in disgrace because he claimed he had cloned a human embryo, which he had not. He actually was the first person to clone a dog, which is a very difficult thing to do, because dog genomes are very plastic. This is Prometea, the first cloned horse. It's a Haflinger horse cloned in Italy, a real "gold ring" of cloning, because there are many horses that win important races who are geldings. In other words, the equipment to put them out to stud has been removed. But if you can clone that horse, you can have both the advantage of having a gelding run in the race and his identical genetic duplicate can then be put out to stud. These were the first cloned calves, the first cloned grey wolves, and then, finally, the first cloned piglets: Alexis, Chista, Carrel, Janie and Dotcom. (Laughter) In addition, we've started to use cloning technology to try to save endangered species. This is the use of animals now to create drugs and other things in their bodies that we want to create. So with antithrombin in that goat — that goat has been genetically modified so that the molecules of its milk actually include the molecule of antithrombin that GTC Genetics wants to create. And then in addition, transgenic pigs, knockout pigs, from the National Institute of Animal Science in South Korea, are pigs that they are going to use, in fact, to try to create all kinds of drugs and other industrial types of chemicals that they want the blood and the milk of these animals to produce for them, instead of producing them in an industrial way. These are two creatures that were created in order to save endangered species. The guar is an endangered Southeast Asian ungulate. A somatic cell, a body cell, was taken from its body, gestated in the ovum of a cow, and then that cow gave birth to a guar. Same thing happened with the mouflon, where it's an endangered species of sheep. It was gestated in a regular sheep body, which actually raises an interesting biological problem. We have two kinds of DNA in our bodies. We have our nucleic DNA that everybody thinks of as our DNA, but we also have DNA in our mitochondria, which are the energy packets of the cell. That DNA is passed down through our mothers. So really, what you end up having here is not a guar and not a mouflon, but a guar with cow mitochondria, and therefore cow mitochondrial DNA, and a mouflon with another species of sheep's mitochondrial DNA. These are really hybrids, not pure animals. And it raises the question of how we're going to define animal species in the age of biotechnology — a question that we're not really sure yet how to solve. This lovely creature is an Asian cockroach. And what they've done here is they've put electrodes in its ganglia and its brain and then a transmitter on top, and it's on a big computer tracking ball. And now, using a joystick, they can send this creature around the lab and control whether it goes left or right, forwards or backwards. They've created a kind of insect bot, or bugbot. It gets worse than that — or perhaps better than that. This actually is one of DARPA's very important — DARPA is the Defense Research Agency — one of their projects. These goliath beetles are wired in their wings. They have a computer chip strapped to their backs, and they can fly these creatures around the lab. They can make them go left, right. They can make them take off. They can't actually make them land. They put them about one inch above the ground, and then they shut everything off and they go pfft. But it's the closest they can get to a landing. And in fact, this technology has gotten so developed that this creature — this is a moth — this is the moth in its pupa stage, and that's when they put the wires in and they put in the computer technology, so that when the moth actually emerges as a moth, it is already prewired. The wires are already in its body, and they can just hook it up to their technology, and now they've got these bugbots that they can send out for surveillance. They can put little cameras on them and perhaps someday deliver other kinds of ordinance to warzones. It's not just insects. This is the ratbot, or the robo-rat by Sanjiv Talwar at SUNY Downstate. Again, it's got technology — it's got electrodes going into its left and right hemispheres; it's got a camera on top of its head. The scientists can make this creature go left, right. They have it running through mazes, controlling where it's going. They've now created an organic robot. The graduate students in Sanjiv Talwar's lab said, "Is this ethical? We've taken away the autonomy of this animal." I'll get back to that in a minute. There's also been work done with monkeys. This is Miguel Nicolelis of Duke. He took owl monkeys, wired them up so that a computer watched their brains while they moved, especially looking at the movement of their right arm. The computer learned what the monkey brain did to move its arm in various ways. They then hooked it up to a prosthetic arm, which you see here in the picture, put the arm in another room. Pretty soon, the computer learned, by reading the monkey's brainwaves, to make that arm in the other room do whatever the monkey's arm did. Then he put a video monitor in the monkey's cage that showed the monkey this prosthetic arm, and the monkey got fascinated. The monkey recognized that whatever she did with her arm, this prosthetic arm would do. And eventually she was moving it and moving it, and eventually stopped moving her right arm and, staring at the screen, could move the prosthetic arm in the other room only with her brainwaves — which means that monkey became the first primate in the history of the world to have three independent functional arms. And it's not just technology that we're putting into animals. This is Thomas DeMarse at the University of Florida. He took 20,000 and then 60,000 disaggregated rat neurons — so these are just individual neurons from rats — put them on a chip. They self-aggregated into a network, became an integrated chip. And he used that as the IT piece of a mechanism which ran a flight simulator. So now we have organic computer chips made out of living, self-aggregating neurons. Finally, Mussa-Ivaldi of Northwestern took a completely intact, independent lamprey eel brain. This is a brain from a lamprey eel. It is living — fully-intact brain in a nutrient medium with these electrodes going off to the sides, attached photosensitive sensors to the brain, put it into a cart — here's the cart, the brain is sitting there in the middle — and using this brain as the sole processor for this cart, when you turn on a light and shine it at the cart, the cart moves toward the light; when you turn it off, it moves away. It's photophilic. So now we have a complete living lamprey eel brain. Is it thinking lamprey eel thoughts, sitting there in its nutrient medium? I don't know, but in fact it is a fully living brain that we have managed to keep alive to do our bidding. So, we are now at the stage where we are creating creatures for our own purposes. This is a mouse created by Charles Vacanti of the University of Massachusetts. He altered this mouse so that it was genetically engineered to have skin that was less immunoreactive to human skin, put a polymer scaffolding of an ear under it and created an ear that could then be taken off the mouse and transplanted onto a human being. Genetic engineering coupled with polymer physiotechnology coupled with xenotransplantation. This is where we are in this process. Finally, not that long ago, Craig Venter created the first artificial cell, where he took a cell, took a DNA synthesizer, which is a machine, created an artificial genome, put it in a different cell — the genome was not of the cell he put it in — and that cell then reproduced as the other cell. In other words, that was the first creature in the history of the world that had a computer as its parent — it did not have an organic parent. And so, asks The Economist: "The first artificial organism and its consequences." So you may have thought that the creation of life was going to happen in something that looked like that. (Laughter) But in fact, that's not what Frankenstein's lab looks like. This is what Frankenstein's lab looks like. This is a DNA synthesizer, and here at the bottom are just bottles of A, T, C and G — the four chemicals that make up our DNA chain. And so, we need to ask ourselves some questions. For the first time in the history of this planet, we are able to directly design organisms. We can manipulate the plasmas of life with unprecedented power, and it confers on us a responsibility. Is everything okay? Is it okay to manipulate and create whatever creatures we want? Do we have free reign to design animals? Do we get to go someday to Pets 'R' Us and say, "Look, I want a dog. I'd like it to have the head of a Dachshund, the body of a retriever, maybe some pink fur, and let's make it glow in the dark"? Does industry get to create creatures who, in their milk, in their blood, and in their saliva and other bodily fluids, create the drugs and industrial molecules we want and then warehouse them as organic manufacturing machines? Do we get to create organic robots, where we remove the autonomy from these animals and turn them just into our playthings? And then the final step of this, once we perfect these technologies in animals and we start using them in human beings, what are the ethical guidelines that we will use then? It's already happening. It's not science fiction. We are not only already using these things in animals, some of them we're already beginning to use on our own bodies. We are now taking control of our own evolution. We are directly designing the future of the species of this planet. It confers upon us an enormous responsibility that is not just the responsibility of the scientists and the ethicists who are thinking about it and writing about it now. It is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future. Thanks. (Applause)

Human exoskeletons -- for war and healing

{0: 'Eythor Bender is the CEO of Berkeley Bionics, which augments humans with wearable, powered and artificially intelligent devices called exoskeletons or "wearable robots."'}

TED2011

I want you now to imagine a wearable robot that gives you superhuman abilities, or another one that takes wheelchair users up standing and walking again. We at Berkeley Bionics call these robots exoskeletons. These are nothing else than something that you put on in the morning, and it will give you extra strength, and it will further enhance your speed, and it will help you, for instance, to manage your balance. It is actually the true integration of the man and the machine. But not only that — it will integrate and network you to the universe and other devices out there. This is just not some blue sky thinking. To show you now what we are working on by starting out talking about the American soldier, that on average does carry about 100 lbs. on their backs, and they are being asked to carry more equipment. Obviously, this is resulting in some major complications — back injuries, 30 percent of them — chronic back injuries. So we thought we would look at this challenge and create an exoskeleton that would help deal with this issue. So let me now introduce to you HULC — or the Human Universal Load Carrier. Soldier: With the HULC exoskeleton, I can carry 200 lbs. over varied terrain for many hours. Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and high-agility movements. It senses what I want to do, where I want to go, and then augments my strength and endurance. Eythor Bender: We are ready with our industry partner to introduce this device, this new exoskeleton this year. So this is for real. Now let's turn our heads towards the wheelchair users, something that I'm particularly passionate about. There are 68 million people estimated to be in wheelchairs worldwide. This is about one percent of the total population. And that's actually a conservative estimate. We are talking here about, oftentimes, very young individuals with spinal cord injuries, that in the prime of their life — 20s, 30s, 40s — hit a wall and the wheelchair's the only option. But it is also the aging population that is multiplying in numbers. And the only option, pretty much — when it's stroke or other complications — is the wheelchair. And that is actually for the last 500 years, since its very successful introduction, I must say. So we thought we would start writing a brand new chapter of mobility. Let me now introduce you to eLEGS that is worn by Amanda Boxtel that 19 years ago was spinal cord injured, and as a result of that she has not been able to walk for 19 years until now. (Applause) Amanda Boxtel: Thank you. (Applause) EB: Amanda is wearing our eLEGS set. It has sensors. It's completely non-invasive, sensors in the crutches that send signals back to our onboard computer that is sitting here at her back. There are battery packs here as well that power motors that are sitting at her hips, as well as her knee joints, that move her forward in this kind of smooth and very natural gait. AB: I was 24 years old and at the top of my game when a freak summersault while downhill skiing paralyzed me. In a split second, I lost all sensation and movement below my pelvis. Not long afterwards, a doctor strode into my hospital room, and he said, "Amanda, you'll never walk again." And that was 19 yeas ago. He robbed every ounce of hope from my being. Adaptive technology has since enabled me to learn how to downhill ski again, to rock climb and even handcycle. But nothing has been invented that enables me to walk, until now. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) EB: As you can see, we have the technology, we have the platforms to sit down and have discussions with you. It's in our hands, and we have all the potential here to change the lives of future generations — not only for the soldiers, or for Amanda here and all the wheelchair users, but for everyone. AB: Thanks. (Applause)

Singing the primal mystery

{0: 'Amsterdam-based singer Claron McFadden sings many of the major oratorio works, but is perhaps best known for her readings of modern and contemporary music.'}

TEDxAmsterdam

(Singing) (Singing ends) (Applause) Pep Rosenfeld: Folks, you've just met Claron McFadden. She is a world-class soprano singer who studied in Rochester, New York. Her celebrated operatic roles are numerous and varied. In August 2007, Claron was awarded the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts, winning praise for her brilliance, her amazing and extensively wide repertoire and her vivid stage personality. Please welcome Claron McFadden. (Applause) Claron McFadden: The human voice: mysterious, spontaneous, primal. For me, the human voice is the vessel on which all emotions travel — except, perhaps, jealousy. And the breath, the breath is the captain of that vessel. A child is born, takes its first breath — (Inhales) Whah! And we behold the wondrous beauty of vocal expression — mysterious, spontaneous and primal. A few years ago, I did a meditation retreat in Thailand. I wanted a place where I would have total silence and total solitude. I spent two weeks at this retreat in my own little hut — no music, no nothing — sounds of nature, trying to find the essence of concentration, being in the moment. On my last day, the woman who looked after the place, she came and we spoke for a minute, and then she said to me, "Would you sing something for me?" And I thought, but this is a place of total quiet and silence. I can't make noise. She said, "Please, sing for me." So I closed my eyes, I took breath and the first thing that came up and out was "Summertime," Porgy and Bess. (Singing) Summertime and the livin' is easy. Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high. Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin'. So hush little baby, don't you cry. And I opened my eyes, and I saw that she had her eyes closed. And after a moment, she opened her eyes and she looked at me and she said, "It's like meditation." And in that moment I understood that everything I had gone to Thailand to look for, to search for, I had it already in my singing — the calm, but alertness, the focus, but awareness, and being totally in the moment. When you're totally in the moment — when I'm totally in the moment, the vessel of expression is open. The emotions can flow from me to you and back. It's an extremely profound experience. There's a piece by a composer, an American composer called John Cage. It's called "Aria." It was written for an amazing singer called Cathy Berberian. And the thing about this piece that's so special — if you see it behind me — it's not notated in any way. No notes, no flats, no sharps. But it's a kind of structure. And the singer, within this structure, has total freedom to be creative, spontaneous. For example, there are different colors and each color gets a different type of singing — pop, country and western, opera, jazz — and you just have to be consistent with that color. You see there are different lines. You choose in your own tempo in your own way to follow the line, but you must respect it, more or less. And these little dots, these represent a sort of sound that's not a vocal, not a lyrical way of expressing the voice. Using the body — it could be sneezing, it could be coughing, animals — (Audience member coughs) Exactly. (Laughter) Clapping, whatever. And there's different text. There's Armenian, Russian, French, English, Italian. So within this structure, one is free. To me, this piece is an ode to the voice, because it's mysterious, as we can see. It's quite spontaneous. And it's primal. So I would like to share this piece with you, It's "Aria," of John Cage. (Singing in various languages) Hampart-zoum Dirouhi Di questa Terra Naprasno Conscience et (Barks) (Singing) Arise Tsk, tsk, tsk. (Singing) Vidiel’a facilmente E io sono per te (Robotic voice) No other way Dans l'espace, so help (Singing) Si juste Dvidzénya bistri (Claps) (Singing) On pekrásen idyot a k u O a k ho a Sivayoot eternal loosin (Sneezes) (Laughs) Shh! (Singing) Gloobinoí più chiara Si ceci est cela cela est ceci Totalmente soi whom they sought to slay To have the fruits gloire J’écoute ... À la vie… Leggermente snédznoi Coo coo P k t d Banalité K o e (Makes the sound of a kiss) (Singing) In armonia (Applause)

Don't insist on English!

{0: 'Patricia Ryan has spent the past three-plus decades teaching English in Arabic countries -- where she has seen vast cultural (and linguistic) change.'}

TEDxDubai

I know what you're thinking. You think I've lost my way, and somebody's going to come on the stage in a minute and guide me gently back to my seat. (Applause) I get that all the time in Dubai. "Here on holiday are you, dear?" (Laughter) "Come to visit the children? How long are you staying?" Well actually, I hope for a while longer yet. I have been living and teaching in the Gulf for over 30 years. (Applause) And in that time, I have seen a lot of changes. Now that statistic is quite shocking. And I want to talk to you today about language loss and the globalization of English. I want to tell you about my friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi. And one fine day, she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary. But it was she who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants, as well as their uses — medicinal uses, cosmetics, cooking, herbal. How did those students get all that knowledge? Of course, from their grandparents and even their great-grandparents. It's not necessary to tell you how important it is to be able to communicate across generations. But sadly, today, languages are dying at an unprecedented rate. A language dies every 14 days. Now, at the same time, English is the undisputed global language. Could there be a connection? Well I don't know. But I do know that I've seen a lot of changes. When I first came out to the Gulf, I came to Kuwait in the days when it was still a hardship post. Actually, not that long ago. That is a little bit too early. But nevertheless, I was recruited by the British Council, along with about 25 other teachers. And we were the first non-Muslims to teach in the state schools there in Kuwait. We were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education. And of course, the U.K. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth. Okay. Now this is the major change that I've seen — how teaching English has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business that it is today. No longer just a foreign language on the school curriculum, and no longer the sole domain of mother England, it has become a bandwagon for every English-speaking nation on earth. And why not? After all, the best education — according to the latest World University Rankings — is to be found in the universities of the U.K. and the U.S. So everybody wants to have an English education, naturally. But if you're not a native speaker, you have to pass a test. Now can it be right to reject a student on linguistic ability alone? Perhaps you have a computer scientist who's a genius. Would he need the same language as a lawyer, for example? Well, I don't think so. We English teachers reject them all the time. We put a stop sign, and we stop them in their tracks. They can't pursue their dream any longer, 'til they get English. Now let me put it this way: if I met a monolingual Dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer, would I stop him from entering my British University? I don't think so. But indeed, that is exactly what we do. We English teachers are the gatekeepers. And you have to satisfy us first that your English is good enough. Now it can be dangerous to give too much power to a narrow segment of society. Maybe the barrier would be too universal. Okay. "But," I hear you say, "what about the research? It's all in English." So the books are in English, the journals are done in English, but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It feeds the English requirement. And so it goes on. I ask you, what happened to translation? If you think about the Islamic Golden Age, there was lots of translation then. They translated from Latin and Greek into Arabic, into Persian, and then it was translated on into the Germanic languages of Europe and the Romance languages. And so light shone upon the Dark Ages of Europe. Now don't get me wrong; I am not against teaching English, all you English teachers out there. I love it that we have a global language. We need one today more than ever. But I am against using it as a barrier. Do we really want to end up with 600 languages and the main one being English, or Chinese? We need more than that. Where do we draw the line? This system equates intelligence with a knowledge of English, which is quite arbitrary. (Applause) And I want to remind you that the giants upon whose shoulders today's intelligentsia stand did not have to have English, they didn't have to pass an English test. Case in point, Einstein. He, by the way, was considered remedial at school because he was, in fact, dyslexic. But fortunately for the world, he did not have to pass an English test. Because they didn't start until 1964 with TOEFL, the American test of English. Now it's exploded. There are lots and lots of tests of English. And millions and millions of students take these tests every year. Now you might think, you and me, "Those fees aren't bad, they're okay," but they are prohibitive to so many millions of poor people. So immediately, we're rejecting them. (Applause) It brings to mind a headline I saw recently: "Education: The Great Divide." Now I get it, I understand why people would want to focus on English. They want to give their children the best chance in life. And to do that, they need a Western education. Because, of course, the best jobs go to people out of the Western Universities, that I put on earlier. It's a circular thing. Okay. Let me tell you a story about two scientists, two English scientists. They were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the forelimbs and the hind limbs of animals. But they couldn't get the results they wanted. They really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb, whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German. So bingo, problem solved. If you can't think a thought, you are stuck. But if another language can think that thought, then, by cooperating, we can achieve and learn so much more. My daughter came to England from Kuwait. She had studied science and mathematics in Arabic. It's an Arabic-medium school. She had to translate it into English at her grammar school. And she was the best in the class at those subjects. Which tells us that when students come to us from abroad, we may not be giving them enough credit for what they know, and they know it in their own language. When a language dies, we don't know what we lose with that language. This is — I don't know if you saw it on CNN recently — they gave the Heroes Award to a young Kenyan shepherd boy who couldn't study at night in his village, like all the village children, because the kerosene lamp, it had smoke and it damaged his eyes. And anyway, there was never enough kerosene, because what does a dollar a day buy for you? So he invented a cost-free solar lamp. And now the children in his village get the same grades at school as the children who have electricity at home. (Applause) When he received his award, he said these lovely words: "The children can lead Africa from what it is today, a dark continent, to a light continent." A simple idea, but it could have such far-reaching consequences. People who have no light, whether it's physical or metaphorical, cannot pass our exams, and we can never know what they know. Let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark. Let us celebrate diversity. Mind your language. Use it to spread great ideas. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause)

Cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-century cyber weapon

{0: 'Ralph Langner is a German control system security consultant. He has received worldwide recognition for his analysis of the Stuxnet malware.'}

TED2011

The idea behind the Stuxnet computer worm is actually quite simple. We don't want Iran to get the bomb. Their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. The gray boxes that you see, these are real-time control systems. Now if we manage to compromise these systems that control drive speeds and valves, we can actually cause a lot of problems with the centrifuge. The gray boxes don't run Windows software; they are a completely different technology. But if we manage to place a good Windows virus on a notebook that is used by a maintenance engineer to configure this gray box, then we are in business. And this is the plot behind Stuxnet. So we start with a Windows dropper. The payload goes onto the gray box, damages the centrifuge, and the Iranian nuclear program is delayed — mission accomplished. That's easy, huh? I want to tell you how we found that out. When we started our research on Stuxnet six months ago, it was completely unknown what the purpose of this thing was. The only thing that was known is it's very, very complex on the Windows part, the dropper part, used multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. And it seemed to want to do something with these gray boxes, these real-time control systems. So that got our attention, and we started a lab project where we infected our environment with Stuxnet and checked this thing out. And then some very funny things happened. Stuxnet behaved like a lab rat that didn't like our cheese — sniffed, but didn't want to eat. Didn't make sense to me. And after we experimented with different flavors of cheese, I realized, well, this is a directed attack. It's completely directed. The dropper is prowling actively on the gray box if a specific configuration is found, and even if the actual program code that it's trying to infect is actually running on that target. And if not, Stuxnet does nothing. So that really got my attention, and we started to work on this nearly around the clock, because I thought, "Well, we don't know what the target is. It could be, let's say for example, a U.S. power plant, or a chemical plant in Germany. So we better find out what the target is soon." So we extracted and decompiled the attack code, and we discovered that it's structured in two digital bombs — a smaller one and a bigger one. And we also saw that they are very professionally engineered by people who obviously had all insider information. They knew all the bits and bites that they had to attack. They probably even know the shoe size of the operator. So they know everything. And if you have heard that the dropper of Stuxnet is complex and high-tech, let me tell you this: the payload is rocket science. It's way above everything that we have ever seen before. Here you see a sample of this actual attack code. We are talking about — around about 15,000 lines of code. Looks pretty much like old-style assembly language. And I want to tell you how we were able to make sense out of this code. So what we were looking for is, first of all, system function calls, because we know what they do. And then we were looking for timers and data structures and trying to relate them to the real world — to potential real world targets. So we do need target theories that we can prove or disprove. In order to get target theories, we remember that it's definitely hardcore sabotage, it must be a high-value target and it is most likely located in Iran, because that's where most of the infections had been reported. Now you don't find several thousand targets in that area. It basically boils down to the Bushehr nuclear power plant and to the Natanz fuel enrichment plant. So I told my assistant, "Get me a list of all centrifuge and power plant experts from our client base." And I phoned them up and picked their brain in an effort to match their expertise with what we found in code and data. And that worked pretty well. So we were able to associate the small digital warhead with the rotor control. The rotor is that moving part within the centrifuge, that black object that you see. And if you manipulate the speed of this rotor, you are actually able to crack the rotor and eventually even have the centrifuge explode. What we also saw is that the goal of the attack was really to do it slowly and creepy — obviously in an effort to drive maintenance engineers crazy, that they would not be able to figure this out quickly. The big digital warhead — we had a shot at this by looking very closely at data and data structures. So for example, the number 164 really stands out in that code; you can't overlook it. I started to research scientific literature on how these centrifuges are actually built in Natanz and found they are structured in what is called a cascade, and each cascade holds 164 centrifuges. So that made sense, that was a match. And it even got better. These centrifuges in Iran are subdivided into 15, what is called, stages. And guess what we found in the attack code? An almost identical structure. So again, that was a real good match. And this gave us very high confidence for what we were looking at. Now don't get me wrong here, it didn't go like this. These results have been obtained over several weeks of really hard labor. And we often went into just a dead end and had to recover. Anyway, so we figured out that both digital warheads were actually aiming at one and the same target, but from different angles. The small warhead is taking one cascade, and spinning up the rotors and slowing them down, and the big warhead is talking to six cascades and manipulating valves. So in all, we are very confident that we have actually determined what the target is. It is Natanz, and it is only Natanz. So we don't have to worry that other targets might be hit by Stuxnet. Here's some very cool stuff that we saw — really knocked my socks off. Down there is the gray box, and on the top you see the centrifuges. Now what this thing does is it intercepts the input values from sensors — so for example, from pressure sensors and vibration sensors — and it provides legitimate program code, which is still running during the attack, with fake input data. And as a matter of fact, this fake input data is actually prerecorded by Stuxnet. So it's just like from the Hollywood movies where during the heist, the observation camera is fed with prerecorded video. That's cool, huh? The idea here is obviously not only to fool the operators in the control room. It actually is much more dangerous and aggressive. The idea is to circumvent a digital safety system. We need digital safety systems where a human operator could not act quick enough. So for example, in a power plant, when your big steam turbine gets too over speed, you must open relief valves within a millisecond. Obviously, this cannot be done by a human operator. So this is where we need digital safety systems. And when they are compromised, then real bad things can happen. Your plant can blow up. And neither your operators nor your safety system will notice it. That's scary. But it gets worse. And this is very important, what I'm going to say. Think about this: this attack is generic. It doesn't have anything to do, in specifics, with centrifuges, with uranium enrichment. So it would work as well, for example, in a power plant or in an automobile factory. It is generic. And you don't have — as an attacker — you don't have to deliver this payload by a USB stick, as we saw it in the case of Stuxnet. You could also use conventional worm technology for spreading. Just spread it as wide as possible. And if you do that, what you end up with is a cyber weapon of mass destruction. That's the consequence that we have to face. So unfortunately, the biggest number of targets for such attacks are not in the Middle East. They're in the United States and Europe and in Japan. So all of the green areas, these are your target-rich environments. We have to face the consequences, and we better start to prepare right now. Thanks. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I've got a question. Ralph, it's been quite widely reported that people assume that Mossad is the main entity behind this. Is that your opinion? Ralph Langner: Okay, you really want to hear that? Yeah. Okay. My opinion is that the Mossad is involved, but that the leading force is not Israel. So the leading force behind that is the cyber superpower. There is only one, and that's the United States — fortunately, fortunately. Because otherwise, our problems would even be bigger. CA: Thank you for scaring the living daylights out of us. Thank you, Ralph. (Applause)

The genius puppetry behind War Horse

{0: 'Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, of Handspring Puppet Company, bring the emotional complexity of animals to the stage with their life-size puppets. Their latest triumph: "War Horse."'}

TED2011

Adrian Kohler: Well, we're here today to talk about the evolution of a puppet horse. Basil Jones: But actually we're going to start this evolution with a hyena. AK: The ancestor of the horse. Okay, we'll do something with it. (Laughter) Hahahaha. The hyena is the ancestor of the horse because it was part of a production called "Faustus in Africa," a Handspring Production from 1995, where it had to play draughts with Helen of Troy. This production was directed by South African artist and theater director, William Kentridge. So it needed a very articulate front paw. But, like all puppets, it has other attributes. BJ: One of them is breath, and it kind of breathes. AK: Haa haa haaa. BJ: Breath is really important for us. It's the kind of original movement for any puppet for us onstage. It's the thing that distinguishes the puppet — AK: Oops. BJ: From an actor. Puppets always have to try to be alive. It's their kind of ur-story onstage, that desperation to live. AK: Yeah, it's basically a dead object, as you can see, and it only lives because you make it. An actor struggles to die onstage, but a puppet has to struggle to live. And in a way that's a metaphor for life. BJ: So every moment it's on the stage, it's making the struggle. So we call this a piece of emotional engineering that uses up-to-the-minute 17th century technology — (Laughter) to turn nouns into verbs. AK: Well actually I prefer to say that it's an object constructed out of wood and cloth with movement built into it to persuade you to believe that it has life. BJ: Okay so. AK: It has ears that move passively when the head goes. BJ: And it has these bulkheads made out of plywood, covered with fabric — curiously similar, in fact, to the plywood canoes that Adrian's father used to make when he was a boy in their workshop. AK: In Port Elizabeth, the village outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa. BJ: His mother was a puppeteer. And when we met at art school and fell in love in 1971, I hated puppets. I really thought they were so beneath me. I wanted to become an avant-garde artist — and Punch and Judy was certainly not where I wanted to go. And, in fact, it took about 10 years to discover the Bambara Bamana puppets of Mali in West Africa, where there's a fabulous tradition of puppetry, to learn a renewed, or a new, respect for this art form. AK: So in 1981, I persuaded Basil and some friends of mine to form a puppet company. And 20 years later, miraculously, we collaborated with a company from Mali, the Sogolon Marionette Troupe of Bamako, where we made a piece about a tall giraffe. It was just called "Tall Horse," which was a life-sized giraffe. BJ: And here again, you see the same structure. The bulkheads have now turned into hoops of cane, but it's ultimately the same structure. It's got two people inside it on stilts, which give them the height, and somebody in the front who's using a kind of steering wheel to move that head. AK: The person in the hind legs is also controlling the tail, a bit like the hyena — same mechanism, just a bit bigger. And he's controlling the ear movement. BJ: So this production was seen by Tom Morris of the National Theatre in London. And just around that time, his mother had said, "Have you seen this book by Michael Morpurgo called 'War Horse'?" AK: It's about a boy who falls in love with a horse. The horse is sold to the First World War, and he joins up to find his horse. BJ: So Tom gave us a call and said, "Do you think you could make us a horse for a show to happen at the National Theatre?" AK: It seemed a lovely idea. BJ: But it had to ride. It had to have a rider. AK: It had to have a rider, and it had to participate in cavalry charges. (Laughter) A play about early 20th century plowing technology and cavalry charges was a little bit of a challenge for the accounting department at the National Theatre in London. But they agreed to go along with it for a while. So we began with a test. BJ: This is Adrian and Thys Stander, who went on to actually design the cane system for the horse, and our next-door neighbor Katherine, riding on a ladder. The weight is really difficult when it's up above your head. AK: And once we put Katherine through that particular brand of hell, we knew that we might be able to make a horse, which could be ridden. So we made a model. This is a cardboard model, a little bit smaller than the hyena. You'll notice that the legs are plywood legs and the canoe structure is still there. BJ: And the two manipulators are inside. But we didn't realize at the time that we actually needed a third manipulator, because we couldn't manipulate the neck from inside and walk the horse at the same time. AK: We started work on the prototype after the model was approved, and the prototype took a bit longer than we anticipated. We had to throw out the plywood legs and make new cane ones. And we had a crate built for it. It had to be shipped to London. We were going to test-drive it on the street outside of our house in Cape Town, and it got to midnight and we hadn't done that yet. BJ: So we got a camera, and we posed the puppet in various galloping stances. And we sent it off to the National Theatre, hoping that they believed that we created something that worked. (Laughter) AK: A month later, we were there in London with this big box and a studio full of people about to work with us. BJ: About 40 people. AK: We were terrified. We opened the lid, we took the horse out, and it did work; it walked and it was able to be ridden. Here I have an 18-second clip of the very first walk of the prototype. This is in the National Theatre studio, the place where they cook new ideas. It had by no means got the green light yet. The choreographer, Toby Sedgwick, invented a beautiful sequence where the baby horse, which was made out of sticks and bits of twigs, grew up into the big horse. And Nick Starr, the director of the National Theatre, saw that particular moment, he was standing next to me — he nearly wet himself. And so the show was given the green light. And we went back to Cape Town and redesigned the horse completely. Here is the plan. (Laughter) And here is our factory in Cape Town where we make horses. You can see quite a lot of skeletons in the background there. The horses are completely handmade. There is very little 20th century technology in them. We used a bit of laser cutting on the plywood and some of the aluminum pieces. But because they have to be light and flexible, and each one of them is different, they can't be mass-produced, unfortunately. So here are some half-finished horses ready to be worked in London. And now we would like to introduce you to Joey. Joey boy, you there? Joey. (Applause) (Applause) Joey. Joey, come here. No, no, I haven't got it. He's got it; it's in his pocket. BJ: Joey. AK: Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey. Come here. Stand here where people can see you. Move around. Come on. I'd just like to describe — I won't talk too loud. He might get irritated. Here, Craig is working the head. He has bicycle brake cables going down to the head control in his hand. Each one of them operates either an ear, separately, or the head, up and down. But he also controls the head directly by using his hand. The ears are obviously a very important emotional indicator of the horse. When they point right back, the horse is fearful or angry, depending upon what's going on in front of him, around him. Or, when he's more relaxed, the head comes down and the ears listen, either side. Horses' hearing is very important. It's almost more important than their eyesight. Over here, Tommy's got what you call the heart position. He's working the leg. You see the string tendon from the hyena, the hyena's front leg, automatically pulls the hoop up. (Laughter) Horses are so unpredictable. (Laughter) The way a hoof comes up with a horse immediately gives you the feeling that it's a convincing horse action. The hind legs have got the same action. BJ: And Mikey also has, in his fingers, the ability to move the tail from left to right, and up and down with the other hand. And together, there's quite a complex possibility of tail expression. AK: You want to say something about the breathing? BJ: We had a big challenge with breathing. Adrian thought that he was going to have to split the chest of the puppet in two and make it breathe like that — because that's how a horse would breathe, with an expanded chest. But we realized that, if that were to be happening, you wouldn't, as an audience, see the breath. So he made a channel in here, and the chest moves up and down in that channel. So it's anti-naturalistic really, the up and down movement, but it feels like breath. And it's very, very simple because all that happens is that the puppeteer breathes with his knees. AK: Other emotional stuff. If I were to touch the horse here on his skin, the heart puppeteer can shake the body from inside and get the skin to quiver. You'll notice, of course, that the puppet is made out of cane lines. And I would like you to believe that it was an aesthetic choice, that I was making a three-dimensional drawing of a horse that somehow moves in space. But of course, it was the cane is light, the cane is flexible, the cane is durable and the cane is moldable. And so it was a very practical reason why it was made of cane. The skin itself is made out of a see-through nylon mesh, which, if the lighting designer wants the horse to almost disappear, she can light the background and the horse becomes ghostlike. You see the skeletal structure of it. Or if you light it from above, it becomes more solid. Again, that was a practical consideration. The guys inside the horse have to be able to see out. They have to be able to act along with their fellow actors in the production. And it's very much an in-the-moment activity that they're engaged in. It's three heads making one character. But now we would like you to put Joey through some paces. And plant. (Whinny) Thank you. And now just — (Applause) All the way from sunny California we have Zem Joaquin who's going to ride the horse for us. (Applause) (Applause) (Music) So we would like to stress that the performance you see in the horse is three guys who have studied horse behavior incredibly thoroughly. BJ: Not being able to talk to one another while they're onstage because they're mic'd. The sound that that very large chest makes, of the horse — the whinnying and the nickering and everything — that starts usually with one performer, carries on with a second person and ends with a third. AK: Mikey Brett from Leicestershire. (Applause) Mikey Brett, Craig, Leo, Zem Joaquin and Basil and me. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

Google's driverless car

{0: 'Sebastian Thrun is a passionate technologist who is constantly looking for new opportunities to make the world better for all of us.'}

TED2011

As a boy, I loved cars. When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident. Like this. And then I decided I'd dedicate my life to saving one million people every year. Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report, but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars. I saw the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges where the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert. And even though a hundred teams were there, these cars went nowhere. So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car. We built the hardware and the software. We made it learn from us, and we set it free in the desert. And the unimaginable happened: it became the first car to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge, winning Stanford 2 million dollars. Yet I still hadn't saved a single life. Since, our work has focused on building driving cars that can drive anywhere by themselves — any street in California. We've driven 140,000 miles. Our cars have sensors by which they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every aspect of driving. It's the perfect driving mechanism. We've driven in cities, like in San Francisco here. We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1. We've encountered joggers, busy highways, toll booths, and this is without a person in the loop; the car just drives itself. In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles, people didn't even notice. Mountain roads, day and night, and even crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco. (Laughter) Sometimes our cars get so crazy, they even do little stunts. (Video) Man: Oh, my God. What? Second Man: It's driving itself. Sebastian Thrun: Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life, but I can do something for all the people who died. Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people? And do you realize that almost all of those are due to human error and not machine error, and can therefore be prevented by machines? Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn't rely on human precision on staying in the lane — improve body position and therefore drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes, and do away with all traffic jams on highways? Do you realize that you, TED users, spend an average of 52 minutes per day in traffic, wasting your time on your daily commute? You could regain this time. This is four billion hours wasted in this country alone. And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted. Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology, and I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars. Thank you. (Applause)

A virtual choir 2,000 voices strong

{0: 'After creating and conducting a worldwide virtual choir on YouTube, Eric Whitacre is now touring with an astonishing live choir.'}

TED2011

I wanted to be a rock star. I dreamed of it, and that's all I dreamed of. To be more accurate, I wanted to be a pop star. This was in the late '80s. And mostly I wanted to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode or Duran Duran. They wouldn't have me. I didn't read music, but I played synthesizers and drum machines. And I grew up in this little farming town in northern Nevada. And I was certain that's what my life would be. And when I went to college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas when I was 18, I was stunned to find that there was not a Pop Star 101, or even a degree program for that interest. And the choir conductor there knew that I sang and invited me to come and join the choir. And I said, "Yes, I would love to do that. It sounds great." And I left the room and said, "No way." The choir people in my high school were pretty geeky, and there was no way I was going to have anything to do with those people. And about a week later, a friend of mine came to me and said, "Listen, you've got to join choir. At the end of the semester, we're taking a trip to Mexico, all expenses paid. And the soprano section is just full of hot girls." And so I figured for Mexico and babes, I could do just about anything. And I went to my first day in choir, and I sat down with the basses and sort of looked over my shoulder to see what they were doing. They opened their scores, the conductor gave the downbeat, and boom, they launched into the Kyrie from the "Requiem" by Mozart. In my entire life I had seen in black and white, and suddenly everything was in shocking Technicolor. The most transformative experience I've ever had — in that single moment, hearing dissonance and harmony and people singing, people together, the shared vision. And I felt for the first time in my life that I was part of something bigger than myself. And there were a lot of cute girls in the soprano section, as it turns out. I decided to write a piece for choir a couple of years later as a gift to this conductor who had changed my life. I had learned to read music by then, or slowly learning to read music. And that piece was published, and then I wrote another piece, and that got published. And then I started conducting, and I ended up doing my master's degree at the Juilliard School. And I find myself now in the unlikely position of standing in front of all of you as a professional classical composer and conductor. Well a couple of years ago, a friend of mine emailed me a link, a YouTube link, and said, "You have got to see this." And it was this young woman who had posted a fan video to me, singing the soprano line to a piece of mine called "Sleep." (Video) Britlin Losee: Hi Mr. Eric Whitacre. My name is Britlin Losee, and this is a video that I'd like to make for you. Here's me singing "Sleep." I'm a little nervous, just to let you know. ♫ If there are noises ♫ ♫ in the night ♫ Eric Whitacre: I was thunderstruck. Britlin was so innocent and so sweet, and her voice was so pure. And I even loved seeing behind her; I could see the little teddy bear sitting on the piano behind her in her room. Such an intimate video. And I had this idea: if I could get 50 people to all do this same thing, sing their parts — soprano, alto, tenor and bass — wherever they were in the world, post their videos to YouTube, we could cut it all together and create a virtual choir. So I wrote on my blog, "OMG OMG." I actually wrote, "OMG," hopefully for the last time in public ever. (Laughter) And I sent out this call to singers. And I made free the download of the music to a piece that I had written in the year 2000 called "Lux Aurumque," which means "light and gold." And lo and behold, people started uploading their videos. Now I should say, before that, what I did is I posted a conductor track of myself conducting. And it's in complete silence when I filmed it, because I was only hearing the music in my head, imagining the choir that would one day come to be. Afterwards, I played a piano track underneath so that the singers would have something to listen to. And then as the videos started to come in ... (Singing) This is Cheryl Ang from Singapore. (Singing) This is Evangelina Etienne (Singing) from Massachusetts. (Singing) Stephen Hanson from Sweden. (Singing) This is Jamal Walker from Dallas, Texas. (Singing) There was even a little soprano solo in the piece, and so I had auditions. And a number of sopranos uploaded their parts. I was told later, and also by lots of singers who were involved in this, that they sometimes recorded 50 or 60 different takes until they got just the right take — they uploaded it. Here's our winner of the soprano solo. This is Melody Myers from Tennessee. (Singing) I love the little smile she does right over the top of the note — like, "No problem, everything's fine." (Laughter) And from the crowd emerged this young man, Scott Haines. And he said, "Listen, this is the project I've been looking for my whole life. I'd like to be the person to edit this all together." I said, "Thank you, Scott. I'm so glad that you found me." And Scott aggregated all of the videos. He scrubbed the audio. He made sure that everything lined up. And then we posted this video to YouTube about a year and a half ago. This is "Lux Aurumque" sung by the Virtual Choir. (Singing) I'll stop it there in the interest of time. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So there's more. There's more. Thank you so much. And I had the same reaction you did. I actually was moved to tears when I first saw it. I just couldn't believe the poetry of all of it — these souls all on their own desert island, sending electronic messages in bottles to each other. And the video went viral. We had a million hits in the first month and got a lot of attention for it. And because of that, then a lot of singers started saying, "All right, what's Virtual Choir 2.0?" And so I decided for Virtual Choir 2.0 that I would choose the same piece that Britlin was singing, "Sleep," which is another work that I wrote in the year 2000 — poetry by my dear friend Charles Anthony Silvestri. And again, I posted a conductor video, and we started accepting submissions. This time we got some more mature members. (Singing) And some younger members. (Video) Soprano: ♫ Upon my pillow ♫ ♫ Safe in bed ♫ EW: That's Georgie from England. She's only nine. Isn't that the sweetest thing you've ever seen? Someone did all eight videos — a bass even singing the soprano parts. This is Beau Awtin. (Video) Beau Awtin: ♫ Safe in bed ♫ EW: And our goal — it was sort of an arbitrary goal — there was an MTV video where they all sang "Lollipop" and they got people from all over the world to just sing that little melody. And there were 900 people involved in that. So I told the singers, "That's our goal. That's the number for us to beat." And we just closed submissions January 10th, and our final tally was 2,051 videos from 58 different countries. Thank you. (Applause) From Malta, Madagascar, Thailand, Vietnam, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, as far north as Alaska and as far south as New Zealand. And we also put a page on Facebook for the singers to upload their testimonials, what it was like for them, their experience singing it. And I've just chosen a few of them here. "My sister and I used to sing in choirs together constantly. Now she's an airman in the air force constantly traveling. It's so wonderful to sing together again!" I love the idea that she's singing with her sister. "Aside from the beautiful music, it's great just to know I'm part of a worldwide community of people I never met before, but who are connected anyway." And my personal favorite, "When I told my husband that I was going to be a part of this, he told me that I did not have the voice for it." Yeah, I'm sure a lot of you have heard that too. Me too. "It hurt so much, and I shed some tears, but something inside of me wanted to do this despite his words. It is a dream come true to be part of this choir, as I've never been part of one. When I placed a marker on the Google Earth Map, I had to go with the nearest city, which is about 400 miles away from where I live. As I am in the Great Alaskan Bush, satellite is my connection to the world." So two things struck me deeply about this. The first is that human beings will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other. It doesn't matter the technology. And the second is that people seem to be experiencing an actual connection. It wasn't a virtual choir. There are people now online that are friends; they've never met. But, I know myself too, I feel this virtual esprit de corps, if you will, with all of them. I feel a closeness to this choir — almost like a family. What I'd like to close with then today is the first look at "Sleep" by Virtual Choir 2.0. This will be a premiere today. We're not finished with the video yet. You can imagine, with 2,000 synchronized YouTube videos, the render time is just atrocious. But we do have the first three minutes. And it's a tremendous honor for me to be able to show it to you here first. You're the very first people to see this. This is "Sleep," the Virtual Choir. (Video) Virtual Choir: ♫ The evening hangs ♫ ♫ beneath the moon ♫ ♫ A silver thread on darkened dune ♫ ♫ With closing eyes and resting head ♫ ♫ I know that sleep is coming soon ♫ ♫ Upon my pillow, ♫ ♫ safe in bed, ♫ ♫ a thousand pictures fill my head ♫ ♫ I cannot sleep ♫ ♫ my mind's aflight ♫ ♫ and yet my limbs seem made of lead ♫ ♫ If there are noises in the night ♫ Eric Whitacre: Thank you very, very much. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

Hands-on science with squishy circuits

{0: 'AnnMarie Thomas works on the playful side of engineering -- using cool tools to teach and help others.'}

TED2011

I'm a huge believer in hands-on education. But you have to have the right tools. If I'm going to teach my daughter about electronics, I'm not going to give her a soldering iron. And similarly, she finds prototyping boards really frustrating for her little hands. So my wonderful student Sam and I decided to look at the most tangible thing we could think of: Play-Doh. And so we spent a summer looking at different Play-Doh recipes. And these recipes probably look really familiar to any of you who have made homemade play-dough — pretty standard ingredients you probably have in your kitchen. We have two favorite recipes — one that has these ingredients and a second that had sugar instead of salt. And they're great. We can make great little sculptures with these. But the really cool thing about them is when we put them together. You see that really salty Play-Doh? Well, it conducts electricity. And this is nothing new. It turns out that regular Play-Doh that you buy at the store conducts electricity, and high school physics teachers have used that for years. But our homemade play-dough actually has half the resistance of commercial Play-Doh. And that sugar dough? Well it's 150 times more resistant to electric current than that salt dough. So what does that mean? Well it means if you them together you suddenly have circuits — circuits that the most creative, tiny, little hands can build on their own. (Applause) And so I want to do a little demo for you. So if I take this salt dough, again, it's like the play-dough you probably made as kids, and I plug it in — it's a two-lead battery pack, simple battery pack, you can buy them at Radio Shack and pretty much anywhere else — we can actually then light things up. But if any of you have studied electrical engineering, we can also create a short circuit. If I push these together, the light turns off. Right, the current wants to run through the play-dough, not through that LED. If I separate them again, I have some light. Well now if I take that sugar dough, the sugar dough doesn't want to conduct electricity. It's like a wall to the electricity. If I place that between, now all the dough is touching, but if I stick that light back in, I have light. In fact, I could even add some movement to my sculptures. If I want a spinning tail, let's grab a motor, put some play-dough on it, stick it on and we have spinning. (Applause) And once you have the basics, we can make a slightly more complicated circuit. We call this our sushi circuit. It's very popular with kids. I plug in again the power to it. And now I can start talking about parallel and series circuits. I can start plugging in lots of lights. And we can start talking about things like electrical load. What happens if I put in lots of lights and then add a motor? It'll dim. We can even add microprocessors and have this as an input and create squishy sound music that we've done. You could do parallel and series circuits for kids using this. So this is all in your home kitchen. We've actually tried to turn it into an electrical engineering lab. We have a website, it's all there. These are the home recipes. We've got some videos. You can make them yourselves. And it's been really fun since we put them up to see where these have gone. We've had a mom in Utah who used them with her kids, to a science researcher in the U.K., and curriculum developers in Hawaii. So I would encourage you all to grab some Play-Doh, grab some salt, grab some sugar and start playing. We don't usually think of our kitchen as an electrical engineering lab or little kids as circuit designers, but maybe we should. Have fun. Thank you. (Applause)

Listen, learn ... then lead

{0: 'General Stanley McChrystal is the former commander of U.S. and International forces in Afghanistan. A four-star general, he is credited for creating a revolution in warfare that fuses intelligence and operations.'}

TED2011

Ten years ago, on a Tuesday morning, I conducted a parachute jump at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was a routine training jump, like many more I'd done since I became a paratrooper 27 years before. We went down to the airfield early because this is the Army and you always go early. You do some routine refresher training, and then you go to put on your parachute and a buddy helps you. And you put on the T-10 parachute. And you're very careful how you put the straps, particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs. And then you put on your reserve, and then you put on your heavy rucksack. And then a jumpmaster comes, and he's an experienced NCO in parachute operations. He checks you out, he grabs your adjusting straps and he tightens everything so that your chest is crushed, your shoulders are crushed down, and, of course, he's tightened so your voice goes up a couple octaves as well. Then you sit down, and you wait a little while, because this is the Army. Then you load the aircraft, and then you stand up and you get on, and you kind of lumber to the aircraft like this, in a line of people, and you sit down on canvas seats on either side of the aircraft. And you wait a little bit longer, because this is the Air Force teaching the Army how to wait. Then you take off. And it's painful enough now — and I think it's designed this way — it's painful enough so you want to jump. You didn't really want to jump, but you want out. So you get in the aircraft, you're flying along, and at 20 minutes out, these jumpmasters start giving you commands. They give 20 minutes — that's a time warning. You sit there, OK. Then they give you 10 minutes. And of course, you're responding with all of these. And that's to boost everybody's confidence, to show that you're not scared. Then they give you, "Get ready." Then they go, "Outboard personnel, stand up." If you're an outboard personnel, now you stand up. If you're an inboard personnel, stand up. And then you hook up, and you hook up your static line. And at that point, you think, "Hey, guess what? I'm probably going to jump. There's no way to get out of this at this point." You go through some additional checks, and then they open the door. And this was that Tuesday morning in September, and it was pretty nice outside. So nice air comes flowing in. The jumpmasters start to check the door. And then when it's time to go, a green light goes and the jumpmaster goes, "Go." The first guy goes, and you're just in line, and you just kind of lumber to the door. Jump is a misnomer; you fall. You fall outside the door, you're caught in the slipstream. The first thing you do is lock into a tight body position — head down in your chest, your arms extended, put over your reserve parachute. You do that because, 27 years before, an airborne sergeant had taught me to do that. I have no idea whether it makes any difference, but he seemed to make sense, and I wasn't going to test the hypothesis that he'd be wrong. And then you wait for the opening shock for your parachute to open. If you don't get an opening shock, you don't get a parachute — you've got a whole new problem set. But typically you do; typically it opens. And of course, if your leg straps aren't set right, at that point you get another little thrill. Boom. So then you look around, you're under a canopy and you say, "This is good." Now you prepare for the inevitable. You are going to hit the ground. You can't delay that much. And you really can't decide where you hit very much, because they pretend you can steer, but you're being delivered. So you look around, where you're going to land, you try to make yourself ready. And then as you get close, you lower your rucksack below you on a lowering line, so that it's not on you when you land, and you prepare to do a parachute-landing fall. Now the Army teaches you to do five points of performance — the toes of your feet, your calves, your thighs, your buttocks and your push-up muscles. It's this elegant little land, twist and roll. And that's not going to hurt. In 30-some years of jumping, I never did one. (Laughter) I always landed like a watermelon out of a third floor window. (Laughter) And as soon as I hit, the first thing I did is I'd see if I'd broken anything that I needed. I'd shake my head, and I'd ask myself the eternal question: "Why didn't I go into banking?" (Laughter) And I'd look around, and then I'd see another paratrooper, a young guy or girl, and they'd have pulled out their M4 carbine and they'd be picking up their equipment. They'd be doing everything that we had taught them. And I realized that, if they had to go into combat, they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders. And I realized that, if they came out of combat, it would be because we led them well. And I was hooked again on the importance of what I did. So now I do that Tuesday morning jump, but it's not any jump — that was September 11th, 2001. And when we took off from the airfield, America was at peace. When we landed on the drop-zone, everything had changed. And what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very, very real — and leadership seemed important. But things had changed; I was a 46-year-old brigadier general. I'd been successful, but things changed so much that I was going to have to make some significant changes, and on that morning, I didn't know it. I was raised with traditional stories of leadership: Robert E. Lee, John Buford at Gettysburg. And I also was raised with personal examples of leadership. This was my father in Vietnam. And I was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful; they didn't lie, cheat, steal or abandon their comrades. And I still believe real leaders are like that. But in my first 25 years of career, I had a bunch of different experiences. One of my first battalion commanders, I worked in his battalion for 18 months and the only conversation he ever had with Lt. McChrystal was at mile 18 of a 25-mile road march, and he chewed my ass for about 40 seconds. And I'm not sure that was real interaction. But then a couple of years later, when I was a company commander, I went out to the National Training Center. And we did an operation, and my company did a dawn attack — you know, the classic dawn attack: you prepare all night, move to the line of departure. And I had an armored organization at that point. We move forward, and we get wiped out — I mean, wiped out immediately. The enemy didn't break a sweat doing it. And after the battle, they bring this mobile theater and they do what they call an "after action review" to teach you what you've done wrong. Sort of leadership by humiliation. They put a big screen up, and they take you through everything: "and then you didn't do this, and you didn't do this, etc." I walked out feeling as low as a snake's belly in a wagon rut. And I saw my battalion commander, because I had let him down. And I went up to apologize to him, and he said, "Stanley, I thought you did great." And in one sentence, he lifted me, put me back on my feet, and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure. When 9/11 came, 46-year-old Brig. Gen. McChrystal sees a whole new world. First, the things that are obvious, that you're familiar with: the environment changed — the speed, the scrutiny, the sensitivity of everything now is so fast, sometimes it evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it. But everything we do is in a different context. More importantly, the force that I led was spread over more than 20 countries. And instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them, I'm now leading a force that's dispersed, and I've got to use other techniques. I've got to use video teleconferences, I've got to use chat, I've got to use email, I've got to use phone calls — I've got to use everything I can, not just for communication, but for leadership. A 22-year-old individual operating alone, thousands of miles from me, has got to communicate to me with confidence. I have to have trust in them and vice versa. And I also have to build their faith. And that's a new kind of leadership for me. We had one operation where we had to coordinate it from multiple locations. An emerging opportunity came — didn't have time to get everybody together. So we had to get complex intelligence together, we had to line up the ability to act. It was sensitive, we had to go up the chain of command, convince them that this was the right thing to do and do all of this on electronic medium. We failed. The mission didn't work. And so now what we had to do is I had to reach out to try to rebuild the trust of that force, rebuild their confidence — me and them, and them and me, and our seniors and us as a force — all without the ability to put a hand on a shoulder. Entirely new requirement. Also, the people had changed. You probably think that the force that I led was all steely-eyed commandos with big knuckle fists carrying exotic weapons. In reality, much of the force I led looked exactly like you. It was men, women, young, old — not just from military; from different organizations, many of them detailed to us just from a handshake. And so instead of giving orders, you're now building consensus and you're building a sense of shared purpose. Probably the biggest change was understanding that the generational difference, the ages, had changed so much. I went down to be with a Ranger platoon on an operation in Afghanistan, and on that operation, a sergeant in the platoon had lost about half his arm throwing a Taliban hand grenade back at the enemy after it had landed in his fire team. We talked about the operation, and then at the end I did what I often do with a force like that. I asked, "Where were you on 9/11?" And one young Ranger in the back — his hair's tousled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold Afghan wind — he said, "Sir, I was in the sixth grade." And it reminded me that we're operating a force that must have shared purpose and shared consciousness, and yet he has different experiences, in many cases a different vocabulary, a completely different skill set in terms of digital media than I do and many of the other senior leaders. And yet, we need to have that shared sense. It also produced something which I call an inversion of expertise, because we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and whatnot, that suddenly the things that we grew up doing wasn't what the force was doing anymore. So how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they haven't done what the people you're leading are doing? And it's a brand new leadership challenge. And it forced me to become a lot more transparent, a lot more willing to listen, a lot more willing to be reverse-mentored from lower. And yet, again, you're not all in one room. Then another thing. There's an effect on you and on your leaders. There's an impact, it's cumulative. You don't reset, or recharge your battery every time. I stood in front of a screen one night in Iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces. And I remembered his son was in our force. And I said, "John, where's your son? And how is he?" And he said, "Sir, he's fine. Thanks for asking." I said, "Where is he now?" And he pointed at the screen, he said, "He's in that firefight." Think about watching your brother, father, daughter, son, wife in a firefight in real time and you can't do anything about it. Think about knowing that over time. And it's a new cumulative pressure on leaders. And you have to watch and take care of each other. I probably learned the most about relationships. I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger — and there are more than 2,000 of them — says a six-stanza Ranger creed. You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. It's a promise. Every Ranger promises every other Ranger, "No matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming." And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing. And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with — godfather to one of their kids — he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive." And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career. And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. That was my journey. I hope it's not over. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. This isn't easy stuff. It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. (Laughter) And it isn't always fair. You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet. Thank you. (Applause)

Everyday compassion at Google

{0: "One of Google's earliest engineers, Chade-Meng Tan is now Google's Jolly Good Fellow -- the head of personal growth at the groundbreaking search company."}

TEDPrize@UN

So what does the happiest man in the world look like? He certainly doesn't look like me. He looks like this. His name is Matthieu Ricard. So how do you get to be the happiest man in the world? Well it turns out there is a way to measure happiness in the brain. And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI, versus the right prefrontal cortex. And Matthieu's happiness measure is off the charts. He's by far the happiest man ever measured by science. Which leads us to a question: What was he thinking when he was being measured? Perhaps something very naughty. (Laughter) Actually, he was meditating on compassion. Matthieu's own experience is that compassion is the happiest state ever. Reading about Matthieu was one of the pivotal moments of my life. My dream is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime — and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale. And learning about Matthieu gave me a new angle to look at my work. Matthieu's brain scan shows that compassion is not a chore. Compassion is something that creates happiness. Compassion is fun. And that mind-blowing insight changes the entire game. Because if compassion was a chore, nobody's going to do it, except maybe the Dalai Lama or something. But if compassion was fun, everybody's going to do it. Therefore, to create the conditions for global compassion, all we have to do is to reframe compassion as something that is fun. But fun is not enough. What if compassion is also profitable? What if compassion is also good for business? Then, every boss, every manager in the world, will want to have compassion — like this. That would create the conditions for world peace. So, I started paying attention to what compassion looks like in a business setting. Fortunately, I didn't have to look very far. Because what I was looking for was right in front of my eyes — in Google, my company. I know there are other compassionate companies in the world, but Google is the place I'm familiar with because I've been there for 10 years, so I'll use Google as the case study. Google is a company born of idealism. It's a company that thrives on idealism. And maybe because of that, compassion is organic and widespread company-wide. In Google, expressions of corporate compassion almost always follow the same pattern. It's sort of a funny pattern. It starts with a small group of Googlers taking the initiative to do something. And they don't usually ask for permission; they just go ahead and do it, and then other Googlers join in, and it just gets bigger and bigger. And sometimes it gets big enough to become official. So in other words, it almost always starts from the bottom up. And let me give you some examples. The first example is the largest annual community event — where Googlers from around the world donate their labor to their local communities — was initiated and organized by three employees before it became official, because it just became too big. Another example, three Googlers — a chef, an engineer and, most funny, a massage therapist — three of them, they learned about a region in India where 200,000 people live without a single medical facility. So what do they do? They just go ahead and start a fundraiser. And they raise enough money to build this hospital — the first hospital of its kind for 200,000 people. During the Haiti earthquake, a number of engineers and product managers spontaneously came together and stayed overnight to build a tool to allow earthquake victims to find their loved ones. And expressions of compassion are also found in our international offices. In China for example, one mid-level employee initiated the largest social action competition in China, involving more than 1,000 schools in China, working on issues such as education, poverty, health care and the environment. There is so much organic social action all around Google that the company decided to form a social responsibility team just to support these efforts. And this idea, again, came from the grassroots, from two Googlers who wrote their own job descriptions and volunteered themselves for the job. And I found it fascinating that the social responsibility team was not formed as part of some grand corporate strategy. It was two persons saying, "Let's do this," and the company said, "Yes." So it turns out that Google is a compassionate company, because Googlers found compassion to be fun. But again, fun is not enough. There are also real business benefits. So what are they? The first benefit of compassion is that it creates highly effective business leaders. What does that mean? There are three components of compassion. There is the affective component, which is, "I feel for you." There is the cognitive component, which is, "I understand you." And there is a motivational component, which is, "I want to help you." So what has this got to do with business leadership? According to a very comprehensive study led by Jim Collins, and documented in the book "Good to Great," it takes a very special kind of leader to bring a company from goodness to greatness. And he calls them "Level 5 leaders." These are leaders who, in addition to being highly capable, possess two important qualities, and they are humility and ambition. These are leaders who are highly ambitious for the greater good. And because they're ambitious for a greater good, they feel no need to inflate their own egos. And they, according to the research, make the best business leaders. And if you look at these qualities in the context of compassion, we find that the cognitive and affective components of compassion — understanding people and empathizing with people — inhibits, tones down, what I call the excessive self-obsession that's in us, therefore creating the conditions for humility. The motivational component of compassion creates ambition for greater good. In other words, compassion is the way to grow Level 5 leaders. And this is the first compelling business benefit. The second compelling benefit of compassion is that it creates an inspiring workforce. Employees mutually inspire each other towards greater good. It creates a vibrant, energetic community where people admire and respect each other. I mean, you come to work in the morning, and you work with three guys who just up and decide to build a hospital in India. It's like how can you not be inspired by those people — your own coworkers? So this mutual inspiration promotes collaboration, initiative and creativity. It makes us a highly effective company. So, having said all that, what is the secret formula for brewing compassion in the corporate setting? In our experience, there are three ingredients. The first ingredient is to create a culture of passionate concern for the greater good. So always think: how is your company and your job serving the greater good? Or, how can you further serve the greater good? This awareness of serving the greater good is very self-inspiring and it creates fertile ground for compassion to grow in. That's one. The second ingredient is autonomy. So in Google, there's a lot of autonomy. And one of our most popular managers jokes that, this is what he says, "Google is a place where the inmates run the asylum." And he considers himself one of the inmates. If you already have a culture of compassion and idealism and you let your people roam free, they will do the right thing in the most compassionate way. The third ingredient is to focus on inner development and personal growth. Leadership training in Google, for example, places a lot of emphasis on the inner qualities, such as self-awareness, self-mastery, empathy and compassion, because we believe that leadership begins with character. We even created a seven-week curriculum on emotion intelligence, which we jokingly call "Searching Inside Yourself." It's less naughty than it sounds. So I'm an engineer by training, but I'm one of the creators and instructors of this course, which I find kind of funny, because this is a company that trusts an engineer to teach emotion intelligence. What a company. (Laughter) So "Search Inside Yourself" — how does it work? It works in three steps. The first step is attention training. Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. Therefore, any curriculum for training emotion intelligence has to begin with attention training. The idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. And this creates the foundation for emotion intelligence. The second step follows the first step. The second step is developing self-knowledge and self-mastery. So using the supercharged attention from step one, we create a high-resolution perception into the cognitive and emotive processes. What does that mean? It means being able to observe our thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity, objectivity and from a third-person perspective. And once you can do that, you create the kind of self-knowledge that enables self-mastery. The third step, following the second step, is to create new mental habits. What does that mean? Imagine this. Imagine whenever you meet any other person, any time you meet a person, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, "I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy." Imagine you can do that. Having this habit, this mental habit, changes everything at work. Because this good will is unconsciously picked up by other people, and it creates trust, and trust creates a lot of good working relationships. And this also creates the conditions for compassion in the workplace. Someday, we hope to open-source "Search Inside Yourself" so that everybody in the corporate world will at least be able to use it as a reference. And in closing, I want to end the same place I started, with happiness. I want to quote this guy — the guy in robes, not the other guy — the Dalai Lama, who said, "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." I found this to be true, both on the individual level and at a corporate level. And I hope that compassion will be both fun and profitable for you too. Thank you. (Applause)

The greatest TED Talk ever sold

{0: 'Morgan Spurlock makes documentary film and TV that is personal, political -- and, above all, deeply empathetic.'}

TED2011

I have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous. I went to prison — difficult. I worked in a coal mine — dangerous. I filmed in war zones — difficult and dangerous. And I spent 30 days eating nothing but this — fun in the beginning, little difficult in the middle, very dangerous in the end. In fact, most of my career, I've been immersing myself into seemingly horrible situations for the whole goal of trying to examine societal issues in a way that make them engaging, that make them interesting, that hopefully break them down in a way that make them entertaining and accessible to an audience. So when I knew I was coming here to do a TED Talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship, I knew I would want to do something a little different. So as some of you may or may not have heard, a couple weeks ago, I took out an ad on eBay. I sent out some Facebook messages, some Twitter messages, and I gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 TED Talk. (Laughter) That's right, some lucky individual, corporation, for-profit or non-profit, was going to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — because I'm sure Chris Anderson will never let it happen again — (Laughter) to buy the naming rights to the talk you're watching right now, that at the time didn't have a title, didn't really have a lot of content and didn't really give much hint as to what the subject matter would actually be. So what you were getting was this: Your name here presents: My TED Talk that you have no idea what the subject is and, depending on the content, could ultimately blow up in your face, especially if I make you or your company look stupid for doing it. But that being said, it's a very good media opportunity. (Laughter) You know how many people watch these TED Talks? It's a lot. That's just a working title, by the way. (Laughter) So even with that caveat, I knew that someone would buy the naming rights. Now if you'd have asked me that a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you that with any certainty. But in the new project that I'm working on, my new film, we examine the world of marketing, advertising. And as I said earlier, I put myself in some pretty horrible situations over the years, but nothing could prepare me, nothing could ready me, for anything as difficult or as dangerous as going into the rooms with these guys. (Laughter) You see, I had this idea for a movie. (Video) Morgan Spurlock: What I want to do is make a film all about product placement, marketing and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising. So the movie will be called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." So what happens in "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," is that everything from top to bottom, from start to finish, is branded from beginning to end — from the above-the-title sponsor that you'll see in the movie, which is brand X. Now this brand, the Qualcomm Stadium, the Staples Center ... these people will be married to the film in perpetuity — forever. And so the film explores this whole idea — (Michael Kassan: It's redundant.) It's what? (MK: It's redundant.) In perpetuity, forever? I'm a redundant person. (MK: I'm just saying.) That was more for emphasis. It was, "In perpetuity. Forever." But not only are we going to have the brand X title sponsor, but we're going to make sure we sell out every category we can in the film. So maybe we sell a shoe and it becomes the greatest shoe you ever wore ... the greatest car you ever drove from "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," the greatest drink you've ever had, courtesy of "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." Xavier Kochhar: So the idea is, beyond just showing that brands are a part of your life, but actually get them to finance the film? (MS: Get them to finance the film.) MS: And actually we show the whole process of how does it work. The goal of this whole film is transparency. You're going to see the whole thing take place in this movie. So that's the whole concept, the whole film, start to finish. And I would love for CEG to help make it happen. Robert Friedman: You know it's funny, because when I first hear it, it is the ultimate respect for an audience. Guy: I don't know how receptive people are going to be to it, though. XK: Do you have a perspective — I don't want to use "angle" because that has a negative connotation — but do you know how this is going to play out? (MS: No idea.) David Cohn: How much money does it take to do this? MS: 1.5 million. (DC: Okay.) John Kamen: I think that you're going to have a hard time meeting with them, but I think it's certainly worth pursuing a couple big, really obvious brands. XK: Who knows, maybe by the time your film comes out, we look like a bunch of blithering idiots. MS: What do you think the response is going to be? Stuart Ruderfer: The responses mostly will be "no." MS: But is it a tough sell because of the film or a tough sell because of me? JK: Both. MS: ... Meaning not so optimistic. So, sir, can you help me? I need help. MK: I can help you. MS: Okay. (MK: Good.) Awesome. MK: We've gotta figure out which brands. MS: Yeah. (MK: That's the challenge.) When you look at the people you deal with .. MK: We've got some places we can go. (MS: Okay.) Turn the camera off. MS: I thought "Turn the camera off" meant, "Let's have an off-the-record conversation." Turns out it really means, "We want nothing to do with your movie." MS: And just like that, one by one, all of these companies suddenly disappeared. None of them wanted anything to do with this movie. I was amazed. They wanted absolutely nothing to do with this project. And I was blown away, because I thought the whole concept, the idea of advertising, was to get your product out in front of as many people as possible, to get as many people to see it as possible. Especially in today's world, this intersection of new media and old media and the fractured media landscape, isn't the idea to get that new buzz-worthy delivery vehicle that's going to get that message to the masses? No, that's what I thought. But the problem was, you see, my idea had one fatal flaw, and that flaw was this. Actually no, that was not the flaw whatsoever. That wouldn't have been a problem at all. This would have been fine. But what this image represents was the problem. See, when you do a Google image search for transparency, this is —- (Laughter) (Applause) This is one of the first images that comes up. So I like the way you roll, Sergey Brin. No. (Laughter) This is was the problem: transparency — free from pretense or deceit; easily detected or seen through; readily understood; characterized by visibility or accessibility of information, especially concerning business practices — that last line being probably the biggest problem. You see, we hear a lot about transparency these days. Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEO's say it. But suddenly when it comes down to becoming a reality, something suddenly changes. But why? Well, transparency is scary — (Roar) like that odd, still-screaming bear. (Laughter) It's unpredictable — (Music) (Laughter) like this odd country road. And it's also very risky. (Laughter) What else is risky? Eating an entire bowl of Cool Whip. (Laughter) That's very risky. Now when I started talking to companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story, and they said, "No, we want you to tell a story. We want you to tell a story, but we just want to tell our story." See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie — and there he is giving me the look he often gave me — he would say, "Son, there's three sides to every story. There's your story, there's my story and there's the real story." Now you see, with this film, we wanted to tell the real story. But with only one company, one agency willing to help me — and that's only because I knew John Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum for years — I realized that I would have to go on my own, I'd have to cut out the middleman and go to the companies myself with all of my team. So what you suddenly started to realize — or what I started to realize — is that when you started having conversations with these companies, the idea of understanding your brand is a universal problem. (Video) MS: I have friends who make great big, giant Hollywood films, and I have friends who make little independent films like I make. And the friends of mine who make big, giant Hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have. And then my friends who make small independent films say, "Well, how are we supposed to compete with these big, giant Hollywood movies?" And the movie is called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." So how specifically will we see Ban in the film? Any time I'm ready to go, any time I open up my medicine cabinet, you will see Ban deodorant. While anytime I do an interview with someone, I can say, "Are you fresh enough for this interview? Are you ready? You look a little nervous. I want to help you calm down. So maybe you should put some one before the interview." So we'll offer one of these fabulous scents. Whether it's a "Floral Fusion" or a "Paradise Winds," they'll have their chance. We will have them geared for both male or female — solid, roll-on or stick, whatever it may be. That's the two-cent tour. So now I can answer any of your questions and give you the five-cent tour. Karen Frank: We are a smaller brand. Much like you talked about being a smaller movie, we're very much a challenger brand. So we don't have the budgets that other brands have. So doing things like this — you know, remind people about Ban — is kind of why were interested in it. MS: What are the words that you would use to describe Ban? Ban is blank. KF: That's a great question. (Laughter) Woman: Superior technology. MS: Technology's not the way you want to describe something somebody's putting in their armpit. Man: We talk about bold, fresh. I think "fresh" is a great word that really spins this category into the positive, versus "fights odor and wetness." It keeps you fresh. How do we keep you fresher longer — better freshness, more freshness, three times fresher. Things like that that are more of that positive benefit. MS: And that's a multi-million dollar corporation. What about me? What about a regular guy? I need to go talk to the man on the street, the people who are like me, the regular Joes. They need to tell me about my brand. (Video) MS: How would you guys describe your brand? Man: Um, my brand? I don't know. I like really nice clothes. Woman: 80's revival meets skater-punk, unless it's laundry day. MS: All right, what is brand Gerry? Gerry: Unique. (MS: Unique.) Man: I guess what kind of genre, style I am would be like dark glamor. I like a lot of black colors, a lot of grays and stuff like that. But usually I have an accessory, like sunglasses, or I like crystal and things like that too. Woman: If Dan were a brand, he might be a classic convertible Mercedes Benz. Man 2: The brand that I am is, I would call it casual fly. Woman 2: Part hippie, part yogi, part Brooklyn girl — I don't know. Man 3: I'm the pet guy. I sell pet toys all over the country, all over the world. So I guess that's my brand. In my warped little industry, that's my brand. Man 4: My brand is FedEx because I deliver the goods. Man 5: Failed writer-alcoholic brand. Is that something? Lawyer: I'm a lawyer brand. Tom: I'm Tom. MS: Well we can't all be brand Tom, but I do often find myself at the intersection of dark glamor and casual fly. (Laughter) And what I realized is I needed an expert. I needed somebody who could get inside my head, somebody who could really help me understand what they call your "brand personality." And so I found a company called Olson Zaltman in Pittsburg. They've helped companies like Nestle, Febreze, Hallmark discover that brand personality. If they could do it for them, surely they could do it for me. (Video) Abigail: You brought your pictures, right? MS: I did. The very first picture is a picture of my family. A: So tell me a little bit how it relates to your thoughts and feelings about who you are. MS: These are the people who shape the way I look at the world. A: Tell me about this world. MS: This world? I think your world is the world that you live in — like people who are around you, your friends, your family, the way you live your life, the job you do. All those things stemmed and started from one place, and for me they stemmed and started with my family in West Virginia. A: What's the next one you want to talk about? MS: The next one: This was the best day ever. A: How does this relate to your thoughts and feelings about who you are? MS: It's like, who do I want to be? I like things that are different. I like things that are weird. I like weird things. A: Tell me about the "why" phase — what does that do for us? What is the machete? What pupa stage are you in now? Why is it important to reboot? What does the red represent? Tell me a little bit about that part. ... A little more about you that is not who you are. What are some other metamorphoses that you've had? ... Doesn't have to be fear. What kind of roller coaster are you on? MS: EEEEEE! (A: Thank you.) No, thank you. A: Thanks for you patience. (MS: Great job.) A: Yeah. (MS: Thanks a lot.) All right. MS: Yeah, I don't know what's going to come of this. There was a whole lot of crazy going on in there. Lindsay Zaltman: The first thing we saw was this idea that you had two distinct, but complementary sides to your brand personality — the Morgan Spurlock brand is a mindful/play brand. Those are juxtaposed very nicely together. And I think there's almost a paradox with those. And I think some companies will just focus on one of their strengths or the other instead of focusing on both. Most companies tend to — and it's human nature — to avoid things that they're not sure of, avoid fear, those elements, and you really embrace those, and you actually turn them into positives for you, and it's a neat thing to see. What other brands are like that? The first on here is the classic, Apple. And you can see here too, Target, Wii, Mini from the Mini Coopers, and JetBlue. Now there's playful brands and mindful brands, those things that have come and gone, but a playful, mindful brand is a pretty powerful thing. MS: A playful, mindful brand. What is your brand? If somebody asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, what would you be? Are you an up attribute? Are you something that gets the blood flowing? Or are you more of a down attribute? Are you something that's a little more calm, reserved, conservative? Up attributes are things like being playful, being fresh like the Fresh Prince, contemporary, adventurous, edgy or daring like Errol Flynn, nimble or agile, profane, domineering, magical or mystical like Gandalf. Or are you more of a down attribute? Are you mindful, sophisticated like 007? Are you established, traditional, nurturing, protective, empathetic like the Oprah? Are you reliable, stable, familiar, safe, secure, sacred, contemplative or wise like the Dalai Lama or Yoda? Over the course of this film, we had 500-plus companies who were up and down companies saying, "no," they didn't want any part of this project. They wanted nothing to do with this film, mainly because they would have no control, they would have no control over the final product. But we did get 17 brand partners who were willing to relinquish that control, who wanted to be in business with someone as mindful and as playful as myself and who ultimately empowered us to tell stories that normally we wouldn't be able to tell — stories that an advertiser would normally never get behind. They enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing, as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they're using MRI's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing. We went to San Paulo where they have banned outdoor advertising. In the entire city for the past five years, there's no billboards, there's no posters, there's no flyers, nothing. (Applause) And we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across America. What's incredible for me is the projects that I've gotten the most feedback out of, or I've had the most success in, are ones where I've interacted with things directly. And that's what these brands did. They cut out the middleman, they cut out their agencies and said, "Maybe these agencies don't have my best interest in mind. I'm going to deal directly with the artist. I'm going to work with him to create something different, something that's going to get people thinking, that's going to challenge the way we look at the world." And how has that been for them? Has it been successful? Well, since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, let's take a look. According to Burrelles, the movie premiered in January, and since then — and this isn't even the whole thing — we've had 900 million media impressions for this film. That's literally covering just like a two and a half-week period. That's only online — no print, no TV. The film hasn't even been distributed yet. It's not even online. It's not even streaming. It's not even been out into other foreign countries yet. So ultimately, this film has already started to gain a lot of momentum. And not bad for a project that almost every ad agency we talked to advised their clients not to take part. What I always believe is that if you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity. I believe that when you push people away from that, you're pushing them more towards failure. I believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged. I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks. We need to encourage people to not be afraid of opportunities that may scare them. Ultimately, moving forward, I think we have to embrace fear. We've got to put that bear in a cage. (Laughter) Embrace fear. Embrace risk. One big spoonful at a time, we have to embrace risk. And ultimately, we have to embrace transparency. Today, more than ever, a little honesty is going to go a long way. And that being said, through honesty and transparency, my entire talk, "Embrace Transparency," has been brought to you by my good friends at EMC, who for $7,100 bought the naming rights on eBay. (Applause) EMC: Turning big data into big opportunity for organizations all over the world. EMC presents: "Embrace Transparency." Thank you very much, guys. (Applause) June Cohen: So, Morgan, in the name of transparency, what exactly happened to that $7,100? MS: That is a fantastic question. I have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the TED organization, the Sapling Foundation — a check for $7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year's TED. (Laughter) (Applause)

The invention that unlocked a locked-in artist

{0: 'Mick Ebeling founded the Not Impossible Foundation, a nonprofit that develops creative solutions to real-world problems.'}

TEDActive 2011

I have had the distinct blessing in my life to have worked on a bunch of amazing projects. But the coolest I ever worked on was around this guy. This guy's name is TEMPT. TEMPT was one of the foremost graffiti artists in the 80s. And he came up home from a run one day and said, "Dad, my legs are tingling." And that was the onset of ALS. So TEMPT is now completely paralyzed. He only has use of his eyes. I was exposed to him. I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world. And so we decided that we were going to sponsor Tony, TEMPT, and his cause. So I went and met with his brother and father and said, "We're going to give you this money. What are you going to do with it?" And his brother said, "I just want to be able to talk to Tony again. I just want to be able to communicate with him and him to be able to communicate with me." And I said, "Wait a second, isn't that — I've seen Stephen Hawking — don't all paralyzed people have the ability to communicate via these devices?" And he said, "No, unless you're in the upper echelon and you've got really amazing insurance, you can't actually do that. These devices aren't accessible to people." And I said, "Well, how do you actually communicate?" Has everyone seen the movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?" That's how they communicate — so run their finger along. I said, "That's archaic. How can that be?" So I showed up with the desire to just write a check, and instead, I wrote a check that I had no freaking idea how I was going to cash. I committed to his brother and his father right then and there — I'm like, "All right, here's the deal: Tony's going to speak, we're going to get him a machine, and we're going to figure out a way for him to do his art again. Because it's a travesty that someone who still has all of that in him isn't able to communicate it." So I spoke at a conference a couple months after that. I met these guys called GRL, Graffiti Research Lab, and they have a technology that allows them to project a light onto any surface and then, with a laser pointer, draw on it, and it just registers the negative space. So they go around and do art installations like this. All the things that go up there, they said there's a life cycle. First it starts with the sexual organs, then it starts with cuss words, then it was Bush slanders and then people actually got to art. But there was always a life cycle to their presentations. So I went home and was having dinner with my wife and was telling her about this, and we were like, "Well wait a second. If we know that this technology exists where you can use your eyes to control things, why don't we figure out a way for TEMPT to control a laser and he could do graf again? Well that would be awesome." So that started the journey. And about two years later, about a year later, after a bunch of organization and a bunch of moving things around, we'd accomplished a couple things. One, we battered down the doors of the insurance companies, and we actually got TEMPT a machine that let him communicate — a Stephen Hawking machine. (Applause) Which was awesome. And he's seriously one of the funniest — I call him Yoda, because you talk to the guy, you get an email from him, and you're like, "I'm not worthy. This guy's so amazing." The other thing we did is we flew seven programmers from all over the world — literally every corner of the world — into our house. My wife and kids and I moved to our back garage, and these hackers and programmers and conspiracy theorists and anarchists took over our house. A lot of our friends thought we were absolutely stupid to do that and that we were going to come back and all the pictures on the wall would be removed and graf on the walls. But for over two weeks, we programmed, we went to the Venice boardwalk, my kids got involved, my dog got involved, and we created this. This is called the EyeWriter, and you can see the description. This is a cheap pair of sunglasses that we bought at the Venice Beach boardwalk, some copper wire and some stuff from Home Depot and Radio Shack. We took a PS3 camera, hacked it open, mounted it to an LED light, and now there's a device that is free — you build this yourself, we publish the code for free, you download the software for free. And now we've created a device that has absolutely no limitations. There's no insurance company that can say "No." There's no hospital that can say "No." Anybody who's paralyzed now has access to actually draw or communicate using only their eyes. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you guys very much. That was awesome. So at the end of the two weeks, we went back to TEMPT's room. I love this picture, because this is someone else's room and that's his room. So there's all this hustle and bustle going on for the big unveiling. And after over a year of planning, two weeks of programming, carb-fest and all-night sessions, Tony drew again for the first time in seven years. And this is an amazing picture, because this is his life support system, and he's looking over his life support system. We kicked his bed so that he could see out. And we set up a projector on a wall out in the parking lot outside of his hospital. And he drew again for the first time, in front of his family and friends — and you can only imagine what the feeling in the parking lot was. The funny thing was, we had to break into the parking lot too, so we totally felt like we were legit in the whole graf scene too. (Laughter) So at the end of this, he sent us an email, and this is what the email said: "That was the first time I've drawn anything for seven years. I feel like I had been held underwater, and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so I could breathe." Isn't that awesome? (Applause) So that's kind of our battle cry. That's what keeps us going and keeps us developing. And we've got such a long way to go with this. This is an amazing device, but it's the equivalent of an Etch A Sketch. And someone who has that kind of artistic potential deserves so much more. So we're in the process of trying to figure out how to make it better, faster, stronger. Since that time, we've had all kinds of acknowledgment. We've won a bunch of awards. Remember, it's free; none of us are making any money on this thing. It's all coming out of our own pockets. So the awards were like, "Oh, this is fantastic." Armstrong Twittered about us, and then in December, Time magazine honored us as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010, which was really cool. (Applause) The coolest thing about this — and this is what's completing the whole circle — is that in April of this year, at the Geffen MOCA in downtown Los Angeles, there's going to be an exhibition called "Art of the Streets." And "Art of the Streets" is going to have pretty much the bad-asses of the street art scene — Banksy, Shepard Fairey, KAWS — all of these guys will be there. TEMPT's going to be in the show, which is pretty awesome. (Applause) So basically this is my point: If you see something that's not possible, make it possible. Everything in this room wasn't possible — this stage, this computer, this mic, the EyeWriter — wasn't possible at one point. Make it possible, everyone in this room. I'm not a programmer, never done anything with ocular recognition technology, but I just recognized something and associated myself with amazing people so that we could make something happen. And this is the question I want everyone to ask yourself every single day when you come up with something you feel that needs to be done: if not now, then when? And if not me, then who? Thank you guys. (Applause)

Looking past limits

{0: 'Caroline Casey works relentlessly to bring out a global shift in business inclusion, and ensure that everyone can live their life without limit or labels.'}

TEDWomen 2010

Can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17? Do you know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be a biker chick. (Laughter) I wanted to race cars, and I wanted to be a cowgirl, and I wanted to be Mowgli from "The Jungle Book." Because they were all about being free, the wind in your hair — just to be free. And on my seventeenth birthday, my parents, knowing how much I loved speed, gave me one driving lesson for my seventeenth birthday. Not that we could have afforded I drive, but to give me the dream of driving. And on my seventeenth birthday, I accompanied my little sister in complete innocence, as I always had all my life — my visually impaired sister — to go to see an eye specialist. Because big sisters are always supposed to support their little sisters. And my little sister wanted to be a pilot — God help her. So I used to get my eyes tested just for fun. And on my seventeenth birthday, after my fake eye exam, the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday. And he said, "So what are you going to do to celebrate?" And I took that driving lesson, and I said, "I'm going to learn how to drive." And then there was a silence — one of those awful silences when you know something's wrong. And he turned to my mother, and he said, "You haven't told her yet?" On my seventeenth birthday, as Janis Ian would best say, I learned the truth at 17. I am, and have been since birth, legally blind. And you know, how on earth did I get to 17 and not know that? Well, if anybody says country music isn't powerful, let me tell you this: I got there because my father's passion for Johnny Cash and a song, "A Boy Named Sue." I'm the eldest of three. I was born in 1971. And very shortly after my birth, my parents found out I had a condition called ocular albinism. And what the hell does that mean to you? So let me just tell you, the great part of all of this? I can't see this clock and I can't see the timing, so holy God, woohoo! (Laughter) I might buy some more time. But more importantly, let me tell you — I'm going to come up really close here. Don't freak out, Pat. Hey. See this hand? Beyond this hand is a world of Vaseline. Every man in this room, even you, Steve, is George Clooney. (Laughter) And every woman, you are so beautiful. And when I want to look beautiful, I step three feet away from the mirror, and I don't have to see these lines etched in my face from all the squinting I've done all my life from all the dark lights. The really strange part is that, at three and a half, just before I was going to school, my parents made a bizarre, unusual and incredibly brave decision. No special needs schools. No labels. No limitations. My ability and my potential. And they decided to tell me that I could see. So just like Johnny Cash's Sue, a boy given a girl's name, I would grow up and learn from experience how to be tough and how to survive, when they were no longer there to protect me, or just take it all away. But more significantly, they gave me the ability to believe, totally, to believe that I could. And so when I heard that eye specialist tell me all the things, a big fat "no," everybody imagines I was devastated. And don't get me wrong, because when I first heard it — aside from the fact that I thought he was insane — I got that thump in my chest, just that "huh?" But very quickly I recovered. It was like that. The first thing I thought about was my mom, who was crying over beside me. And I swear to God, I walked out of his office, "I will drive. I will drive. You're mad. I'll drive. I know I can drive." And with the same dogged determination that my father had bred into me since I was such a child — he taught me how to sail, knowing I could never see where I was going, I could never see the shore, and I couldn't see the sails, and I couldn't see the destination. But he told me to believe and feel the wind in my face. And that wind in my face made me believe that he was mad and I would drive. And for the next 11 years, I swore nobody would ever find out that I couldn't see, because I didn't want to be a failure, and I didn't want to be weak. And I believed I could do it. So I rammed through life as only a Casey can do. And I was an archeologist, and then I broke things. And then I managed a restaurant, and then I slipped on things. And then I was a masseuse. And then I was a landscape gardener. And then I went to business school. And you know, disabled people are hugely educated. And then I went in and I got a global consulting job with Accenture. And they didn't even know. And it's extraordinary how far belief can take you. In 1999, two and a half years into that job, something happened. Wonderfully, my eyes decided, enough. And temporarily, very unexpectedly, they dropped. And I'm in one of the most competitive environments in the world, where you work hard, play hard, you gotta be the best, you gotta be the best. And two years in, I really could see very little. And I found myself in front of an HR manager in 1999, saying something I never imagined that I would say. I was 28 years old. I had built a persona all around what I could and couldn't do. And I simply said, "I'm sorry. I can't see, and I need help." Asking for help can be incredibly difficult. And you all know what it is. You don't need to have a disability to know that. We all know how hard it is to admit weakness and failure. And it's frightening, isn't it? But all that belief had fueled me so long. And can I tell you, operating in the sighted world when you can't see, it's kind of difficult — it really is. Can I tell you, airports are a disaster. Oh, for the love of God. And please, any designers out there? OK, designers, please put up your hands, even though I can't even see you. I always end up in the gents' toilets. And there's nothing wrong with my sense of smell. But can I just tell you, the little sign for a gents' toilet or a ladies' toilet is determined by a triangle. Have you ever tried to see that if you have Vaseline in front of your eyes? It's such a small thing, right? And you know how exhausting it can be to try to be perfect when you're not, or to be somebody that you aren't? And so after admitting I couldn't see to HR, they sent me off to an eye specialist. And I had no idea that this man was going to change my life. But before I got to him, I was so lost. I had no idea who I was anymore. And that eye specialist, he didn't bother testing my eyes. God no, it was therapy. And he asked me several questions, of which many were, "Why? Why are you fighting so hard not to be yourself? And do you love what you do, Caroline?" And you know, when you go to a global consulting firm, they put a chip in your head, and you're like, "I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture." (Laughter) To leave would be failure. And he said, "Do you love it?" I couldn't even speak I was so choked up. I just was so — how do I tell him? And then he said to me, "What did you want to be when you were little?" Now listen, I wasn't going to say to him, "Well, I wanted to race cars and motorbikes." Hardly appropriate at this moment in time. He thought I was mad enough anyway. And as I left his office, he called me back and he said, "I think it's time. I think it's time to stop fighting and do something different." And that door closed. And that silence just outside a doctor's office, that many of us know. And my chest ached. And I had no idea where I was going. I had no idea. But I did know the game was up. And I went home, and, because the pain in my chest ached so much, I thought, "I'll go out for a run." Really not a very sensible thing to do. And I went on a run that I know so well. I know this run so well, by the back of my hand. I always run it perfectly fine. I count the steps and the lampposts and all those things that visually impaired people have a tendency to have a lot of meetings with. And there was a rock that I always missed. And I'd never fallen on it, never. And there I was crying away, and smash, bash on my rock. Broken, fallen over on this rock in the middle of March in 2000, typical Irish weather on a Wednesday — gray, snot, tears everywhere, ridiculously self-pitying. And I was floored, and I was broken, and I was angry. And I didn't know what to do. And I sat there for quite some time going, "How am I going to get off this rock and go home? Because who am I going to be? What am I going to be?" And I thought about my dad, and I thought, "Good God, I'm so not Sue now." And I kept thinking over and over in my mind, what had happened? Where did it go wrong? Why didn't I understand? And you know, the extraordinary part of it is I just simply had no answers. I had lost my belief. Look where my belief had brought me to. And now I had lost it. And now I really couldn't see. I was crumpled. And then I remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me, "What do you want to be? What do you want to be? What did you want to be when you were little? Do you love what you do? Do something different. What do you want to be? Do something different. What do you want to be?" And really slowly, slowly, slowly, it happened. And it did happen this way. And then the minute it came, it blew up in my head and bashed in my heart — something different. "Well, how about Mowgli from 'The Jungle Book'? You don't get more different than that." And the moment, and I mean the moment, the moment that hit me, I swear to God, it was like woo hoo! You know — something to believe in. And nobody can tell me no. Yes, you can say I can't be an archeologist. But you can't tell me, no, I can't be Mowgli, because guess what? Nobody's ever done it before, so I'm going to go do it. And it doesn't matter whether I'm a boy or a girl, I'm just going to scoot. And so I got off that rock, and, oh my God, did I run home. And I sprinted home, and I didn't fall, and I didn't crash. And I ran up the stairs, and there was one of my favorite books of all time, "Travels on My Elephant" by Mark Shand — I don't know if any of you know it. And I grabbed this book off, and I'm sitting on the couch going, "I know what I'm going to do. I know how to be Mowgli. I'm going to go across India on the back of an elephant. I'm going to be an elephant handler." And I had no idea how I was going to be an elephant handler. From global management consultant to elephant handler. I had no idea how. I had no idea how you hire an elephant, get an elephant. I didn't speak Hindi. I'd never been to India. Hadn't a clue. But I knew I would. Because, when you make a decision at the right time and the right place, God, that universe makes it happen for you. Nine months later, after that day on snot rock, I had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called Kanchi. And together we would trek a thousand kilometers across India. (Applause) The most powerful thing of all, it's not that I didn't achieve before then. Oh my God, I did. But you know, I was believing in the wrong thing. Because I wasn't believing in me, really me, all the bits of me — all the bits of all of us. Do you know how much of us all pretend to be somebody we're not? And you know what, when you really believe in yourself and everything about you, it's extraordinary what happens. And you know what, that trip, that thousand kilometers, it raised enough money for 6,000 cataract eye operations. Six thousand people got to see because of that. When I came home off that elephant, do you know what the most amazing part was? I chucked in my job at Accenture. I left, and I became a social entrepreneur, and I set up an organization with Mark Shand called Elephant Family, which deals with Asian elephant conservation. And I set up Kanchi, because my organization was always going to be named after my elephant, because disability is like the elephant in the room. And I wanted to make you see it in a positive way — no charity, no pity. But I wanted to work only and truly with business and media leadership to totally reframe disability in a way that was exciting and possible. It was extraordinary. That's what I wanted to do. And I never thought about noes anymore, or not seeing, or any of that kind of nothing. It just seemed that it was possible. And you know, the oddest part is, when I was on my way traveling here to TED, I'll be honest, I was petrified. And I speak, but this is an amazing audience, and what am I doing here? But as I was traveling here, you'll be very happy to know, I did use my white symbol stick cane, because it's really good to skip queues in the airport. And I got my way here being happily proud that I couldn't see. And the one thing is that a really good friend of mine, he texted me on the way over, knowing I was scared. Even though I present confident, I was scared. He said, "Be you." And so here I am. This is me, all of me. (Applause) And I have learned, you know what, cars and motorbikes and elephants, that's not freedom. Being absolutely true to yourself is freedom. And I never needed eyes to see — never. I simply needed vision and belief. And if you truly believe — and I mean believe from the bottom of your heart — you can make change happen. And we need to make it happen, because every single one of us — woman, man, gay, straight, disabled, perfect, normal, whatever — everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves. I no longer want anybody to be invisible. We all have to be included. And stop with the labels, the limiting. Losing of labels, because we are not jam jars. We are extraordinary, different, wonderful people. Thank you. (Applause)

A song inspired by the ocean

{0: 'Jackson Browne has written and performed some of the most literate and moving songs in popular music -- and has defined a genre of songwriting charged with honesty, emotion and personal politics.'}

TEDxGreatPacificGarbagePatch

(Applause) Thank you. (Music) ♫ Slide into the shimmering surface ♫ ♫ between two worlds. ♫ ♫ Standing at the center of time ♫ ♫ as it uncurls. ♫ ♫ Cutting through the veil of illusion. ♫ ♫ Moving beyond past conclusions. ♫ ♫ Wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere right now, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ Searching for the future ♫ ♫ among the things we're throwing away. ♫ ♫ Trying to see the world ♫ ♫ through the junk we produce everyday. ♫ ♫ They say nothing lasts forever, ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in history, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ The Romans, the Spanish ♫ ♫ the British, the Dutch, ♫ ♫ American exceptionalism, so out of touch. ♫ ♫ The folly of empire repeating its course, ♫ ♫ imposing its will ♫ ♫ and ruling by force ♫ ♫ on and on through time. ♫ ♫ But the world can't take it very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world is going to shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change things, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫ ♫ They say nothing last forever, ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it ♫ ♫ very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it, that you can see. ♫ ♫ If the oceans don't make it, neither will we. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself all the way free ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change the outcome, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫ (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

The history of our world in 18 minutes

{0: 'David Christian teaches an ambitious world history course that tells the tale of the entire universe -- from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to present day.'}

TED2011

First, a video. Yes, it is a scrambled egg. But as you look at it, I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy. Because you may notice that what's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself. And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated. And now they're going to be poured back into the egg. And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works. A scrambled egg is mush — tasty mush — but it's mush. An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure — in fact, to mush. And that's why that video feels a bit strange. And yet, look around us. What we see around us is staggering complexity. Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone, there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded. That's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth. And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals, who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity. So here's a great puzzle: in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described, the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center? Well, the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls "Goldilocks conditions" — not too hot, not too cold, just right for the creation of complexity. And slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage. Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity. Now, we, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility. And that's the story that we tell in big history. But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible. You have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it. (Laughter) Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years, to the beginning of time. Around us, there's nothing. There's not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we've crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. It's incredibly hot. It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting. And it's expanding at incredible speed. And at first, it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter — quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second. Now we move forward 380,000 years. That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet. And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium. Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage. We know above all that it was extremely simple. It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and they have no structure. They're really a sort of cosmic mush. But that's not completely true. Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background. What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas. These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity. And this is how it works. Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff. So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds. And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then, at the center, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there's a huge release of energy, and — bam! We have our first stars. From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them. And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex. Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds. When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. So now the universe is chemically more complex. And in a chemically more complex universe, it's possible to make more things. And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually, they form planets and moons. And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago. Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials. So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity. Now, the going gets tougher. The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity. I'm talking, of course, about living organisms. Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals. So, chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force. That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets. Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry? What are the Goldilocks conditions? Well, first, you need energy, but not too much. In the center of a star, there's so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again. But not too little. In intergalactic space, there's so little energy that atoms can't combine. What you want is just the right amount, and planets, it turns out, are just right, because they're close to stars, but not too close. You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquids, such as water. Why? Well, in gases, atoms move past each other so fast that they can't hitch up. In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move. In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules. Now, where do you find such Goldilocks conditions? Well, planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect. It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of liquid water. And deep beneath those oceans, at cracks in the Earth's crust, you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you've got a great diversity of elements. So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations. But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry. How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable? Well, it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick. You don't stabilize the individual; you stabilize the template, the thing that carries information, and you allow the template to copy itself. And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information. You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA. Each rung contains information. So, DNA contains information about how to make living organisms. And DNA also copies itself. So, it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean. So the information spreads. Notice that information has become part of our story. The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections. As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error. And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning. It's accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work. So DNA's learning and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity. And we can see this happening over the last four billion years. For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple — single cells. But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity. Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear. You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs. And occasionally, there are disasters. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out. Terrible news for the dinosaurs, but great news for our mammalian ancestors, who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs. And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid. Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. Let me explain why. We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow. DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them. Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift. I call this ability collective learning. It's what makes us different. We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments, into desert lands, into jungles, into the Ice Age tundra of Siberia — tough, tough environment — into the Americas, into Australasia. Each migration involved learning — learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings. Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. And that brain is learning at warp speed. And in the last 200 years, something else has happened. We've stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us. So — Here we are, back at the convention center. We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. I hope you agree this is a powerful story. And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. But it also contains warnings. Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it. I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us. We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years. So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning. And now, finally — this is what I want. I want my grandson, Daniel, and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us. And that's why a group of us are building a free, online syllabus in big history for high-school students throughout the world. We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet. I thank you for your attention. (Applause)

The antidote to apathy

{0: 'Dave Meslin is a "professional rabble-rouser." Based in Toronto, he works to make local issues engaging and even fun to get involved in.'}

TEDxToronto 2010

How often do we hear that people just don't care? How many times have you been told that real, substantial change isn't possible because most people are too selfish, too stupid or too lazy to try to make a difference in their community? I propose to you today that apathy as we think we know it doesn't actually exist; but rather, that people do care, but that we live in a world that actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles and barriers in our way. I'll give you some examples of what I mean. Let's start with city hall. You ever see one of these before? This is a newspaper ad. It's a notice of a zoning application change for a new office building so the neighborhood knows what's happening. As you can see, it's impossible to read. You need to get halfway down to even find out which address they're talking about, and then further down, in tiny 10-point font, to find out how to actually get involved. Imagine if the private sector advertised in the same way — if Nike wanted to sell a pair of shoes — (Laughter) And put an ad in the paper like that. (Applause) Now, that would never happen. You'll never see an ad like that, because Nike actually wants you to buy their shoes, whereas the city of Toronto clearly doesn't want you involved with the planning process, otherwise their ads would look something like this, with all the information laid out clearly. As long as the city's putting out notices like this to try to get people engaged, then of course people aren't going to be engaged. But that's not apathy; that's intentional exclusion. Public space. (Applause) The manner in which we mistreat our public spaces is a huge obstacle towards any type of progressive political change, because we've essentially put a price tag on freedom of expression. Whoever has the most money gets the loudest voice, dominating the visual and mental environment. The problem with this model is there are some amazing messages that need to be said, that aren't profitable to say. So you're never going to see them on a billboard. The media plays an important role in developing our relationship with political change, mainly by ignoring politics and focusing on celebrities and scandals, but even when they do talk about important political issues, they do it in a way that I feel discourages engagement. I'll give you an example. The "Now" magazine from last week: progressive, downtown weekly in Toronto. This is the cover story. It's an article about a theater performance, and it starts with basic information about where it is, in case you actually want to go and see it after you've read the article — where, the time, the website. Same with this — it's a movie review. An art review. A book review — where the reading is in case you want to go. A restaurant — you might not want to just read about it, maybe you want to go there. So they tell you where it is, the prices, the address, the phone number, etc. Then you get to their political articles. Here's a great article about an important election race that's happening. It talks about the candidates, written very well, but no information, no follow-up, no websites for the campaigns, no information about when the debates are, where the campaign offices are. Here's another good article, about a new campaign opposing privatization of transit, without any contact information for the campaign. The message seems to be that the readers are most likely to want to eat, maybe read a book, maybe see a movie, but not be engaged in their community. You might think this is a small thing, but I think it's important, because it sets a tone and it reinforces the dangerous idea that politics is a spectator sport. Heroes: How do we view leadership? Look at these 10 movies. What do they have in common? Anyone? They all have heroes who were chosen. Someone came up to them and said, "You're the chosen one. There's a prophecy. You have to save the world." And then they go off and save the world because they've been told to, with a few people tagging along. This helps me understand why a lot of people have trouble seeing themselves as leaders — because it sends all the wrong messages about what leadership is about. A heroic effort is a collective effort, number one. Number two, it's imperfect; it's not very glamorous, and doesn't suddenly start and suddenly end. It's an ongoing process your whole life. But most importantly, it's voluntary. It's voluntary. As long as we're teaching our kids that heroism starts when someone scratches a mark on your forehead, or someone tells you you're part of a prophecy, they're missing the most important characteristic of leadership, which is that it comes from within. It's about following your own dreams, uninvited, and then working with others to make those dreams come true. Political parties: oh, boy. Political parties could and should be one of the basic entry points for people to get engaged in politics. Instead, they've become, sadly, uninspiring and uncreative organizations that rely so heavily on market research and polling and focus groups that they end up all saying the same thing, pretty much regurgitating back to us what we already want to hear at the expense of putting forward bold and creative ideas. And people can smell that, and it feeds cynicism. (Applause) Charitable status. Groups who have charitable status in Canada aren't allowed to do advocacy. This is a huge problem and a huge obstacle to change, because it means that some of the most passionate and informed voices are completely silenced, especially during election time. Which leads us to the last one, which is: our elections. As you may have noticed, our elections in Canada are a complete joke. We use out-of-date systems that are unfair and create random results. Canada's currently led by a party that most Canadians didn't actually want. How can we honestly and genuinely encourage more people to vote when votes don't count in Canada? You add all this up together, and of course people are apathetic. It's like trying to run into a brick wall. Now, I'm not trying to be negative by throwing all these obstacles out and explaining what's in our way. Quite the opposite — I actually think people are amazing and smart and that they do care, but that, as I said, we live in this environment where all these obstacles are being put in our way. As long as we believe that people, our own neighbors, are selfish, stupid or lazy, then there's no hope. But we can change all those things I mentioned. We can open up city hall. We can reform our electoral systems. We can democratize our public spaces. My main message is: if we can redefine apathy, not as some kind of internal syndrome, but as a complex web of cultural barriers that reinforces disengagement, and if we can clearly define, clearly identify what those obstacles are, and then if we can work together collectively to dismantle those obstacles, then anything is possible. Thank you. (Applause)

Remaking my voice

{0: 'After losing the power to speak, legendary film critic Roger Ebert went on to write about creativity, race, politics and culture -- and film, just as brilliantly as ever.'}

TED2011

Roger Ebert: These are my words, but this is not my voice. This is Alex, the best computer voice I've been able to find, which comes as standard equipment on every Macintosh. For most of my life, I never gave a second thought to my ability to speak. It was like breathing. In those days, I was living in a fool's paradise. After surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak, eat or drink, I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me. For several days now, we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at TED. I used to be able to talk like that. Maybe I wasn't as smart, but I was at least as talkative. I want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself, and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away. However, I've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous. So I've decided to recruit some of my TED friends to read my words aloud for me. I will start with my wife, Chaz. Chaz Ebert: It was Chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak. Going into the first surgery for a recurrence of salivary cancer in 2006, I expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show, 'Ebert and Roeper at the Movies.' I had pre-taped enough shows to get me through six weeks of surgery and recuperation. The doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw. My tongue, larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected. (Laughter) (Laughter) CE: I was optimistic, and all was right with the world. The first surgery was a great success. I saw myself in the mirror and I looked pretty good. Two weeks later, I was ready to return home. I was using my iPod to play the Leonard Cohen song 'I'm Your Man' for my doctors and nurses. Suddenly, I had an episode of catastrophic bleeding. My carotid artery had ruptured. Thank God I was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there. Chaz told me that if that song hadn't played for so long, I might have already been in the car, on the way home, and would have died right there and then. So thank you, Leonard Cohen, for saving my life. (Applause) There was a second surgery — which held up for five or six days and then it also fell apart. And then a third attempt, which also patched me back together pretty well, until it failed. A doctor from Brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture. And before I left the hospital, after a year of being hospitalized, I had seven ruptures of my carotid artery. There was no particular day when anyone told me I would never speak again; it just sort of became obvious. Human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system. We need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath in order to form sounds. Therefore, the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air. Because I had lost my jaw, I could no longer form a seal, and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless. Dean Ornish: At first for a long time, I wrote messages in notebooks. Then I tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice. This was faster, and nobody had to try to read my handwriting. I tried out various computer voices that were available online, and for several months I had a British accent, which Chaz called Sir Lawrence." (Laughter) "It was the clearest I could find. Then Apple released the Alex voice, which was the best I'd heard. It knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark. When it saw a period, it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air. There are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices, and I've experimented with them. For me, they share a fundamental problem: they're too slow. When I find myself in a conversational situation, I need to type fast and to jump right in. People don't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase. But what value do we place on the sound of our own voice? How does that affect who you are as a person? When people hear Alex speaking my words, do they experience a disconnect? Does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next? How did I feel not being able to speak? I felt, and I still feel, a lot of distance from the human mainstream. I've become uncomfortable when I'm separated from my laptop. Even then, I'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties. So Chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my TV show voice from a period of 30 years. At first I was against it. I thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer. There was something comforting about a voice that was not my own. But I decided then to just give it a try. So we contacted a company in Scotland that created personalized computer voices. They'd never made one from previously-recorded materials. All of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth. But they were willing to give it a try. So I sent them many hours of recordings of my voice, including several audio commentary tracks that I'd made for movies on DVDs. And it sounded like me, it really did. There was a reason for that; it was me. But it wasn't that simple. The tapes from my TV show weren't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved — movie soundtracks, for example, or Gene Siskel arguing with me — (Laughter) and my words often had a particular emphasis that didn't fit into a sentence well enough. I'll let you hear a sample of that voice. These are a few of the comments I recorded for use when Chaz and I appeared on the Oprah Winfrey program. And here's the voice we call Roger Jr. or Roger 2.0. Roger 2.0: Oprah, I can't tell you how great it is to be back on your show. We have been talking for a long time, and now here we are again. This is the first version of my computer voice. It still needs improvement, but at least it sounds like me and not like HAL 9000. When I heard it the first time, it sent chills down my spine. When I type anything, this voice will speak whatever I type. When I read something, it will read in my voice. I have typed these words in advance, as I didn't think it would be thrilling to sit here watching me typing. The voice was created by a company in Scotland named CereProc. It makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while I was commenting on "Casablanca" and "Citizen Kane." This is the first voice they've created for an individual. There are several very good voices available for computers, but they all sound like somebody else, while this voice sounds like me. I plan to use it on television, radio and the Internet. People who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems. Many blind people use them to read pages on the Web to themselves. But I've got to say, in first grade, they said I talked too much, and now I still can. (Laughter) Roger Ebert: As you can hear, it sounds like me, but the words jump up and down. The flow isn't natural. The good people in Scotland are still improving my voice, and I'm optimistic about it. But so far, the Apple Alex voice is the best one I've heard. I wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played Alex. He said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice. A very large sample is needed. John Hunter: All my life I was a motormouth. Now I have spoken my last words, and I don't even remember for sure what they were. I feel like the hero of that Harlan Ellison story titled "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." On Wednesday, David Christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time-span of the universe. For almost all of its millions and billions of years, there was no life on Earth at all. For almost all the years of life on Earth, there was no intelligent life. Only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next, did civilization become possible. In cosmological terms, that was about 10 minutes ago. Finally came mankind's most advanced and mysterious tool, the computer. That has mostly happened in my lifetime. Some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of Urbana, the birthplace of HAL 9000. When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday, about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world, I had a flashback. It was about 1960. As a local newspaper reporter still in high school, I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called PLATO. The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations. This was a computer-assisted instruction system, which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC. The programmers said it could assist students in their learning. I doubt, on that day 50 years ago, they even dreamed of what Salman Khan has accomplished. But that's not the point. The point is PLATO was only 50 years ago, an instant in time. It continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers, until only five years ago. I have learned from Wikipedia that, starting with that humble beginning, PLATO established forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing and multiple-player games. Since the first Web browser was also developed in Urbana, it appears that my hometown in downstate Illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual, online universe we occupy today. But I'm not here from the Chamber of Commerce. (Laughter) I'm here as a man who wants to communicate. All of this has happened in my lifetime. I started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first Atech systems was installed at the Chicago Sun-Times. I was in line at Radio Shack to buy one of the first Model 100's. And when I told the people in the press room at the Academy Awards that they'd better install some phone lines for Internet connections, they didn't know what I was talking about. When I bought my first desktop, it was a DEC Rainbow. Does anybody remember that?" (Applause) "The Sun Times sent me to the Cannes Film Festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the Porteram Telebubble. I joined CompuServe when it had fewer numbers than I currently have followers on Twitter. (Laughter) CE: All of this has happened in the blink of an eye. It is unimaginable what will happen next. It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history. Indeed, I am lucky to live in history at all, because without intelligence and memory there is no history. For billions of years, the universe evolved completely without notice. Now we live in the age of the Internet, which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness. And because of it, I can communicate as well as I ever could. We are born into a box of time and space. We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others. For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence. I cannot speak; I can only type so fast. Computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated, but with my computer, I can communicate more widely than ever before. I feel as if my blog, my email, Twitter and Facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation. They aren't an improvement, but they're the best I can do. They give me a way to speak. Not everybody has the patience of my wife, Chaz. But online, everybody speaks at the same speed. This whole adventure has been a learning experience. Every time there was a surgery that failed, I was left with a little less flesh and bone. Now I have no jaw left at all. While harvesting tissue from both my shoulders, the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily. Ironic that my legs are fine, and it's my shoulders that slow up my walk. When you see me today, I look like the Phantom of the Opera. But no you don't. (Laughter) (Applause) It is human nature to look at someone like me and assume I have lost some of my marbles. People — (Applause) People talk loudly — I'm so sorry. Excuse me. (Applause) People talk loudly and slowly to me. Sometimes they assume I am deaf. There are people who don't want to make eye contact. Believe me, he didn't mean this as — anyway, let me just read it. (Laughter) You should never let your wife read something like this. (Laughter) It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression. I have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way. One of my Twitter friends can type only with his toes. One of the funniest blogs on the Web is written by a friend of mine named Smartass Cripple. (Laughter) Google him and he will make you laugh. All of these people are saying, in one way or another, that what you see is not all you get. So I have not come here to complain. I have much to make me happy and relieved. I seem, for the time being, to be cancer-free. I am writing as well as ever. I am productive. If I were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago, I would be as isolated as a hermit. I would be trapped inside my head. Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream. RE: Wait. I have one more thing to add. A guy goes into a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, "You're crazy." The guy says, "I want a second opinion." The psychiatrist says, "All right, you're ugly." (Laughter) You all know the test for artificial intelligence — the Turing test. A human judge has a conversation with a human and a computer. If the judge can't tell the machine apart from the human, the machine has passed the test. I now propose a test for computer voices — the Ebert test. If a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that's the voice I want. (Applause)

Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

{0: 'Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing a set of blueprints for 50 farming tools that can be built cheaply from scratch. Call it a "civilization starter kit."'}

TED2011

Hi, my name is Marcin — farmer, technologist. I was born in Poland, now in the U.S. I started a group called Open Source Ecology. We've identified the 50 most important machines that we think it takes for modern life to exist — things from tractors, bread ovens, circuit makers. Then we set out to create an open source, DIY, do it yourself version that anyone can build and maintain at a fraction of the cost. We call this the Global Village Construction Set. So let me tell you a story. So I finished my 20s with a Ph.D. in fusion energy, and I discovered I was useless. I had no practical skills. The world presented me with options, and I took them. I guess you can call it the consumer lifestyle. So I started a farm in Missouri and learned about the economics of farming. I bought a tractor — then it broke. I paid to get it repaired — then it broke again. Then pretty soon, I was broke too. I realized that the truly appropriate, low-cost tools that I needed to start a sustainable farm and settlement just didn't exist yet. I needed tools that were robust, modular, highly efficient and optimized, low-cost, made from local and recycled materials that would last a lifetime, not designed for obsolescence. I found that I would have to build them myself. So I did just that. And I tested them. And I found that industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale. So then I published the 3D designs, schematics, instructional videos and budgets on a wiki. Then contributors from all over the world began showing up, prototyping new machines during dedicated project visits. So far, we have prototyped eight of the 50 machines. And now the project is beginning to grow on its own. We know that open source has succeeded with tools for managing knowledge and creativity. And the same is starting to happen with hardware too. We're focusing on hardware because it is hardware that can change people's lives in such tangible material ways. If we can lower the barriers to farming, building, manufacturing, then we can unleash just massive amounts of human potential. That's not only in the developing world. Our tools are being made for the American farmer, builder, entrepreneur, maker. We've seen lots of excitement from these people, who can now start a construction business, parts manufacturing, organic CSA or just selling power back to the grid. Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear, so complete, that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit. I've planted a hundred trees in a day. I've pressed 5,000 bricks in one day from the dirt beneath my feet and built a tractor in six days. From what I've seen, this is only the beginning. If this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant. A greater distribution of the means of production, environmentally sound supply chains, and a newly relevant DIY maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity. We're exploring the limits of what we all can do to make a better world with open hardware technology. Thank you. (Applause)

Transplant cells, not organs

{0: 'A surgical pioneer in Singapore, Susan Lim is a researcher and entrepreneur.'}

INK Conference

So I was privileged to train in transplantation under two great surgical pioneers: Thomas Starzl, who performed the world's first successful liver transplant in 1967, and Sir Roy Calne, who performed the first liver transplant in the U.K. in the following year. I returned to Singapore and, in 1990, performed Asia's first successful cadaveric liver transplant procedure, but against all odds. Now when I look back, the transplant was actually the easiest part. Next, raising the money to fund the procedure. But perhaps the most challenging part was to convince the regulators — a matter which was debated in the parliament — that a young female surgeon be allowed the opportunity to pioneer for her country. But 20 years on, my patient, Surinder, is Asia's longest surviving cadaveric liver transplant to date. (Applause) And perhaps more important, I am the proud godmother to her 14 year-old son. (Applause) But not all patients on the transplant wait list are so fortunate. The truth is, there are just simply not enough donor organs to go around. As the demand for donor organs continues to rise, in large part due to the aging population, the supply has remained relatively constant. In the United States alone, 100,000 men, women and children are on the waiting list for donor organs, and more than a dozen die each day because of a lack of donor organs. The transplant community has actively campaigned in organ donation. And the gift of life has been extended from brain-dead donors to living, related donors — relatives who might donate an organ or a part of an organ, like a split liver graft, to a relative or loved one. But as there was still a dire shortage of donor organs, the gift of life was then extended from living, related donors to now living, unrelated donors. And this then has given rise to unprecedented and unexpected moral controversy. How can one distinguish a donation that is voluntary and altruistic from one that is forced or coerced from, for example, a submissive spouse, an in-law, a servant, a slave, an employee? Where and how can we draw the line? In my part of the world, too many people live below the poverty line. And in some areas, the commercial gifting of an organ in exchange for monetary reward has led to a flourishing trade in living, unrelated donors. Shortly after I performed the first liver transplant, I received my next assignment, and that was to go to the prisons to harvest organs from executed prisoners. I was also pregnant at the time. Pregnancies are meant to be happy and fulfilling moments in any woman's life. But my joyful period was marred by solemn and morbid thoughts — thoughts of walking through the prison's high-security death row, as this was the only route to take me to the makeshift operating room. And at each time, I would feel the chilling stares of condemned prisoners' eyes follow me. And for two years, I struggled with the dilemma of waking up at 4:30 am on a Friday morning, driving to the prison, getting down, gloved and scrubbed, ready to receive the body of an executed prisoner, remove the organs and then transport these organs to the recipient hospital and then graft the gift of life to a recipient the same afternoon. No doubt, I was informed, the consent had been obtained. But, in my life, the one fulfilling skill that I had was now invoking feelings of conflict — conflict ranging from extreme sorrow and doubt at dawn to celebratory joy at engrafting the gift of life at dusk. In my team, the lives of one or two of my colleagues were tainted by this experience. Some of us may have been sublimated, but really none of us remained the same. I was troubled that the retrieval of organs from executed prisoners was at least as morally controversial as the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos. And in my mind, I realized as a surgical pioneer that the purpose of my position of influence was surely to speak up for those who have no influence. It made me wonder if there could be a better way — a way to circumvent death and yet deliver the gift of life that might exponentially impact millions of patients worldwide. Now just about that time, the practice of surgery evolved from big to small, from wide open incisions to keyhole procedures, tiny incisions. And in transplantation, concepts shifted from whole organs to cells. In 1988, at the University of Minnesota, I participated in a small series of whole organ pancreas transplants. I witnessed the technical difficulty. And this inspired in my mind a shift from transplanting whole organs to perhaps transplanting cells. I thought to myself, why not take the individual cells out of the pancreas — the cells that secrete insulin to cure diabetes — and transplant these cells? — technically a much simpler procedure than having to grapple with the complexities of transplanting a whole organ. And at that time, stem cell research had gained momentum, following the isolation of the world's first human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s. The observation that stem cells, as master cells, could give rise to a whole variety of different cell types — heart cells, liver cells, pancreatic islet cells — captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the public. I too was fascinated by this new and disruptive cell technology, and this inspired a shift in my mindset, from transplanting whole organs to transplanting cells. And I focused my research on stem cells as a possible source for cell transplants. Today we realize that there are many different types of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells have occupied center stage, chiefly because of their pluripotency — that is their ease in differentiating into a variety of different cell types. But the moral controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells — the fact that these cells are derived from five-day old human embryos — has encouraged research into other types of stem cells. Now to the ridicule of my colleagues, I inspired my lab to focus on what I thought was the most non-controversial source of stem cells, adipose tissue, or fat, yes fat — nowadays available in abundant supply — you and I, I think, would be very happy to get rid of anyway. Fat-derived stem cells are adult stem cells. And adult stem cells are found in you and me — in our blood, in our bone marrow, in our fat, our skin and other organs. And as it turns out, fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells. But adult stem cells are not embryonic stem cells. And here is the limitation: adult stem cells are mature cells, and, like mature human beings, these cells are more restricted in their thought and more restricted in their behavior and are unable to give rise to the wide variety of specialized cell types, as embryonic stem cells [can]. But in 2007, two remarkable individuals, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and Jamie Thomson of the United States, made an astounding discovery. They discovered that adult cells, taken from you and me, could be reprogrammed back into embryonic-like cells, which they termed IPS cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells. And so guess what, scientists around the world and in the labs are racing to convert aging adult cells — aging adult cells from you and me — they are racing to reprogram these cells back into more useful IPS cells. And in our lab, we are focused on taking fat and reprogramming mounds of fat into fountains of youthful cells — cells that we may use to then form other, more specialized, cells, which one day may be used as cell transplants. If this research is successful, it may then reduce the need to research and sacrifice human embryos. Indeed, there is a lot of hype, but also hope that the promise of stem cells will one day provide cures for a whole range of conditions. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, retinal eye diseases — are any of these conditions relevant, personally, to you? In May 2006, something horrible happened to me. I was about to start a robotic operation, but stepping out of the elevator into the bright and glaring lights of the operating room, I realized that my left visual field was fast collapsing into darkness. Earlier that week, I had taken a rather hard knock during late spring skiing — yes, I fell. And I started to see floaters and stars, which I casually dismissed as too much high-altitude sun exposure. What happened to me might have been catastrophic, if not for the fact that I was in reach of good surgical access. And I had my vision restored, but not before a prolonged period of convalescence — three months — in a head down position. This experience taught me to empathize more with my patients, and especially those with retinal diseases. 37 million people worldwide are blind, and 127 million more suffer from impaired vision. Stem cell-derived retinal transplants, now in a research phase, may one day restore vision, or part vision, to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide. Indeed, we live in both challenging as well as exciting times. As the world population ages, scientists are racing to discover new ways to enhance the power of the body to heal itself through stem cells. It is a fact that when our organs or tissues are injured, our bone marrow releases stem cells into our circulation. And these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue. Stem cells may be used as building blocks to repair damaged scaffolds within our body, or to provide new liver cells to repair damaged liver. As we speak, there are 117 or so clinical trials researching the use of stem cells for liver diseases. What lies ahead? Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. 1.1 million Americans suffer heart attacks yearly. 4.8 million suffer cardiac failure. Stem cells may be used to deliver growth factors to repair damaged heart muscle or be differentiated into heart muscle cells to restore heart function. There are 170 clinical trials investigating the role of stem cells in heart disease. While still in a research phase, stem cells may one day herald a quantum leap in the field of cardiology. Stem cells provide hope for new beginnings — small, incremental steps, cells rather than organs, repair rather than replacement. Stem cell therapies may one day reduce the need for donor organs. Powerful new technologies always present enigmas. As we speak, the world's first human embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury is currently underway following the USFDA approval. And in the U.K., neural stem cells to treat stroke are being investigated in a phase one trial. The research success that we celebrate today has been made possible by the curiosity and contribution and commitment of individual scientists and medical pioneers. Each one has his story. My story has been about my journey from organs to cells — a journey through controversy, inspired by hope — hope that, as we age, you and I may one day celebrate longevity with an improved quality of life. Thank you.

A radical experiment in empathy

{0: 'Sam Richards is a sociologist and teacher of the largest race relations course in the US. He argues that empathy is the core of sociology.'}

TEDxPSU

My students often ask me, "What is sociology?" And I tell them it's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see. And they say, "So, how can I be a sociologist? How can I understand those invisible forces?" And I say, "Empathy. Start with empathy. It all begins with empathy. Take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person." Here, I'll give you an example. So I imagine my life if, a hundred years ago, China had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the United States in search of coal. And they found it, and, in fact, they found lots of it right here. And pretty soon, they began shipping that coal, ton by ton, railcar by railcar, boatload by boatload, back to China and elsewhere around the world. And they got fabulously wealthy in doing so. And they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal. And back here in the United States, we saw economic despair, deprivation. This is what I saw. I saw people struggling to get by, not knowing what was what and what was next. And I asked myself the question: How is it possible that we could be so poor here in the United States, because coal is such a wealthy resource; it's so much money? And I realize: because the Chinese ingratiated themselves with a small ruling class here in the United States, who stole all of that money and all of that wealth for themselves. And the rest of us, the vast majority of us, struggle to get by. And the Chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like me would not speak out against this relationship. Does this sound familiar? And they did things like train Americans to help protect the coal. And everywhere, there were symbols of the Chinese — everywhere, a constant reminder. And back in China, what do they say in China? Nothing! They don't talk about us. They don't talk about the coal. If you ask them, they'll say, "Well, you know, we need the coal. I mean, come on, I'm not going to turn down my thermostat. You can't expect that." And so, I get angry, and I get pissed, as do lots of average people. And we fight back, and it gets really ugly. And the Chinese respond in a very ugly way. And before we know it, they send in the tanks and they send in the troops. And lots of people are dying. And it's a very, very difficult situation. Can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes? Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there, or a truck full of soldiers? Just imagine what you would feel, because you know why they're here; you know what they're doing here. And you just feel the anger and you feel the fear. If you can, that's empathy. That's empathy. You've left your shoes, and you've stood in mine. And you've got to feel that. OK, so that's the warm-up. That's the warm-up. Now we're going to have the real radical experiment. So, for the remainder of my talk, what I want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary Arab Muslim living in the Middle East — in particular, in Iraq. And so to help you, perhaps you're a member of this middle-class family in Baghdad. What you want is the best for your kids. You want your kids to have a better life. And you watch the news, you pay attention. You read the newspaper, you go down to the coffee shop with your friends, you read the newspapers from around the world. Sometimes you even watch satellite, CNN, from the United States. You have a sense of what the Americans are thinking. But really, you just want a better life for yourself. That's what you want. You're Arab Muslim living in Iraq. You want a better life for yourself. So here, let me help you. Let me help you with some things that you might be thinking. Number one: this incursion into your land these past 20 years and before — the reason anyone is interested in your land, and particularly the United States, is oil. It's all about oil; you know that, everybody knows that. People back in the United States know it's about oil. It's because somebody else has a design for your resource. It's your resource — it's not somebody else's. It's your land; it's your resource. Somebody else has a design for it. And you know why they have a design? You know why they have their eyes set on it? Because they have an entire economic system that's dependent on that oil — foreign oil, oil from other parts of the world that they don't own. And what else do you think about these people? The Americans, they're rich. Come on, they live in big houses, they have big cars. They all have blond hair, blue eyes. They're happy. You think that. It's not true, of course, but that's the media impression. And that's what you get. And they have big cities, and the cities are all dependent on oil. And back home, what do you see? Poverty, despair, struggle. Look, you don't live in a wealthy country. I mean — this is Iraq. This is what you see. You see people struggling to get by. It's not easy; you see a lot of poverty. And you feel something about this. These people have designs for your resource, and this is what you see? Something else you see that you talk about — Americans don't talk about this, but you do — there's this thing, this militarization of the world, and it's centered right in the United States. And the United States is responsible for almost one half of the world's military spending. Four percent of the world's population! And you feel it; you see it every day. It's part of your life. And you talk about it with your friends. You read about it. And back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered. And what you see, something else: the United States, the hub of democracy around the world — they don't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world. There are a lot of countries, oil-producing countries, that aren't very democratic, but supported by the United States. That's odd. Oh — these incursions, these two wars, the 10 years of sanctions, the eight years of occupation, the insurgency that's been unleashed on your people, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths? All because of oil. You can't help but think that. You talk about it. It's in the forefront of your mind, always. You say, "How is that possible?" And this man, he's everyman — your grandfather, your uncle, your father, your son, your neighbor, your professor, your student. Once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly, pain and sorrow. Everyone in your country has been touched by the violence, the bloodshed, the pain, the horror — everybody. Not a single person in your country has not been touched. But there's something else. There's something else about these people, these Americans who are there. There's something else about them that you see that they don't see themselves. And what do you see? They're Christians! They're Christians. They worship the Christian God, they have crosses, they carry Bibles. Their Bibles have a little insignia that says "US Army" on them. And their leaders, their leaders: before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country — and you know the reason — before they send them off, they go to a Christian church, and they pray to their Christian God, and they ask for protection and guidance from that god. Why? Well, obviously, when people die in the war, they are Muslims, they are Iraqis — they're not Americans. You don't want Americans to die — "Protect Our Troops." And you feel something about that — of course you do. And they do wonderful things. You read about it, you hear about it. They're there to build schools and help people. That's what they want to do. They do wonderful things, but they also do the bad things, and you can't tell the difference. And this guy, you get a guy like Lt. Gen. William Boykin. Here's a guy who says that your god is a false god. Your god's an idol; his god is the true god. The solution to the problem in the Middle East, according to him, is to convert you all to Christianity — just get rid of your religion. And you know that. Americans don't read about this guy. They don't know anything about him, but you do. You pass it around. You pass his words around. I mean, this is serious. You're afraid. He was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of Iraq. And you're thinking, "My God, if this guy is saying that, then all the soldiers must be saying that." And this word here — George Bush called this war a crusade. Man, the Americans, they're just like, "Ah, crusade. Whatever. I don't know what that means." You know what it means — it's a holy war against Muslims. Look, invade, subdue them, take their resources. If they won't submit, kill them. That's what this is about. And you're thinking, "My God, these Christians are coming to kill us." This is frightening. You feel frightened. Of course you feel frightened. And this man, Terry Jones: I mean here's a guy who wants to burn Qurans, right? And the Americans: "Ah, he's a knucklehead. He's a former hotel manager; he's got three dozen members of his church ..." They laugh him off. You don't laugh him off, because in the context of everything else, all the pieces fit. Of course this is how Americans think. So people all over the Middle East, not just in your country, are protesting. "He wants to burn Qurans, our holy book. These Christians — who are these Christians? They're so evil, they're so mean — this is what they're about?" This is what you're thinking as an Arab Muslim, as an Iraqi. Of course you're going to think this. And then your cousin says, "Hey coz, check out this website. You've got to see this — Bible Boot Camp. These Christians are nuts! They're training their little kids to be soldiers for Jesus. They take little kids and run them through these things till they teach them how to say, 'Sir! Yes, sir!' and things like 'grenade toss' and 'weapons care and maintenance.' And go to the website — it says 'US Army' right on it. I mean, these Christians, they're nuts. How can they do this to their little kids?" And you're reading this website. And of course, Christians in the United States, or anybody, says, "This is some little church in the middle of nowhere." You don't know that. For you, this is like, all Christians. It's all over the Web: "Bible Boot Camp." And look at this. They even teach their kids — they train them in the same way the US Marines train. Isn't that interesting. And it scares you, and it frightens you. So these guys, you see them. You see, I, Sam Richards — I know who these guys are. They're my students, my friends; I know what they're thinking. You don't know. When you see them, they're something else. They're something else. That's what they are to you. We don't see it that way in the United States, but you see it that way. So here. Of course, you've got it wrong. You're generalizing. It's wrong. You don't understand the Americans. It's not a Christian invasion. We're not just there for oil; we're there for lots of reasons. You have it wrong. You've missed it. And of course, most of you don't support the insurgency; you don't support killing Americans; you don't support the terrorists. Of course you don't. Very few people do. But — some of you do. And this is a perspective. OK. So now, here's what we're going to do. Step outside of your shoes that you're in right now, and step back into your normal shoes. So everyone's back in the room. OK? Now here comes the radical experiment. So we're all back home. This photo: this woman — man, I feel her. I feel her. She's my sister, my wife, my cousin, my neighbor. She's anybody to me. These guys standing there, everybody in the photo — I feel this photo, man. So here's what I want you to do. Let's go back to my first example, of the Chinese. I want you to go there. It's all about coal, and the Chinese are here in the United States. What I want you to do is picture her as a Chinese woman receiving a Chinese flag because her loved one has died in America in the coal uprising. And the soldiers are Chinese, and everybody else is Chinese. As an American, how do you feel about this picture? What do you think about that scene? OK, try this. Bring it back. This is the scene here. It's an American, American soldiers, American woman who lost her loved one in the Middle East, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now, put yourself in the shoes, go back to the shoes of an Arab Muslim living in Iraq. What are you feeling and thinking about this photo, about this woman? OK, now follow me on this, because I'm taking a big risk here. And so I'm going to invite you to take a risk with me. These gentlemen here, they're insurgents. They were caught by the American soldiers, trying to kill Americans. And maybe they succeeded. Maybe they succeeded. Put yourself in the shoes of the Americans who caught them. Can you feel the rage? Can you feel that you just want to take these guys and wring their necks? Can you go there? It shouldn't be that difficult. You just — oh, man. Now, put yourself in their shoes. Are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders? Which one? Can you feel their anger, their fear, their rage at what has happened in their country? Can you imagine that maybe one of them, in the morning, bent down to their child and hugged their child and said, "Dear, I'll be back later. I'm going out to defend your freedom, your lives. I'm going out to look out for us, the future of our country." Can you imagine that? Can you imagine saying that? Can you go there? What do you think they're feeling? You see, that's empathy. It's also understanding. [understand] Now, you might ask, "OK, Sam, so why do you do this sort of thing? Why would you use this example of all examples?" And I say, because. You're allowed to hate these people. You're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being. And if I can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch — one tiny inch — then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life. You can walk a mile when it comes to understanding why that person's driving 40 miles per hour in the passing lane; or your teenage son; or your neighbor who annoys you by cutting his lawn on Sunday mornings. Whatever it is, you can go so far. And this is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny, little world. Step inside of the tiny, little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly, all these tiny, little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world. And suddenly, without realizing it, you're seeing the world differently. Everything has changed. Everything in your life has changed. And that's, of course, what this is about. Attend to other lives, other visions. Listen to other people, enlighten ourselves. I'm not saying that I support the terrorists in Iraq. But as a sociologist, what I am saying is: I understand. And now perhaps — perhaps — you do, too. Thank you. (Applause)

On being wrong

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

TED2011

So it's 1995, I'm in college, and a friend and I go on a road trip from Providence, Rhode Island to Portland, Oregon. And you know, we're young and unemployed, so we do the whole thing on back roads through state parks and national forests — basically the longest route we can possibly take. And somewhere in the middle of South Dakota, I turn to my friend and I ask her a question that's been bothering me for 2,000 miles. "What's up with the Chinese character I keep seeing by the side of the road?" My friend looks at me totally blankly. There's actually a gentleman in the front row who's doing a perfect imitation of her look. (Laughter) And I'm like, "You know, all the signs we keep seeing with the Chinese character on them." She just stares at me for a few moments, and then she cracks up, because she figures out what I'm talking about. And what I'm talking about is this. (Laughter) Right, the famous Chinese character for picnic area. (Laughter) I've spent the last five years of my life thinking about situations exactly like this — why we sometimes misunderstand the signs around us, and how we behave when that happens, and what all of this can tell us about human nature. In other words, as you heard Chris say, I've spent the last five years thinking about being wrong. This might strike you as a strange career move, but it actually has one great advantage: no job competition. (Laughter) In fact, most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong, or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. We get it in the abstract. We all know everybody in this room makes mistakes. The human species, in general, is fallible — okay fine. But when it comes down to me, right now, to all the beliefs I hold, here in the present tense, suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window — and I can't actually think of anything I'm wrong about. And the thing is, the present tense is where we live. We go to meetings in the present tense; we go on family vacations in the present tense; we go to the polls and vote in the present tense. So effectively, we all kind of wind up traveling through life, trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything. I think this is a problem. I think it's a problem for each of us as individuals, in our personal and professional lives, and I think it's a problem for all of us collectively as a culture. So what I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right. And second, why it's such a problem. And finally, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap you can make. So why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right? One reason, actually, has to do with a feeling of being wrong. So let me ask you guys something — or actually, let me ask you guys something, because you're right here: How does it feel — emotionally — how does it feel to be wrong? Dreadful. Thumbs down. Embarrassing. Okay, wonderful, great. Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing — thank you, these are great answers, but they're answers to a different question. You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you're wrong? (Laughter) Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right? I mean it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny, like my stupid Chinese character mistake. But just being wrong doesn't feel like anything. I'll give you an analogy. Do you remember that Loony Tunes cartoon where there's this pathetic coyote who's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner? In pretty much every episode of this cartoon, there's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine — he's a bird, he can fly. But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him. And what's funny — at least if you're six years old — is that the coyote's totally fine too. He just keeps running — right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he's in mid-air. That's when he falls. When we're wrong about something — not when we realize it, but before that — we're like that coyote after he's gone off the cliff and before he looks down. You know, we're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we feel like we're on solid ground. So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right. (Laughter) So this is one reason, a structural reason, why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness. I call this error blindness. Most of the time, we don't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we're wrong about something, until it's too late. But there's a second reason that we get stuck inside this feeling as well — and this one is cultural. Think back for a moment to elementary school. You're sitting there in class, and your teacher is handing back quiz papers, and one of them looks like this. This is not mine, by the way. (Laughter) So there you are in grade school, and you know exactly what to think about the kid who got this paper. It's the dumb kid, the troublemaker, the one who never does his homework. So by the time you are nine years old, you've already learned, first of all, that people who get stuff wrong are lazy, irresponsible dimwits — and second of all, that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes. We learn these really bad lessons really well. And a lot of us — and I suspect, especially a lot of us in this room — deal with them by just becoming perfect little A students, perfectionists, over-achievers. Right, Mr. CFO, astrophysicist, ultra-marathoner? (Laughter) You're all CFO, astrophysicists, ultra-marathoners, it turns out. Okay, so fine. Except that then we freak out at the possibility that we've gotten something wrong. Because according to this, getting something wrong means there's something wrong with us. So we just insist that we're right, because it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe. So let me tell you a story. A couple of years ago, a woman comes into Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for a surgery. Beth Israel's in Boston. It's the teaching hospital for Harvard — one of the best hospitals in the country. So this woman comes in and she's taken into the operating room. She's anesthetized, the surgeon does his thing — stitches her back up, sends her out to the recovery room. Everything seems to have gone fine. And she wakes up, and she looks down at herself, and she says, "Why is the wrong side of my body in bandages?" Well the wrong side of her body is in bandages because the surgeon has performed a major operation on her left leg instead of her right one. When the vice president for health care quality at Beth Israel spoke about this incident, he said something very interesting. He said, "For whatever reason, the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient." (Laughter) The point of this story is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous. This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world. And when we act like it is, and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong, well that's when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, or torpedoing the global economy. So this is a huge practical problem. But it's also a huge social problem. Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. And when you feel that way, you've got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions. The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. They don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team. When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots. (Laughter) They have all the right pieces of the puzzle, and they are too moronic to put them together correctly. And when that doesn't work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes. So this is a catastrophe. This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly. But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human. It's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds. And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing. That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring. The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't. We can remember the past, and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it's like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this a little differently, which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this. And yeah, it is also why we get things wrong. 1,200 years before Descartes said his famous thing about "I think therefore I am," this guy, St. Augustine, sat down and wrote "Fallor ergo sum" — "I err therefore I am." Augustine understood that our capacity to screw up, it's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system, something we can eradicate or overcome. It's totally fundamental to who we are. Because, unlike God, we don't really know what's going on out there. And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity. Last year, for various reasons, I found myself listening to a lot of episodes of the Public Radio show This American Life. And so I'm listening and I'm listening, and at some point, I start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong. And my first thought was, "I've lost it. I've become the crazy wrongness lady. I just imagined it everywhere," which has happened. But a couple of months later, I actually had a chance to interview Ira Glass, who's the host of the show. And I mentioned this to him, and he was like, "No actually, that's true. In fact," he says, "as a staff, we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme. And the crypto-theme is: 'I thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead.' And the thing is," says Ira Glass, "we need this. We need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work." And for the rest of us, audience members, as listeners, as readers, we eat this stuff up. We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings. When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong. But, you know, our stories are like this because our lives are like this. We think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead. George Bush thought he was going to invade Iraq, find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction, liberate the people and bring democracy to the Middle East. And something else happened instead. And Hosni Mubarak thought he was going to be the dictator of Egypt for the rest of his life, until he got too old or too sick and could pass the reigns of power onto his son. And something else happened instead. And maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweetheart and move back to your hometown and raise a bunch of kids together. And something else happened instead. And I have to tell you that I thought I was writing an incredibly nerdy book about a subject everybody hates for an audience that would never materialize. And something else happened instead. (Laughter) I mean, this is life. For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us. No offense, but this entire conference is an unbelievable monument to our capacity to get stuff wrong. We just spent an entire week talking about innovations and advancements and improvements, but you know why we need all of those innovations and advancements and improvements? Because half the stuff that's the most mind-boggling and world-altering — TED 1998 — eh. (Laughter) Didn't really work out that way, did it? (Laughter) Where's my jet pack, Chris? (Laughter) (Applause) So here we are again. And that's how it goes. We come up with another idea. We tell another story. We hold another conference. The theme of this one, as you guys have now heard seven million times, is the rediscovery of wonder. And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, "Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong." Thank you. (Applause) Thank you guys. (Applause)

Teaching with the World Peace Game

{0: 'Teacher and musician John Hunter is the inventor of the World Peace Game (and the star of the documentary "World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements").'}

TED2011

I'm very fortunate to be here. I feel so fortunate. I've been so impressed by the kindness expressed to me. I called my wife Leslie, and I said, "You know, there's so many good people trying to do so much good. It feels like I've landed in a colony of angels." It's a true feeling. But let me get to the talk — I see the clock is running. I'm a public school teacher, and I just want to share a story of my superintendent. Her name is Pam Moran in Albemarle County, Virginia, the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And she's a very high-tech superintendent. She uses smart boards, she blogs, she Tweets, she does Facebook, she does all this sort of high-tech stuff. She's a technology leader and instructional leader. But in her office, there's this old wooden, weather-worn table, kitchen table — peeling green paint, it's kind of rickety. And I said, "Pam, you're such a modern, cutting-edge person. Why is this old table in your office?" And she told me, she said, "You know, I grew up in Southwestern Virginia, in the coal mines and the farmlands of rural Virginia, and this table was in my grandfather's kitchen. And we'd come in from playing, he'd come in from plowing and working, and we'd sit around that table every night. And as I grew up, I heard so much knowledge and so many insights and so much wisdom come out around this table, I began to call it the wisdom table. And when he passed on, I took this table with me and brought it to my office, and it reminds me of him. It reminds me of what goes on around an empty space sometimes." The project I'm going to tell you about is called the World Peace Game, and essentially it is also an empty space. And I'd like to think of it as a 21st century wisdom table, really. It all started back in 1977. I was a young man, and I had been dropping in and out of college. And my parents were very patient, but I had been doing intermittent sojourns to India on a mystical quest. And I remember the last time I came back from India — in my long white flowing robes and my big beard and my John Lennon glasses — and I said to my father, "Dad, I think I've just about found spiritual enlightenment." He said, "Well there's one more thing you need to find." I said, "What is that, dad?" "A job." (Laughter) And so they pleaded with me to get a degree in something. So I got a degree and it turned out to be education. It was an experimental education program. It could have been dentistry, but the word "experimental" was in it, and so that's what I had to go for. And I went in for a job interview in the Richmond Public Schools in Virginia, the capital city, bought a three-piece suit — my concession to convention — kept my long beard and my afro and my platform shoes — at the time it was the '70s — and I walked in, and I sat down and had an interview. And I guess they were hard up for teachers because the supervisor, her name was Anna Aro, said I had the job teaching gifted children. And I was so shocked, so stunned, I got up and said, "Well, thank you, but what do I do?" (Laughter) Gifted education hadn't really taken hold too much. There weren't really many materials or things to use. And I said, "What do I do?" And her answer shocked me. It stunned me. Her answer set the template for the entire career I was to have after that. She said, "What do you want to do?" And that question cleared the space. There was no program directive, no manual to follow, no standards in gifted education in that way. And she cleared such a space that I endeavored from then on to clear a space for my students, an empty space, whereby they could create and make meaning out of their own understanding. So this happened in 1978, and I was teaching many years later, and a friend of mine introduced me to a young filmmaker. His name is Chris Farina. Chris Farina is here today at his own cost. Chris, could you stand up and let them see you — a young, visionary filmmaker who's made a film. (Applause) This film is called "World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements." He proposed the film to me — it's a great title. He proposed the film to me, and I said, "Yeah, maybe it'll be on local TV, and we can say hi to our friends." But the film has really gone places. Now it's still in debt, but Chris has managed, through his own sacrifice, to get this film out. So we made a film and it turns out to be more than a story about me, more than a story about one teacher. It's a story that's a testament to teaching and teachers. And it's a beautiful thing. And the strange thing is, when I watch the film — I have the eerie sensation of seeing it — I saw myself literally disappear. What I saw was my teachers coming through me. I saw my geometry teacher in high school, Mr. Rucell's wry smile under his handlebar mustache. That's the smile I use — that's his smile. I saw Jan Polo's flashing eyes. And they weren't flashing in anger, they were flashing in love, intense love for her students. And I have that kind of flash sometimes. And I saw Miss Ethel J. Banks who wore pearls and high-heels to elementary school every day. And you know, she had that old-school teacher stare. You know the one. (Laughter) "And I'm not even talking about you behind me, because I've got eyes in the back of my head." (Laughter) You know that teacher? I didn't use that stare very often, but I do have it in my repertoire. And Miss Banks was there as a great mentor for me. And then I saw my own parents, my first teachers. My father, very inventive, spatial thinker. That's my brother Malcolm there on the right. And my mother, who taught me in fourth grade in segregated schools in Virginia, who was my inspiration. And really, I feel as though, when I see the film — I have a gesture she does, like this — I feel like I am a continuation of her gesture. I am one of her teaching gestures. And the beautiful thing was, I got to teach my daughter in elementary school, Madeline. And so that gesture of my mother's continues through many generations. It's an amazing feeling to have that lineage. And so I'm here standing on the shoulders of many people. I'm not here alone. There are many people on this stage right now. And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something — I didn't say interactive; we didn't have that term in 1978 — but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers. There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it — even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries — some are rich; some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a Prime Minister, Secretary of State, Minister of Defense and a CFO, or Comptroller. I choose the Prime Minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather. (Laughter) That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have — let's see — ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable schools to you because they solved global warming in a week. (Laughter) (Applause) And they've done it several times too. (Laughter) So I also have in the game a saboteur — some child — it's basically a troublemaker — and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Fourth-graders understand it — nine years old — and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow — at first they do — the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way. Stewart Brand is here, and one of the ideas for this game came from him with a CoEvolution Quarterly article on a peace force. And in the game, sometimes students actually form a peace force. I'm just a clock watcher. I'm just a clarifier. I'm just a facilitator. The students run the game. I have no chance to make any policy whatsoever once they start playing. So I'll just share with you ... (Video) Boy: The World Peace Game is serious. You're actually getting taught something like how to take care of the world. See, Mr. Hunter is doing that because he says his time has messed up a lot, and he's trying to tell us how to fix that problem. John Hunter: I offered them a — (Applause) Actually, I can't tell them anything because I don't know the answer. And I admit the truth to them right up front: I don't know. And because I don't know, they've got to dig up the answer. And so I apologize to them as well. I say, "I'm so sorry, boys and girls, but the truth is we have left this world to you in such a sad and terrible shape, and we hope you can fix it for us, and maybe this game will help you learn how to do it." It's a sincere apology, and they take it very seriously. Now you may be wondering what all this complexity looks like. Well when we have the game start, here's what you see. (Video) JH: All right, we're going into negotiations as of now. Go. (Chatter) JH: My question to you is, who's in charge of that classroom? It's a serious question: who is really in charge? I've learned to cede control of the classroom over to the students over time. There's a trust and an understanding and a dedication to an ideal that I simply don't have to do what I thought I had to do as a beginning teacher: control every conversation and response in the classroom. It's impossible. Their collective wisdom is much greater than mine, and I admit it to them openly. So I'll just share with you some stories very quickly of some magical things that have happened. In this game we had a little girl, and she was the Defense Minister of the poorest nation. And the Defense Minister — she had the tank corps and Air Force and so forth. And she was next door to a very wealthy, oil-rich neighbor. Without provocation, suddenly she attacked, against her Prime Minister's orders, the next-door neighbor's oil fields. She marched into the oil field reserves, surrounded it, without firing a shot, and secured it and held it. And that neighbor was unable to conduct any military operations because their fuel supply was locked up. We were all upset with her, "Why are you doing this? This is the World Peace Game. What is wrong with you?" (Laughter) This was a little girl and, at nine years old, she held her pieces and said, "I know what I'm doing." To her girlfriends she said that. That's a breach there. And we learned in this, you don't really ever want to cross a nine year-old girl with tanks. (Laughter) They are the toughest opponents. And we were very upset. I thought I was failing as a teacher. Why would she do this? But come to find out, a few game days later — and there are turns where we take negotiation from a team — actually there's a negotiation period with all teams, and each team takes a turn, then we go back in negotiation, around and around, so each turn around is one game day. So a few game days later it came to light that we found out this major country was planning a military offensive to dominate the entire world. Had they had their fuel supplies, they would have done it. She was able to see the vectors and trend lines and intentions long before any of us and understand what was going to happen and made a philosophical decision to attack in a peace game. Now she used a small war to avert a larger war, so we stopped and had a very good philosophical discussion about whether that was right, conditional good, or not right. That's the kind of thinking that we put them in, the situations. I could not have designed that in teaching it. It came about spontaneously through their collective wisdom. (Applause) Another example, a beautiful thing happened. We have a letter in the game. If you're a military commander and you wage troops — the little plastic toys on the board — and you lose them, I put in a letter. You have to write a letter to their parents — the fictional parents of your fictional troops — explaining what happened and offering your condolences. So you have a little bit more thought before you commit to combat. And so we had this situation come up — last summer actually, at Agnor-Hurt School in Albemarle County — and one of our military commanders got up to read that letter and one of the other kids said, "Mr. Hunter, let's ask — there's a parent over there." There was a parent visiting that day, just sitting in the back of the room. "Let's ask that mom to read the letter. It'll be more realer if she reads it." So we did, we asked her, and she gamely picked up the letter. "Sure." She started reading. She read one sentence. She read two sentences. By the third sentence, she was in tears. I was in tears. Everybody understood that when we lose somebody, the winners are not gloating. We all lose. And it was an amazing occurrence and an amazing understanding. I'll show you what my friend David says about this. He's been in many battles. (Video) David: We've really had enough of people attacking. I mean, we've been lucky [most of] the time. But now I'm feeling really weird because I'm living what Sun Tzu said one week. One week he said, "Those who go into battle and win will want to go back, and those who lose in battle will want to go back and win." And so I've been winning battles, so I'm going into battles, more battles. And I think it's sort of weird to be living what Sun Tzu said. JH: I get chills every time I see that. That's the kind of engagement you want to have happen. And I can't design that, I can't plan that, and I can't even test that. But it's self-evident assessment. We know that's an authentic assessment of learning. We have a lot of data, but I think sometimes we go beyond data with the real truth of what's going on. So I'll just share a third story. This is about my friend Brennan. We had played the game one session after school for many weeks, about seven weeks, and we had essentially solved all 50 of the interlocking crises. The way the game is won is all 50 problems have to be solved and every country's asset value has to be increased above its starting point. Some are poor, some are wealthy. There are billions. The World Bank president was a third-grader one time. He says, "How many zeros in a trillion? I've got to calculate that right away." But he was setting fiscal policy in that game for high school players who were playing with him. So the team that was the poorest had gotten even poorer. There was no way they could win. And we were approaching four o'clock, our cut-off time — there was about a minute left — and despair just settled over the room. I thought, I'm failing as a teacher. I should have gotten it so they could have won. They shouldn't be failing like this. I've failed them. And I was just feeling so sad and dejected. And suddenly, Brennan walked over to my chair and he grabbed the bell, the bell I ring to signal a change or a reconvening of cabinets, and he ran back to his seat, rang the bell. Everybody ran to his chair: there was screaming; there was yelling, waving of their dossiers. They get these dossiers full of secret documents. They were gesticulating; they were running around. I didn't know what they were doing. I'd lost control of my classroom. Principal walks in, I'm out of a job. The parents were looking in the window. And Brennan runs back to his seat. Everybody runs back to their seat. He rings the bell again. He says, "We have" — and there's 12 seconds left on the clock — "we have, all nations, pooled all our funds together. And we've got 600 billion dollars. We're going to offer it as a donation to this poor country. And if they accept it, it'll raise their asset value and we can win the game. Will you accept it?" And there are three seconds left on the clock. Everybody looks at this prime minister of that country, and he says, "Yes." And the game is won. Spontaneous compassion that could not be planned for, that was unexpected and unpredictable. Every game we play is different. Some games are more about social issues, some are more about economic issues. Some games are more about warfare. But I don't try to deny them that reality of being human. I allow them to go there and, through their own experience, learn, in a bloodless way, how not to do what they consider to be the wrong thing. And they find out what is right their own way, their own selves. And so in this game, I've learned so much from it, but I would say that if only they could pick up a critical thinking tool or creative thinking tool from this game and leverage something good for the world, they may save us all. If only. And on behalf of all of my teachers on whose shoulders I'm standing, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

What it takes to do extreme astrophysics

{0: 'Anil Ananthaswamy specializes in writing about neuroscience and physics. He is the author of "The Man Who Wasn’t There," "The Edge of Physics" and the forthcoming "Through Two Doors at Once."'}

INK Conference

I would like to talk today about what I think is one of the greatest adventures human beings have embarked upon, which is the quest to understand the universe and our place in it. My own interest in this subject, and my passion for it, began rather accidentally. I had bought a copy of this book, "The Universe and Dr. Einstein" — a used paperback from a secondhand bookstore in Seattle. A few years after that, in Bangalore, I was finding it hard to fall asleep one night, and I picked up this book, thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes. And as it happened, I read it from midnight to five in the morning in one shot. And I was left with this intense feeling of awe and exhilaration at the universe and our own ability to understand as much as we do. And that feeling hasn't left me yet. That feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career — from being a software engineer to become a science writer — so that I could partake in the joy of science, and also the joy of communicating it to others. And that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts, to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes, detectors, instruments that people are building, or have built, in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail. So it took me from places like Chile — the Atacama Desert in Chile — to Siberia, to underground mines in the Japanese Alps, in Northern America, all the way to Antarctica and even to the South Pole. And today I would like to share with you some images, some stories of these trips. I have been basically spending the last few years documenting the efforts of some extremely intrepid men and women who are putting, literally at times, their lives at stake working in some very remote and very hostile places so that they may gather the faintest signals from the cosmos in order for us to understand this universe. And I first begin with a pie chart — and I promise this is the only pie chart in the whole presentation — but it sets up the state of our knowledge of the cosmos. All the theories in physics that we have today properly explain what is called normal matter — the stuff that we're all made of — and that's four percent of the universe. Astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe, which makes up 23 percent of the universe, and something called dark energy, which permeates the fabric of space-time, that makes up another 73 percent. So if you look at this pie chart, 96 percent of the universe, at this point in our exploration of it, is unknown or not well understood. And most of the experiments, telescopes that I went to see are in some way addressing this question, these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. I will take you first to an underground mine in Northern Minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter. And the idea here is that they are looking for a sign of a dark matter particle hitting one of their detectors. And the reason why they have to go underground is that, if you did this experiment on the surface of the Earth, the same experiment would be swamped by signals that could be created by things like cosmic rays, ambient radio activity, even our own bodies. You might not believe it, but even our own bodies are radioactive enough to disturb this experiment. So they go deep inside mines to find a kind of environmental silence that will allow them to hear the ping of a dark matter particle hitting their detector. And I went to see one of these experiments, and this is actually — you can barely see it, and the reason for that is it's entirely dark in there — this is a cavern that was left behind by the miners who left this mine in 1960. And physicists came and started using it sometime in the 1980s. And the miners in the early part of the last century worked, literally, in candlelight. And today, you would see this inside the mine, half a mile underground. This is one of the largest underground labs in the world. And, among other things, they're looking for dark matter. There is another way to search for dark matter, which is indirectly. If dark matter exists in our universe, in our galaxy, then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about — one of them being neutrinos. And neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules. When a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light, a flash of blue light, and by looking for this blue light, you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then, indirectly, something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino. But you need very, very large volumes of water in order to do this. You need something like tens of megatons of water — almost a gigaton of water — in order to have any chance of catching this neutrino. And where in the world would you find such water? Well the Russians have a tank in their own backyard. This is Lake Baikal. It is the largest lake in the world. It's 800 km long. It's about 40 to 50 km wide in most places, and one to two kilometers deep. And what the Russians are doing is they're building these detectors and immersing them about a kilometer beneath the surface of the lake so that they can watch for these flashes of blue light. And this is the scene that greeted me when I landed there. This is Lake Baikal in the peak of the Siberian winter. The lake is entirely frozen. And the line of black dots that you see in the background, that's the ice camp where the physicists are working. The reason why they have to work in winter is because they don't have the money to work in summer and spring, which, if they did that, they would need ships and submersibles to do their work. So they wait until winter — the lake is completely frozen over — and they use this meter-thick ice as a platform on which to establish their ice camp and do their work. So this is the Russians working on the ice in the peak of the Siberian winter. They have to drill holes in the ice, dive down into the water — cold, cold water — to get hold of the instrument, bring it up, do any repairs and maintenance that they need to do, put it back and get out before the ice melts. Because that phase of solid ice lasts for two months and it's full of cracks. And you have to imagine, there's an entire sea-like lake underneath, moving. I still don't understand this one Russian man working in his bare chest, but that tells you how hard he was working. And these people, a handful of people, have been working for 20 years, looking for particles that may or may not exist. And they have dedicated their lives to it. And just to give you an idea, they have spent 20 million over 20 years. It's very harsh conditions. They work on a shoestring budget. The toilets there are literally holes in the ground covered with a wooden shack. And it's that basic, but they do this every year. From Siberia to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to see something called The Very Large Telescope. The Very Large Telescope is one of these things that astronomers do — they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively. I can tell you for a fact, that the next one that they're planning is called The Extremely Large Telescope. (Laughter) And you wouldn't believe it, but the one after that is going to be called The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. But nonetheless, it's an extraordinary piece of engineering. These are four 8.2 meter telescopes. And these telescopes, among other things, they're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time. And the more you understand that, the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about. And one piece of engineering that I want to leave you with as regards this telescope is the mirror. Each mirror, there are four of them, is made of a single piece of glass, a monolithic piece of high-tech ceramic, that has been ground down and polished to such accuracy that the only way to understand what that is is [to] imagine a city like Paris, with all its buildings and the Eiffel Tower, if you grind down Paris to that kind of accuracy, you would be left with bumps that are one millimeter high. And that's the kind of polishing that these mirrors have endured. An extraordinary set of telescopes. Here's another view of the same. The reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the Atacama Desert is because of the high altitude desert. The dry air is really good for telescopes, and also, the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies. Finally, I want to take you to Antarctica. I want to spend most of my time on this part of the world. This is cosmology's final frontier. Some of the most amazing experiments, some of the most extreme experiments, are being done in Antarctica. I was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight, which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere, the upper stratosphere, 40 km up. And that's where they do their experiments, and then the balloon, the payload, is brought down. So this is us landing on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. That's an American C-17 cargo plane that flew us from New Zealand to McMurdo in Antarctica. And here we are about to board our bus. And I don't know if you can read the lettering, but it says, "Ivan the Terribus." And that's taking us to McMurdo. And this is the scene that greets you in McMurdo. And you barely might be able to make out this hut here. This hut was built by Robert Falcon Scott and his men when they first came to Antarctica on their first expedition to go to the South Pole. Because it's so cold, the entire contents of that hut is still as they left it, with the remnants of the last meal they cooked still there. It's an extraordinary place. This is McMurdo itself. About a thousand people work here in summer, and about 200 in winter when it's completely dark for six months. I was here to see the launch of this particular type of instrument. This is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km. What I want you to imagine is this is two tons in weight. So you're using a balloon to carry something that is two tons all the way to an altitude of 40 km. And the engineers, the technicians, the physicists have all got to assemble on the Ross Ice Shelf, because Antarctica — I won't go into the reasons why — but it's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches, except for the weather. The weather, as you can imagine, this is summer, and you're standing on 200 ft of ice. And there's a volcano behind, which has glaciers at the very top. And what they have to do is they have to assemble the entire balloon — the fabric, parachute and everything — on the ice and then fill it up with helium. And that process takes about two hours. And the weather can change as they're putting together this whole assembly. For instance, here they are laying down the balloon fabric behind, which is eventually going to be filled up with helium. Those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium. Now, in case the weather changes before the launch, they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to McMurdo Station. And this particular balloon, because it has to launch two tons of weight, is an extremely huge balloon. The fabric alone weighs two tons. In order to minimize the weight, it's very thin, it's as thin as a sandwich wrapper. And if they have to pack it back, they have to put it into boxes and stamp on it so that it fits into the box again — except, when they did it first, it would have been done in Texas. Here, they can't do it with the kind shoes they're wearing, so they have to take their shoes off, get barefoot into the boxes, in this cold, and do that kind of work. That's the kind of dedication these people have. Here's the balloon being filled up with helium, and you can see it's a gorgeous sight. Here's a scene that shows you the balloon and the payload end-to-end. So the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side, and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute, and then the parachute is then connected to the payload. And remember, all this wiring is being done by people in extreme cold, in sub-zero temperatures. They're wearing about 15 kg of clothing and stuff, but they have to take their gloves off in order to do that. And I would like to share with you a launch. (Video) Radio: Okay, release the balloon, release the balloon, release the balloon. Anil Ananthaswamy: And I'll finally like to leave you with two images. This is an observatory in the Himalayas, in Ladakh in India. And the thing I want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side. And on the far left there is a 400 year-old Buddhist monastery. This is a close-up of the Buddhist monastery. And I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two enormous disciplines that humanity has. One is exploring the cosmos on the outside, and the other one is exploring our interior being. And both require silence of some sort. And what struck me was every place that I went to to see these telescopes, the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence, whether it's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever. And it was very obvious that, if we destroy these silent places on Earth, we will be stuck on a planet without the ability to look outwards, because we will not be able to understand the signals that come from outer space. Thank you. (Applause)

3 things I learned while my plane crashed

{0: 'Ric Elias is the CEO and cofounder of Red Ventures, a portfolio of fast-growing digital businesses.'}

TED2011

Imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000 ft. Imagine a plane full of smoke. Imagine an engine going clack, clack, clack. It sounds scary. Well, I had a unique seat that day. I was sitting in 1D. I was the only one who could talk to the flight attendants. So I looked at them right away, and they said, "No problem. We probably hit some birds." The pilot had already turned the plane around, and we weren't that far. You could see Manhattan. Two minutes later, three things happened at the same time. The pilot lines up the plane with the Hudson River. That's usually not the route. (Laughter) He turns off the engines. Now, imagine being in a plane with no sound. And then he says three words. The most unemotional three words I've ever heard. He says, "Brace for impact." I didn't have to talk to the flight attendant anymore. (Laughter) I could see in her eyes, it was terror. Life was over. Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day. I learned that it all changes in an instant. We have this bucket list, we have these things we want to do in life, and I thought about all the people I wanted to reach out to that I didn't, all the fences I wanted to mend, all the experiences I wanted to have and I never did. As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, "I collect bad wines." Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it. I no longer want to postpone anything in life. And that urgency, that purpose, has really changed my life. The second thing I learned that day — and this is as we clear the George Washington Bridge, which was by not a lot — (Laughter) I thought about, wow, I really feel one real regret. I've lived a good life. In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried. But in my humanity, I also allow my ego to get in. And I regretted the time I wasted on things that did not matter with people that matter. And I thought about my relationship with my wife, with my friends, with people. And after, as I reflected on that, I decided to eliminate negative energy from my life. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better. I've not had a fight with my wife in two years. It feels great. I no longer try to be right; I choose to be happy. The third thing I learned — and this is as your mental clock starts going, "15, 14, 13." You can see the water coming. I'm saying, "Please blow up." I don't want this thing to break in 20 pieces like you've seen in those documentaries. And as we're coming down, I had a sense of, wow, dying is not scary. It's almost like we've been preparing for it our whole lives. But it was very sad. I didn't want to go; I love my life. And that sadness really framed in one thought, which is, I only wish for one thing. I only wish I could see my kids grow up. About a month later, I was at a performance by my daughter — first-grader, not much artistic talent — (Laughter) Yet! (Laughter) And I'm bawling, I'm crying, like a little kid. And it made all the sense in the world to me. I realized at that point, by connecting those two dots, that the only thing that matters in my life is being a great dad. Above all, above all, the only goal I have in life is to be a good dad. I was given the gift of a miracle, of not dying that day. I was given another gift, which was to be able to see into the future and come back and live differently. I challenge you guys that are flying today, imagine the same thing happens on your plane — and please don't — but imagine, and how would you change? What would you get done that you're waiting to get done because you think you'll be here forever? How would you change your relationships and the negative energy in them? And more than anything, are you being the best parent you can? Thank you. (Applause)

Are we ready for neo-evolution?

{0: 'Harvey Fineberg studies medical decisionmaking -- from how we roll out new medical technology, to how we cope with new illnesses and threatened epidemics.'}

TED2011

How would you like to be better than you are? Suppose I said that, with just a few changes in your genes, you could get a better memory — more precise, more accurate and quicker. Or maybe you'd like to be more fit, stronger, with more stamina. Would you like to be more attractive and self-confident? How about living longer with good health? Or perhaps you're one of those who's always yearned for more creativity. Which one would you like the most? Which would you like, if you could have just one? (Audience Member: Creativity.) Creativity. How many people would choose creativity? Raise your hands. Let me see. A few. Probably about as many as there are creative people here. (Laughter) That's very good. How many would opt for memory? Quite a few more. How about fitness? A few less. What about longevity? Ah, the majority. That makes me feel very good as a doctor. If you could have any one of these, it would be a very different world. Is it just imaginary? Or, is it, perhaps, possible? Evolution has been a perennial topic here at the TED Conference, but I want to give you today one doctor's take on the subject. The great 20th-century geneticist, T.G. Dobzhansky, who was also a communicant in the Russian Orthodox Church, once wrote an essay that he titled "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." Now if you are one of those who does not accept the evidence for biological evolution, this would be a very good time to turn off your hearing aid, take out your personal communications device — I give you permission — and perhaps take another look at Kathryn Schultz's book on being wrong, because nothing in the rest of this talk is going to make any sense whatsoever to you. (Laughter) But if you do accept biological evolution, consider this: is it just about the past, or is it about the future? Does it apply to others, or does it apply to us? This is another look at the tree of life. In this picture, I've put a bush with a center branching out in all directions, because if you look at the edges of the tree of life, every existing species at the tips of those branches has succeeded in evolutionary terms: it has survived; it has demonstrated a fitness to its environment. The human part of this branch, way out on one end, is, of course, the one that we are most interested in. We branch off of a common ancestor to modern chimpanzees about six or eight million years ago. In the interval, there have been perhaps 20 or 25 different species of hominids. Some have come and gone. We have been here for about 130,000 years. It may seem like we're quite remote from other parts of this tree of life, but actually, for the most part, the basic machinery of our cells is pretty much the same. Do you realize that we can take advantage and commandeer the machinery of a common bacterium to produce the protein of human insulin used to treat diabetics? This is not like human insulin; this is the same protein that is chemically indistinguishable from what comes out of your pancreas. And speaking of bacteria, do you realize that each of us carries in our gut more bacteria than there are cells in the rest of our body? Maybe 10 times more. I mean think of it, when Antonio Damasio asks about your self-image, do you think about the bacteria? Our gut is a wonderfully hospitable environment for those bacteria. It's warm, it's dark, it's moist, it's very cozy. And you're going to provide all the nutrition that they could possibly want with no effort on their part. It's really like an Easy Street for bacteria, with the occasional interruption of the unintended forced rush to the exit. But otherwise, you are a wonderful environment for those bacteria, just as they are essential to your life. They help in the digestion of essential nutrients, and they protect you against certain diseases. But what will come in the future? Are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species? Or, are we destined to become something different — something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment? Now let's take a step back in time to the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago — the Earth, the solar system, about four and a half billion years — the first signs of proto-life, maybe three to four billion years ago on Earth — the first multi-celled organisms, perhaps as much as 800 or a billion years ago — and then the human species, finally emerging in the last 130,000 years. In this vast unfinished symphony of the universe, life on Earth is like a brief measure; the animal kingdom, like a single measure; and human life, a small grace note. That was us. That also constitutes the entertainment portion of this talk, so I hope you enjoyed it. (Laughter) Now when I was a freshman in college, I took my first biology class. I was fascinated by the elegance and beauty of biology. I became enamored of the power of evolution, and I realized something very fundamental: in most of the existence of life in single-celled organisms, each cell simply divides, and all of the genetic energy of that cell is carried on in both daughter cells. But at the time multi-celled organisms come online, things start to change. Sexual reproduction enters the picture. And very importantly, with the introduction of sexual reproduction that passes on the genome, the rest of the body becomes expendable. In fact, you could say that the inevitability of the death of our bodies enters in evolutionary time at the same moment as sexual reproduction. Now I have to confess, when I was a college undergraduate, I thought, okay, sex/death, sex/death, death for sex — it seemed pretty reasonable at the time, but with each passing year, I've come to have increasing doubts. I've come to understand the sentiments of George Burns, who was performing still in Las Vegas well into his 90s. And one night, there's a knock at his hotel room door. He answers the door. Standing before him is a gorgeous, scantily clad showgirl. She looks at him and says, "I'm here for super sex." "That's fine," says George, "I'll take the soup." (Laughter) I came to realize, as a physician, that I was working toward a goal which was different from the goal of evolution — not necessarily contradictory, just different. I was trying to preserve the body. I wanted to keep us healthy. I wanted to restore health from disease. I wanted us to live long and healthy lives. Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea. I think we would all understand the sentiment that Woody Allen expressed when he said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." (Laughter) Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. That is the sole test of survival and success. At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them. So what does this mean, as we look back at what has happened in evolution, and as we think about the place again of humans in evolution, and particularly as we look ahead to the next phase, I would say that there are a number of possibilities. The first is that we will not evolve. We have reached a kind of equipoise. And the reasoning behind that would be, first, we have, through medicine, managed to preserve a lot of genes that would otherwise be selected out and be removed from the population. And secondly, we as a species have so configured our environment that we have managed to make it adapt to us as well as we adapt to it. And by the way, we immigrate and circulate and intermix so much that you can't any longer have the isolation that is necessary for evolution to take place. A second possibility is that there will be evolution of the traditional kind, natural, imposed by the forces of nature. And the argument here would be that the wheels of evolution grind slowly, but they are inexorable. And as far as isolation goes, when we as a species do colonize distant planets, there will be the isolation and the environmental changes that could produce evolution in the natural way. But there's a third possibility, an enticing, intriguing and frightening possibility. I call it neo-evolution — the new evolution that is not simply natural, but guided and chosen by us as individuals in the choices that we will make. Now how could this come about? How could it be possible that we would do this? Consider, first, the reality that people today, in some cultures, are making choices about their offspring. They're, in some cultures, choosing to have more males than females. It's not necessarily good for the society, but it's what the individual and the family are choosing. Think also, if it were possible ever for you to choose, not simply to choose the sex of your child, but for you in your body to make the genetic adjustments that would cure or prevent diseases. What if you could make the genetic changes to eliminate diabetes or Alzheimer's or reduce the risk of cancer or eliminate stroke? Wouldn't you want to make those changes in your genes? If we look ahead, these kind of changes are going to be increasingly possible. The Human Genome Project started in 1990, and it took 13 years. It cost 2.7 billion dollars. The year after it was finished in 2004, you could do the same job for 20 million dollars in three to four months. Today, you can have a complete sequence of the three billion base pairs in the human genome at a cost of about 20,000 dollars and in the space of about a week. It won't be very long before the reality will be the 1,000-dollar human genome, and it will be increasingly available for everyone. Just a week ago, the National Academy of Engineering awarded its Draper Prize to Francis Arnold and Willem Stemmer, two scientists who independently developed techniques to encourage the natural process of evolution to work faster and to lead to desirable proteins in a more efficient way — what Frances Arnold calls "directed evolution." A couple of years ago, the Lasker Prize was awarded to the scientist Shinya Yamanaka for his research in which he took an adult skin cell, a fibroblast, and by manipulating just four genes, he induced that cell to revert to a pluripotential stem cell — a cell potentially capable of becoming any cell in your body. These changes are coming. The same technology that has produced the human insulin in bacteria can make viruses that will not only protect you against themselves, but induce immunity against other viruses. Believe it or not, there's an experimental trial going on with vaccine against influenza that has been grown in the cells of a tobacco plant. Can you imagine something good coming out of tobacco? These are all reality today, and [in] the future, will be evermore possible. Imagine then just two other little changes. You can change the cells in your body, but what if you could change the cells in your offspring? What if you could change the sperm and the ova, or change the newly fertilized egg, and give your offspring a better chance at a healthier life — eliminate the diabetes, eliminate the hemophilia, reduce the risk of cancer? Who doesn't want healthier children? And then, that same analytic technology, that same engine of science that can produce the changes to prevent disease, will also enable us to adopt super-attributes, hyper-capacities — that better memory. Why not have the quick wit of a Ken Jennings, especially if you can augment it with the next generation of the Watson machine? Why not have the quick twitch muscle that will enable you to run faster and longer? Why not live longer? These will be irresistible. And when we are at a position where we can pass it on to the next generation, and we can adopt the attributes we want, we will have converted old-style evolution into neo-evolution. We'll take a process that normally might require 100,000 years, and we can compress it down to a thousand years — and maybe even in the next 100 years. These are choices that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are going to have before them. Will we use these choices to make a society that is better, that is more successful, that is kinder? Or, will we selectively choose different attributes that we want for some of us and not for others of us? Will we make a society that is more boring and more uniform, or more robust and more versatile? These are the kinds of questions that we will have to face. And most profoundly of all, will we ever be able to develop the wisdom, and to inherit the wisdom, that we'll need to make these choices wisely? For better or worse, and sooner than you may think, these choices will be up to us. Thank you. (Applause)

The security mirage

{0: 'Bruce Schneier thinks hard about security -- as a computer security guru, and as a philosopher of the larger notion of making a safer world. '}

TEDxPSU

So, security is two different things: it's a feeling, and it's a reality. And they're different. You could feel secure even if you're not. And you can be secure even if you don't feel it. Really, we have two separate concepts mapped onto the same word. And what I want to do in this talk is to split them apart — figuring out when they diverge and how they converge. And language is actually a problem here. There aren't a lot of good words for the concepts we're going to talk about. So if you look at security from economic terms, it's a trade-off. Every time you get some security, you're always trading off something. Whether this is a personal decision — whether you're going to install a burglar alarm in your home — or a national decision, where you're going to invade a foreign country — you're going to trade off something: money or time, convenience, capabilities, maybe fundamental liberties. And the question to ask when you look at a security anything is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it's worth the trade-off. You've heard in the past several years, the world is safer because Saddam Hussein is not in power. That might be true, but it's not terribly relevant. The question is: Was it worth it? And you can make your own decision, and then you'll decide whether the invasion was worth it. That's how you think about security: in terms of the trade-off. Now, there's often no right or wrong here. Some of us have a burglar alarm system at home and some of us don't. And it'll depend on where we live, whether we live alone or have a family, how much cool stuff we have, how much we're willing to accept the risk of theft. In politics also, there are different opinions. A lot of times, these trade-offs are about more than just security, and I think that's really important. Now, people have a natural intuition about these trade-offs. We make them every day. Last night in my hotel room, when I decided to double-lock the door, or you in your car when you drove here; when we go eat lunch and decide the food's not poison and we'll eat it. We make these trade-offs again and again, multiple times a day. We often won't even notice them. They're just part of being alive; we all do it. Every species does it. Imagine a rabbit in a field, eating grass. And the rabbit sees a fox. That rabbit will make a security trade-off: "Should I stay, or should I flee?" And if you think about it, the rabbits that are good at making that trade-off will tend to live and reproduce, and the rabbits that are bad at it will get eaten or starve. So you'd think that us, as a successful species on the planet — you, me, everybody — would be really good at making these trade-offs. Yet it seems, again and again, that we're hopelessly bad at it. And I think that's a fundamentally interesting question. I'll give you the short answer. The answer is, we respond to the feeling of security and not the reality. Now, most of the time, that works. Most of the time, feeling and reality are the same. Certainly that's true for most of human prehistory. We've developed this ability because it makes evolutionary sense. One way to think of it is that we're highly optimized for risk decisions that are endemic to living in small family groups in the East African Highlands in 100,000 BC. 2010 New York, not so much. Now, there are several biases in risk perception. A lot of good experiments in this. And you can see certain biases that come up again and again. I'll give you four. We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and downplay common risks — so, flying versus driving. The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar. One example would be: people fear kidnapping by strangers, when the data supports that kidnapping by relatives is much more common. This is for children. Third, personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks. So, Bin Laden is scarier because he has a name. And the fourth is: people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in situations they don't control. So once you take up skydiving or smoking, you downplay the risks. If a risk is thrust upon you — terrorism is a good example — you'll overplay it, because you don't feel like it's in your control. There are a bunch of other of these cognitive biases, that affect our risk decisions. There's the availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. So you can imagine how that works. If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must be a lot of tigers around. You don't hear about lion attacks, there aren't a lot of lions around. This works, until you invent newspapers, because what newspapers do is repeat again and again rare risks. I tell people: if it's in the news, don't worry about it, because by definition, news is something that almost never happens. (Laughter) When something is so common, it's no longer news. Car crashes, domestic violence — those are the risks you worry about. We're also a species of storytellers. We respond to stories more than data. And there's some basic innumeracy going on. I mean, the joke "One, two, three, many" is kind of right. We're really good at small numbers. One mango, two mangoes, three mangoes, 10,000 mangoes, 100,000 mangoes — it's still more mangoes you can eat before they rot. So one half, one quarter, one fifth — we're good at that. One in a million, one in a billion — they're both almost never. So we have trouble with the risks that aren't very common. And what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality. And the result is that feeling and reality get out of whack, they get different. Now, you either have a feeling — you feel more secure than you are, there's a false sense of security. Or the other way, and that's a false sense of insecurity. I write a lot about "security theater," which are products that make people feel secure, but don't actually do anything. There's no real word for stuff that makes us secure, but doesn't make us feel secure. Maybe it's what the CIA is supposed to do for us. So back to economics. If economics, if the market, drives security, and if people make trade-offs based on the feeling of security, then the smart thing for companies to do for the economic incentives is to make people feel secure. And there are two ways to do this. One, you can make people actually secure and hope they notice. Or two, you can make people just feel secure and hope they don't notice. Right? So what makes people notice? Well, a couple of things: understanding of the security, of the risks, the threats, the countermeasures, how they work. But if you know stuff, you're more likely to have your feelings match reality. Enough real-world examples helps. We all know the crime rate in our neighborhood, because we live there, and we get a feeling about it that basically matches reality. Security theater is exposed when it's obvious that it's not working properly. OK. So what makes people not notice? Well, a poor understanding. If you don't understand the risks, you don't understand the costs, you're likely to get the trade-off wrong, and your feeling doesn't match reality. Not enough examples. There's an inherent problem with low-probability events. If, for example, terrorism almost never happens, it's really hard to judge the efficacy of counter-terrorist measures. This is why you keep sacrificing virgins, and why your unicorn defenses are working just great. There aren't enough examples of failures. Also, feelings that cloud the issues — the cognitive biases I talked about earlier: fears, folk beliefs — basically, an inadequate model of reality. So let me complicate things. I have feeling and reality. I want to add a third element. I want to add "model." Feeling and model are in our head, reality is the outside world; it doesn't change, it's real. Feeling is based on our intuition, model is based on reason. That's basically the difference. In a primitive and simple world, there's really no reason for a model, because feeling is close to reality. You don't need a model. But in a modern and complex world, you need models to understand a lot of the risks we face. There's no feeling about germs. You need a model to understand them. This model is an intelligent representation of reality. It's, of course, limited by science, by technology. We couldn't have a germ theory of disease before we invented the microscope to see them. It's limited by our cognitive biases. But it has the ability to override our feelings. Where do we get these models? We get them from others. We get them from religion, from culture, teachers, elders. A couple years ago, I was in South Africa on safari. The tracker I was with grew up in Kruger National Park. He had some very complex models of how to survive. And it depended on if you were attacked by a lion, leopard, rhino, or elephant — and when you had to run away, when you couldn't run away, when you had to climb a tree, when you could never climb a tree. I would have died in a day. But he was born there, and he understood how to survive. I was born in New York City. I could have taken him to New York, and he would have died in a day. (Laughter) Because we had different models based on our different experiences. Models can come from the media, from our elected officials ... Think of models of terrorism, child kidnapping, airline safety, car safety. Models can come from industry. The two I'm following are surveillance cameras, ID cards, quite a lot of our computer security models come from there. A lot of models come from science. Health models are a great example. Think of cancer, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. All of our feelings of security about those diseases come from models given to us, really, by science filtered through the media. So models can change. Models are not static. As we become more comfortable in our environments, our model can move closer to our feelings. So an example might be, if you go back 100 years ago, when electricity was first becoming common, there were a lot of fears about it. There were people who were afraid to push doorbells, because there was electricity in there, and that was dangerous. For us, we're very facile around electricity. We change light bulbs without even thinking about it. Our model of security around electricity is something we were born into. It hasn't changed as we were growing up. And we're good at it. Or think of the risks on the Internet across generations — how your parents approach Internet security, versus how you do, versus how our kids will. Models eventually fade into the background. "Intuitive" is just another word for familiar. So as your model is close to reality and it converges with feelings, you often don't even know it's there. A nice example of this came from last year and swine flu. When swine flu first appeared, the initial news caused a lot of overreaction. Now, it had a name, which made it scarier than the regular flu, even though it was more deadly. And people thought doctors should be able to deal with it. So there was that feeling of lack of control. And those two things made the risk more than it was. As the novelty wore off and the months went by, there was some amount of tolerance; people got used to it. There was no new data, but there was less fear. By autumn, people thought the doctors should have solved this already. And there's kind of a bifurcation: people had to choose between fear and acceptance — actually, fear and indifference — and they kind of chose suspicion. And when the vaccine appeared last winter, there were a lot of people — a surprising number — who refused to get it. And it's a nice example of how people's feelings of security change, how their model changes, sort of wildly, with no new information, with no new input. This kind of thing happens a lot. I'm going to give one more complication. We have feeling, model, reality. I have a very relativistic view of security. I think it depends on the observer. And most security decisions have a variety of people involved. And stakeholders with specific trade-offs will try to influence the decision. And I call that their agenda. And you see agenda — this is marketing, this is politics — trying to convince you to have one model versus another, trying to convince you to ignore a model and trust your feelings, marginalizing people with models you don't like. This is not uncommon. An example, a great example, is the risk of smoking. In the history of the past 50 years, the smoking risk shows how a model changes, and it also shows how an industry fights against a model it doesn't like. Compare that to the secondhand smoke debate — probably about 20 years behind. Think about seat belts. When I was a kid, no one wore a seat belt. Nowadays, no kid will let you drive if you're not wearing a seat belt. Compare that to the airbag debate, probably about 30 years behind. All examples of models changing. What we learn is that changing models is hard. Models are hard to dislodge. If they equal your feelings, you don't even know you have a model. And there's another cognitive bias I'll call confirmation bias, where we tend to accept data that confirms our beliefs and reject data that contradicts our beliefs. So evidence against our model, we're likely to ignore, even if it's compelling. It has to get very compelling before we'll pay attention. New models that extend long periods of time are hard. Global warming is a great example. We're terrible at models that span 80 years. We can do "to the next harvest." We can often do "until our kids grow up." But "80 years," we're just not good at. So it's a very hard model to accept. We can have both models in our head simultaneously — that kind of problem where we're holding both beliefs together, the cognitive dissonance. Eventually, the new model will replace the old model. Strong feelings can create a model. September 11 created a security model in a lot of people's heads. Also, personal experiences with crime can do it, personal health scare, a health scare in the news. You'll see these called "flashbulb events" by psychiatrists. They can create a model instantaneously, because they're very emotive. So in the technological world, we don't have experience to judge models. And we rely on others. We rely on proxies. And this works, as long as it's the correct others. We rely on government agencies to tell us what pharmaceuticals are safe. I flew here yesterday. I didn't check the airplane. I relied on some other group to determine whether my plane was safe to fly. We're here, none of us fear the roof is going to collapse on us, not because we checked, but because we're pretty sure the building codes here are good. It's a model we just accept pretty much by faith. And that's OK. Now, what we want is people to get familiar enough with better models, have it reflected in their feelings, to allow them to make security trade-offs. When these go out of whack, you have two options. One, you can fix people's feelings, directly appeal to feelings. It's manipulation, but it can work. The second, more honest way is to actually fix the model. Change happens slowly. The smoking debate took 40 years — and that was an easy one. Some of this stuff is hard. Really, though, information seems like our best hope. And I lied. Remember I said feeling, model, reality; reality doesn't change? It actually does. We live in a technological world; reality changes all the time. So we might have, for the first time in our species: feeling chases model, model chases reality, reality's moving — they might never catch up. We don't know. But in the long term, both feeling and reality are important. And I want to close with two quick stories to illustrate this. 1982 — I don't know if people will remember this — there was a short epidemic of Tylenol poisonings in the United States. It's a horrific story. Someone took a bottle of Tylenol, put poison in it, closed it up, put it back on the shelf, someone else bought it and died. This terrified people. There were a couple of copycat attacks. There wasn't any real risk, but people were scared. And this is how the tamper-proof drug industry was invented. Those tamper-proof caps? That came from this. It's complete security theater. As a homework assignment, think of 10 ways to get around it. I'll give you one: a syringe. But it made people feel better. It made their feeling of security more match the reality. Last story: a few years ago, a friend of mine gave birth. I visit her in the hospital. It turns out, when a baby's born now, they put an RFID bracelet on the baby, a corresponding one on the mother, so if anyone other than the mother takes the baby out of the maternity ward, an alarm goes off. I said, "Well, that's kind of neat. I wonder how rampant baby snatching is out of hospitals." I go home, I look it up. It basically never happens. (Laughter) But if you think about it, if you are a hospital, and you need to take a baby away from its mother, out of the room to run some tests, you better have some good security theater, or she's going to rip your arm off. (Laughter) So it's important for us, those of us who design security, who look at security policy — or even look at public policy in ways that affect security. It's not just reality; it's feeling and reality. What's important is that they be about the same. It's important that, if our feelings match reality, we make better security trade-offs. Thank you. (Applause)

Using nature to grow batteries

{0: 'Angela Belcher looks to nature for inspiration on how to engineer viruses to create extraordinary new materials.'}

TEDxCaltech

I thought I'd talk a little bit about how nature makes materials. I brought along with me an abalone shell. This abalone shell is a biocomposite material that's 98 percent by mass calcium carbonate and two percent by mass protein. Yet, it's 3,000 times tougher than its geological counterpart. And a lot of people might use structures like abalone shells, like chalk. I've been fascinated by how nature makes materials, and there's a lot of secrets to how they do such an exquisite job. Part of it is that these materials are macroscopic in structure, but they're formed at the nano scale. They're formed at the nano scale, and they use proteins that are coded by the genetic level that allow them to build these really exquisite structures. So something I think is very fascinating is: What if you could give life to non-living structures, like batteries and like solar cells? What if they had some of the same capabilities that an abalone shell did, in terms of being able to build really exquisite structures at room temperature and room pressure, using nontoxic chemicals and adding no toxic materials back into the environment? So that's kind of the vision that I've been thinking about. And so what if you could grow a battery in a Petri dish? Or what if you could give genetic information to a battery so that it could actually become better as a function of time, and do so in an environmentally friendly way? And so, going back to this abalone shell, besides being nanostructured, one thing that's fascinating is, when a male and female abalone get together, they pass on the genetic information that says, "This is how to build an exquisite material. Here's how to do it at room temperature and pressure, using nontoxic materials." Same with diatoms, which are shown right here, which are glasseous structures. Every time the diatoms replicate, they give the genetic information that says, "Here's how to build glass in the ocean that's perfectly nanostructured." And you can do it the same, over and over again." So what if you could do the same thing with a solar cell or a battery? I like to say my favorite biomaterial is my four year old. But anyone who's ever had or knows small children knows, they're incredibly complex organisms. If you wanted to convince them to do something they don't want to do, it's very difficult. So when we think about future technologies, we actually think of using bacteria and viruses — simple organisms. Can you convince them to work with a new toolbox, so they can build a structure that will be important to me? Also, when we think about future technologies, we start with the beginning of Earth. Basically, it took a billion years to have life on Earth. And very rapidly, they became multi-cellular, they could replicate, they could use photosynthesis as a way of getting their energy source. But it wasn't until about 500 million years ago — during the Cambrian geologic time period — that organisms in the ocean started making hard materials. Before that, they were all soft, fluffy structures. It was during this time that there was increased calcium, iron and silicon in the environment, and organisms learned how to make hard materials. So that's what I would like to be able to do, convince biology to work with the rest of the periodic table. Now, if you look at biology, there's many structures like DNA, antibodies, proteins and ribosomes you've heard about, that are nanostructured — nature already gives us really exquisite structures on the nano scale. What if we could harness them and convince them to not be an antibody that does something like HIV? What if we could convince them to build a solar cell for us? Here are some examples. Natural shells, natural biological materials. The abalone shell here. If you fracture it, you can look at the fact that it's nanostructured. There's diatoms made out of SiO2, and there are magnetotactic bacteria that make small, single-domain magnets used for navigation. What all these have in common is these materials are structured at the nano scale, and they have a DNA sequence that codes for a protein sequence that gives them the blueprint to be able to build these really wonderful structures. Now, going back to the abalone shell, the abalone makes this shell by having these proteins. These proteins are very negatively charged. They can pull calcium out of the environment, and put down a layer of calcium and then carbonate, calcium and carbonate. It has the chemical sequences of amino acids which says, "This is how to build the structure. Here's the DNA sequence, here's the protein sequence in order to do it." So an interesting idea is, what if you could take any material you wanted, or any element on the periodic table, and find its corresponding DNA sequence, then code it for a corresponding protein sequence to build a structure, but not build an abalone shell — build something that nature has never had the opportunity to work with yet. And so here's the periodic table. I absolutely love the periodic table. Every year for the incoming freshman class at MIT, I have a periodic table made that says, "Welcome to MIT. Now you're in your element." (Laughter) And you flip it over, and it's the amino acids with the pH at which they have different charges. And so I give this out to thousands of people. And I know it says MIT and this is Caltech, but I have a couple extra if people want it. I was really fortunate to have President Obama visit my lab this year on his visit to MIT, and I really wanted to give him a periodic table. So I stayed up at night and talked to my husband, "How do I give President Obama a periodic table? What if he says, 'Oh, I already have one,' or, 'I've already memorized it?'" (Laughter) So he came to visit my lab and looked around — it was a great visit. And then afterward, I said, "Sir, I want to give you the periodic table, in case you're ever in a bind and need to calculate molecular weight." (Laughter) I thought "molecular weight" sounded much less nerdy than "molar mass." (Laughter) And he looked at it and said, "Thank you. I'll look at it periodically." (Laughter) (Applause) Later in a lecture that he gave on clean energy, he pulled it out and said, "And people at MIT, they give out periodic tables." So ... So basically what I didn't tell you is that about 500 million years ago, the organisms started making materials, but it took them about 50 million years to get good at it — 50 million years to learn how to perfect how to make that abalone shell. And that's a hard sell to a graduate student: "I have this great project ... 50 million years ..." So we had to develop a way of trying to do this more rapidly. And so we use a nontoxic virus called M13 bacteriophage, whose job is to infect bacteria. Well, it has a simple DNA structure that you can go in and cut and paste additional DNA sequences into it, and by doing that, it allows the virus to express random protein sequences. This is pretty easy biotechnology, and you could basically do this a billion times. So you can have a billion different viruses that are all genetically identical, but they differ from each other based on their tips, on one sequence, that codes for one protein. Now if you take all billion viruses, and put them in one drop of liquid, you can force them to interact with anything you want on the periodic table. And through a process of selection evolution, you can pull one of a billion that does something you'd like it to do, like grow a battery or a solar cell. Basically, viruses can't replicate themselves; they need a host. Once you find that one out of a billion, you infect it into a bacteria, and make millions and billions of copies of that particular sequence. The other thing that's beautiful about biology is that biology gives you really exquisite structures with nice link scales. These viruses are long and skinny, and we can get them to express the ability to grow something like semiconductors or materials for batteries. Now, this is a high-powered battery that we grew in my lab. We engineered a virus to pick up carbon nanotubes. One part of the virus grabs a carbon nanotube, the other part of the virus has a sequence that can grow an electrode material for a battery, and then it wires itself to the current collector. And so through a process of selection evolution, we went from being able to have a virus that made a crummy battery to a virus that made a good battery to a virus that made a record-breaking, high-powered battery that's all made at room temperature, basically at the benchtop. That battery went to the White House for a press conference, and I brought it here. You can see it in this case that's lighting this LED. Now if we could scale this, you could actually use it to run your Prius, which is kind of my dream — to be able to drive a virus-powered car. (Laughter) But basically you can pull one out of a billion, and make lots of amplifications to it. Basically, you make an amplification in the lab, and then you get it to self-assemble into a structure like a battery. We're able to do this also with catalysis. This is the example of a photocatalytic splitting of water. And what we've been able to do is engineer a virus to basically take dye-absorbing molecules and line them up on the surface of the virus so it acts as an antenna, and you get an energy transfer across the virus. And then we give it a second gene to grow an inorganic material that can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, that can be used for clean fuels. I brought an example of that with me today. My students promised me it would work. These are virus-assembled nanowires. When you shine light on them, you can see them bubbling. In this case, you're seeing oxygen bubbles come out. (Applause) Basically, by controlling the genes, you can control multiple materials to improve your device performance. The last example are solar cells. You can also do this with solar cells. We've been able to engineer viruses to pick up carbon nanotubes and then grow titanium dioxide around them, and use it as a way of getting electrons through the device. And what we've found is through genetic engineering, we can actually increase the efficiencies of these solar cells to record numbers for these types of dye-sensitized systems. And I brought one of those as well, that you can play around with outside afterward. So this is a virus-based solar cell. Through evolution and selection, we took it from an eight percent efficiency solar cell to an 11 percent efficiency solar cell. So I hope that I've convinced you that there's a lot of great, interesting things to be learned about how nature makes materials, and about taking it the next step, to see if you can force or take advantage of how nature makes materials, to make things that nature hasn't yet dreamed of making. Thank you. (Applause)

A next-generation digital book

{0: "While at Apple, Mike Matas helped write the user interface for the iPhone and iPad. Now with Push Pop Press, he's helping to rewrite the electronic book."}

TED2011

So for the past year and a half, my team at Push Pop Press and Charlie Melcher and Melcher Media have been working on creating the first feature-length interactive book. It's called "Our Choice" and the author is Al Gore. It's the sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth," and it explores all the solutions that will solve the climate crisis. The book starts like this. This is the cover. As the globe spins, we can see our location, and we can open the book and swipe through the chapters to browse the book. Or, we can scroll through the pages at the bottom. And if we wanted to zoom into a page, we can just open it up. And anything you see in the book, you can pick up with two fingers and lift off the page and open up. And if you want to go back and read the book again, you just fold it back up and put it back on the page. And so this works the same way; you pick it up and pop it open. (Audio) Al Gore: I consider myself among the majority who look at windmills and feel they're a beautiful addition to the landscape. Mike Matas: And so throughout the whole book, Al Gore will walk you through and explain the photos. This photo, you can you can even see on an interactive map. Zoom into it and see where it was taken. And throughout the book, there's over an hour of documentary footage and interactive animations. So you can open this one. (Audio) AG: Most modern wind turbines consist of a large ... MM: It starts playing immediately. And while it's playing, we can pinch and peak back at the page, and the movie keeps playing. Or we can zoom out to the table of contents, and the video keeps playing. But one of the coolest things in this book are the interactive infographics. This one shows the wind potential all around the United States. But instead of just showing us the information, we can take our finger and explore, and see, state by state, exactly how much wind potential there is. We can do the same for geothermal energy and solar power. This is one of my favorites. So this shows ... (Laughter) (Applause) When the wind is blowing, any excess energy coming from the windmill is diverted into the battery. And as the wind starts dying down, any excess energy will be diverted back into the house — the lights never go out. And this whole book, it doesn't just run on the iPad. It also runs on the iPhone. And so you can start reading on your iPad in your living room and then pick up where you left off on the iPhone. And it works the exact same way. You can pinch into any page. Open it up. So that's Push Pop Press' first title, Al Gore's "Our Choice." Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That's spectacular. Do you want to be a publisher, a technology licenser? What is the business here? Is this something that other people can do? MM: Yeah, we're building a tool that makes it really easy for publishers right now to build this content. So Melcher Media's team, who's on the East coast — and we're on the West coast, building the software — takes our tool and, every day, drags in images and text. CA: So you want to license this software to publishers to make books as beautiful as that? (MM: Yes.) All right. Mike, thanks so much. MM: Thank you. (CA: Good luck.) (Applause)

Turning trash into toys for learning

{0: 'Science educator Arvind Gupta uses simple toys to teach.'}

INK Conference

My name is Arvind Gupta, and I'm a toymaker. I've been making toys for the last 30 years. The early '70s, I was in college. It was a very revolutionary time. It was a political ferment, so to say — students out in the streets of Paris, revolting against authority. America was jolted by the anti-Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights movement. In India, we had the Naxalite movement, the [unclear] movement. But you know, when there is a political churning of society, it unleashes a lot of energy. The National Movement of India was testimony to that. Lots of people resigned from well-paid jobs and jumped into the National Movement. Now in the early '70s, one of the great programs in India was to revitalize primary science in village schools. There was a person, Anil Sadgopal, did a Ph.D. from Caltech and returned back as a molecular biologist in India's cutting-edge research institute, the TIFR. At 31, he was not able to relate the kind of [unclear] research, which he was doing with the lives of the ordinary people. So he designed and went and started a village science program. Many people were inspired by this. The slogan of the early '70s was "Go to the people. Live with them; love them. Start from what they know. Build on what they have." This was kind of the defining slogan. Well I took one year. I joined Telco, made TATA trucks, pretty close to Pune. I worked there for two years, and I realized that I was not born to make trucks. Often one doesn't know what one wants to do, but it's good enough to know what you don't want to do. So I took one year off, and I went to this village science program. And it was a turning point. It was a very small village — a weekly bazaar where people, just once in a week, they put in all the vats. So I said, "I'm going to spend a year over here." So I just bought one specimen of everything which was sold on the roadside. And one thing which I found was this black rubber. This is called a cycle valve tube. When you pump in air in a bicycle, you use a bit of this. And some of these models — so you take a bit of this cycle valve tube, you can put two matchsticks inside this, and you make a flexible joint. It's a joint of tubes. You start by teaching angles — an acute angle, a right angle, an obtuse angle, a straight angle. It's like its own little coupling. If you have three of them, and you loop them together, well you make a triangle. With four, you make a square, you make a pentagon, you make a hexagon, you make all these kind of polygons. And they have some wonderful properties. If you look at the hexagon, for instance, it's like an amoeba, which is constantly changing its own profile. You can just pull this out, this becomes a rectangle. You give it a push, this becomes a parallelogram. But this is very shaky. Look at the pentagon, for instance, pull this out — it becomes a boat shape trapezium. Push it and it becomes house shaped. This becomes an isosceles triangle — again, very shaky. This square might look very square and prim. Give it a little push — this becomes a rhombus. It becomes kite-shaped. But give a child a triangle, he can't do a thing to it. Why use triangles? Because triangles are the only rigid structures. We can't make a bridge with squares because the train would come, it would start doing a jig. Ordinary people know about this because if you go to a village in India, they might not have gone to engineering college, but no one makes a roof placed like this. Because if they put tiles on top, it's just going to crash. They always make a triangular roof. Now this is people science. And if you were to just poke a hole over here and put a third matchstick, you'll get a T joint. And if I were to poke all the three legs of this in the three vertices of this triangle, I would make a tetrahedron. So you make all these 3D shapes. You make a tetrahedron like this. And once you make these, you make a little house. Put this on top. You can make a joint of four. You can make a joint of six. You just need a ton. Now this was — you make a joint of six, you make an icosahedron. You can play around with it. This makes an igloo. Now this is in 1978. I was a 24-year-old young engineer. And I thought this was so much better than making trucks. (Applause) If you, as a matter of fact, put four marbles inside, you simulate the molecular structure of methane, CH4. Four atoms of hydrogen, the four points of the tetrahedron, which means the little carbon atom. Well since then, I just thought that I've been really privileged to go to over 2,000 schools in my country — village schools, government schools, municipal schools, Ivy League schools — I've been invited by most of them. And every time I go to a school, I see a gleam in the eyes of the children. I see hope. I see happiness in their faces. Children want to make things. Children want to do things. Now this, we make lots and lots of pumps. Now this is a little pump with which you could inflate a balloon. It's a real pump. You could actually pop the balloon. And we have a slogan that the best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it. So all you do is — it's a very kind of provocative statement — this old bicycle tube and this old plastic [unclear] This filling cap will go very snugly into an old bicycle tube. And this is how you make a valve. You put a little sticky tape. This is one-way traffic. Well we make lots and lots of pumps. And this is the other one — that you just take a straw, and you just put a stick inside and you make two half-cuts. Now this is what you do, is you bend both these legs into a triangle, and you just wrap some tape around. And this is the pump. And now, if you have this pump, it's like a great, great sprinkler. It's like a centrifuge. If you spin something, it tends to fly out. (Applause) Well in terms of — if you were in Andhra Pradesh, you would make this with the palmyra leaf. Many of our folk toys have great science principles. If you spin-top something, it tends to fly out. If I do it with both hands, you can see this fun Mr. Flying Man. Right. This is a toy which is made from paper. It's amazing. There are four pictures. You see insects, you see frogs, snakes, eagles, butterflies, frogs, snakes, eagles. Here's a paper which you could [unclear] — designed by a mathematician at Harvard in 1928, Arthur Stone, documented by Martin Gardner in many of his many books. But this is great fun for children. They all study about the food chain. The insects are eaten by the frogs; the frogs are eaten by the snakes; the snakes are eaten by the eagles. And this can be, if you had a whole photocopy paper — A4 size paper — you could be in a municipal school, you could be in a government school — a paper, a scale and a pencil — no glue, no scissors. In three minutes, you just fold this up. And what you could use it for is just limited by your imagination. If you take a smaller paper, you make a smaller flexagon. With a bigger one, you make a bigger one. Now this is a pencil with a few slots over here. And you put a little fan here. And this is a hundred-year-old toy. There have been six major research papers on this. There's some grooves over here, you can see. And if I take a reed — if I rub this, something very amazing happens. Six major research papers on this. As a matter of fact, Feynman, as a child, was very fascinated by this. He wrote a paper on this. And you don't need the three billion-dollar Hadron Collider for doing this. (Laughter) (Applause) This is there for every child, and every child can enjoy this. If you want to put a colored disk, well all these seven colors coalesce. And this is what Newton talked about 400 years back, that white light's made of seven colors, just by spinning this around. This is a straw. What we've done, we've just sealed both the ends with tape, nipped the right corner and the bottom left corner, so there's holes in the opposite corners, there's a little hole over here. This is a kind of a blowing straw. I just put this inside this. There's a hole here, and I shut this. And this costs very little money to make — great fun for children to do. What we do is make a very simple electric motor. Now this is the simplest motor on Earth. The most expensive thing is the battery inside this. If you have a battery, it costs five cents to make it. This is an old bicycle tube, which gives you a broad rubber band, two safety pins. This is a permanent magnet. Whenever current flows through the coil, this becomes an electromagnet. It's the interaction of both these magnets which makes this motor spin. We made 30,000. Teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years, they just muck up the definition and they spit it out. When teachers make it, children make it. You can see a gleam in their eye. They get a thrill of what science is all about. And this science is not a rich man's game. In a democratic country, science must reach to our most oppressed, to the most marginalized children. This program started with 16 schools and spread to 1,500 government schools. Over 100,000 children learn science this way. And we're just trying to see possibilities. Look, this is the tetrapak — awful materials from the point of view of the environment. There are six layers — three layers of plastic, aluminum — which are are sealed together. They are fused together, so you can't separate them. Now you can just make a little network like this and fold them and stick them together and make an icosahedron. So something which is trash, which is choking all the seabirds, you could just recycle this into a very, very joyous — all the platonic solids can be made with things like this. This is a little straw, and what you do is you just nip two corners here, and this becomes like a baby crocodile's mouth. You put this in your mouth, and you blow. (Honk) It's children's delight, a teacher's envy, as they say. You're not able to see how the sound is produced, because the thing which is vibrating goes inside my mouth. I'm going to keep this outside, to blow out. I'm going to suck in air. (Honk) So no one actually needs to muck up the production of sound with wire vibrations. The other is that you keep blowing at it, keep making the sound, and you keep cutting it. And something very, very nice happens. (Honk) (Applause) And when you get a very small one — (Honk) This is what the kids teach you. You can also do this. Well before I go any further, this is something worth sharing. This is a touching slate meant for blind children. This is strips of Velcro, this is my drawing slate, and this is my drawing pen, which is basically a film box. It's basically like a fisherman's line, a fishing line. And this is wool over here. If I crank the handle, all the wool goes inside. And what a blind child can do is to just draw this. Wool sticks on Velcro. There are 12 million blind children in our country — (Applause) who live in a world of darkness. And this has come as a great boon to them. There's a factory out there making our children blind, not able to provide them with food, not able to provide them with vitamin A. But this has come as a great boon for them. There are no patents. Anyone can make it. This is very, very simple. You can see, this is the generator. It's a crank generator. These are two magnets. This is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old CDs. Small pulley and two strong magnets. And this fiber turns a wire attached to an LED. If I spin this pulley, the small one's going to spin much faster. There will be a spinning magnetic field. Lines, of course, would be cut, the force will be generated. And you can see, this LED is going to glow. So this is a small crank generator. Well, this is, again, it's just a ring, a steel ring with steel nuts. And what you can do is just, if you give it a twirl, well they just keep going on. And imagine a bunch of kids standing in a circle and just waiting for the steel ring to be passed on. And they'd be absolutely joyous playing with this. Well in the end, what we can also do: we use a lot of old newspapers to make caps. This is worthy of Sachin Tendulkar. It's a great cricket cap. (Laughter) (Applause) When first you see Nehru and Gandhi, this is the Nehru cap — just half a newspaper. We make lots of toys with newspapers, and this is one of them. And this is — you can see — this is a flapping bird. All of our old newspapers, we cut them into little squares. And if you have one of these birds — children in Japan have been making this bird for many, many years. And you can see, this is a little fantail bird. Well in the end, I'll just end with a story. This is called "The Captain's Hat Story." The captain was a captain of a sea-going ship. It goes very slowly. And there were lots of passengers on the ship, and they were getting bored, so the captain invited them on the deck. "Wear all your colorful clothes and sing and dance, and I'll provide you with good food and drinks." And the captain would wear a cap everyday and join in the regalia. The first day, it was a huge umbrella cap, like a captain's cap. That night, when the passengers would be sleeping, he would give it one more fold, and the second day, he would be wearing a fireman's cap — with a little shoot just like a designer cap, because it protects the spinal cord. And the second night, he would take the same cap and give it another fold. And the third day, it would be a Shikari cap — just like an adventurer's cap. And the third night, he would give it two more folds — and this is a very, very famous cap. If you've seen any of our Bollywood films, this is what the policeman wears, it's called a zapalu cap. It's been catapulted to international glory. And we must not forget that he was the captain of the ship. So that's a ship. And now the end: everyone was enjoying the journey very much. They were singing and dancing. Suddenly there was a storm and huge waves. And all the ship can do is to dance and pitch along with the waves. A huge wave comes and slaps the front and knocks it down. And another one comes and slaps the aft and knocks it down. And there's a third one over here. This swallows the bridge and knocks it down. And the ship sinks, and the captain has lost everything, but for a life jacket. Thank you so much. (Applause)

The mothers who found forgiveness, friendship

{0: 'Aicha el-Wafi and Phyllis Rodriguez met around a shared tragedy -- and their friendship has become a powerful symbol for forgiveness and dialogue.'}

TEDWomen 2010

Phyllis Rodriguez: We are here today because of the fact that we have what most people consider an unusual friendship. And it is. And yet, it feels natural to us now. I first learned that my son had been in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001. We didn't know if he had perished yet until 36 hours later. At the time, we knew that it was political. We were afraid of what our country was going to do in the name of our son — my husband, Orlando, and I and our family. And when I saw it — and yet, through the shock, the terrible shock, and the terrible explosion in our lives, literally, we were not vengeful. And a couple of weeks later when Zacarias Moussaoui was indicted on six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism, and the U.S. government called for a death penalty for him, if convicted, my husband and I spoke out in opposition to that, publicly. Through that and through human rights groups, we were brought together with several other victims' families. When I saw Aicha in the media, coming over when her son was indicted, and I thought, "What a brave woman. Someday I want to meet that woman when I'm stronger." I was still in deep grief; I knew I didn't have the strength. I knew I would find her someday, or we would find each other. Because, when people heard that my son was a victim, I got immediate sympathy. But when people learned what her son was accused of, she didn't get that sympathy. But her suffering is equal to mine. So we met in November 2002, and Aicha will now tell you how that came about. (Translator) Aicha el-Wafi: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui. And I asked the Organization of Human Rights to put me in touch with the parents of the victims. So they introduced me to five families. And I saw Phyllis, and I watched her. She was the only mother in the group. The others were brothers, sisters. And I saw in her eyes that she was a mother, just like me. I suffered a lot as a mother. I was married when I was 14. I lost a child when I was 15, a second child when I was 16. So the story with Zacarias was too much really. And I still suffer, because my son is like he's buried alive. I know she really cried for her son. But she knows where he is. My son, I don't know where he is. I don't know if he's alive. I don't know if he's tortured. I don't know what happened to him. So that's why I decided to tell my story, so that my suffering is something positive for other women. For all the women, all the mothers that give life, you can give back, you can change. It's up to us women, because we are women, because we love our children. We must be hand-in-hand and do something together. It's not against women, it's for us, for us women, for our children. I talk against violence, against terrorism. I go to schools to talk to young, Muslim girls so they don't accept to be married against their will very young. So if I can save one of the young girls, and avoid that they get married and suffer as much as I did, well this is something good. This is why I'm here in front of you. PR: I would like to say that I have learned so much from Aicha, starting with that day we had our very first meeting with other family members — which was a very private meeting with security, because it was November 2002, and, frankly, we were afraid of the super-patriotism of that time in the country — those of us family members. But we were all so nervous. "Why does she want to meet us?" And then she was nervous. "Why did we want to meet her?" What did we want from each other? Before we knew each others' names, or anything, we had embraced and wept. Then we sat in a circle with support, with help, from people experienced in this kind of reconciliation. And Aicha started, and she said, "I don't know if my son is guilty or innocent, but I want to tell you how sorry I am for what happened to your families. I know what it is to suffer, and I feel that if there is a crime, a person should be tried fairly and punished." But she reached out to us in that way, and it was, I'd like to say, it was an ice-breaker. And what happened then is we all told our stories, and we all connected as human beings. By the end of the afternoon — it was about three hours after lunch — we'd felt as if we'd known each other forever. Now what I learned from her, is a woman, not only who could be so generous under these present circumstances and what it was then, and what was being done to her son, but the life she's had. I never had met someone with such a hard life, from such a totally different culture and environment from my own. And I feel that we have a special connection, which I value very much. And I think it's all about being afraid of the other, but making that step and then realizing, "Hey, this wasn't so hard. Who else can I meet that I don't know, or that I'm so different from?" So, Aicha, do you have a couple of words for conclusion? Because our time is up. (Laughter) (Translator) AW: I wanted to say that we have to try to know other people, the other. You have to be generous, and your hearts must be generous, your mind must be generous. You must be tolerant. You have to fight against violence. And I hope that someday we'll all live together in peace and respecting each other. This is what I wanted to say. (Applause)

Beware online "filter bubbles"

{0: 'As a cofounder of Upworthy, and the author of "The Filter Bubble," Eli Pariser leverages technology to help build better and more democratic societies.'}

TED2011

Mark Zuckerberg, a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed. And the journalist was asking him, "Why is this so important?" And Zuckerberg said, "A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." And I want to talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like. So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something very different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that would connect us all together. And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society. But there's this shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible. And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time — my Facebook page. I'm progressive, politically — big surprise — but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared. So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web. Google's doing it too. If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at — everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located — that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see. You can't see how different your search results are from anyone else's. But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google "Egypt" and to send me screen shots of what they got. So here's my friend Scott's screen shot. And here's my friend Daniel's screen shot. When you put them side-by-side, you don't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links, it's really quite remarkable. Daniel didn't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. Scott's results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at that time. That's how different these results are becoming. So it's not just Google and Facebook either. This is something that's sweeping the Web. There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized — different people get different things. Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times — all flirting with personalization in various ways. And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt said, "It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." So I do think this is a problem. And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out. So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. And they were looking at the Netflix queues, and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses. They enter the queue, they just zip right out. So "Iron Man" zips right out, and "Waiting for Superman" can wait for a really long time. What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there's this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. You know we all want to be someone who has watched "Rashomon," but right now we want to watch "Ace Ventura" for the fourth time. (Laughter) So the best editing gives us a bit of both. It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables; it gives us some information dessert. And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that, because they're mainly looking at what you click on first, it can throw off that balance. And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food. What this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong. In a broadcast society — this is how the founding mythology goes — in a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. And along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that's not actually what's happening right now. What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they're going to decide what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important — this is what TED does — other points of view. And the thing is, we've actually been here before as a society. In 1915, it's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities. Then people noticed that they were doing something really important. That, in fact, you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of information, that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter, and then journalistic ethics developed. It wasn't perfect, but it got us through the last century. And so now, we're kind of back in 1915 on the Web. And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing. I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google — Larry and Sergey — people who have helped build the Web as it is, and I'm grateful for that. But we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. We need you to make sure that they're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters. And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't. Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one. Thank you. (Applause)

Architecture that senses and responds

{0: 'Carlo Ratti directs the MIT SENSEable City Lab, which explores the "real-time city" by studying the way sensors and electronics relate to the built environment. '}

TED2011

Good afternoon, everybody. I've got something to show you. (Laughter) Think about this as a pixel, a flying pixel. This is what we call, in our lab, sensible design. Let me tell you a bit about it. Now if you take this picture — I'm Italian originally, and every boy in Italy grows up with this picture on the wall of his bedroom — but the reason I'm showing you this is that something very interesting happened in Formula 1 racing over the past couple of decades. Now some time ago, if you wanted to win a Formula 1 race, you take a budget, and you bet your budget on a good driver and a good car. And if the car and the driver were good enough, then you'd win the race. Now today, if you want to win the race, actually you need also something like this — something that monitors the car in real time, has a few thousand sensors collecting information from the car, transmitting this information into the system, and then processing it and using it in order to go back to the car with decisions and changing things in real time as information is collected. This is what, in engineering terms, you would call a real time control system. And basically, it's a system made of two components — a sensing and an actuating component. What is interesting today is that real time control systems are starting to enter into our lives. Our cities, over the past few years, just have been blanketed with networks, electronics. They're becoming like computers in open air. And, as computers in open air, they're starting to respond in a different way to be able to be sensed and to be actuated. If we fix cities, actually it's a big deal. Just as an aside, I wanted to mention, cities are only two percent of the Earth's crust, but they are 50 percent of the world's population. They are 75 percent of the energy consumption — up to 80 percent of CO2 emissions. So if we're able to do something with cities, that's a big deal. Beyond cities, all of this sensing and actuating is entering our everyday objects. That's from an exhibition that Paola Antonelli is organizing at MoMA later this year, during the summer. It's called "Talk to Me." Well our objects, our environment is starting to talk back to us. In a certain sense, it's almost as if every atom out there were becoming both a sensor and an actuator. And that is radically changing the interaction we have as humans with the environment out there. In a certain sense, it's almost as if the old dream of Michelangelo ... you know, when Michelangelo sculpted the Moses, at the end it said that he took the hammer, threw it at the Moses — actually you can still see a small chip underneath — and said, shouted, "Perché non parli? Why don't you talk?" Well today, for the first time, our environment is starting to talk back to us. And I'll show just a few examples — again, with this idea of sensing our environment and actuating it. Let's starting with sensing. Well, the first project I wanted to share with you is actually one of the first projects by our lab. It was four and a half years ago in Italy. And what we did there was actually use a new type of network at the time that had been deployed all across the world — that's a cellphone network — and use anonymous and aggregated information from that network, that's collected anyway by the operator, in order to understand how the city works. The summer was a lucky summer — 2006. It's when Italy won the soccer World Cup. Some of you might remember, it was Italy and France playing, and then Zidane at the end, the headbutt. And anyway, Italy won at the end. (Laughter) Now look at what happened that day just by monitoring activity happening on the network. Here you see the city. You see the Colosseum in the middle, the river Tiber. It's morning, before the match. You see the timeline on the top. Early afternoon, people here and there, making calls and moving. The match begins — silence. France scores. Italy scores. Halftime, people make a quick call and go to the bathroom. Second half. End of normal time. First overtime, second. Zidane, the headbutt in a moment. Italy wins. Yeah. (Laughter) (Applause) Well, that night, everybody went to celebrate in the center. You saw the big peak. The following day, again everybody went to the center to meet the winning team and the prime minister at the time. And then everybody moved down. You see the image of the place called Circo Massimo, where, since Roman times, people go to celebrate, to have a big party, and you see the peak at the end of the day. Well, that's just one example of how we can sense the city today in a way that we couldn't have done just a few years ago. Another quick example about sensing: it's not about people, but about things we use and consume. Well today, we know everything about where our objects come from. This is a map that shows you all the chips that form a Mac computer, how they came together. But we know very little about where things go. So in this project, we actually developed some small tags to track trash as it moves through the system. So we actually started with a number of volunteers who helped us in Seattle, just over a year ago, to tag what they were throwing away — different types of things, as you can see here — things they would throw away anyway. Then we put a little chip, little tag, onto the trash and then started following it. Here are the results we just obtained. (Music) From Seattle ... after one week. With this information we realized there's a lot of inefficiencies in the system. We can actually do the same thing with much less energy. This data was not available before. But there's a lot of wasted transportation and convoluted things happening. But the other thing is that we believe that if we see every day that the cup we're throwing away, it doesn't disappear, it's still somewhere on the planet. And the plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there. And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change. So that was the reason for the project. My colleague at MIT, Assaf Biderman, he could tell you much more about sensing and many other wonderful things we can do with sensing, but I wanted to go to the second part we discussed at the beginning, and that's actuating our environment. And the first project is something we did a couple of years ago in Zaragoza, Spain. It started with a question by the mayor of the city, who came to us saying that Spain and Southern Europe have a beautiful tradition of using water in public space, in architecture. And the question was: How could technology, new technology, be added to that? And one of the ideas that was developed at MIT in a workshop was, imagine this pipe, and you've got valves, solenoid valves, taps, opening and closing. You create like a water curtain with pixels made of water. If those pixels fall, you can write on it, you can show patterns, images, text. And even you can approach it, and it will open up to let you jump through, as you see in this image. Well, we presented this to Mayor Belloch. He liked it very much. And we got a commission to design a building at the entrance of the expo. We called it Digital Water Pavilion. The whole building is made of water. There's no doors or windows, but when you approach it, it will open up to let you in. (Music) The roof also is covered with water. And if there's a bit of wind, if you want to minimize splashing, you can actually lower the roof. Or you could close the building, and the whole architecture will disappear, like in this case. You know, these days, you always get images during the winter, when they take the roof down, of people who have been there and said, "They demolished the building." No, they didn't demolish it, just when it goes down, the architecture almost disappears. Here's the building working. You see the person puzzled about what was going on inside. And here was myself trying not to get wet, testing the sensors that open the water. Well, I should tell you now what happened one night when all of the sensors stopped working. But actually that night, it was even more fun. All the kids from Zaragoza came to the building, because the way of engaging with the building became something different. Not anymore a building that would open up to let you in, but a building that would still make cuts and holes through the water, and you had to jump without getting wet. (Video) (Crowd Noise) And that was, for us, was very interesting, because, as architects, as engineers, as designers, we always think about how people will use the things we design. But then reality's always unpredictable. And that's the beauty of doing things that are used and interact with people. Here is an image then of the building with the physical pixels, the pixels made of water, and then projections on them. And this is what led us to think about the following project I'll show you now. That's, imagine those pixels could actually start flying. Imagine you could have small helicopters that move in the air, and then each of them with a small pixel in changing lights — almost as a cloud that can move in space. Here is the video. (Music) So imagine one helicopter, like the one we saw before, moving with others, in synchrony. So you can have this cloud. You can have a kind of flexible screen or display, like this — a regular configuration in two dimensions. Or in regular, but in three dimensions, where the thing that changes is the light, not the pixels' position. You can play with a different type. Imagine your screen could just appear in different scales or sizes, different types of resolution. But then the whole thing can be just a 3D cloud of pixels that you can approach and move through it and see from many, many directions. Here is the real Flyfire control and going down to form the regular grid as before. When you turn on the light, actually you see this. So the same as we saw before. And imagine each of them then controlled by people. You can have each pixel having an input that comes from people, from people's movement, or so and so. I want to show you something here for the first time. We've been working with Roberto Bolle, one of today's top ballet dancers — the étoile at Metropolitan in New York and La Scala in Milan — and actually captured his movement in 3D in order to use it as an input for Flyfire. And here you can see Roberto dancing. You see on the left the pixels, the different resolutions being captured. It's both 3D scanning in real time and motion capture. So you can reconstruct a whole movement. You can go all the way through. But then, once we have the pixels, then you can play with them and play with color and movement and gravity and rotation. So we want to use this as one of the possible inputs for Flyfire. I wanted to show you the last project we are working on. It's something we're working on for the London Olympics. It's called The Cloud. And the idea here is, imagine, again, we can involve people in doing something and changing our environment — almost to impart what we call cloud raising — like barn raising, but with a cloud. Imagine you can have everybody make a small donation for one pixel. And I think what is remarkable that has happened over the past couple of years is that, over the past couple of decades, we went from the physical world to the digital one. This has been digitizing everything, knowledge, and making that accessible through the Internet. Now today, for the first time — and the Obama campaign showed us this — we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one. This can be, in our case, we want to use it for designing and doing a symbol. That means something built in a city. But tomorrow it can be, in order to tackle today's pressing challenges — think about climate change or CO2 emissions — how we can go from the digital world to the physical one. So the idea that we can actually involve people in doing this thing together, collectively. The cloud is a cloud, again, made of pixels, in the same way as the real cloud is a cloud made of particles. And those particles are water, where our cloud is a cloud of pixels. It's a physical structure in London, but covered with pixels. You can move inside, have different types of experiences. You can actually see from underneath, sharing the main moments for the Olympics in 2012 and beyond, and really using it as a way to connect with the community. So both the physical cloud in the sky and something you can go to the top [of], like London's new mountaintop. You can enter inside it. And a kind of new digital beacon for the night — but most importantly, a new type of experience for anybody who will go to the top. Thank you. (Applause)

Grow your own clothes

{0: 'TED Fellow Suzanne Lee is a fashion designer turned biofabrication pioneer who is nurturing a global community of innovators growing materials.'}

TED2011

So as a fashion designer, I've always tended to think of materials something like this, or this, or maybe this. But then I met a biologist, and now I think of materials like this — green tea, sugar, a few microbes and a little time. I'm essentially using a kombucha recipe, which is a symbiotic mix of bacteria, yeasts and other micro-organisms, which spin cellulose in a fermentation process. Over time, these tiny threads form in the liquid into layers and produce a mat on the surface. So we start by brewing the tea. I brew up to about 30 liters of tea at a time, and then while it's still hot, add a couple of kilos of sugar. We stir this in until it's completely dissolved and then pour it into a growth bath. We need to check that the temperature has cooled to below 30 degrees C. And then we're ready to add the living organism. And along with that, some acetic acid. And once you get this process going, you can actually recycle your previous fermented liquid. We need to maintain an optimum temperature for the growth. And I use a heat mat to sit the bath on and a thermostat to regulate it. And actually, in hot weather, I can just grow it outside. So this is my mini fabric farm. After about three days, the bubbles will appear on the surface of the liquid. So this is telling us that the fermentation is in full swing. And the bacteria are feeding on the sugar nutrients in the liquid. So they're spinning these tiny nano fibers of pure cellulose. And they're sticking together, forming layers and giving us a sheet on the surface. After about two to three weeks, we're looking at something which is about an inch in thickness. So the bath on the left is after five days, and on the right, after 10. And this is a static culture. You don't have to do anything to it; you just literally watch it grow. It doesn't need light. And when it's ready to harvest, you take it out of the bath and you wash it in cold, soapy water. At this point, it's really heavy. It's over 90 percent water, so we need to let that evaporate. So I spread it out onto a wooden sheet. Again, you can do that outside and just let it dry in the air. And as it's drying, it's compressing, so what you're left with, depending on the recipe, is something that's either like a really light-weight, transparent paper, or something which is much more like a flexible vegetable leather. And then you can either cut that out and sew it conventionally, or you can use the wet material to form it around a three-dimensional shape. And as it evaporates, it will knit itself together, forming seams. So the color in this jacket is coming purely from green tea. I guess it also looks a little bit like human skin, which intrigues me. Since it's organic, I'm really keen to try and minimize the addition of any chemicals. I can make it change color without using dye by a process of iron oxidation. Using fruit and vegetable staining, create organic patterning. And using indigo, make it anti-microbial. And in fact, cotton would take up to 18 dips in indigo to achieve a color this dark. And because of the super-absorbency of this kind of cellulose, it just takes one, and a really short one at that. What I can't yet do is make it water-resistant. So if I was to walk outside in the rain wearing this dress today, I would immediately start to absorb huge amounts of water. The dress would get really heavy, and eventually the seams would probably fall apart — leaving me feeling rather naked. Possibly a good performance piece, but definitely not ideal for everyday wear. What I'm looking for is a way to give the material the qualities that I need. So what I want to do is say to a future bug, "Spin me a thread. Align it in this direction. Make it hydrophobic. And while you're at it, just form it around this 3D shape." Bacterial cellulose is actually already being used for wound healing, and possibly in the future for biocompatible blood vessels, possibly even replacement bone tissue. But with synthetic biology, we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality, quantity and shape of material that we desire. Obviously, as a designer, that's really exciting because then I start to think, wow, we could actually imagine growing consumable products. What excites me about using microbes is their efficiency. So we only grow what we need. There's no waste. And in fact, we could make it from a waste stream — so for example, a waste sugar stream from a food processing plant. Finally, at the end of use, we could biodegrade it naturally along with your vegetable peelings. What I'm not suggesting is that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton, leather or other textile materials. But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources. Ultimately, maybe it won't even be fashion where we see these microbes have their impact. We could, for example, imagine growing a lamp, a chair, a car or maybe even a house. So I guess what my question to you is: in the future, what would you choose to grow? Thank you very much. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Suzanne, just a curiosity, what you're wearing is not random. (Suzanne Lee: No.) This is one of the jackets you grew? SL: Yes, it is. It's probably — part of the project's still in process because this one is actually biodegrading in front of your eyes. (Laughter) It's absorbing my sweat, and it's feeding on it. BG: Okay, so we'll let you go and save it, and rescue it. Suzanne Lee. (SL: Thank you.) (Applause)

Distant time and the hint of a multiverse

{0: 'A physicist, cosmologist and gifted science communicator, Sean Carroll is asking himself -- and asking us to consider -- questions that get at the fundamental nature of the universe.'}

TEDxCaltech

The universe is really big. We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy. There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky, and you just keep the shutter open, as long as your camera is attached to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will see something like this. Every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way — a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs. There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. 100 billion is the only number you need to know. The age of the universe, between now and the Big Bang, is a hundred billion in dog years. (Laughter) Which tells you something about our place in the universe. One thing you can do with a picture like this is simply admire it. It's extremely beautiful. I've often wondered, what is the evolutionary pressure that made our ancestors in the Veldt adapt and evolve to really enjoy pictures of galaxies when they didn't have any. But we would also like to understand it. As a cosmologist, I want to ask, why is the universe like this? One big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time. If you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity, it would be moving away from you. And if you look at a galaxy even farther away, it would be moving away faster. So we say the universe is expanding. What that means, of course, is that, in the past, things were closer together. In the past, the universe was more dense, and it was also hotter. If you squeeze things together, the temperature goes up. That kind of makes sense to us. The thing that doesn't make sense to us as much is that the universe, at early times, near the Big Bang, was also very, very smooth. You might think that that's not a surprise. The air in this room is very smooth. You might say, "Well, maybe things just smoothed themselves out." But the conditions near the Big Bang are very, very different than the conditions of the air in this room. In particular, things were a lot denser. The gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the Big Bang. What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, a hundred billion stars each. At early times, those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big — literally — at early times. And you have to imagine doing that squeezing without any imperfections, without any little spots where there were a few more atoms than somewhere else. Because if there had been, they would have collapsed under the gravitational pull into a huge black hole. Keeping the universe very, very smooth at early times is not easy; it's a delicate arrangement. It's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly. There is something that made it that way. We would like to know what. So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 19th century. And Boltzmann's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy. You've heard of entropy. It's the randomness, the disorder, the chaoticness of some systems. Boltzmann gave us a formula — engraved on his tombstone now — that really quantifies what entropy is. And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same. If you have the air in this room, you don't notice each individual atom. A low entropy configuration is one in which there's only a few arrangements that look that way. A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way. This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics — the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe. The reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy. That's a wonderful insight, but it leaves something out. This insight that entropy increases, by the way, is what's behind what we call the arrow of time, the difference between the past and the future. Every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing — the fact that you can remember the past, but not the future. The fact that you are born, and then you live, and then you die, always in that order, that's because entropy is increasing. Boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy, it's very natural for it to increase because there's more ways to be high entropy. What he didn't explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place. The fact that the entropy of the universe was low was a reflection of the fact that the early universe was very, very smooth. We'd like to understand that. That's our job as cosmologists. Unfortunately, it's actually not a problem that we've been giving enough attention to. It's not one of the first things people would say, if you asked a modern cosmologist, "What are the problems we're trying to address?" One of the people who did understand that this was a problem was Richard Feynman. 50 years ago, he gave a series of a bunch of different lectures. He gave the popular lectures that became "The Character of Physical Law." He gave lectures to Caltech undergrads that became "The Feynman Lectures on Physics." He gave lectures to Caltech graduate students that became "The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation." In every one of these books, every one of these sets of lectures, he emphasized this puzzle: Why did the early universe have such a small entropy? So he says — I'm not going to do the accent — he says, "For some reason, the universe, at one time, had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. The arrow of time cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to understanding." So that's our job. We want to know — this is 50 years ago, "Surely," you're thinking, "we've figured it out by now." It's not true that we've figured it out by now. The reason the problem has gotten worse, rather than better, is because in 1998 we learned something crucial about the universe that we didn't know before. We learned that it's accelerating. The universe is not only expanding. If you look at the galaxy, it's moving away. If you come back a billion years later and look at it again, it will be moving away faster. Individual galaxies are speeding away from us faster and faster so we say the universe is accelerating. Unlike the low entropy of the early universe, even though we don't know the answer for this, we at least have a good theory that can explain it, if that theory is right, and that's the theory of dark energy. It's just the idea that empty space itself has energy. In every little cubic centimeter of space, whether or not there's stuff, whether or not there's particles, matter, radiation or whatever, there's still energy, even in the space itself. And this energy, according to Einstein, exerts a push on the universe. It is a perpetual impulse that pushes galaxies apart from each other. Because dark energy, unlike matter or radiation, does not dilute away as the universe expands. The amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same, even as the universe gets bigger and bigger. This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future. For one thing, the universe will expand forever. Back when I was your age, we didn't know what the universe was going to do. Some people thought that the universe would recollapse in the future. Einstein was fond of this idea. But if there's dark energy, and the dark energy does not go away, the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever. 14 billion years in the past, 100 billion dog years, but an infinite number of years into the future. Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes, space looks finite to us. Space may be finite or infinite, but because the universe is accelerating, there are parts of it we cannot see and never will see. There's a finite region of space that we have access to, surrounded by a horizon. So even though time goes on forever, space is limited to us. Finally, empty space has a temperature. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking told us that a black hole, even though you think it's black, it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics. The curvature of space-time around the black hole brings to life the quantum mechanical fluctuation, and the black hole radiates. A precisely similar calculation by Hawking and Gary Gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space, then the whole universe radiates. The energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations. And so even though the universe will last forever, and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away, there will always be some radiation, some thermal fluctuations, even in empty space. So what this means is that the universe is like a box of gas that lasts forever. Well what is the implication of that? That implication was studied by Boltzmann back in the 19th century. He said, well, entropy increases because there are many, many more ways for the universe to be high entropy, rather than low entropy. But that's a probabilistic statement. It will probably increase, and the probability is enormously huge. It's not something you have to worry about — the air in this room all gathering over one part of the room and suffocating us. It's very, very unlikely. Except if they locked the doors and kept us here literally forever, that would happen. Everything that is allowed, every configuration that is allowed to be obtained by the molecules in this room, would eventually be obtained. So Boltzmann says, look, you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium. He didn't know about the Big Bang. He didn't know about the expansion of the universe. He thought that space and time were explained by Isaac Newton — they were absolute; they just stuck there forever. So his idea of a natural universe was one in which the air molecules were just spread out evenly everywhere — the everything molecules. But if you're Boltzmann, you know that if you wait long enough, the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations. And then, of course, in the natural course of things, they will expand back. So it's not that entropy must always increase — you can get fluctuations into lower entropy, more organized situations. Well if that's true, Boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas — the multiverse and the anthropic principle. He says, the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we can't live there. Remember, life itself depends on the arrow of time. We would not be able to process information, metabolize, walk and talk, if we lived in thermal equilibrium. So if you imagine a very, very big universe, an infinitely big universe, with randomly bumping into each other particles, there will occasionally be small fluctuations in the lower entropy states, and then they relax back. But there will also be large fluctuations. Occasionally, you will make a planet or a star or a galaxy or a hundred billion galaxies. So Boltzmann says, we will only live in the part of the multiverse, in the part of this infinitely big set of fluctuating particles, where life is possible. That's the region where entropy is low. Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time. Now your homework assignment is to really think about this, to contemplate what it means. Carl Sagan once famously said that "in order to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe." But he was not right. In Boltzmann's scenario, if you want to make an apple pie, you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie. That will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven, and then making you an apple pie. So this scenario makes predictions. And the predictions are that the fluctuations that make us are minimal. Even if you imagine that this room we are in now exists and is real and here we are, and we have, not only our memories, but our impression that outside there's something called Caltech and the United States and the Milky Way Galaxy, it's much easier for all those impressions to randomly fluctuate into your brain than for them actually to randomly fluctuate into Caltech, the United States and the galaxy. The good news is that, therefore, this scenario does not work; it is not right. This scenario predicts that we should be a minimal fluctuation. Even if you left our galaxy out, you would not get a hundred billion other galaxies. And Feynman also understood this. Feynman says, "From the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation, all the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we've never seen before, we will find it mixed up, and not like the piece we've just looked at — high entropy. If our order were due to a fluctuation, we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it. We therefore conclude the universe is not a fluctuation." So that's good. The question is then what is the right answer? If the universe is not a fluctuation, why did the early universe have a low entropy? And I would love to tell you the answer, but I'm running out of time. (Laughter) Here is the universe that we tell you about, versus the universe that really exists. I just showed you this picture. The universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so. It's cooling off. But we now know enough about the future of the universe to say a lot more. If the dark energy remains around, the stars around us will use up their nuclear fuel, they will stop burning. They will fall into black holes. We will live in a universe with nothing in it but black holes. That universe will last 10 to the 100 years — a lot longer than our little universe has lived. The future is much longer than the past. But even black holes don't last forever. They will evaporate, and we will be left with nothing but empty space. That empty space lasts essentially forever. However, you notice, since empty space gives off radiation, there's actually thermal fluctuations, and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space. So even though the universe lasts forever, there's only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe. They all happen over a period of time equal to 10 to the 10 to the 120 years. So here's two questions for you. Number one: If the universe lasts for 10 to the 10 to the 120 years, why are we born in the first 14 billion years of it, in the warm, comfortable afterglow of the Big Bang? Why aren't we in empty space? You might say, "Well there's nothing there to be living," but that's not right. You could be a random fluctuation out of the nothingness. Why aren't you? More homework assignment for you. So like I said, I don't actually know the answer. I'm going to give you my favorite scenario. Either it's just like that. There is no explanation. This is a brute fact about the universe that you should learn to accept and stop asking questions. Or maybe the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe. An egg, an unbroken egg, is a low entropy configuration, and yet, when we open our refrigerator, we do not go, "Hah, how surprising to find this low entropy configuration in our refrigerator." That's because an egg is not a closed system; it comes out of a chicken. Maybe the universe comes out of a universal chicken. Maybe there is something that naturally, through the growth of the laws of physics, gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations. If that's true, it would happen more than once; we would be part of a much bigger multiverse. That's my favorite scenario. So the organizers asked me to end with a bold speculation. My bold speculation is that I will be absolutely vindicated by history. And 50 years from now, all of my current wild ideas will be accepted as truths by the scientific and external communities. We will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse. And even better, we will understand what happened at the Big Bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations. This is a prediction. I might be wrong. But we've been thinking as a human race about what the universe was like, why it came to be in the way it did for many, many years. It's exciting to think we may finally know the answer someday. Thank you. (Applause)

The hidden beauty of pollination

{0: 'Louie Schwartzberg is a cinematographer, director and producer who captures breathtaking images that celebrate life -- revealing connections, universal rhythms, patterns and beauty.'}

TED2011

It's great being here at TED. You know, I think there might be some presentations that will go over my head, but the most amazing concepts are the ones that go right under my feet. The little things in life, sometimes that we forget about, like pollination, that we take for granted. And you can't tell the story about pollinators — bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies — without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years. I've been filming time-lapse flowers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 35 years. To watch them move is a dance I'm never going to get tired of. It fills me with wonder, and it opens my heart. Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth. It reminds us that we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it. When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action. We depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat. And many scientists believe it's the most serious issue facing mankind. It's like the canary in the coalmine. If they disappear, so do we. It reminds us that we are a part of nature and we need to take care of it. What motivated me to film their behavior was something that I asked my scientific advisers: "What motivates the pollinators?" Well, their answer was, "It's all about risk and reward." Like a wide-eyed kid, I'd say, "Why is that?" And they'd say, "Well, because they want to survive." I go, "Why?" "Well, in order to reproduce." "Well, why?" And I thought that they'd probably say, "Well, it's all about sex." And Chip Taylor, our monarch butterfly expert, he replied, "Nothing lasts forever. Everything in the universe wears out." And that blew my mind. Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment. It's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again. So here is some nectar from my film. I hope you'll drink, tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden. And always take time to smell the flowers, and let it fill you with beauty, and rediscover that sense of wonder. Here are some images from the film. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Animal tales from icy wonderlands

{0: 'Paul Nicklen photographs the creatures of the Arctic and Antarctic, generating global awareness about wildlife in these isolated and endangered environments.'}

TED2011

My journey to become a polar specialist, photographing, specializing in the polar regions, began when I was four years old, when my family moved from southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland. There we lived with the Inuit in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people, where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families. And in this community, we didn't have a television; we didn't have computers, obviously, radio. We didn't even have a telephone. All of my time was spent outside with the Inuit, playing. The snow and the ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my teachers. And that's where I became truly obsessed with this polar realm. And I knew someday that I was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it. I'd like to share with you, for just two minutes only, some images, a cross-section of my work, to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile, "Have You Ever." I don't know why National Geographic has done this, they've never done this before, but they're allowing me to show you a few images from a coverage that I've just completed that is not published yet. National Geographic doesn't do this, so I'm very excited to be able to share this with you. And what these images are — you'll see them at the start of the slide show — there's only about four images — but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest. It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear. It's a spirit bear, or a Kermode bear. There are only 200 of these bears left. They're more rare than the panda bear. I sat there on the river for two months without seeing one. I thought, my career's over. I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic. What in the heck was I thinking? So I had two months to sit there and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life, after I was a photographer, because they were going to fire me. Because National Geographic is a magazine; they remind us all the time: they publish pictures, not excuses. (Laughter) And after two months of sitting there — one day, thinking that it was all over, this incredible big white male came down, right beside me, three feet away from me, and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it. And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest. He went through this old-growth forest and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep. And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him, just in the forest, and photograph him. So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions. Please enjoy. (Music) Brandi Carlile: ♫ Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? ♫ ♫ And everything there feels just as it should ♫ ♫ You're part of the life there ♫ ♫ You're part of something good ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Lying on your back, you're asking why ♫ ♫ What's the purpose? ♫ ♫ I wonder, who am I? ♫ ♫ If you've ever stared into a starry sky ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, oh, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Have you ever been out walking in the snow? ♫ ♫ Tried to get back where you were before ♫ ♫ You always end up ♫ ♫ Not knowing where to go ♫ ♫ If you've ever been out walking in the snow ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, ah ♫ ♫ Oh, ah, ah, ah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ If you'd ever been out walking you would know ♫ (Applause) Paul Nicklen: Thank you very much. The show's not over. My clock is ticking. OK, let's stop. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. We're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it's at its lowest level. And in fact, scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years. Now they're saying the sea ice in the Arctic, the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years. And what does that mean? After a while of reading this in the news, it just becomes news. You glaze over with it. And what I'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this. And I want people to understand and get the concept that, if we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire ecosystem. Projections are that we could lose polar bears, they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years. And there's no better, sexier, more beautiful, charismatic megafauna species for me to hang my campaign on. Polar bears are amazing hunters. This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores. There was no ice around. But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it. And this bear swam out to that seal — 800 lb. bearded seal — grabbed it, swam back and ate it. And he was so full, he was so happy and so fat eating this seal, that, as I approached him — about 20 feet away — to get this picture, his only defense was to keep eating more seal. And as he ate, he was so full — he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly — and as he ate inside one side of his mouth, he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth. So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive, but it's the ice that's disappearing. We're finding more and more dead bears in the Arctic. When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago, we never found dead bears. And in the last four or five years, we're finding dead bears popping up all over the place. We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea, floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out. I found a couple in Norway last year. We're seeing them on the ice. These bears are already showing signs of the stress of disappearing ice. Here's a mother and her two year-old cub were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere, and they're riding on this big piece of glacier ice, which is great for them; they're safe at this point. They're not going to die of hypothermia. They're going to get to land. But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem. These ringed seals, these are the "fatsicles" of the Arctic. These little, fat dumplings, 150-pound bundles of blubber are the mainstay of the polar bear. And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here. These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice. They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice. And here's a picture of sick ice. This is a piece of multi-year ice that's 12 years old. And what scientists didn't predict is that, as this ice melts, these big pockets of black water are forming and they're grabbing the sun's energy and accelerating the melting process. And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea. The visibility's 600 ft.; we're on our safety lines; the ice is moving all over the place. I wish I could spend half an hour telling you about how we almost died on this dive. But what's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice, that big chunk of ice up in the corner. In that one single piece of ice, you have 300 species of microorganisms. And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life. So really what the ice does is it acts like a garden. It acts like the soil in a garden. It's an inverted garden. Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden. Here's me in my office. I hope you appreciate yours. This is after an hour under the ice. I can't feel my lips; my face is frozen; I can't feel my hands; I can't feel my feet. And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water. After an hour in these conditions, it's so extreme that, when I go down, almost every dive I vomit into my regulator because my body can't deal with the stress of the cold on my head. And so I'm just so happy that the dive is over. I get to hand my camera to my assistant, and I'm looking up at him, and I'm going, "Woo. Woo. Woo." Which means, "Take my camera." And he thinks I'm saying, "Take my picture." So we had this little communication breakdown. (Laughter) But it's worth it. I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales, and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today, but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made. I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw, and I looked up under the underside of the ice, and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo. I got very nervous — no rope, no safety line, the whole world is moving around me — and I thought, "I'm in trouble." But what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice, giving birth and living out their entire life cycle. This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic, right here. And when you have low productivity in this, in ice, the productivity in copepods go down. This is a bowhead whale. Supposedly, science is stating that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now. This very whale right here could be over 250 years old. This whale could have been born around the start of the Industrial Revolution. It could have survived 150 years of whaling. And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North because of the lives that we're leading in the South. Narwhals, these majestic narwhals with their eight-foot long ivory tusks, don't have to be here; they could be out on the open water. But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe, catch a breath, because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod. And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods. Alright, my favorite part. When I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to remember one story more than any other. Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful, I don't think I'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals. Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation. They've got that wryly smile on their mouth. They've got those black sinister eyes and those spots on their body. They look positively prehistoric and a bit scary. And tragically in [2003], a scientist was taken down and drowned, and she was being consumed by a leopard seal. And people were like, "We knew they were vicious. We knew they were." And so people love to form their opinions. And that's when I got a story idea: I want to go to Antarctica, get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can and give them a fair shake — find out if they really are these vicious animals, or if they're misunderstood. So this is that story. Oh, and they also happen to eat Happy Feet. (Laughter) As a species, as humans, we like to say penguins are really cute, therefore, leopard seals eat them, so leopard seals are ugly and bad. It doesn't work that way. The penguin doesn't know it's cute, and the leopard seal doesn't know it's kind of big and monstrous. This is just the food chain unfolding. They're also big. They're not these little harbor seals. They are 12 ft. long, a thousand pounds. And they're also curiously aggressive. You get 12 tourists packed into a Zodiac, floating in these icy waters, and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon. The boat starts to sink, they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked. All the leopard seal was doing — it's just biting a balloon. It just sees this big balloon in the ocean — it doesn't have hands — it's going to take a little bite, the boat pops, and off they go. (Laughter) So after five days of crossing the Drake Passage — isn't that beautiful — after five days of crossing the Drake Passage, we have finally arrived at Antarctica. I'm with my Swedish assistant and guide. His name is Goran Ehlme from Sweden — Goran. And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals. I have never seen one. So we come around the cove in our little Zodiac boat, and there's this monstrous leopard seal. And even in his voice, he goes, "That's a bloody big seal, ya." (Laughter) And this seal is taking this penguin by the head, and it's flipping it back and forth. And what it's trying to do is turn that penguin inside-out, so it can eat the meat off the bones, and then it goes off and gets another one. And so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin, came under the boat, the Zodiac, starting hitting the hull of the boat. And we're trying to not fall in the water. And we sit down, and that's when Goran said to me, "This is a good seal, ya. It's time for you to get in the water." (Laughter) And I looked at Goran, and I said to him, "Forget that." But I think I probably used a different word starting with the letter "F." But he was right. He scolded me out, and said, "This is why we're here. And you purposed this stupid story to National Geographic. And now you've got to deliver. And you can't publish excuses." So I had such dry mouth — probably not as bad as now — but I had such, such dry mouth. And my legs were just trembling. I couldn't feel my legs. I put my flippers on. I could barely part my lips. I put my snorkel in my mouth, and I rolled over the side of the Zodiac into the water. And this was the first thing she did. She came racing up to me, engulfed my whole camera — and her teeth are up here and down here — but Goran, before I had gotten in the water, had given me amazing advice. He said, "If you get scared, you close your eyes, ya, and she'll go away." (Laughter) So that's all I had to work with at that point. But I just started to shoot these pictures. So she did this threat display for a few minutes, and then the most amazing thing happened — she totally relaxed. She went off, she got a penguin. She stopped about 10 feet away from me, and she sat there with this penguin, the penguin's flapping, and she let's it go. The penguin swims toward me, takes off. She grabs another one. She does this over and over. And it dawned on me that she's trying to feed me a penguin. Why else would she release these penguins at me? And after she did this four or five times, she swam by me with this dejected look on her face. You don't want to be too anthropomorphic, but I swear that she looked at me like, "This useless predator's going to starve in my ocean." (Laughter) So realizing I couldn't catch swimming penguins, she'd get these other penguins and bring them slowly towards me, bobbing like this, and she'd let them go. This didn't work. I was laughing so hard and so emotional that my mask was flooding, because I was crying underwater, just because it was so amazing. And so that didn't work. So then she'd get another penguin and try this ballet-like sexy display sliding down this iceberg like this. (Laughter) And she would sort of bring them over to me and offer it to me. This went on for four days. This just didn't happen a couple of times. And then so she realized I couldn't catch live ones, so she brought me dead penguins. (Laughter) Now I've got four or five penguins floating around my head, and I'm just sitting there shooting away. And she would often stop and have this dejected look on her face like, "Are you for real?" Because she can't believe I can't eat this penguin. Because in her world, you're either breeding or you're eating — and I'm not breeding, so ... (Laughter) And then that wasn't enough; she started to flip penguins onto my head. She was trying to force-feed me. She's pushing me around. She's trying to force-feed my camera, which is every photographer's dream. And she would get frustrated; she'd blow bubbles in my face. She would, I think, let me know that I was going to starve. But yet she didn't stop. She would not stop trying to feed me penguins. And on the last day with this female where I thought I had pushed her too far, I got nervous because she came up to me, she rolled over on her back, and she did this deep, guttural jackhammer sound, this gok-gok-gok-gok. And I thought, she's about to bite. She's about to let me know she's too frustrated with me. What had happened was another seal had snuck in behind me, and she did that to threat display. She chased that big seal away, went and got its penguin and brought it to me. (Laughter) That wasn't the only seal I got in the water with. I got in the water with 30 other leopard seals, and I never once had a scary encounter. They are the most remarkable animals I've ever worked with, and the same with polar bears. And just like the polar bears, these animals depend on an icy environment. I get emotional. Sorry. It's a story that lives deep in my heart, and I'm proud to share this with you. And I'm so passionate about it. Anybody want to come with me to Antarctica or the Arctic, I'll take you; let's go. We've got to get the story out now. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Silk, the ancient material of the future

{0: "Fiorenzo G. Omenetto's research spans nonlinear optics, nanostructured materials (such as photonic crystals and photonic crystal fibers), biomaterials and biopolymer-based photonics. Most recently, he's working on high-tech applications for silk."}

TED2011

Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm going to talk about a new, old material that still continues to amaze us, and that might impact the way we think about material science, high technology — and maybe, along the way, also do some stuff for medicine and for global health and help reforestation. So that's kind of a bold statement. I'll tell you a little bit more. This material actually has some traits that make it seem almost too good to be true. It's sustainable; it's a sustainable material that is processed all in water and at room temperature — and is biodegradable with a clock, so you can watch it dissolve instantaneously in a glass of water or have it stable for years. It's edible; it's implantable in the human body without causing any immune response. It actually gets reintegrated in the body. And it's technological, so it can do things like microelectronics, and maybe photonics do. And the material looks something like this. In fact, this material you see is clear and transparent. The components of this material are just water and protein. So this material is silk. So it's kind of different from what we're used to thinking about silk. So the question is, how do you reinvent something that has been around for five millennia? The process of discovery, generally, is inspired by nature. And so we marvel at silk worms — the silk worm you see here spinning its fiber. The silk worm does a remarkable thing: it uses these two ingredients, protein and water, that are in its gland, to make a material that is exceptionally tough for protection — so comparable to technical fibers like Kevlar. And so in the reverse engineering process that we know about, and that we're familiar with, for the textile industry, the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things. We want to know how you go from water and protein to this liquid Kevlar, to this natural Kevlar. So the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material. And this is an insight that came, about two decades ago, from a person that I'm very fortunate to work with, David Kaplan. And so we get this starting material. And so this starting material is back to the basic building block. And then we use this to do a variety of things — like, for example, this film. And we take advantage of something that is very simple. The recipe to make those films is to take advantage of the fact that proteins are extremely smart at what they do. They find their way to self-assemble. So the recipe is simple: you take the silk solution, you pour it, and you wait for the protein to self-assemble. And then you detach the protein and you get this film, as the proteins find each other as the water evaporates. But I mentioned that the film is also technological. And so what does that mean? It means that you can interface it with some of the things that are typical of technology, like microelectronics and nanoscale technology. And the image of the DVD here is just to illustrate a point that silk follows very subtle topographies of the surface, which means that it can replicate features on the nanoscale. So it would be able to replicate the information that is on the DVD. And we can store information that's film with water and protein. So we tried something out, and we wrote a message in a piece of silk, which is right here, and the message is over there. And much like in the DVD, you can read it out optically. And this requires a stable hand, so this is why I decided to do it onstage in front of a thousand people. So let me see. So as you see the film go in transparently through there, and then ... (Applause) And the most remarkable feat is that my hand actually stayed still long enough to do that. So once you have these attributes of this material, then you can do a lot of things. It's actually not limited to films. And so the material can assume a lot of formats. And then you go a little crazy, and so you do various optical components or you do microprism arrays, like the reflective tape that you have on your running shoes. Or you can do beautiful things that, if the camera can capture, you can make. You can add a third dimensionality to the film. And if the angle is right, you can actually see a hologram appear in this film of silk. But you can do other things. You can imagine that then maybe you can use a pure protein to guide light, and so we've made optical fibers. But silk is versatile and it goes beyond optics. And you can think of different formats. So for instance, if you're afraid of going to the doctor and getting stuck with a needle, we do microneedle arrays. What you see there on the screen is a human hair superimposed on the needle that's made of silk — just to give you a sense of size. You can do bigger things. You can do gears and nuts and bolts — that you can buy at Whole Foods. And the gears work in water as well. So you think of alternative mechanical parts. And maybe you can use that liquid Kevlar if you need something strong to replace peripheral veins, for example, or maybe an entire bone. And so you have here a little example of a small skull — what we call mini Yorick. (Laughter) But you can do things like cups, for example, and so, if you add a little bit of gold, if you add a little bit of semiconductors you could do sensors that stick on the surfaces of foods. You can do electronic pieces that fold and wrap. Or if you're fashion forward, some silk LED tattoos. So there's versatility, as you see, in the material formats, that you can do with silk. But there are still some unique traits. I mean, why would you want to do all these things for real? I mentioned it briefly at the beginning; the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible. And you see here a picture of a tissue section. And so what does that mean, that it's biodegradable and biocompatible? You can implant it in the body without needing to retrieve what is implanted. Which means that all the devices that you've seen before and all the formats, in principle, can be implanted and disappear. And what you see there in that tissue section, in fact, is you see that reflector tape. So, much like you're seen at night by a car, then the idea is that you can see, if you illuminate tissue, you can see deeper parts of tissue because there is that reflective tape there that is made out of silk. And you see there, it gets reintegrated in tissue. And reintegration in the human body is not the only thing, but reintegration in the environment is important. So you have a clock, you have protein, and now a silk cup like this can be thrown away without guilt — (Applause) unlike the polystyrene cups that unfortunately fill our landfills everyday. It's edible, so you can do smart packaging around food that you can cook with the food. It doesn't taste good, so I'm going to need some help with that. But probably the most remarkable thing is that it comes full circle. Silk, during its self-assembly process, acts like a cocoon for biological matter. And so if you change the recipe, and you add things when you pour — so you add things to your liquid silk solution — where these things are enzymes or antibodies or vaccines, the self-assembly process preserves the biological function of these dopants. So it makes the materials environmentally active and interactive. So that screw that you thought about beforehand can actually be used to screw a bone together — a fractured bone together — and deliver drugs at the same, while your bone is healing, for example. Or you could put drugs in your wallet and not in your fridge. So we've made a silk card with penicillin in it. And we stored penicillin at 60 degrees C, so 140 degrees Fahrenheit, for two months without loss of efficacy of the penicillin. And so that could be —- (Applause) that could be potentially a good alternative to solar powered refrigerated camels. (Laughter) And of course, there's no use in storage if you can't use [it]. And so there is this other unique material trait that these materials have, that they're programmably degradable. And so what you see there is the difference. In the top, you have a film that has been programmed not to degrade, and in the bottom, a film that has been programmed to degrade in water. And what you see is that the film on the bottom releases what is inside it. So it allows for the recovery of what we've stored before. And so this allows for a controlled delivery of drugs and for reintegration in the environment in all of these formats that you've seen. So the thread of discovery that we have really is a thread. We're impassioned with this idea that whatever you want to do, whether you want to replace a vein or a bone, or maybe be more sustainable in microelectronics, perhaps drink a coffee in a cup and throw it away without guilt, maybe carry your drugs in your pocket, deliver them inside your body or deliver them across the desert, the answer may be in a thread of silk. Thank you. (Applause)

The hidden power of smiling

{0: "Ron Gutman is the founder and former CEO of HealthTap, free mobile and online apps for health info. He's also the organizer of TEDxSiliconValley."}

TED2011

When I was a child, I always wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to save the world and make everyone happy. But I knew that I'd need superpowers to make my dreams come true. So I used to embark on these imaginary journeys to find intergalactic objects from planet Krypton, which was a lot of fun, but didn't yield much result. When I grew up and realized that science fiction was not a good source for superpowers, I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science, to find a more useful truth. I started my journey in California, with a UC Berkeley 30-year longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook, and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. By measuring the students' smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage would be, (Laughter) how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being, and how inspiring she would be to others. In another yearbook, I stumbled upon Barry Obama's picture. When I first saw his picture, I thought that his superpowers came from his super collar. (Laughter) But now I know it was all in his smile. Another aha! moment came from a 2010 Wayne State University research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of Major League players. The researchers found that the span of a player's smile could actually predict the span of his life. Players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years. (Laughter) The good news is that we're actually born smiling. Using 3D ultrasound technology, we can now see that developing babies appear to smile, even in the womb. When they're born, babies continue to smile — initially, mostly in their sleep. And even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice. Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically uniform expressions of all humans. In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman, the world's most renowned researcher on facial expressions, found that even members of the Fore tribe, who were completely disconnected from Western culture, and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals, (Laughter) attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would. So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often, and use smiles to express joy and satisfaction. How many people here in this room smile more than 20 times per day? Raise your hand if you do. Oh, wow. Outside of this room, more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day, whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five. In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children, who smile as many as 400 times per day. Have you ever wondered why being around children, who smile so frequently, makes you smile very often? A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it's very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. You ask why? Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically helps us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler. In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles. Without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges, but with the pencil in their mouth — when they could not mimic the smile they saw — their judgment was impaired. (Laughter) In addition to theorizing on evolution in "The Origin of Species," Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory. His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better, rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who sent electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles. Please, don't try this at home. (Laughter) In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles. The finding supported Darwin's theory, by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain, in a way that helps us feel better when we smile. Smiling stimulates our brain reward mechanism in a way that even chocolate — a well-regarded pleasure inducer — cannot match. British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate. (Laughter) Wait — The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds sterling in cash. (Laughter) That's like 25 grand a smile. It's not bad. And think about it this way: 25,000 times 400 — quite a few kids out there feel like Mark Zuckerberg every day. (Laughter) And unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier. Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphins, and reduce overall blood pressure. And if that's not enough, smiling can actually make you look good in the eyes of others. A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile, you don't only appear to be more likable and courteous, but you actually appear to be more competent. So whenever you want to look great and competent, reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or feel as if you just had a whole stack of high-quality chocolate without incurring the caloric cost, or as if you found 25 grand in a pocket of an old jacket you hadn't worn for ages, or whenever you want to tap into a superpower that will help you and everyone around you live a longer, healthier, happier life, smile. (Applause)

Building a museum of museums on the web

{0: "As the director of Google's Cultural Institute and Art Project, Amit Sood leads the effort to bring cultural artifacts from museums, archives and foundations onto the web in extraordinary detail."}

TED2011

My name is Amit. And 18 months ago, I had another job at Google, and I pitched this idea of doing something with museums and art to my boss who's actually here, and she allowed me to do it. And it took 18 months. A lot of fun, negotiations and stories, I can tell you, with 17 very interesting museums from nine countries. But I'm going to focus on the demo. There are a lot of stories about why we did this. I think my personal story is explained very simply on the slide, and it's access. And I grew up in India. I had a great education — I'm not complaining — but I didn't have access to a lot of these museums and these artworks. And so when I started traveling and going to these museums, I started learning a lot. And while working at Google, I tried to put this desire to make it more accessible with technology together. So we formed a team, a great team of people, and we started doing this. I'm going to probably get into the demo and then tell you a couple of the interesting things we've had since launch. So, simple: you come to GoogleArtProject.com. You look around at all these museums here. You've got the Uffizi, you've got the MoMA, the Hermitage, the Rijks, the Van Gogh. I'm going to actually get to one of my favorites, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Two ways of going in — very simple. Click and, bang, you're in this museum. It doesn't matter where you are — Bombay, Mexico, it doesn't really matter. You move around, you have fun. You want to navigate around the museum? Open the plan up, and, in one click, jump. You're in there, you want to go to the end of the corridor. Keep going. Have fun. Explore. (Applause) Thanks. I haven't come to the best part. (Laughter) So now I'm in front of one of my favorite paintings, "The Harvesters" by Pieter Bruegel at the Met. I see this plus sign. If the museum has given us the image, you click on it. Now this is one of the images. So this is all of the meta-data information. For those of you who are truly interested in art, you can click this — but I'm going to click this off right now. And this is one of these images that we captured in what we call gigapixel technology. So this image, for example, has close to, I think, around 10 billion pixels. And I get a lot of people asking me: "What do you get for 10 billion pixels?" So I'm going to try and show you what you really get for 10 billion pixels. You can zoom around very simply. You see some fun stuff happening here. I love this guy; his expression is priceless. But then you really want to go deep. And so I started playing around, and I found something going on over here. And I was like, "Hold on. That sounds interesting." Went in, and I started noticing that these kids were actually beating something. I did a little research, spoke to a couple of my contacts at the Met, and actually found out that this is a game called squall, which involves beating a goose with a stick on Shrove Tuesday. And apparently it was quite popular. I don't know why they did it, but I learned something about it. Now just to get really deep in, you can really get to the cracks. Now just to give you some perspective, I'm going to zoom out so you really see what you get. Here is where we were, and this is the painting. (Applause) The best is yet to come — so in a second. So now let's just quickly jump into the MoMA, again in New York. So another one of my favorites, "The Starry Night." Now the example I showed you was all about finding details. But what if you want to see brush strokes? And what if you want to see how Van Gogh actually created this masterpiece? You zoom in. You really go in. I'm going to go to one of my favorite parts in this painting, and I'm really going to get to the cracks. This is "The Starry Night," I think, never seen like this before. I'm going to show you my other favorite feature. There's a lot of other stuff here, but I don't have time. This is the real cool part. It's called Collections. Any one of you, anybody — doesn't matter if you're rich, if you're poor, if you have a fancy house — doesn't matter. You can go and create your own museum online — create your own collection across all these images. Very simply, you go in — and I've created this, called The Power of Zoom — you can just zoom around. This is "The Ambassadors," based in the National Gallery. You can annotate the stuff, send it to your friends and really get a conversation going about what you're feeling when you go through these masterpieces. So I think, in conclusion, for me, the main thing is that all the amazing stuff here does not really come from Google. It doesn't, in my opinion, even come from the museums. I probably shouldn't say that. It really comes from these artists. And that's been my humbling experience in this. I mean, I hope in this digital medium that we do justice to their artwork and represent it properly online. And the biggest question I get asked nowadays is, "Did you do this to replicate the experience of going to a museum?" And the answer is no. It's to supplement the experience. And that's it. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

My friend Richard Feynman

{0: 'Leonard Susskind works on string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology at Stanford.'}

TEDxCaltech

I decided when I was asked to do this that what I really wanted to talk about was my friend, Richard Feynman. I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence. And I'm going to tell you about the Richard Feynman that I knew. I'm sure there are people here who could tell you about the Richard Feynman they knew, and it would probably be a different Richard Feynman. Richard Feynman was a very complex man. He was a man of many, many parts. He was, of course, foremost, a very, very, very great scientist. He was an actor. You saw him act. I also had the good fortune to be in those lectures, up in the balcony. They were fantastic. He was a philosopher. He was a drum player. He was a teacher par excellence. Richard Feynman was also a showman, an enormous showman. He was brash, irreverent. He was full of macho, a kind of macho one-upmanship. He loved intellectual battle. He had a gargantuan ego. But the man had, somehow, a lot of room at the bottom. And what I mean by that is a lot of room, in my case — I can't speak for anybody else, but in my case — a lot of room for another big ego. Well, not as big as his, but fairly big. I always felt good with Dick Feynman. It was always fun to be with him. He always made me feel smart. How can somebody like that make you feel smart? Somehow he did. He made me feel smart. He made me feel he was smart. He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem whatever. And in fact, we did sometimes do physics together. We never published a paper together, but we did have a lot of fun. He loved to win, win these little macho games we would sometimes play. And he didn't only play them with me, but with all sorts of people. He would almost always win. But when he didn't win, when he lost, he would laugh and seem to have just as much fun as if he had won. I remember once he told me a story about a joke the students played on him. I think it was for his birthday — they took him for lunch to a sandwich place in Pasadena. It may still exist; I don't know. Celebrity sandwiches was their thing. You could get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich. You could get a Humphrey Bogart sandwich. The students went there in advance, and arranged that they'd all order Feynman sandwiches. One after another, they came in and ordered Feynman sandwiches. Feynman loved this story. He told me this story, and he was really happy and laughing. When he finished the story, I said to him, "Dick, I wonder what would be the difference between a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich." And without skipping a beat at all, he said, "Well, they'd be about the same. The only difference is a Susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham." "Ham" as in bad actor. (Laughter) Well, I happened to have been very quick that day, and I said, "Yeah, but a lot less baloney." (Laughter) (Applause) The truth of the matter is that a Feynman sandwich had a load of ham, but absolutely no baloney. What Feynman hated worse than anything else was intellectual pretense — phoniness, false sophistication, jargon. I remember sometime during the mid-'80s, Dick and I and Sidney Coleman would meet a couple of times up in San Francisco — at some very rich guy's house — up in San Francisco for dinner. And the last time the rich guy invited us, he also invited a couple of philosophers. These guys were philosophers of mind. Their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness. And they were full of all kinds of jargon. I'm trying to remember the words — "monism," "dualism," categories all over the place. I didn't know what those meant, neither did Dick or Sydney, for that matter. And what did we talk about? Well, what do you talk about when you talk about minds? There's one obvious thing to talk about: Can a machine become a mind? Can you build a machine that thinks like a human being that is conscious? We sat around and talked about this — we of course never resolved it. But the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-ophizing. It's a scientific question, after all. And this was a very, very dangerous thing to do around Dick Feynman. (Laughter) Feynman let them have it — both barrels, right between the eyes. It was brutal; it was funny — ooh, it was funny. But it was really brutal. He really popped their balloon. But the amazing thing was — Feynman had to leave a little early; he wasn't feeling too well, so he left a little bit early. And Sidney and I were left there with the two philosophers. And the amazing thing is these guys were flying. They were so happy. They had met the great man; they had been instructed by the great man; they had an enormous amount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud ... And it was something special. I realized there was something just extraordinary about Feynman, even when he did what he did. Dick — he was my friend; I did call him Dick — Dick and I had a little bit of a rapport. I think it may have been a special rapport that he and I had. We liked each other; we liked the same kind of things. I also like the intellectual macho games. Sometimes I would win, mostly he would win, but we both enjoyed them. And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality. I don't think he was right. I think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves. But he was convinced of this. And the man was incredibly curious. And he wanted to understand what it was and why it was that there was this funny connection. And one day, we were walking. We were in France, in Les Houches. We were up in the mountains, 1976. And Feynman said to me, "Leonardo ..." The reason he called me "Leonardo" is because we were in Europe, and he was practicing his French. (Laughter) And he said, "Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or your father when you were a kid?" I said, "Well, my real hero was my father. He was a working man, had a fifth-grade education. He was a master mechanic, and he taught me how to use tools. He taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things. He even taught me the Pythagorean theorem. He didn't call it the hypotenuse, he called it the shortcut distance." And Feynman's eyes just opened up. He went off like a lightbulb. And he said that he had had basically exactly the same relationship with his father. In fact, he had been convinced at one time that to be a good physicist, it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father. I apologize for the sexist conversation here, but this is the way it really happened. He said he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary, a necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist. Being Dick, he, of course, wanted to check this. He wanted to go out and do an experiment. (Laughter) Well, he did. He went out and did an experiment. He asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists, "Was it your mom or your pop that influenced you?" They were all men, and to a man, every single one of them said, "My mother." (Laughter) There went that theory, down the trash can of history. (Laughter) But he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with his father as he had with his father. And for some time, he was convinced this was the reason we got along so well. I don't know. Maybe. Who knows? But let me tell you a little bit about Feynman the physicist. Feynman's style — no, "style" is not the right word. "Style" makes you think of the bow tie he might have worn, or the suit he was wearing. It's something much deeper than that, but I can't think of another word for it. Feynman's scientific style was always to look for the simplest, most elementary solution to a problem that was possible. If it wasn't possible, you had to use something fancier. No doubt, part of this was his great joy and pleasure in showing people that he could think more simply than they could. But he also deeply believed, he truly believed, that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it. In the 1950s, people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked. There was a theory. It was due to a Russian mathematical physicist. It was a complicated theory; I'll tell you what it was soon enough. It was a terribly complicated theory, full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth. And it sort of worked, but it didn't work very well. The only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very, very far apart. And unfortunately, the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other. Feynman decided, as a sort of amateur helium physicist, that he would try to figure it out. He had an idea, a very clear idea. He would try to figure out what the quantum wave function of this huge number of atoms looked like. He would try to visualize it, guided by a small number of simple principles. The small number of simple principles were very, very simple. The first one was that when helium atoms touch each other, they repel. The implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero, it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other. The other fact is that in the ground state — the lowest energy state of a quantum system — the wave function is always very smooth; it has the minimum number of wiggles. So he sat down — and I imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil — and he tried to write down, and did write down, the simplest function that he could think of, which had the boundary conditions that the wave function vanish when things touch and is smooth in between. He wrote down a simple thing — so simple, in fact, that I suspect a really smart high-school student who didn't even have calculus could understand what he wrote down. The thing was, that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium, and then some. I've always wondered whether the professionals — the real professional helium physicists — were just a little bit embarrassed by this. They had their super-powerful technique, and they couldn't do as well. Incidentally, I'll tell you what that super-powerful technique was. It was the technique of Feynman diagrams. (Laughter) He did it again in 1968. In 1968, in my own university — I wasn't there at the time — they were exploring the structure of the proton. The proton is obviously made of a whole bunch of little particles; this was more or less known. And the way to analyze it was, of course, Feynman diagrams. That's what Feynman diagrams were constructed for — to understand particles. The experiments that were going on were very simple: you simply take the proton, and you hit it really sharply with an electron. This was the thing the Feynman diagrams were for. The only problem was that Feynman diagrams are complicated. They're difficult integrals. If you could do all of them, you would have a very precise theory, but you couldn't — they were just too complicated. People were trying to do them. You could do a one-loop diagram. Don't worry about one loop. One loop, two loops — maybe you could do a three-loop diagram, but beyond that, you couldn't do anything. Feynman said, "Forget all of that. Just think of the proton as an assemblage, a swarm, of little particles." He called them "partons." He said, "Just think of it as a swarm of partons moving real fast." Because they're moving real fast, relativity says the internal motions go very slow. The electron hits it suddenly — it's like taking a very sudden snapshot of the proton. What do you see? You see a frozen bunch of partons. They don't move, and because they don't move during the course of the experiment, you don't have to worry about how they're moving. You don't have to worry about the forces between them. You just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons." This was the key to analyzing these experiments. Extremely effective. Somebody said the word "revolution" is a bad word. I suppose it is, so I won't say "revolution," but it certainly evolved very, very deeply our understanding of the proton, and of particles beyond that. Well, I had some more that I was going to tell you about my connection with Feynman, what he was like, but I see I have exactly half a minute. So I think I'll just finish up by saying: I actually don't think Feynman would have liked this event. I think he would have said, "I don't need this." But ... (Laughter) How should we honor Feynman? How should we really honor Feynman? I think the answer is we should honor Feynman by getting as much baloney out of our own sandwiches as we can. Thank you. (Applause)

A light switch for neurons

{0: 'Ed Boyden is a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute.'}

TED2011

Think about your day for a second. You woke up, felt fresh air on your face as you walked out the door, encountered new colleagues and had great discussions and felt in awe when you found something new. But I bet there's something you didn't think about today, something so close to home, you probably don't think about it very often at all. And that's that all those sensations, feelings, decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called your brain. Now, the brain may not look like much from the outside — a couple pounds of pinkish-gray flesh, amorphous. But the last 100 years of neuroscience have allowed us to zoom in on the brain and to see the intricacy of what lies within. And they've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons. Now, unlike a human-designed computer, where there's a fairly small number of different parts, and we know how they work because we humans designed them, the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells, maybe tens of thousands. They come in different shapes; they're made out of different molecules; they project and connect to different brain regions. They also change in different ways in different disease states. Let's make it concrete. There's a class of cells, a fairly small cell, an inhibitory cell, that quiets its neighbors. It's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in disorders like schizophrenia. It's called the basket cell. And this cell is one of the thousands of kinds of cell that we're learning about. New ones are being discovered every day. As just a second example: these pyramidal cells, large cells, can span a significant fraction of the brain. They're excitatory. And these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy. Every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device. They receive inputs from thousands of upstream partners and compute their own electrical outputs, which then, if they pass a certain threshold, will go to thousands of downstream partners. And this process, which takes just a millisecond or so, happens thousands of times a minute in every one of your 100 billion cells, as long as you live and think and feel. So how are we going to figure out what this circuit does? Ideally, we could go through this circuit and turn these different kinds of cell on and off and see whether we could figure out which ones contribute to certain functions and which ones go wrong in certain pathologies. If we could activate cells, we could see what powers they can unleash, what they can initiate and sustain. If we could turn them off, then we could try and figure out what they're necessary for. And that's the story I'm going to tell you about today. And honestly, where we've gone through over the last 11 years, through an attempt to find ways of turning circuits and cells and parts and pathways of the brain on and off, both to understand the science and also to confront some of the issues that face us all as humans. Now, before I tell you about the technology, the bad news is that a significant fraction of us in this room, if we live long enough, will encounter, perhaps, a brain disorder. Already, a billion people have had some kind of brain disorder that incapacitates them. The numbers don't do it justice, though. These disorders — schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction — they not only steal away our time to live, they change who we are. They take our identity and change our emotions and change who we are as people. Now, in the 20th century, there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders. And while many drugs have been developed that can alleviate symptoms of brain disorders, practically none of them can be considered to be cured. In part, that's because, if you think about it, we're bathing the brain in a chemical — this elaborate circuit, made of thousands of different kinds of cell — is being bathed in a substance. That's also why most of the drugs, not all, on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too. Now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain, for Parkinson's disease or cochlear implants. These have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorders. But electricity also will go in all directions — the path of least resistance — which is where that phrase, in part, comes from, and will also affect normal circuits, as well as the abnormal ones you want to fix. So again, we're sent back to the idea of ultraprecise control: Could we dial in information precisely where we want it to go? So, when I started in neuroscience 11 years ago — I had trained as an electrical engineer and a physicist — the first thing I thought about was, if these neurons are electrical devices, all we need to do is to find some way of driving those electrical changes at a distance. If we could turn on the electricity in one cell but not its neighbors, that'd give us the tool to activate and shut down these different cells to figure out what they do and how they contribute to the networks in which they're embedded. It would also allow us to have the ultraprecise control we need to fix the circuit computations that have gone awry. Now, how are we going to do that? Well, there are many molecules that exist in nature which are able to convert light into electricity. You can think of them as little proteins that are like solar cells. If we install these molecules in neurons somehow, then these neurons would become electrically drivable with light, and their neighbors, which don't have this molecule, would not. There's one other magic trick you need to make this happen: the ability to get light into the brain. The brain doesn't feel pain. Taking advantage of all the effort that's gone into the internet, telecommunications, etc., you can put optical fibers connected to lasers to activate — in animal models, for example, in preclinical studies — these neurons and see what they do. So how do we do this? Around 2004, in collaboration with Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth, this vision came to fruition. There's a certain alga that swims in the wild, and it needs to navigate towards light in order to photosynthesize optimally. And it senses light with a little eyespot, which works not unlike how our eye works. In its membrane, or its boundary, it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity. These molecules are called channelrhodopsins. And each of these proteins acts just like that solar cell that I told you about. When blue light hits it, it opens a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eyespot; that allows this eyespot to have an electrical signal, just like a solar cell charging a battery. So what we need to do is take these molecules and somehow install them in neurons. And because it's a protein, it's encoded for in the DNA of this organism. So all we've got to do is take that DNA, put it into a gene therapy vector, like a virus, and put it into neurons. And this was a very productive time in gene therapy, and lots of viruses were coming along, so this turned out to be fairly simple. Early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004, we gave it a try, and it worked on the first try. You take this DNA and put it into the neuron. The neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell, like putting solar panels on a roof. And the next thing you know, you have a neuron which can be activated with light. So this is very powerful. One of the tricks you have to do is figure out how to deliver these genes to the cells you want and not all the other neighbors. And you can do that; you can tweak the viruses so they hit some cells and not others. And there's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells. This field has now come to be known as "optogenetics." And just as one example of the kind of thing you can do, you can take a complex network, use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network. And then when you shine light on the entire network, just that cell type will be activated. For example, let's consider that basket cell I told you about earlier, the one that's atrophied in schizophrenia and the one that is inhibitory. If we can deliver that gene to these cells — they won't be altered by the expression of the gene, of course — then flash blue light over the entire brain network, just these cells are going to be driven. And when the light turns off, these cells go back to normal; there don't seem to be adverse events. Not only can you study what these cells do, what their power is in computing in the brain, you can also use this to try to figure out if we could jazz up the activity of these cells if indeed, they're atrophied. I want to tell you some short stories about how we're using this both at the scientific clinical and preclinical levels. One of the questions that we've confronted is: What signals in the brain mediate the sensation of reward? Because if you could find those, those would be some of the signals that could drive learning; the brain will do more of what got that reward. These are also signals that go awry in disorders such as addiction. So if we could figure out what cells they are, we could maybe find new targets for which drugs can be designed or screened against or maybe places where electrodes could be put in for people who have severe disability. To do that, we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the Fiorillo group, where, if the animal goes to one side of this little box, it gets a pulse of light. And we'll make different cells in the brain sensitive to light. If these cells can mediate reward, the animal should go there more and more. And that's what happens. The animal goes to the right-hand side and pokes his nose there and gets a flash of blue light every time he does it. He'll do that hundreds of times. These are the dopamine neurons, in some of the pleasure centers in the brain. We've shown that a brief activation of these is enough to drive learning. Now we can generalize the idea. Instead of one point in the brain, we can devise devices that span the brain, that can deliver light into three-dimensional patterns — arrays of optical fibers, each coupled to its own independent miniature light source. Then we can try to do things in vivo that have only been done to date in a dish, like high-throughput screening throughout the entire brain for the signals that can cause certain things to happen or that could be good clinical targets for treating brain disorders. One story I want to tell you about is: How can we find targets for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, a form of uncontrolled anxiety and fear? One of the things that we did was to adopt a very classical model of fear. This goes back to the Pavlovian days. It's called Pavlovian fear conditioning, where a tone ends with a brief shock. The shock isn't painful, but it's a little annoying. And over time — in this case, a mouse, which is a good animal model, commonly used in such experiments — the animal learns to fear the tone. It will react by freezing, sort of like a deer in the headlights. Now the question is: What targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear? So we play that tone again, after it's been associated with fear. But we activate different targets in the brain, using that optical fiber array I showed on the previous slide, in order to try and figure out which targets can cause the brain to overcome that memory of fear. This brief video shows you one of these targets that we're working on now. This is an area in the prefrontal cortex, a region where we can use cognition to try to overcome aversive emotional states. The animal hears a tone. A flash of light occurs. There's no audio, but you see that the animal freezes — the tone used to mean bad news. There's a little clock in the lower left-hand corner. You can see the animal is about two minutes into this. This next clip is just eight minutes later. And the same tone is going to play, and the light is going to flash again. OK, there it goes. Right ... now. And now you can see, just 10 minutes into the experiment, that we've equipped the brain, by photoactivating this area, to overcome the expression of this fear memory. Over the last couple years, we've gone back to the tree of life, because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off. If we could do that, this could be extremely powerful. If you can delete cells for a few milliseconds or seconds, you can figure out what role they play in the circuits in which they're embedded. We surveyed organisms from all over the tree of life — every kingdom of life but animals; we see slightly differently. We found molecules called halorhodopsins or archaerhodopsins, that respond to green and yellow light. And they do the opposite of the molecule I told you about before, with the blue light activator, channelrhodopsin. Let's give an example of where we think this is going to go. Consider, for example, a condition like epilepsy, where the brain is overactive. Now, if drugs fail in epileptic treatment, one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain, but that's irreversible, and there could be side effects. What if we could just turn off that brain for the brief amount of time until the seizure dies away, and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state, like a dynamical system that's being coaxed down into a stable state? This animation tries to explain this concept where we made these cells sensitive to being turned off with light, and we beam light in, and just for the time it takes to shut down a seizure, we're hoping to be able to turn it off. We don't have data to show you on this front, but we're very excited about this. I want to close on one story, which we think is another possibility, which is that maybe these molecules, if you can do ultraprecise control, can be used in the brain itself to make a new kind of prosthetic, an optical prosthetic. I already told you that electrical stimulators are not uncommon. Seventy-five thousand people have Parkinson's deep-brain stimulators implanted, maybe 100,000 people have cochlear implants, which allow them to hear. Another thing — you've got to get these genes into cells. A new hope in gene therapy has been developed, because viruses like the adeno-associated virus — which probably most of us around this room have; it doesn't have any symptoms — have been used in hundreds of patients to deliver genes into the brain or the body. And so far, there have not been serious adverse events associated with the virus. There's one last elephant in the room: the proteins themselves, which come from algae, bacteria and funguses and all over the tree of life. Most of us don't have funguses or algae in our brains, so what will our brain do if we put that in? Will the cells tolerate it? Will the immune system react? It's early — these haven't been done in humans yet — but we're working on a variety of studies to examine this. So far, we haven't seen overt reactions of any severity to these molecules or to the illumination of the brain with light. So it's early days, to be upfront, but we're excited about it. I wanted to close with one story, which we think could potentially be a clinical application. Now, there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors — light sensors in the back of our eye — are gone. And the retina is a complex structure. Let's zoom in on it so we can see it in more detail. The photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top. The signals that are detected by the photoreceptors are transformed via various computations until finally, the layer of cells at the bottom, the ganglion cells, relay the information to the brain, where we see that as perception. In many forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration, the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed. Now, how could you repair this? It's not even clear that a drug could cause this to be restored, since there's nothing for the drug to bind to. On the other hand, light can still get into the eye. The eye is still transparent and you can get light in. So what if we could take these channelrhodopsins and other molecules and install them on some of these other spared cells and convert them into little cameras? And because there are so many of these cells in the eye, potentially, they could be very high-resolution cameras. This is some work that we're doing, led by one of our collaborators, Alan Horsager at USC, and being sought to be commercialized by a start-up company, Eos Neuroscience, which is funded by the NIH. What you see here is a mouse trying to solve a six-arm maze. There's a bit of water to motivate the mouse to move or he'll just sit there. The goal of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that's under the lit top port. Mice are smart, so this one solves the maze eventually, but he does a brute-force search. He's swimming down every avenue until he finally gets to the platform. He's not using vision to do it. These different mice are different mutations that recapitulate different kinds of blindness that affect humans. So we're being careful in trying to look at these different models so we come up with a generalized approach. So how can we solve this? We'll do exactly what we outlined in the previous slide. We'll take these blue light photo sensors and install them onto a layer of cells in the middle of the retina in the back of the eye and convert them into a camera — just like installing solar cells all over those neurons to make them light-sensitive. Light is converted to electricity on them. So this mouse was blind a couple weeks before this experiment and received one dose of this photosensitive molecule on a virus. And now you can see, the animal can indeed avoid walls and go to this little platform and make cognitive use of its eyes again. And to point out the power of this: these animals can get to that platform just as fast as animals that have seen their entire lives. So this preclinical study, I think, bodes hope for the kinds of things we're hoping to do in the future. We're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology. We're developing tools and sharing them freely with hundreds of groups all over the world for them to study and try to treat different disorders. Our hope is that by figuring out brain circuits at a level of abstraction that lets us repair them and engineer them, we can take some of these intractable disorders I mentioned earlier, practically none of which are cured, and in the 21st century, make them history. Thank you. (Applause) Juan Enriquez: So some of this stuff is a little dense. (Laughter) But the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs and being able to target those specifically is a first step. The second thing that I think I heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors, like an on-off switch. Ed Boyden: That's right. JE: Which makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code. EB: Right. With blue light, we can drive information, and it's in the form of a one. And by turning things off, it's more or less a zero. Our hope is to eventually build brain coprocessors that work with the brain so we can augment functions in people with disabilities. JE: And in theory, that means that, as a mouse feels, smells, hears, touches, you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros. EB: Yeah. We're hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes can drive certain behaviors and certain thoughts and certain feelings and use that to understand more about the brain. JE: Does that mean that someday you could download memories and maybe upload them? EB: That's something we're starting to work on very hard. We're now working on trying to tile the brain with recording elements, too, so we can record information and then drive information back in — sort of computing what the brain needs in order to augment its information processing. JE: Well, that might change a couple things. Thank you. EB: Thank you. (Applause)

Building the Seed Cathedral

{0: 'Thomas Heatherwick is the founder of Heatherwick Studio, an architecture and design firm that, among other projects, designed the astonishing "Seed Cathedral" for the UK Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010.'}

TED2011

Hello, my name is Thomas Heatherwick. I have a studio in London that has a particular approach to designing buildings. When I was growing up, I was exposed to making and crafts and materials and invention on a small scale. And I was there looking at the larger scale of buildings and finding that the buildings that were around me and that were being designed and that were there in the publications I was seeing felt soulless and cold. And there on the smaller scale, the scale of an earring or a ceramic pot or a musical instrument, was a materiality and a soulfulness. And this influenced me. The first building I built was 20 years ago. And since, in the last 20 years, I've developed a studio in London. Sorry, this was my mother, by the way, in her bead shop in London. I spent a lot of time counting beads and things like that. I'm just going to show, for people who don't know my studio's work, a few projects that we've worked on. This is a hospital building. This is a shop for a bag company. This is studios for artists. This is a sculpture made from a million yards of wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of a golf ball. And this is a window display. And this is pair of cooling towers for an electricity substation next to St. Paul's Cathedral in London. And this is a temple in Japan for a Buddhist monk. And this is a cafe by the sea in Britain. And just very quickly, something we've been working on very recently is we were commissioned by the mayor of London to design a new bus that gave the passenger their freedom again. Because the original Routemaster bus that some of you may be familiar with, which had this open platform at the back — in fact, I think all our Routemasters are here in California now actually. But they aren't in London. And so you're stuck on a bus. And if the bus is going to stop and it's three yards away from the bus stop, you're just a prisoner. But the mayor of London wanted to reintroduce buses with this open platform. So we've been working with Transport for London, and that organization hasn't actually been responsible as a client for a new bus for 50 years. And so we've been very lucky to have a chance to work. The brief is that the bus should use 40 percent less energy. So it's got hybrid drive. And we've been working to try to improve everything from the fabric to the format and structure and aesthetics. I was going to show four main projects. And this is a project for a bridge. And so we were commissioned to design a bridge that would open. And openings seemed — everyone loves opening bridges, but it's quite a basic thing. I think we all kind of stand and watch. But the bridges that we saw that opened and closed — I'm slightly squeamish — but I once saw a photograph of a footballer who was diving for a ball. And as he was diving, someone had stamped on his knee, and it had broken like this. And then we looked at these kinds of bridges and just couldn't help feeling that it was a beautiful thing that had broken. And so this is in Paddington in London. And it's a very boring bridge, as you can see. It's just steel and timber. But instead of what it is, our focus was on the way it worked. (Applause) So we liked the idea that the two farthest bits of it would end up kissing each other. (Applause) We actually had to halve its speed, because everyone was too scared when we first did it. So that's it speeded up. A project that we've been working on very recently is to design a new biomass power station — so a power station that uses organic waste material. In the news, the subject of where our future water is going to come from and where our power is going to come from is in all the papers all the time. And we used to be quite proud of the way we generated power. But recently, any annual report of a power company doesn't have a power station on it. It has a child running through a field, or something like that. (Laughter) And so when a consortium of engineers approached us and asked us to work with them on this power station, our condition was that we would work with them and that, whatever we did, we were not just going to decorate a normal power station. And instead, we had to learn — we kind of forced them to teach us. And so we spent time traveling with them and learning about all the different elements, and finding that there were plenty of inefficiencies that weren't being capitalized on. That just taking a field and banging all these things out isn't necessarily the most efficient way that they could work. So we looked at how we could compose all those elements — instead of just litter, create one composition. And what we found — this area is one of the poorest parts of Britain. It was voted the worst place in Britain to live. And there are 2,000 new homes being built next to this power station. So it felt this has a social dimension. It has a symbolic importance. And we should be proud of where our power is coming from, rather than something we are necessarily ashamed of. So we were looking at how we could make a power station, that, instead of keeping people out and having a big fence around the outside, could be a place that pulls you in. And it has to be — I'm trying to get my — 250 feet high. So it felt that what we could try to do is make a power park and actually bring the whole area in, and using the spare soil that's there on the site, we could make a power station that was silent as well. Because just that soil could make the acoustic difference. And we also found that we could make a more efficient structure and have a cost-effective way of making a structure to do this. The finished project is meant to be more than just a power station. It has a space where you could have a bar mitzvah at the top. (Laughter) And it's a power park. So people can come and really experience this and also look out all around the area, and use that height that we have to have for its function. In Shanghai, we were invited to build — well we weren't invited; what am I talking about. We won the competition, and it was painful to get there. (Laughter) So we won the competition to build the U.K. pavilion. And an expo is a totally bonkers thing. There's 250 pavilions. It's the world's biggest ever expo that had ever happened. So there are up to a million people there everyday. And 250 countries all competing. And the British government saying, "You need to be in the top five." And so that became the governmental goal — is, how do you stand out in this chaos, which is an expo of stimulus? So our sense was we had to do one thing, and only one thing, instead of trying to have everything. And so what we also felt was that whatever we did we couldn't do a cheesy advert for Britain. (Laughter) But the thing that was true, the expo was about the future of cities, and particularly the Victorians pioneered integrating nature into the cities. And the world's first public park of modern times was in Britain. And the world's first major botanical institution is in London, and they have this extraordinary project where they've been collecting 25 percent of all the world's plant species. So we suddenly realized that there was this thing. And everyone agrees that trees are beautiful, and I've never met anyone who says, "I don't like trees." And the same with flowers. I've never met anyone who says, "I don't like flowers." But we realized that seeds — there's been this very serious project happening — but that seeds — at these major botanical gardens, seeds aren't on show. But you just have to go to a garden center, and they're in little paper packets. But this phenomenal project's been happening. So we realized we had to make a project that would be seeds, some kind of seed cathedral. But how could we show these teeny-weeny things? And the film "Jurassic Park" actually really helped us. Because the DNA of the dinosaur that was trapped in the amber gave us some kind of clue that these tiny things could be trapped and be made to seem precious, rather than looking like nuts. So the challenge was, how are we going to bring light and expose these things? We didn't want to make a separate building and have separate content. So we were trying to think, how could we make a whole thing emanate. By the way, we had half the budget of the other Western nations. So that was also in the mix with the site the size of a football pitch. And so there was one particular toy that gave us a clue. (Video) Voice Over: The new Play-Doh Mop Top Hair Shop. Song: ♫ We've got the Mop Tops, the Play-Doh Mop Tops ♫ ♫ Just turn the chair and grow Play-Doh hair ♫ ♫ They're the Mop Tops ♫ Thomas Heatherwick: Okay, you get the idea. So the idea was to take these 66,000 seeds that they agreed to give us, and to take each seed and trap it in this precious optical hair and grow that through this box, very simple box element, and make it a building that could move in the wind. So the whole thing can gently move when the wind blows. And inside, the daylight — each one is an optic and it brings light into the center. And by night, artificial light in each one emanates and comes out to the outside. And to make the project affordable, we focused our energy. Instead of building a building as big as the football pitch, we focused it on this one element. And the government agreed to do that and not do anything else, and focus our energy on that. And so the rest of the site was a public space. And with a million people there a day, it just felt like offering some public space. We worked with an AstroTurf manufacturer to develop a mini-me version of the seed cathedral, so that, even if you're partially-sighted, that it was kind of crunchy and soft, that piece of landscape that you see there. And then, you know when a pet has an operation and they shave a bit of the skin and get rid of the fur — in order to get you to go into the seed cathedral, in effect, we've shaved it. And inside there's nothing; there's no famous actor's voice; there's no projections; there's no televisions; there's no color changing. There's just silence and a cool temperature. And if a cloud goes past, you can see a cloud on the tips where it's letting the light through. This is the only project that we've done where the finished thing looked more like a rendering than our renderings. (Laughter) A key thing was how people would interact. I mean, in a way it was the most serious thing you could possible do at the expo. And I just wanted to show you. The British government — any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have. And there was a lot of terror. But there was an underlying support. And so there was a moment when suddenly — actually, the next thing. This is the head of U.K. Trade and Investment, who was our client, with the Chinese children, using the landscape. (Video) Children: One, two, three, go. (Laughter) TH: I'm sorry about my stupid voice there. (Laughter) So finally, texture is something. In the projects we've been working on, these slick buildings, where they might be a fancy shape, but the materiality feels the same, is something that we've been trying to research really, and explore alternatives. And the project that we're building in Malaysia is apartment buildings for a property developer. And it's in a piece of land that's this site. And the mayor of Kuala Lumpur said that, if this developer would give something that gave something back to the city, they would give them more gross floor area, buildable. So there was an incentive for the developer to really try to think about what would be better for the city. And the conventional thing with apartment buildings in this part of the world is you have your tower, and you squeeze a few trees around the edge, and you see cars parked. It's actually only the first couple of floors that you really experience, and the rest of it is just for postcards. The lowest value is actually the bottom part of a tower like this. So if we could chop that away and give the building a small bottom, we could take that bit and put it at the top where the greater commercial value is for a property developer. And by linking these together, we could have 90 percent of the site as a rainforest, instead of only 10 percent of scrubby trees and bits of road around buildings. (Applause) So we're building these buildings. They're actually identical, so it's quite cost-effective. They're just chopped at different heights. But the key part is trying to give back an extraordinary piece of landscape, rather than engulf it. And that's my final slide. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: So thank you. Thank you, Thomas. You're a delight. Since we have an extra minute here, I thought perhaps you could tell us a little bit about these seeds, which maybe came from the shaved bit of the building. TH: These are a few of the tests we did when we were building the structure. So there were 66,000 of these. This optic was 22 feet long. And so the daylight was just coming — it was caught on the outside of the box and was coming down to illuminate each seed. Waterproofing the building was a bit crazy. Because it's quite hard to waterproof buildings anyway, but if you say you're going to drill 66,000 holes in it — we had quite a time. There was one person in the contractors who was the right size — and it wasn't a child — who could fit between them for the final waterproofing of the building. JC: Thank you, Thomas. (Applause)

The mystery of chronic pain

{0: "At the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, Elliot Krane works on the problem of treating pain in children."}

TED2011

I'm a pediatrician and an anesthesiologist, so I put children to sleep for a living. (Laughter) And I'm an academic, so I put audiences to sleep for free. (Laughter) But what I actually mostly do is I manage the pain management service at the Packard Children's Hospital up at Stanford in Palo Alto. And it's from the experience from about 20 or 25 years of doing that that I want to bring to you the message this morning, that pain is a disease. Now most of the time, you think of pain as a symptom of a disease, and that's true most of the time. It's the symptom of a tumor or an infection or an inflammation or an operation. But about 10 percent of the time, after the patient has recovered from one of those events, pain persists. It persists for months and oftentimes for years, and when that happens, it is its own disease. And before I tell you about how it is that we think that happens and what we can do about it, I want to show you how it feels for my patients. So imagine, if you will, that I'm stroking your arm with this feather, as I'm stroking my arm right now. Now, I want you to imagine that I'm stroking it with this. Please keep your seat. (Laughter) A very different feeling. Now what does it have to do with chronic pain? Imagine, if you will, these two ideas together. Imagine what your life would be like if I were to stroke it with this feather, but your brain was telling you that this is what you are feeling — and that is the experience of my patients with chronic pain. In fact, imagine something even worse. Imagine I were to stroke your child's arm with this feather, and their brain [was] telling them that they were feeling this hot torch. That was the experience of my patient, Chandler, whom you see in the photograph. As you can see, she's a beautiful, young woman. She was 16 years old last year when I met her, and she aspired to be a professional dancer. And during the course of one of her dance rehearsals, she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist. Now you would probably imagine, as she did, that a wrist sprain is a trivial event in a person's life. Wrap it in an ACE bandage, take some ibuprofen for a week or two, and that's the end of the story. But in Chandler's case, that was the beginning of the story. This is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain. You can see that the arm is discolored, purplish in color. It was cadaverically cold to the touch. The muscles were frozen, paralyzed — dystonic is how we refer to that. The pain had spread from her wrist to her hands, to her fingertips, from her wrist up to her elbow, almost all the way to her shoulder. But the worst part was, not the spontaneous pain that was there 24 hours a day. The worst part was that she had allodynia, the medical term for the phenomenon that I just illustrated with the feather and with the torch. The lightest touch of her arm — the touch of a hand, the touch even of a sleeve, of a garment, as she put it on — caused excruciating, burning pain. How can the nervous system get this so wrong? How can the nervous system misinterpret an innocent sensation like the touch of a hand and turn it into the malevolent sensation of the touch of the flame? Well you probably imagine that the nervous system in the body is hardwired like your house. In your house, wires run in the wall, from the light switch to a junction box in the ceiling and from the junction box to the light bulb. And when you turn the switch on, the light goes on. And when you turn the switch off, the light goes off. So people imagine the nervous system is just like that. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, these wires in your arm — that, of course, we call nerves — transmit the information into the junction box in the spinal cord where new wires, new nerves, take the information up to the brain where you become consciously aware that your thumb is now hurt. But the situation, of course, in the human body is far more complicated than that. Instead of it being the case that that junction box in the spinal cord is just simple where one nerve connects with the next nerve by releasing these little brown packets of chemical information called neurotransmitters in a linear one-on-one fashion, in fact, what happens is the neurotransmitters spill out in three dimensions — laterally, vertically, up and down in the spinal cord — and they start interacting with other adjacent cells. These cells, called glial cells, were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together, like the nerves. But it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation, amplification and, in the case of pain, the distortion of sensory experiences. These glial cells become activated. Their DNA starts to synthesize new proteins, which spill out and interact with adjacent nerves, and they start releasing their neurotransmitters, and those neurotransmitters spill out and activate adjacent glial cells, and so on and so forth, until what we have is a positive feedback loop. It's almost as if somebody came into your home and rewired your walls so that the next time you turned on the light switch, the toilet flushed three doors down, or your dishwasher went on, or your computer monitor turned off. That's crazy, but that's, in fact, what happens with chronic pain. And that's why pain becomes its own disease. The nervous system has plasticity. It changes, and it morphs in response to stimuli. Well, what do we do about that? What can we do in a case like Chandler's? We treat these patients in a rather crude fashion at this point in time. We treat them with symptom-modifying drugs — painkillers — which are, frankly, not very effective for this kind of pain. We take nerves that are noisy and active that should be quiet, and we put them to sleep with local anesthetics. And most importantly, what we do is we use a rigorous, and often uncomfortable, process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to retrain the nerves in the nervous system to respond normally to the activities and sensory experiences that are part of everyday life. And we support all of that with an intensive psychotherapy program to address the despondency, despair and depression that always accompanies severe, chronic pain. It's successful, as you can see from this video of Chandler, who, two months after we first met her, is now doings a back flip. And I had lunch with her yesterday because she's a college student studying dance at Long Beach here, and she's doing absolutely fantastic. But the future is actually even brighter. The future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom-modifying drugs that simply mask the problem, as we have now, but that will be disease-modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells, or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate, that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind-up, or plasticity, that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain. So I have hope that in the future, the prophetic words of George Carlin will be realized, who said, "My philosophy: No pain, no pain." Thank you very much. (Applause)

The weird, wonderful world of bioluminescence

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

TED2011

So I want to take you on a trip to an alien world. And it's not a trip that requires light-years of travel, but it's to a place where it's defined by light. So it's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light. I've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence. I study it because I think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs. I also use it as a tool for visualizing and tracking pollution. But mostly I'm entranced by it. Since my my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. I needed some way to share the experience directly. And the first time I figured out that way was in this little single-person submersible called Deep Rover. This next video clip, you're going to see how we stimulated the bioluminescence. And the first thing you're going to see is a transect screen that is about a meter across. (Video) Narrator: In front of the sub, a mess screen will come into contact with the soft-bodied creatures of the deep sea. With the sub's lights switched off, it is possible to see their bioluminescence — the light produced when they collide with the mesh. This is the first time it has ever been recorded. Edith Widder: So I recorded that with an intensified video camera that has about the sensitivity of the fully dark-adapted human eye. Which means that really is what you would see if you took a dive in a submersible. But just to try to prove that fact to you, I've brought along some bioluminescent plankton in what is undoubtedly a foolhardy attempt at a live demonstration. (Laughter) So, if we could have the lights down and have it as dark in here as possible, I have a flask that has bioluminescent plankton in it. And you'll note there's no light coming from them right now, either because they're dead — (Laughter) or because I need to stir them up in some way for you to see what bioluminescence really looks like. (Gasps) Oops. Sorry. (Laughter) I spend most of my time working in the dark; I'm used to that. Okay. So that light was made by a bioluminescent dinoflagellate, a single-celled alga. So why would a single-celled alga need to be able to produce light? Well, it uses it to defend itself from its predators. The flash is like a scream for help. It's what's known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm, and just like the alarm on your car or your house, it's meant to cast unwanted attention onto the intruder, thereby either leading to his capture or scaring him away. There's a lot of animals that use this trick, for example this black dragonfish. It's got a light organ under its eye. It's got a chin barbel. It's got a lot of other light organs you can't see, but you'll see in here in a minute. So we had to chase this in the submersible for quite sometime, because the top speed of this fish is one knot, which was the top speed of the submersible. But it was worth it, because we caught it in a special capture device, brought it up into the lab on the ship, and then everything on this fish lights up. It's unbelievable. The light organs under the eyes are flashing. That chin barbel is flashing. It's got light organs on its belly that are flashing, fin lights. It's a scream for help; it's meant to attract attention. It's phenomenal. And you normally don't get to see this because we've exhausted the luminescence when we bring them up in nets. There's other ways you can defend yourself with light. For example, this shrimp releases its bioluminescent chemicals into the water just the way a squid or an octopus would release an ink cloud. This blinds or distracts the predator. This little squid is called the fire shooter because of its ability to do this. Now it may look like a tasty morsel, or a pig's head with wings — (Laughter) but if it's attacked, it puts out a barrage of light — in fact, a barrage of photon torpedoes. I just barely got the lights out in time for you to be able to see those gobs of light hitting the transect screen and then just glowing. It's phenomenal. So there's a lot of animals in the open ocean — most of them that make light. And we have a pretty good idea, for most of them, why. They use it for finding food, for attracting mates, for defending against predators. But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean, that's where things get really strange. And some of these animals are probably inspiration for the things you saw in "Avatar," but you don't have to travel to Pandora to see them. They're things like this. This is a golden coral, a bush. It grows very slowly. In fact, it's thought that some of these are as much as 3,000 years old, which is one reason that bottom trawling should not be allowed. The other reason is this amazing bush glows. So if you brush up against it, any place you brushed against it, you get this twinkling blue-green light that's just breathtaking. And you see things like this. This looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book — just all manner of creatures all over this thing. And these are flytrap anemones. Now if you poke it, it pulls in its tentacles. But if you keep poking it, it starts to produce light. And it actually ends up looking like a galaxy. It produces these strings of light, presumably as some form of defense. There are starfish that can make light. And there are brittle stars that produce bands of light that dance along their arms. This looks like a plant, but it's actually an animal. And it anchors itself in the sand by blowing up a balloon on the end of its stock. So it can actually hold itself in very strong currents, as you see here. But if we collect it very gently, and we bring it up into the lab and just squeeze it at the base of the stock, it produces this light that propagates from stem to the plume, changing color as it goes, from green to blue. Colorization and sound effects added for you viewing pleasure. (Laughter) But we have no idea why it does that. Here's another one. This is also a sea pen. It's got a brittle star hitching a ride. It's a green saber of light. And like the one you just saw, it can produce these as bands of light. So if I squeeze the base, the bands go from base to tip. If I squeeze the tip, they go from tip to base. So what do you think happens if you squeeze it in the middle? (Gasps) I'd be very interested in your theories about what that's about. (Laughter) So there's a language of light in the deep ocean, and we're just beginning to understand it, and one way we're going about that is we're imitating a lot of these displays. This is an optical lure that I've used. We call it the electronic jellyfish. It's just 16 blue LEDs that we can program to do different types of displays. And we view it with a camera system I developed called Eye-in-the-Sea that uses far red light that's invisible to most animals, so it's unobtrusive. So I just want to show you some of the responses we've elicited from animals in the deep sea. So the camera's black and white. It's not high-resolution. And what you're seeing here is a bait box with a bunch of — like the cockroaches of the ocean — there are isopods all over it. And right in the front is the electronic jellyfish. And when it starts flashing, it's just going to be one of the LEDs that's flashing very fast. But as soon as it starts to flash — and it's going to look big, because it blooms on the camera — I want you to look right here. There's something small there that responds. We're talking to something. It looks like a little of string pearls basically — in fact, three strings of pearls. And this was very consistent. This was in the Bahamas at about 2,000 feet. We basically have a chat room going on here, because once it gets started, everybody's talking. And I think this is actually a shrimp that's releasing its bioluminescent chemicals into the water. But the cool thing is, we're talking to it. We don't know what we're saying. Personally, I think it's something sexy. (Laughter) And then finally, I want to show you some responses that we recorded with the world's first deep-sea webcam, which we had installed in Monterey Canyon last year. We've only just begun to analyze all of this data. This is going to be a glowing source first, which is like bioluminescent bacteria. And it is an optical cue that there's carrion on the bottom of the ocean. So this scavenger comes in, which is a giant sixgill shark. And I can't claim for sure that the optical source brought it in, because there's bait right there. But if it had been following the odor plume, it would have come in from the other direction. And it does actually seem to be trying to eat the electronic jellyfish. That's a 12-foot-long giant sixgill shark. Okay, so this next one is from the webcam, and it's going to be this pinwheel display. And this is a burglar alarm. And that was a Humboldt squid, a juvenile Humboldt squid, about three feet long. This is at 3,000 feet in Monterey Canyon. But if it's a burglar alarm, you wouldn't expect it to attack the jellyfish directly. It's supposed to be attacking what's attacking the jellyfish. But we did see a bunch of responses like this. This guy is a little more contemplative. "Hey, wait a minute. There's supposed to be something else there." He's thinking about it. But he's persistent. He keeps coming back. And then he goes away for a few seconds to think about it some more, and thinks, "Maybe if I come in from a different angle." (Laughter) Nope. So we are starting to get a handle on this, but only just the beginnings. We need more eyes on the process. So if any of you ever get a chance to take a dive in a submersible, by all means, climb in and take the plunge. This is something that should be on everybody's bucket list, because we live on an ocean planet. More than 90 percent, 99 percent, of the living space on our planet is ocean. It's a magical place filled with breathtaking light shows and bizarre and wondrous creatures, alien life forms that you don't have to travel to another planet to see. But if you do take the plunge, please remember to turn out the lights. But I warn you, it's addictive. Thank you. (Applause)

How to tie your shoes

{0: 'Terry Moore is the director of the Radius Foundation, a forum for exploring and gaining insight from different worldviews.'}

TED2005

I'm used to thinking of the TED audience as a wonderful collection of some of the most effective, intelligent, intellectual, savvy, worldly and innovative people in the world. And I think that's true. However, I also have reason to believe that many, if not most, of you are actually tying your shoes incorrectly. (Laughter) Now I know that seems ludicrous. I know that seems ludicrous. And believe me, I lived the same sad life until about three years ago. And what happened to me was I bought, what was for me, a very expensive pair of shoes. But those shoes came with round nylon laces, and I couldn't keep them tied. So I went back to the store and said to the owner, "I love the shoes, but I hate the laces." He took a look and said, "Oh, you're tying them wrong." Now up until that moment, I would have thought that, by age 50, one of the life skills that I had really nailed was tying my shoes. (Laughter) But not so — let me demonstrate. This is the way that most of us were taught to tie our shoes. Now as it turns out — thank you. (Applause) Wait, there's more. As it turns out — (Laughter) there's a strong form and a weak form of this knot, and we were taught the weak form. And here's how to tell. If you pull the strands at the base of the knot, you will see that the bow will orient itself down the long axis of the shoe. That's the weak form of the knot. But not to worry. If we start over and simply go the other direction around the bow, we get this, the strong form of the knot. And if you pull the cords under the knot, you will see that the bow orients itself along the transverse axis of the shoe. This is a stronger knot. It will come untied less often. It will let you down less, and not only that, it looks better. We're going to do this one more time. (Applause) Start as usual — (Applause) go the other way around the loop. This is a little hard for children, but I think you can handle it. Pull the knot. There it is: the strong form of the shoe knot. Now, in keeping with today's theme, I'd like to point out — something you already know — that sometimes a small advantage someplace in life can yield tremendous results someplace else. (Laughter) Live long and prosper. (Applause)