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Visualizing ourselves ... with crowd-sourced data

{0: 'Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data and digital technologies. His work takes real world and community-generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and technology.'}

TED2011

So I think data can actually make us more human. We're collecting and creating all kinds of data about how we're living our lives, and it's enabling us to tell some amazing stories. Recently, a wise media theorist Tweeted, "The 19th century culture was defined by the novel, the 20th century culture was defined by the cinema, and the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface." And I believe this is going to prove true. Our lives are being driven by data, and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories. So I'm going to show you a few of the projects that I've been working on over the last couple years that reflect on our lives and our systems. This is a project called Flight Patterns. What you're looking at is airplane traffic over North America for a 24-hour period. As you see, everything starts to fade to black, and you see people going to sleep. Followed by that, you see on the West coast planes moving across, the red-eye flights to the East coast. And you'll see everybody waking up on the East coast, followed by European flights coming in the upper right-hand corner. Everybody's moving from the East coast to the West coast. You see San Francisco and Los Angeles start to make their journeys down to Hawaii in the lower left-hand corner. I think it's one thing to say there's 140,000 planes being monitored by the federal government at any one time, and it's another thing to see that system as it ebbs and flows. This is a time-lapse image of that exact same data, but I've color-coded it by type, so you can see the diversity of aircraft that are in the skies above us. And I started making these, and I put them into Google Maps and allow you to zoom in and see individual airports and the patterns that are occurring there. So here we can see the white represents low altitudes, and the blue are higher altitudes. And you can zoom in. This is taking a look at Atlanta. You can see this is a major shipping airport, and there's all kinds of activity there. You can also toggle between altitude for model and manufacturer. See again, the diversity. And you can scroll around and see some of the different airports and the different patterns that they have. This is scrolling up the East coast. You can see some of the chaos that's happening in New York with the air traffic controllers having to deal with all those major airports next to each other. So zooming back out real quick, we see, again, the U.S. — you get Florida down in the right-hand corner. Moving across to the West coast, you see San Francisco and Los Angeles — big low-traffic zones across Nevada and Arizona. And that's us down there in L.A. and Long Beach on the bottom. I started taking a look as well at different perimeters, because you can choose what you want to pull out from the data. This is looking at ascending versus descending flights. And you can see, over time, the ways the airports change. You see the holding patterns that start to develop in the bottom of the screen. And you can see, eventually the airport actually flips directions. So this is another project that I worked on with the Sensible Cities Lab at MIT. This is visualizing international communications. So it's how New York communicates with other international cities. And we set this up as a live globe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the Design the Elastic Mind exhibition. And it had a live feed with a 24-hour offset, so you could see the changing relationship and some demographic info coming through AT&T's data and revealing itself. This is another project I worked on with Sensible Cities Lab and CurrentCity.org. And it's visualizing SMS messages being sent in the city of Amsterdam. So you're seeing the daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city, until we approach New Year's Eve, where everybody says, "Happy New Year!" (Laughter) So this is an interactive tool that you can move around and see different parts of the city. This is looking at another event. This is called Queen's Day. So again, you get this daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city. And then you're going to see people start to gather in the center of the city to celebrate the night before, which happens right here. And then you can see people celebrating the next day. And you can pause it and step back and forth and see different phases. So now on to something completely different. Some of you may recognize this. This is Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical chess playing machine. And it's this amazing robot that plays chess extremely well, except for one thing: it's not a robot at all. There's actually a legless man that sits in that box and controls this chess player. This was the inspiration for a web service by Amazon called the Mechanical Turk — named after this guy. And it's based on the premise that there are certain things that are easy for people, but really difficult for computers. So they made this web service and said, "Any programmer can write a piece of software and tap into the minds of thousands of people." The nerdy side of me thought, "Wow, this is amazing. I can tap into thousands of people's minds." And the other nerdy side of me thought, "This is horrible. This is completely bizarre. What does this mean for the future of mankind, where we're all plugged into this borg?" I was probably being a little extreme. But what does this mean when we have no context for what it is that we're working on, and we're just doing these little labors? So I created this drawing tool. I asked people to draw a sheep facing to the left. And I said, "I'll pay you two cents for your contribution." And I started collecting sheep. And I collected a lot, a lot of different sheep. Lots of sheep. I took the first 10,000 sheep that I collected, and I put them on a website called TheSheepMarket.com where you can actually buy collections of 20 sheep. You can't pick individual sheep, but you can buy a single plate block of stamps as a commodity. And juxtaposed against this grid, you see actually, by rolling over each individual one, the humanity behind this hugely mechanical process. I think there's something really interesting to watching people as they go through this creative toil — something we can all relate to, this creative process of trying to come up with something from nothing. I think it was really interesting to juxtapose this humanity versus this massive distributed grid. Kind of amazing what some people did. So here's a few statistics from the project. Approximate collection rate of 11 sheep per hour, which would make a working wage of 69 cents per hour. There were 662 rejected sheep that didn't meet "sheep-like" criteria and were thrown out of the flock. (Laughter) The amount of time spent drawing ranged from four seconds to 46 minutes. That gives you an idea of the different types of motivations and dedication. And there were 7,599 people that contributed to the project, or were unique IP addresses — so about how many people contributed. But only one of them out of the 7,599 said this. (Laughter) Which I was pretty surprised by. I expected people to be wondering, "Why did I draw a sheep?" And I think it's a pretty valid question. And there's a lot of reasons why I chose sheep. Sheep were the first animal to be raised from mechanically processed byproducts, the first to be selectively bred for production traits, the first animal to be cloned. Obviously, we think of sheep as followers. And there's this reference to "Le Petit Prince" where the narrator asks the prince to draw a sheep. He draws sheep after sheep. The narrator's only appeased when he draws a box. And he says, "It's not about a scientific rendering of a sheep. It's about your own interpretation and doing something different." And I like that. So this is a clip from Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." It's showing Charlie Chaplin dealing with some of the major changes during the Industrial Revolution. So there were no longer shoe makers, but now there are people slapping soles on people's shoes. And the whole idea of one's relationship to their work changed a lot. So I thought this was an interesting clip to divide into 16 pieces and feed into the Mechanical Turk with a drawing tool. This basically allowed — what you see on the left side is the original frame, and on the right side you see that frame as interpreted by 16 people who have no idea what it is they're doing. And this was the inspiration for a project that I worked on with my friend Takashi Kawashima. We decided to use the Mechanical Turk for exactly what it was meant for, which is making money. So we took a hundred dollar bill and divided it into 10,000 teeny pieces, and we fed those into the Mechanical Turk. We asked people to draw what it was that they saw. But here there was no sheep-like criteria. People, if they drew a stick figure or a smiley face, it actually made it into the bill. So what you see is actually a representation of how well people did what it was they were asked to do. So we took these hundred dollar bills, and we put them on a website called TenThousandsCents.com, where you can browse through and see all the individual contributions. And you can also trade real hundred-dollar bills for fake hundred-dollar bills and make a donation to the Hundred Dollar Laptop Project, which is now known as One Laptop Per Child. This is again showing all the different contributions. You see some people did beautiful stipple renderings, like this one on top — spent a long time making realistic versions. And other people would draw stick figures or smiley faces. Here on the right-hand side in the middle you see this one guy writing, "$0.01!!! Really?" That's all I'm getting paid for this? (Laughter) So the last Mechanical Turk project I'm going to talk to you about is called Bicycle Built for 2000. This is a collaboration with my friend Daniel Massey. You may recognize these two guys. This is Max Mathews and John Kelly from Bell Labs in the '60s, where they created the song "Daisy Bell," which was the world's first singing computer. You may recognize it from "2001: A Space Odyssey." When HAL's dying at the end of the film he starts singing this song, as a reference to when computers became human. So we resynthesized this song. This is what that sounded like. We broke down all the individual notes in the singing as well as the phonemes in the singing. Daisy Bell: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ... ♫ Aaron Koblin: And we took all of those individual pieces, and we fed them into another Turk request. This is what it would look like if you went to the site. You type in your code, but you first test your mic. You'd be fed a simple audio clip. (Honk) And then you'd do your best to recreate that with your own voice. After previewing it and confirming it's what you submitted, you could submit it into the Mechanical Turk with no other context. And this is what we first got back from the very first set of submissions. Recording: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ♫ ♫ give me your answer do ♫ ♫ I'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ It can't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ I can't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ But you'll look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫ AK: So James Surowieki has this idea of the wisdom of crowds, that says that a whole bunch of people are smarter than any individual. We wanted to see how this applies to collaborative, distributed music making, where nobody has any idea what it is they're working on. So if you go to the BicycleBuiltforTwoThousand.com you can actually hear what all this sounds like together. I'm sorry for this. (Noise) Chorus: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ♫ ♫ Give me your answer do ♫ ♫ I'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ It can't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ I can't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ But you'd look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫ AK: So stepping back for a quick second, when I was at UCLA going to grad school, I was also working at a place called the Center for Embedded Network Sensing. And I was writing software to visualize laser scanners. So basically motion through 3D space. And this was seen by a director in L.A. named James Frost who said, "Wait a minute. You mean we can shoot a music video without actually using any video?" So we did exactly that. We made a music video for one of my favorite bands, Radiohead. And I think one of my favorite parts of this project was not just shooting a video with lasers, but we also open sourced it, and we made it released as a Google Code project, where people could download a bunch of the data and some source code to build their own versions of it. And people were making some amazing things. This is actually two of my favorites: the pin-board Thom Yorke and a LEGO Thom Yorke. A whole YouTube channel of people submitting really interesting content. More recently, somebody even 3D-printed Thom Yorke's head, which is a little creepy, but pretty cool. So with everybody making so much amazing stuff and actually understanding what it was they were working on, I was really interested in trying to make a collaborative project where people were working together to build something. And I met a music video director named Chris Milk. And we started bouncing around ideas to make a collaborative music video project. But we knew we really needed the right person to kind of rally behind and build something for. So we put the idea on the back burner for a few months. And he ended up talking to Rick Rubin, who was finishing up Johnny Cash's final album called "Ain't No Grave." The lyrics to the leading track are "Ain't no grave can hold my body down." So we thought this was the perfect project to build a collaborative memorial and a virtual resurrection for Johnny Cash. So I teamed up with my good friend Ricardo Cabello, also known as Mr. doob, who's a much better programmer than I am, and he made this amazing Flash drawing tool. As you know, an animation is a series of images. So what we did was cross-cut a bunch of archival footage of Johnny Cash, and at eight frames a second, we allowed individuals to draw a single frame that would get woven into this dynamically changing music video. So I don't have time to play the entire thing for you, but I want to show you two short clips. One is the beginning of the music video. And that's going to be followed by a short clip of people who have already contributed to the project talking about it briefly. (Music) (Video) Johnny Cash: ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body down ♫ ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold body down ♫ ♫ When I hear the trumpet sound ♫ ♫ I'm going to ride right out of the ground ♫ ♫ Ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body ... ♫ (Applause) AK: What better way to pay tribute to the man than to make something for one of his songs. Collaborator: I felt really sad when he died. And I just thought it'd be wonderful, it'd be really nice to contribute something to his memory. Collaborator Two: It really allows this last recording of his to be a living, breathing memorial. Collaborator Three: For all of the frames to be drawn by fans, each individual frame, it's got a very powerful feeling to it. Collaborator Four: I've seen everybody from Japan, Venezuela, to the States, to Knoxville, Tennessee. Collaborator Five: As much as is different from frame to frame, it really is personal. Collaborator Six: Watching the video in my room, I could see me not understanding at the beginning of it. And I just worked and worked through problems, until my little wee battles that I was fighting within the picture all began to resolve themselves. You can actually see the point when I know what I'm doing, and a lot of light and dark comes into it. And in a weird way, that's what I actually like about Johnny Cash's music as well. It's the sum total of his life, all the things that had happened — the bad things, the good things. You're hearing a person's life. AK: So if you go to the website JohnnyCashProject.com, what you'll see is the video playing above. And below it are all the individual frames that people have been submitting to the project. So this isn't finished at all, but it's an ongoing project where people can continue to collaborate. If you roll over any one of those individual thumbnails, you can see the person who drew that individual thumbnail and where they were located. And if you find one that you're interested in, you can actually click on it and open up an information panel where you're able to rate that frame, which helps it bubble up to the top. And you can also see the way that it was drawn. Again, you can get the playback and personal contribution. In addition to that, it's listed, the artist's name, the location, how long they spent drawing it. And you can pick a style. So this one was tagged "Abstract." But there's a bunch of different styles. And you can sort the video a number of different ways. You can say, "I want to see the pointillist version or the sketchy version or the realistic version. And then this is, again, the abstract version, which ends up getting a little bit crazy. So the last project I want to talk to you about is another collaboration with Chris Milk. And this is called "The Wilderness Downtown." It's an online music video for the Arcade Fire. Chris and I were really amazed by the potential now with modern web browsers, where you have HTML5 audio and video and the power of JavaScript to render amazingly fast. And we wanted to push the idea of the music video that was meant for the Web beyond the four-by-three or sixteen-by-nine window and try to make it play out and choreograph throughout the screen. But most importantly, I think, we really wanted to make an experience that was unlike the Johnny Cash Project, where you had a small group of people spending a lot of time to contribute something for everyone. What if we had a very low commitment, but delivered something individually unique to each person who contributed? So the project starts off by asking you to enter the address of the home where you grew up. And you type in the address — it actually creates a music video specifically for you, pulling in Google maps and Streetview images into the experience itself. So this should really be seen at home with you typing in your own address, but I'm going to give you a little preview of what you can expect. (Video) Win Butler: ♫ Now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ Now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ Hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ Hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ Sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ Still moving through the pain ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ AK: So I think, if there's one thing to take away from my talk today, it's that an interface can be a powerful narrative device. And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together. Thanks a lot. (Applause)

How we'll stop polio for good

{0: 'As the Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization’s Polio and Emergencies Cluster, Bruce Aylward works to ensure that polio stays under control and that the world is prepared to respond to health crises.'}

TED2011

I want to share with you over the next 18 minutes a pretty incredible idea. Actually, it's a really big idea. But to get us started, I want to ask if everyone could just close your eyes for two seconds and try and think of a technology or a bit of science that you think has changed the world. Now I bet, in this audience, you're thinking of some really incredible technology, some stuff that I haven't even heard of, I'm absolutely sure. But I'm also sure, pretty sure, that absolutely nobody is thinking of this. This is a polio vaccine. And it's a great thing actually that nobody's had to think about it here today because it means that we can take this for granted. This is a great technology. We can take it completely for granted. But it wasn't always that way. Even here in California, if we were to go back just a few years, it was a very different story. People were terrified of this disease. They were terrified of polio, and it would cause public panic. And it was because of scenes like this. In this scene, people are living in an iron lung. These are people who were perfectly healthy two or three days before, and then two days later, they can no longer breathe, and this polio virus has paralyzed not only their arms and their legs, but also their breathing muscles. And they were going to spend the rest of their lives, usually, in this iron lung to breathe for them. This disease was terrifying. There was no cure, and there was no vaccine. The disease was so terrifying that the president of the United States launched an extraordinary national effort to find a way to stop it. Twenty years later, they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine. It was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s. Finally, a vaccine that could stop this awful disease, and here in the United States it had an incredible impact. As you can see, the virus stopped, and it stopped very, very fast. But this wasn't the case everywhere in the world. And it happened so fast in the United States, however, that even just last month Jon Stewart said this: (Video) Jon Stewart: Where is polio still active? Because I thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated. Bruce Aylward: Oops. Jon, polio's almost been eradicated. But the reality is that polio still exists today. We made this map for Jon to try to show him exactly where polio still exists. This is the picture. There's not very much left in the world. But the reason there's not very much left is because there's been an extraordinary public/private partnership working behind the scenes, almost unknown, I'm sure to most of you here today. It's been working for 20 years to try and eradicate this disease, and it's got it down to these few cases that you can see here on this graphic. But just last year, we had an incredible shock and realized that almost just isn't good enough with a virus like polio. And this is the reason: in two countries that hadn't had this disease for more than probably a decade, on opposite sides of the globe, there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks. Hundreds of people were paralyzed. Hundreds of people died — children as well as adults. And in both cases, we were able to use genetic sequencing to look at the polio viruses, and we could tell these viruses were not from these countries. They had come from thousands of miles away. And in one case, it originated on another continent. And not only that, but when they came into these countries, then they got on commercial jetliners probably and they traveled even farther to other places like Russia, where, for the first time in over a decade last year, children were crippled and paralyzed by a disease that they had not seen for years. Now all of these outbreaks that I just showed you, these are under control now, and it looks like they'll probably stop very, very quickly. But the message was very clear. Polio is still a devastating, explosive disease. It's just happening in another part of the world. And our big idea is that the scientific miracle of this decade should be the complete eradication of poliomyelitis. So I want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership, the Polio Partnership, is trying to do. We're not trying to control polio. We're not trying to get it down to just a few cases, because this disease is like a root fire; it can explode again if you don't snuff it out completely. So what we're looking for is a permanent solution. We want a world in which every child, just like you guys, can take for granted a polio-free world. So we're looking for a permanent solution, and this is where we get lucky. This is one of the very few viruses in the world where there are big enough cracks in its armor that we can try to do something truly extraordinary. This virus can only survive in people. It can't live for a very long time in people. It doesn't survive in the environment hardly at all. And we've got pretty good vaccines, as I've just showed you. So we are trying to wipe out this virus completely. What the polio eradication program is trying to do is to kill the virus itself that causes polio everywhere on Earth. Now we don't have a great track record when it comes to doing something like this, to eradicating diseases. It's been tried six times in the last century, and it's been successful exactly once. And this is because disease eradication, it's still the venture capital of public health. The risks are massive, but the pay-off — economic, humanitarian, motivational — it's absolutely huge. One congressman here in the United States thinks that the entire investment that the U.S. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days — in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs. And if we can finish polio eradication, the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone. So those are the kind of stakes that we're after. But smallpox eradication was hard; it was very, very hard. And polio eradication, in many ways, is even tougher, and there's a few reasons for that. The first is that, when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago, more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox. And there were more than 10 times as many people living in these countries. So it was a massive effort. The second challenge we had was — in contrast to the smallpox vaccine, which was very stable, and a single dose protected you for life — the polio vaccine is incredibly fragile. It deteriorates so quickly in the tropics that we've had to put this special vaccine monitor on every single vial so that it will change very quickly when it's exposed to too much heat, and we can tell that it's not a good vaccine to use on a child — it's not potent; it's not going to protect them. Even then, kids need many doses of the vaccine. But the third challenge we have — and probably even bigger one, the biggest challenge — is that, in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy — every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash. So you could get around the disease; you could vaccinate around the disease and cut it off. With polio it's almost completely different. The vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus show absolutely no sign of the disease. So you can't see the enemy most of the time, and as a result, we've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox. We've had to create one of the largest social movements in history. There's over 10 million people, probably 20 million people, largely volunteers, who have been working over the last 20 years in what has now been called the largest internationally-coordinated operation in peacetime. These people, these 20 million people, vaccinate over 500 million children every single year, multiple times at the peak of our operation. Now giving the polio vaccine is simple. It's just two drops, like that. But reaching 500 million people is much, much tougher. And these vaccinators, these volunteers, they have got to dive headlong into some of the toughest, densest urban slums in the world. They've got to trek under sweltering suns to some of the most remote, difficult to reach places in the world. And they also have to dodge bullets, because we have got to operate during shaky cease-fires and truces to try and vaccinate children, even in areas affected by conflict. One reporter who was watching our program in Somalia about five years ago — a place which has eradicated polio, not once, but twice, because they got reinfected. He was sitting outside of the road, watching one of these polio campaigns unfold, and a few months later he wrote: "This is foreign aid at its most heroic." And these heroes, they come from every walk of life, all sorts of backgrounds. But one of the most extraordinary is Rotary International. This is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years. They're right at the center of the whole thing. Now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication — more than 15 years, much longer than it should have — but once it was built, the results were striking. Within a couple of years, every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses, with the exception of four countries that you see here. And in each of those, it was only part of the country. And then, by 1999, one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide — proof of concept. And then today, there's been a 99 percent reduction — greater than 99 percent reduction — in the number of children who are being paralyzed by this awful disease. When we started, over 20 years ago, 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus. Last year, it was 1,000. And at the same time, the polio eradication program has been working to help with a lot of other areas. It's been working to help control pandemic flu, SARS for example. It's also tried to save children by doing other things — giving vitamin A drops, giving measles shots, giving bed nets against malaria even during some of these campaigns. But the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us, the international community, to reach every single child, every single community, the most vulnerable people in the world, with the most basic of health services, irrespective of geography, poverty, culture and even conflict. So things were looking very exciting, and then about five years ago, this virus, this ancient virus, started to fight back. The first problem we ran into was that, in these last four countries, the strongholds of this virus, we just couldn't seem to get the virus rooted out. And then to make the matters even worse, the virus started to spread out of these four places, especially northern India and northern Nigeria, into much of Africa, Asia, and even into Europe, causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades. And then, in one of the most important, tenacious and toughest reservoirs of the polio virus in the world, we found that our vaccine was working half as well as it should have. In conditions like this, the vaccine just couldn't get the grip it needed to in the guts of these children and protect them the way that it needed to. Now at that time, there was a great, as you can imagine, frustration — let's call it frustration — it started to grow very, very quickly. And all of a sudden, some very important voices in the world of public health started to say, "Hang on. We should abandon this idea of eradication. Let's settle for control — that's good enough." Now as seductive as the idea of control sounds, it's a false premise. The brutal truth is, if we don't have the will or the skill, or even the money that we need to reach children, the most vulnerable children in the world, with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine, then pretty soon, more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year. There's absolutely no question. These are children like Umar. Umar is seven years old, and he's from northern Nigeria. He lives in a family home there with his eight brothers and sisters. Umar also has polio. Umar was paralyzed for life. His right leg was paralyzed in 2004. This leg, his right leg, now takes an awful beating because he has to half-crawl, because it's faster to move that way to keep up with his friends, keep up with his brothers and sisters, than to get up on his crutches and walk. But Umar is a fantastic student. He's an incredible kid. As you probably can't see the detail here, but this is his report card, and you'll see, he's got perfect scores. He got 100 percent in all the important things, like nursery rhymes, for example there. But you know I'd love to be able to tell you that Umar is a typical kid with polio these days, but it's not true. Umar is an exceptional kid in exceptional circumstances. The reality of polio today is something very different. Polio strikes the poorest communities in the world. It leaves their children paralyzed, and it drags their families deeper into poverty, because they're desperately searching and they're desperately spending the little bit of savings that they have, trying in vain to find a cure for their children. We think children deserve better. And so when the going got really tough in the polio eradication program about two years ago, when people were saying, "We should call it off," the Polio Partnership decided to buckle down once again and try and find innovative new solutions, new ways to get to the children that we were missing again and again. In northern India, we started mapping the cases using satellite imaging like this, so that we could guide our investments and vaccinator shelters, so we could get to the millions of children on the Koshi River basin where there are no other health services. In northern Nigeria, the political leaders and the traditional Muslim leaders, they got directly involved in the program to help solve the problems of logistics and community confidence. And now they've even started using these devices — speaking of cool technology — these little devices, little GIS trackers like this, which they put into the vaccine carriers of their vaccinators. And then they can track them, and at the end of the day, they look and see, did these guys get every single street, every single house. This is the kind of commitment now we're seeing to try and reach all of the children we've been missing. And in Afghanistan, we're trying new approaches — access negotiators. We're working closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure that we can reach every child. But as we tried these extraordinary things, as people went to this trouble to try and rework their tactics, we went back to the vaccine — it's a 50-year-old vaccine — and we thought, surely we can make a better vaccine, so that when they finally get to these kids, we can have a better bang for our buck. And this started an incredible collaboration with industry, and within six months, we were testing a new polio vaccine that targeted, just two years ago, the last two types of polio in the world. Now June the ninth, 2009, we got the first results from the first trial with this vaccine, and it turned out to be a game-changer. The new vaccine had twice the impact on these last couple of viruses as the old vaccine had, and we immediately started using this. Well, in a couple of months we had to get it out of production. And it started rolling off the production lines and into the mouths of children around the world. And we didn't start with the easy places. The first place this vaccine was used was in southern Afghanistan, because it's in places like that where kids are going to benefit the most from technologies like this. Now here at TED, over the last couple of days, I've seen people challenging the audience again and again to believe in the impossible. So this morning at about seven o'clock, I decided that we'd try to drive Chris and the production crew here berserk by downloading all of our data from India again, so that you could see something that's just unfolding today, which proves that the impossible is possible. And only two years ago, people were saying that this is impossible. Now remember, northern India is the perfect storm when it comes to polio. Over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio — Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — 500,000 children every single month. Sanitation is terrible, and our old vaccine, you remember, worked half as well as it should have. And yet, the impossible is happening. Today marks exactly six months — and for the first time in history, not a single child has been paralyzed in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. (Applause) India's not unique. In Umar's home country of Nigeria, a 95 percent reduction in the number of children paralyzed by polio last year. And in the last six months, we've had less places reinfected by polio than at any other time in history. Ladies and gentlemen, with a combination of smart people, smart technology and smart investments, polio can now be eradicated anywhere. We have major challenges, you can imagine, to finish this job, but as you've also seen, it's doable, it has great secondary benefits, and polio eradication is a great buy. And as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus, it's a stark reminder that we are failing, as a society, to reach children with the most basic of services. And for that reason, polio eradication: it's the ultimate in equity and it's the ultimate in social justice. The huge social movement that's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children. It's ready to reach them with bed nets, with other things. But capitalizing on their enthusiasm, capitalizing on their energy means finishing the job that they started 20 years ago. Finishing polio is a smart thing to do, and it's the right thing to do. Now we're in tough times economically. But as David Cameron of the United Kingdom said about a month ago when he was talking about polio, "There's never a wrong time to do the right thing." Finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do. And we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years. We have a new vaccine, we have new resolve, and we have new tactics. We have the chance to write an entirely new polio-free chapter in human history. But if we blink now, we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease. Here's a great idea to spread: End polio now. Help us tell the story. Help us build the momentum so that very soon every child, every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever. Thank you. (Applause) Bill Gates: Well Bruce, where do you think the toughest places are going to be? Where would you say we need to be the smartest? BA: The four places where you saw, that we've never stopped — northern Nigeria, northern India, the southern corner of Afghanistan and bordering areas of Pakistan — they're going to be the toughest. But the interesting thing is, of those three, India's looking real good, as you just saw in the data. And Afghanistan, Afghanistan, we think has probably stopped polio repeatedly. It keeps getting reinfected. So the tough ones: going to get the top of Nigeria finished and getting Pakistan finished. They're going to be the tough ones. BG: Now what about the money? Give us a sense of how much the campaign costs a year. And is it easy to raise that money? And what's it going to be like the next couple of years? BA: It's interesting. We spend right now about 750 million to 800 million dollars a year. That's what it costs to reach 500 million children. It sounds like a lot of money; it is a lot of money. But when you're reaching 500 million children multiple times — 20, 30 cents to reach a child — that's not very much money. But right now we don't have enough of that. We have a big gap in that money. We're cutting corners, and every time we cut corners, more places get infected that shouldn't have, and it just slows us down. And that great buy costs us a little bit more. BG: Well, hopefully we'll get the word out, and the governments will keep their generosity up. So good luck. We're all in this with you. Thank you. (BA: Thank you.) (Applause)

Art in exile

{0: 'Shirin Neshat has lived much of her life outside her native Iran. Her photographs and films offer a glimpse of the cultural, religious and political realities that shape the identities of Muslim women worldwide.\r\n'}

TEDWomen 2010

The story I wanted to share with you today is my challenge as an Iranian artist, as an Iranian woman artist, as an Iranian woman artist living in exile. Well, it has its pluses and minuses. On the dark side, politics doesn't seem to escape people like me. Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. Politics have defined our lives. If you're living in Iran, you're facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture — at times, execution. If you're living outside like me, you're faced with life in exile — the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family. Therefore, we don't find the moral, emotional, psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility. Oddly enough, an artist such as myself finds herself also in the position of being the voice, the speaker of my people, even if I have, indeed, no access to my own country. Also, people like myself, we're fighting two battles on different grounds. We're being critical of the West, the perception of the West about our identity — about the image that is constructed about us, about our women, about our politics, about our religion. We are there to take pride and insist on respect. And at the same time, we're fighting another battle. That is our regime, our government — our atrocious government, [that] has done every crime in order to stay in power. Our artists are at risk. We are in a position of danger. We pose a threat to the order of the government. But ironically, this situation has empowered all of us, because we are considered, as artists, central to the cultural, political, social discourse in Iran. We are there to inspire, to provoke, to mobilize, to bring hope to our people. We are the reporters of our people, and are communicators to the outside world. Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance. I envy sometimes the artists of the West for their freedom of expression. For the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics. From the fact that they are only serving one audience, mainly the Western culture. But also, I worry about the West, because often in this country, in this Western world that we have, culture risks being a form of entertainment. Our people depend on our artists, and culture is beyond communication. My journey as an artist started from a very, very personal place. I did not start to make social commentary about my country. The first one that you see in front of you is actually when I first returned to Iran after being separated for a good 12 years. It was after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. While I was absent from Iran, the Islamic Revolution had descended on Iran and had entirely transformed the country from Persian to the Islamic culture. I came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that I found my place in the society. But instead, I found a country that was totally ideological and that I didn't recognize anymore. More so, I became very interested, as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions, I became immersed in the study of the Islamic Revolution — how, indeed, it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women. I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting, in the way the women of Iran, historically, seemed to embody the political transformation. So in a way, by studying a woman, you can read the structure and the ideology of the country. So I made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life, and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse — the subject of martyrdom, the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of God, faith, but violence and crime and cruelty. For me, this became incredibly important. And yet, I had an unusual position toward this. I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place, but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic Revolution. This changed slowly as I found my voice and I discovered things that I didn't know I would discover. So my art became slightly more critical. My knife became a little sharper. And I fell into a life in exile. I am a nomadic artist. I work in Morocco, in Turkey, in Mexico. I go everywhere to make believe it's Iran. Now I am making films. Last year, I finished a film called "Women Without Men." "Women Without Men" returns to history, but another part of our Iranian history. It goes to 1953 when American CIA exercised a coup and removed a democratically elected leader, Dr. Mossadegh. The book is written by an Iranian woman, Shahrnush Parsipur. It's a magical realist novel. This book is banned, and she spent five years in prison. My obsession with this book, and the reason I made this into a film, is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female — traditionally, historically in Iran — and the question of four women who are all looking for an idea of change, freedom and democracy — while the country of Iran, equally, as if another character, also struggled for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign interventions. I made this film because I felt it's important for it to speak to the Westerners about our history as a country. That all of you seem to remember Iran after the Islamic Revolution. That Iran was once a secular society, and we had democracy, and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government, by the British government. This film also speaks to the Iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so Islamicized — in the way we looked, in the way we played music, in the way we had intellectual life. And most of all, in the way that we fought for democracy. These are some of the shots actually from my film. These are some of the images of the coup. And we made this film in Casablanca, recreating all the shots. This film tried to find a balance between telling a political story, but also a feminine story. Being a visual artist, indeed, I am foremost interested to make art — to make art that transcends politics, religion, the question of feminism, and become an important, timeless, universal work of art. The challenge I have is how to do that. How to tell a political story but an allegorical story. How to move you with your emotions, but also make your mind work. These are some of the images and the characters of the film. Now comes the green movement — the summer of 2009, as my film is released — the uprising begins in the streets of Tehran. What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film, the cry for democracy and social justice, repeats itself now again in Tehran. The green movement significantly inspired the world. It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy. What was most significant for me was, once again, the presence of the women. They're absolutely inspirational for me. If in the Islamic Revolution, the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and didn't have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Tehran — women who were educated, forward thinking, non-traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist. These women and those young men united Iranians across the world, inside and outside. I then discovered why I take so much inspiration from Iranian women. That, under all circumstances, they have pushed the boundary. They have confronted the authority. They have broken every rule in the smallest and the biggest way. And once again, they proved themselves. I stand here to say that Iranian women have found a new voice, and their voice is giving me my voice. And it's a great honor to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist, even if I have to operate in the West only for now. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Faith versus tradition in Islam

{0: "Mustafa Akyol is a columnist for Turkey's oldest English-language daily, Hurriyet Daily News."}

TEDxWarwick

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to go to Saudi Arabia. And the first thing I wanted to do as a Muslim was to go to Mecca and visit the Kaaba, the holiest shrine of Islam. And I did that; I put on my ritualistic dress, I went to the holy mosque, I did my prayers, I observed all the rituals. And meanwhile, besides all the spirituality, there was one mundane detail in the Kaaba that was pretty interesting for me: there was no separation of sexes. In other words, men and women were worshiping all together. They were together while doing tawāf, the circular walk around the Kaaba. They were together while praying. And if you wonder why this is interesting at all, you have to see the rest of Saudi Arabia, because this a country which is strictly divided between the sexes. In other words: as men, you are simply not supposed to be in the same physical space with women. And I noticed this in a very funny way. I left the Kaaba to eat something in downtown Mecca. I headed to the nearest Burger King restaurant. And I went there — I noticed that there was a male section, which is carefully separated from the female section. I had to pay, order and eat in the male section. "It's funny," I said to myself, "You can mingle with the opposite sex at the holy Kaaba, but not at the Burger King?" (Laughter) Quite, quite ironic. Ironic, and it's also, I think, quite telling, because the Kaaba and the rituals around it are relics from the earliest phase of Islam, that of prophet Muhammad. And if there was a big emphasis at the time to separate men from women, the rituals around the Kaaba could have been designed accordingly. But apparently, that was not an issue at the time. So the rituals came that way. This is also, I think, confirmed by the fact that the seclusion of women in creating a divided society is something that you also do not find in the Koran — the very core of Islam, the divine core of Islam — that all Muslims, equally myself, believe. And I think it's not an accident that you don't find this idea in the very origin of Islam, because many scholars who study the history of Islamic thought — Muslim scholars or Westerners — think that, actually, the practice of dividing men and women physically came as a later development in Islam, as Muslims adopted some preexisting cultures and traditions of the Middle East. Seclusion of women was actually a Byzantine and Persian practice, and Muslims adopted it and made it a part of their religion. Actually, this is just one example of a much larger phenomenon. What we call today Islamic law, and especially Islamic culture — and there are many Islamic cultures, actually; the one in Saudi Arabia is much different from where I come from in Istanbul or Turkey. But still, if you're going to speak about a Muslim culture, this has a core: the divine message which began the religion. But then many traditions, perceptions, practices were added on top of it. And these were traditions of the Middle East medieval traditions. There are two important messages, or two lessons, to take from that reality. First of all, Muslims — pious, conservative, believing Muslims who want to be loyal to their religion — should not cling onto everything in their culture, thinking that that's divinely mandated. Maybe some things are bad traditions and they need to be changed. On the other hand, the Westerners who look at Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that this is what Islam ordains. Maybe it's a Middle Eastern culture that became confused with Islam. There is a practice called female circumcision. It's something terrible, horrible. It is basically an operation to deprive women of sexual pleasure. And Westerners — Europeans or Americans — who didn't know about this before, [saw] this practice within some of the Muslim communities who migrated from North Africa. And they've thought, "Oh, what a horrible religion that is, which ordains something like that." But when you look at female circumcision, you see that it has nothing to do with Islam; it's just a North African practice which predates Islam. It was there for thousands of years. And, quite tellingly, some Muslims do practice it — the Muslims in North Africa, not in other places. But also the non-Muslim communities of North Africa — the animists, some Christians and even a Jewish tribe in North Africa — are known to practice female circumcision. So what might look like a problem within Islamic faith might turn out to be a tradition that Muslims have subscribed to. The same thing can be said for honor killings, which is a recurrent theme in the Western media — and which is, of course, a horrible tradition. And we see, truly, in some Muslim communities, that tradition. But in the non-Muslim communities of the Middle East, such as some Christian communities, Eastern communities, you see the same practice. We had a tragic case of an honor killing within Turkey's Armenian community just a few months ago. Now, these are things about general culture, but I'm also very much interested in political culture and whether liberty and democracy is appreciated, or whether there's an authoritarian political culture in which the state is supposed to impose things on the citizens. And it is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called "Islamic regimes," such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and the worst case, the Taliban in Afghanistan, they are pretty authoritarian — no doubt about that. For example, in Saudi Arabia, there is a phenomenon called the religious police. And the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen, by force — like, women are forced to cover their heads — wear the hijab, the Islamic head cover. Now that is pretty authoritarian, and that's something I'm very much critical of. But when I realized that the non-Muslim, or the non-Islamic-minded actors in the same geography sometimes behaved similarly, I realized that the problem maybe lies in the political culture of the whole region, not just Islam. Let me give you an example: in Turkey, where I come from, which is a very hyper-secular republic, until very recently, we used to have what I call "secularism police," which would guard the universities against veiled students. In other words, they would force students to uncover their heads. And I think forcing people to uncover their head is as tyrannical as forcing them to cover it. It should be the citizen's decision. But when I saw that, I said, "Maybe the problem is just an authoritarian culture in the region, and some Muslims have been influenced by that. But the secular-minded people can be influenced by that. Maybe it's a problem of the political culture, and we have to think about how to change that political culture." Now, these are some of the questions I had in mind a few years ago when I sat down to write a book. I said, "Well, I will do research about how Islam actually came to be what it is today, and what roads were taken and what roads could have been taken." The name of the book is "Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty." And as the subtitle suggests, I looked at Islamic tradition and the history of Islamic thought from the perspective of individual liberty, and I tried to find what are the strengths with regard to individual liberty. And there are strengths in Islamic tradition. Islam, actually, as a monotheistic religion, which defined man as a responsible agent by itself, created the idea of the individual in the Middle East, and saved it from the communitarianism, the collectivism of the tribe. You can derive many ideas from that. But besides that, I also saw problems within Islamic tradition. But one thing was curious: most of those problems turn out to be problems that emerged later, not from the very divine core of Islam, the Koran, but from, again, traditions and mentalities, or the interpretations of the Koran that Muslims made in the Middle Ages. The Koran, for example, doesn't condone stoning. There is no punishment for apostasy. There is no punishment for personal sins like drinking. These things which make Islamic law, the troubling aspects of Islamic law, were developed into later interpretations of Islam. Which means that Muslims can, today, look at those things and say, "Well, the core of our religion is here to stay with us. It's our faith, and we will be loyal to it. But we can change how it was interpreted, because it was interpreted according to the time and milieu in the Middle Ages. Now we're living in a different world, with different values and political systems." That interpretation is quite possible and feasible. Now, if I were the only person thinking that way, we would be in trouble. But that's not the case at all. Actually, from the 19th century on, there's a whole revisionist, reformist — whatever you call it — tradition, a trend in Islamic thinking. These were intellectuals or statesmen of the 19th century, and later, 20th century, which looked at Europe, basically, and saw that Europe has many things to admire, like science and technology. But not just that; also democracy, parliament, the idea of representation, the idea of equal citizenship. These Muslim thinkers, intellectuals and statesmen of the 19th century, looked at Europe, saw these things, and said, "Why don't we have these things?" And they looked back at Islamic tradition, and saw that there are problematic aspects, but they're not the core of the religion, so maybe they can be re-understood, and the Koran can be reread in the modern world. That trend is generally called Islamic modernism, and it was advanced by intellectuals and statesmen, not just as an intellectual idea, though, but also as a political program. And that's why, actually, in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East, made very important reforms — reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status, accepting a constitution, accepting a representative parliament, advancing the idea of freedom of religion. That's why the Ottoman Empire, in its last decades, turned into a proto-democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and freedom was a very important political value at the time. Similarly, in the Arab world, there was what the great Arab historian Albert Hourani defines as the Liberal Age. He has a book, "Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age," and the Liberal Age, he defines as 19th century and early 20th century. Quite notably, this was the dominant trend in the early 20th century among Islamic thinkers and statesmen and theologians. But there is a very curious pattern in the rest of the 20th century, because we see a sharp decline in this Islamic modernist line. And in place of that, what happens is that Islamism grows as an ideology which is authoritarian, which is quite strident, which is quite anti-Western, and which wants to shape society based on a utopian vision. So Islamism is the problematic idea that really created a lot of problems in the 20th-century Islamic world. And even the very extreme forms of Islamism led to terrorism in the name of Islam — which is actually a practice that I think is against Islam, but some, obviously, extremists, did not think that way. But there is a curious question: If Islamic modernism was so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, why did Islamism become so popular in the rest of the 20th century? And this is a question, I think, which needs to be discussed carefully. In my book, I went into that question as well. And actually, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that. Just look at the political history of the 20th century, and you see things have changed a lot. The contexts have changed. In the 19th century, when Muslims were looking at Europe as an example, they were independent; they were more self-confident. In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized. And when you have colonialization, what do you have? You have anti-colonialization. So Europe is not just an example now to emulate; it's an enemy to fight and to resist. So there's a very sharp decline in liberal ideas in the Muslim world, and what you see is more of a defensive, rigid, reactionary strain, which led to Arab socialism, Arab nationalism and ultimately to the Islamist ideology. And when the colonial period ended, what you had in place of that was generally secular dictators, which say they're a country, but did not bring democracy to the country, and established their own dictatorship. And I think the West, at least some powers in the West, particularly the United States, made the mistake of supporting those secular dictators, thinking that they were more helpful for their interests. But the fact that those dictators suppressed democracy in their country and suppressed Islamic groups in their country actually made the Islamists much more strident. So in the 20th century, you had this vicious cycle in the Arab world, where you have a dictatorship suppressing its own people, including the Islamic pious, and they're reacting in reactionary ways. There was one country, though, which was able to escape or stay away from that vicious cycle. And that's the country where I come from, Turkey. Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. That's one thing to remember; it did not share the same anti-colonial hype that you can find in some other countries in the region. Secondly, and most importantly, Turkey became a democracy earlier than any of the countries we are talking about. In 1950, Turkey had the first free and fair elections, which ended the more autocratic secular regime, which was in the beginning of Turkey. And the pious Muslims in Turkey saw that they could change the political system by voting. And they realized that democracy is something compatible with Islam, compatible with their values, and they've been supportive of democracy. That's an experience that not every other Muslim nation in the Middle East had, until very recently. Secondly, in the past two decades, thanks to globalization, thanks to the market economy, thanks to the rise of a middle class, we in Turkey see what I define as a rebirth of Islamic modernism. Now, there's the more urban middle-class pious Muslims who, again, look at their tradition and see that there are some problems in the tradition, and understand that they need to be changed and questioned and reformed. And they look at Europe, and see an example, again, to follow. They see an example, at least, to take some inspiration from. That's why the EU process, Turkey's effort to join the EU, has been supported inside Turkey by the Islamic pious, while some secular nationalists were against it. Well, that process has been a little bit blurred by the fact that not all Europeans are that welcoming, but that's another discussion. But the pro-EU sentiment in Turkey in the past decade has become almost an Islamic cause and supported by the Islamic liberals and the secular liberals as well, of course. And thanks to that, Turkey has been able to reasonably create a success story in which Islam and the most pious understandings of Islam have become part of the democratic game, and even contributes to the democratic and economic advance of the country. And this has been an inspiring example right now for some of the Islamic movements or some of the countries in the Arab world. You must have all seen the Arab Spring, which began in Tunis and in Egypt. Arab masses just revolted against their dictators. They were asking for democracy; they were asking for freedom. And they did not turn out to be the Islamist boogeyman that the dictators were always using to justify their regime. They said, "We want freedom; we want democracy. We are Muslim believers, but we want to be living as free people in free societies." Of course, this is a long road. Democracy is not an overnight achievement; it's a process. But this is a promising era in the Muslim world. And I believe that the Islamic modernism which began in the 19th century, but which had a setback in the 20th century because of the political troubles of the Muslim world, is having a rebirth. And I think the takeaway message from that would be that Islam, despite some of the skeptics in the West, has the potential in itself to create its own way to democracy, create its own way to liberalism, create its own way to freedom. They just should be allowed to work for that. Thanks so much. (Applause)

On violin and cello, "Passacaglia"

{0: "Violinist Robert Gupta joined the LA Philharmonic at the age of 19 -- and maintains a passionate parallel interest in neurobiology and mental health issues. He's a TED Senior Fellow.", 1: 'Joshua Roman is an internationally recognized cellist. '}

TED2011

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

Making a car for blind drivers

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

TED2011

Many believe driving is an activity solely reserved for those who can see. A blind person driving a vehicle safely and independently was thought to be an impossible task, until now. Hello, my name is Dennis Hong, and we're bringing freedom and independence to the blind by building a vehicle for the visually impaired. So before I talk about this car for the blind, let me briefly tell you about another project that I worked on called the DARPA Urban Challenge. Now this was about building a robotic car that can drive itself. You press start, nobody touches anything, and it can reach its destination fully autonomously. So in 2007, our team won half a million dollars by placing third place in this competition. So about that time, the National Federation of the Blind, or NFB, challenged the research committee about who can develop a car that lets a blind person drive safely and independently. We decided to give it a try, because we thought, "Hey, how hard could it be?" We have already an autonomous vehicle. We just put a blind person in it and we're done, right? (Laughter) We couldn't have been more wrong. What NFB wanted was not a vehicle that can drive a blind person around, but a vehicle where a blind person can make active decisions and drive. So we had to throw everything out the window and start from scratch. So to test this crazy idea, we developed a small dune buggy prototype vehicle to test the feasibility. And in the summer of 2009, we invited dozens of blind youth from all over the country and gave them a chance to take it for a spin. It was an absolutely amazing experience. But the problem with this car was it was designed to only be driven in a very controlled environment, in a flat, closed-off parking lot — even the lanes defined by red traffic cones. So with this success, we decided to take the next big step, to develop a real car that can be driven on real roads. So how does it work? Well, it's a rather complex system, but let me try to explain it, maybe simplify it. So we have three steps. We have perception, computation and non-visual interfaces. Now obviously the driver cannot see, so the system needs to perceive the environment and gather information for the driver. For that, we use an initial measurement unit. So it measures acceleration, angular acceleration — like a human ear, inner ear. We fuse that information with a GPS unit to get an estimate of the location of the car. We also use two cameras to detect the lanes of the road. And we also use three laser range finders. The lasers scan the environment to detect obstacles — a car approaching from the front, the back and also any obstacles that run into the roads, any obstacles around the vehicle. So all this vast amount of information is then fed into the computer, and the computer can do two things. One is, first of all, process this information to have an understanding of the environment — these are the lanes of the road, there's the obstacles — and convey this information to the driver. The system is also smart enough to figure out the safest way to operate the car. So we can also generate instructions on how to operate the controls of the vehicle. But the problem is this: How do we convey this information and instructions to a person who cannot see fast enough and accurate enough so he can drive? So for this, we developed many different types of non-visual user interface technology. So starting from a three-dimensional ping sound system, a vibrating vest, a click wheel with voice commands, a leg strip, even a shoe that applies pressure to the foot. But today we're going to talk about three of these non-visual user interfaces. Now the first interface is called a DriveGrip. So these are a pair of gloves, and it has vibrating elements on the knuckle part so you can convey instructions about how to steer — the direction and the intensity. Another device is called SpeedStrip. So this is a chair — as a matter of fact, it's actually a massage chair. We gut it out, and we rearrange the vibrating elements in different patterns, and we actuate them to convey information about the speed, and also instructions how to use the gas and the brake pedal. So over here, you can see how the computer understands the environment, and because you cannot see the vibration, we actually put red LED's on the driver so that you can see what's happening. This is the sensory data, and that data is transferred to the devices through the computer. So these two devices, DriveGrip and SpeedStrip, are very effective. But the problem is these are instructional cue devices. So this is not really freedom, right? The computer tells you how to drive — turn left, turn right, speed up, stop. We call this the "backseat-driver problem." So we're moving away from the instructional cue devices, and we're now focusing more on the informational devices. A good example for this informational non-visual user interface is called AirPix. So think of it as a monitor for the blind. So it's a small tablet, has many holes in it, and compressed air comes out, so it can actually draw images. So even though you are blind, you can put your hand over it, you can see the lanes of the road and obstacles. Actually, you can also change the frequency of the air coming out and possibly the temperature. So it's actually a multi-dimensional user interface. So here you can see the left camera, the right camera from the vehicle and how the computer interprets that and sends that information to the AirPix. For this, we're showing a simulator, a blind person driving using the AirPix. This simulator was also very useful for training the blind drivers and also quickly testing different types of ideas for different types of non-visual user interfaces. So basically that's how it works. So just a month ago, on January 29th, we unveiled this vehicle for the very first time to the public at the world-famous Daytona International Speedway during the Rolex 24 racing event. We also had some surprises. Let's take a look. (Music) (Video) Announcer: This is an historic day in January. He's coming up to the grandstand, fellow Federationists. (Cheering) (Honking) There's the grandstand now. And he's [unclear] following that van that's out in front of him. Well there comes the first box. Now let's see if Mark avoids it. He does. He passes it on the right. Third box is out. The fourth box is out. And he's perfectly making his way between the two. He's closing in on the van to make the moving pass. Well this is what it's all about, this kind of dynamic display of audacity and ingenuity. He's approaching the end of the run, makes his way between the barrels that are set up there. (Honking) (Applause) Dennis Hong: I'm so happy for you. Mark's going to give me a ride back to the hotel. Mark Riccobono: Yes. (Applause) DH: So since we started this project, we've been getting hundreds of letters, emails, phone calls from people from all around the world. Letters thanking us, but sometimes you also get funny letters like this one: "Now I understand why there is Braille on a drive-up ATM machine." (Laughter) But sometimes — (Laughter) But sometimes I also do get — I wouldn't call it hate mail — but letters of really strong concern: "Dr. Hong, are you insane, trying to put blind people on the road? You must be out of your mind." But this vehicle is a prototype vehicle, and it's not going to be on the road until it's proven as safe as, or safer than, today's vehicle. And I truly believe that this can happen. But still, will the society, would they accept such a radical idea? How are we going to handle insurance? How are we going to issue driver's licenses? There's many of these different kinds of hurdles besides technology challenges that we need to address before this becomes a reality. Of course, the main goal of this project is to develop a car for the blind. But potentially more important than this is the tremendous value of the spin-off technology that can come from this project. The sensors that are used can see through the dark, the fog and rain. And together with this new type of interfaces, we can use these technologies and apply them to safer cars for sighted people. Or for the blind, everyday home appliances — in the educational setting, in the office setting. Just imagine, in a classroom a teacher writes on the blackboard and a blind student can see what's written and read using these non-visual interfaces. This is priceless. So today, the things I've showed you today, is just the beginning. Thank you very much. (Applause)

7 rules for making more happiness

{0: 'Renowned for album covers, posters and his recent book of life lessons, designer Stefan Sagmeister invariably has a slightly different way of looking at things.'}

TED@Cannes

I spent the best part of last year working on a documentary about my own happiness — trying to see if I can actually train my mind in a particular way, like I can train my body, so I can end up with an improved feeling of overall well-being. Then this January, my mother died, and pursuing a film like that just seemed the last thing that was interesting to me. So in a very typical, silly designer fashion, after years worth of work, pretty much all I have to show for it are the titles for the film. (Music) They were still done when I was on sabbatical with my company in Indonesia. We can see the first part here was designed here by pigs. It was a little bit too funky, and we wanted a more feminine point of view and employed a duck who did it in a much more fitting way — fashion. My studio in Bali was only 10 minutes away from a monkey forest, and monkeys, of course, are supposed to be the happiest of all animals. So we trained them to be able to do three separate words, to lay out them properly. You can see, there still is a little bit of a legibility problem there. The serif is not really in place. So of course, what you don't do properly yourself is never deemed done really. So this is us climbing onto the trees and putting it up over the Sayan Valley in Indonesia. In that year, what I did do a lot was look at all sorts of surveys, looking at a lot of data on this subject. And it turns out that men and women report very, very similar levels of happiness. This is a very quick overview of all the studies that I looked at. That climate plays no role. That if you live in the best climate, in San Diego in the United States, or in the shittiest climate, in Buffalo, New York, you are going to be just as happy in either place. If you make more than 50,000 bucks a year in the U.S., any salary increase you're going to experience will have only a tiny, tiny influence on your overall well-being. Black people are just as happy as white people are. If you're old or young it doesn't really make a difference. If you're ugly or if you're really, really good-looking it makes no difference whatsoever. You will adapt to it and get used to it. If you have manageable health problems it doesn't really matter. Now this does matter. So now the woman on the right is actually much happier than the guy on the left — meaning that, if you have a lot of friends, and you have meaningful friendships, that does make a lot of difference. As well as being married — you are likely to be much happier than if you are single. A fellow TED speaker, Jonathan Haidt, came up with this beautiful little analogy between the conscious and the unconscious mind. He says that the conscious mind is this tiny rider on this giant elephant, the unconscious. And the rider thinks that he can tell the elephant what to do, but the elephant really has his own ideas. If I look at my own life, I'm born in 1962 in Austria. If I would have been born a hundred years earlier, the big decisions in my life would have been made for me — meaning I would have stayed in the town that I was born in; I would have very much likely entered the same profession that my dad did; and I would have very much likely married a woman that my mom had selected. I, of course, and all of us, are very much in charge of these big decisions in our lives. We live where we want to be — at least in the West. We become what we really are interested in. We choose our own profession, and we choose our own partners. And so it's quite surprising that many of us let our unconscious influence those decisions in ways that we are not quite aware of. If you look at the statistics and you see that the guy called George, when he decides on where he wants to live — is it Florida or North Dakota? — he goes and lives in Georgia. And if you look at a guy called Dennis, when he decides what to become — is it a lawyer, or does he want to become a doctor or a teacher? — best chance is that he wants to become a dentist. And if Paula decides should she marry Joe or Jack, somehow Paul sounds the most interesting. And so even if we make those very important decisions for very silly reasons, it remains statistically true that there are more Georges living in Georgia and there are more Dennises becoming dentists and there are more Paulas who are married to Paul than statistically viable. (Laughter) Now I, of course, thought, "Well this is American data," and I thought, "Well, those silly Americans. They get influenced by things that they're not aware of. This is just completely ridiculous." Then, of course, I looked at my mom and my dad — (Laughter) Karolina and Karl, and grandmom and granddad, Josefine and Josef. So I am looking still for a Stephanie. I'll figure something out. If I make this whole thing a little bit more personal and see what makes me happy as a designer, the easiest answer, of course, is do more of the stuff that I like to do and much less of the stuff that I don't like to do — for which it would be helpful to know what it is that I actually do like to do. I'm a big list maker, so I came up with a list. One of them is to think without pressure. This is a project we're working on right now with a very healthy deadline. It's a book on culture, and, as you can see, culture is rapidly drifting around. Doing things like I'm doing right now — traveling to Cannes. The example I have here is a chair that came out of the year in Bali — clearly influenced by local manufacturing and culture, not being stuck behind a single computer screen all day long and be here and there. Quite consciously, design projects that need an incredible amount of various techniques, just basically to fight straightforward adaptation. Being close to the content — that's the content really is close to my heart. This is a bus, or vehicle, for a charity, for an NGO that wants to double the education budget in the United States — carefully designed, so, by two inches, it still clears highway overpasses. Having end results — things that come back from the printer well, like this little business card for an animation company called Sideshow on lenticular foils. Working on projects that actually have visible impacts, like a book for a deceased German artist whose widow came to us with the requirement to make her late husband famous. It just came out six months ago, and it's getting unbelievable traction right now in Germany. And I think that his widow is going to be very successful on her quest. And lately, to be involved in projects where I know about 50 percent of the project technique-wise and the other 50 percent would be new. So in this case, it's an outside projection for Singapore on these giant Times Square-like screens. And I of course knew stuff, as a designer, about typography, even though we worked with those animals not so successfully. But I didn't quite know all that much about movement or film. And from that point of view we turned it into a lovely project. But also because the content was very close. In this case, "Keeping a Diary Supports Personal Development" — I've been keeping a diary since I was 12. And I've found that it influenced my life and work in a very intriguing way. In this case also because it's part of one of the many sentiments that we build the whole series on — that all the sentiments originally had come out of the diary. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Making sense of a visible quantum object

{0: "Aaron O'Connell is the first person to experimentally induce and measure quantum effects in the motion of a humanmade object, bridging the quantum and classical worlds."}

TED2011

This is a representation of your brain, and your brain can be broken into two parts. There's the left half, which is the logical side, and then the right half, which is the intuitive. And so if we had a scale to measure the aptitude of each hemisphere, then we can plot our brain. And for example, this would be somebody who's completely logical. This would be someone who's entirely intuitive. So where would you put your brain on this scale? Some of us may have opted for one of these extremes, but I think for most people in the audience, your brain is something like this — with a high aptitude in both hemispheres at the same time. It's not like they're mutually exclusive or anything. You can be logical and intuitive. And so I consider myself one of these people, along with most of the other experimental quantum physicists, who need a good deal of logic to string together these complex ideas. But at the same time, we need a good deal of intuition to actually make the experiments work. How do we develop this intuition? Well we like to play with stuff. So we go out and play with it, and then we see how it acts, and then we develop our intuition from there. And really you do the same thing. So some intuition that you may have developed over the years is that one thing is only in one place at a time. I mean, it can sound weird to think about one thing being in two different places at the same time, but you weren't born with this notion, you developed it. And I remember watching a kid playing on a car stop. He was just a toddler and he wasn't very good at it, and he kept falling over. But I bet playing with this car stop taught him a really valuable lesson, and that's that large things don't let you get right past them, and that they stay in one place. And so this is a great conceptual model to have of the world, unless you're a particle physicist. It'd be a terrible model for a particle physicist, because they don't play with car stops, they play with these little weird particles. And when they play with their particles, they find they do all sorts of really weird things — like they can fly right through walls, or they can be in two different places at the same time. And so they wrote down all these observations, and they called it the theory of quantum mechanics. And so that's where physics was at a few years ago; you needed quantum mechanics to describe little, tiny particles. But you didn't need it to describe the large, everyday objects around us. This didn't really sit well with my intuition, and maybe it's just because I don't play with particles very often. Well, I play with them sometimes, but not very often. And I've never seen them. I mean, nobody's ever seen a particle. But it didn't sit well with my logical side either. Because if everything is made up of little particles and all the little particles follow quantum mechanics, then shouldn't everything just follow quantum mechanics? I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. And so I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if we could somehow show that an everyday object also follows quantum mechanics. So a few years ago, I set off to do just that. So I made one. This is the first object that you can see that has been in a mechanical quantum superposition. So what we're looking at here is a tiny computer chip. And you can sort of see this green dot right in the middle. And that's this piece of metal I'm going to be talking about in a minute. This is a photograph of the object. And here I'll zoom in a little bit. We're looking right there in the center. And then here's a really, really big close-up of the little piece of metal. So what we're looking at is a little chunk of metal, and it's shaped like a diving board, and it's sticking out over a ledge. And so I made this thing in nearly the same way as you make a computer chip. I went into a clean room with a fresh silicon wafer, and then I just cranked away at all the big machines for about 100 hours. For the last stuff, I had to build my own machine — to make this swimming pool-shaped hole underneath the device. This device has the ability to be in a quantum superposition, but it needs a little help to do it. Here, let me give you an analogy. You know how uncomfortable it is to be in a crowded elevator? I mean, when I'm in an elevator all alone, I do all sorts of weird things, but then other people get on board and I stop doing those things because I don't want to bother them, or, frankly, scare them. So quantum mechanics says that inanimate objects feel the same way. The fellow passengers for inanimate objects are not just people, but it's also the light shining on it and the wind blowing past it and the heat of the room. And so we knew, if we wanted to see this piece of metal behave quantum mechanically, we're going to have to kick out all the other passengers. And so that's what we did. We turned off the lights, and then we put it in a vacuum and sucked out all the air, and then we cooled it down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Now, all alone in the elevator, the little chunk of metal is free to act however it wanted. And so we measured its motion. We found it was moving in really weird ways. Instead of just sitting perfectly still, it was vibrating, and the way it was vibrating was breathing something like this — like expanding and contracting bellows. And by giving it a gentle nudge, we were able to make it both vibrate and not vibrate at the same time — something that's only allowed with quantum mechanics. So what I'm telling you here is something truly fantastic. What does it mean for one thing to be both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time? So let's think about the atoms. So in one case: all the trillions of atoms that make up that chunk of metal are sitting still and at the same time those same atoms are moving up and down. Now it's only at precise times when they align. The rest of the time they're delocalized. That means that every atom is in two different places at the same time, which in turn means the entire chunk of metal is in two different places. I think this is really cool. (Laughter) Really. (Applause) It was worth locking myself in a clean room to do this for all those years because, check this out, the difference in scale between a single atom and that chunk of metal is about the same as the difference between that chunk of metal and you. So if a single atom can be in two different places at the same time, that chunk of metal can be in two different places, then why not you? I mean, this is just my logical side talking. So imagine if you're in multiple places at the same time, what would that be like? How would your consciousness handle your body being delocalized in space? There's one more part to the story. It's when we warmed it up, and we turned on the lights and looked inside the box, we saw that the piece metal was still there in one piece. And so I had to develop this new intuition, that it seems like all the objects in the elevator are really just quantum objects just crammed into a tiny space. You hear a lot of talk about how quantum mechanics says that everything is all interconnected. Well, that's not quite right. It's more than that; it's deeper. It's that those connections, your connections to all the things around you, literally define who you are, and that's the profound weirdness of quantum mechanics. Thank you. (Applause)

Wearing nothing new

{0: 'Jessi Arrington is a color-loving designer based in Brooklyn.'}

TEDActive 2011

I'm Jessi, and this is my suitcase. But before I show you what I've got inside, I'm going to make a very public confession, and that is, I'm outfit-obsessed. I love finding, wearing, and more recently, photographing and blogging a different, colorful, crazy outfit for every single occasion. But I don't buy anything new. I get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores. Aww, thank you. Secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet. I get to meet all kinds of great people; my dollars usually go to a good cause; I look pretty unique; and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt. I mean, what am I going to find today? Is it going to be my size? Will I like the color? Will it be under $20? If all the answers are yes, I feel as though I've won. I want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what I packed for this exciting week here at TED. I mean, what does somebody with all these outfits bring with her? So I'm going to show you exactly what I brought. I brought seven pairs of underpants and that's it. Exactly one week's worth of undies is all I put in my suitcase. I was betting that I'd be able to find everything else I could possible want to wear once I got here to Palm Springs. And since you don't know me as the woman walking around TED in her underwear — (Laughter) that means I found a few things. And I'd really love to show you my week's worth of outfits right now. Does that sound good? (Applause) So as I do this, I'm also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that, believe it or not, I have picked up in these adventures wearing nothing new. So let's start with Sunday. I call this "Shiny Tiger." You do not have to spend a lot of money to look great. You can almost always look phenomenal for under $50. This whole outfit, including the jacket, cost me $55, and it was the most expensive thing that I wore the entire week. Monday: Color is powerful. It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants. (Laughter) If you are happy, you are going to attract other happy people to you. Tuesday: Fitting in is way overrated. I've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in. Just be who you are. If you are surrounding yourself with the right people, they will not only get it, they will appreciate it. Wednesday: Embrace your inner child. Sometimes people tell me that I look like I'm playing dress-up, or that I remind them of their seven-year-old. I like to smile and say, "Thank you." Thursday: Confidence is key. If you think you look good in something, you almost certainly do. And if you don't think you look good in something, you're also probably right. I grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out. But it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really got what this meant. And I'm going to break it down for you for just a second. If you believe you're a beautiful person inside and out, there is no look that you can't pull off. So there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience. We should be able to rock anything we want to rock. Thank you. (Applause) Friday: A universal truth — five words for you: Gold sequins go with everything. And finally, Saturday: Developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word. It's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what I'm wearing, and we've had great conversations. So obviously this is not all going to fit back in my tiny suitcase. So before I go home to Brooklyn, I'm going to donate everything back. Because the lesson I'm trying to learn myself this week is that it's okay to let go. I don't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner, there is always going to be another crazy, colorful, shiny outfit just waiting for me, if I put a little love in my heart and look. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

We need a "moral operating system"

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

TEDxSiliconValley

Power. That is the word that comes to mind. We're the new technologists. We have a lot of data, so we have a lot of power. How much power do we have? Scene from a movie: "Apocalypse Now" — great movie. We've got to get our hero, Captain Willard, to the mouth of the Nung River so he can go pursue Colonel Kurtz. The way we're going to do this is fly him in and drop him off. So the scene: the sky is filled with this fleet of helicopters carrying him in. And there's this loud, thrilling music in the background, this wild music. ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Da ta da da ♫ That's a lot of power. That's the kind of power I feel in this room. That's the kind of power we have because of all of the data that we have. Let's take an example. What can we do with just one person's data? What can we do with that guy's data? I can look at your financial records. I can tell if you pay your bills on time. I know if you're good to give a loan to. I can look at your medical records; I can see if your pump is still pumping — see if you're good to offer insurance to. I can look at your clicking patterns. When you come to my website, I actually know what you're going to do already because I've seen you visit millions of websites before. And I'm sorry to tell you, you're like a poker player, you have a tell. I can tell with data analysis what you're going to do before you even do it. I know what you like. I know who you are, and that's even before I look at your mail or your phone. Those are the kinds of things we can do with the data that we have. But I'm not actually here to talk about what we can do. I'm here to talk about what we should do. What's the right thing to do? Now I see some puzzled looks like, "Why are you asking us what's the right thing to do? We're just building this stuff. Somebody else is using it." Fair enough. But it brings me back. I think about World War II — some of our great technologists then, some of our great physicists, studying nuclear fission and fusion — just nuclear stuff. We gather together these physicists in Los Alamos to see what they'll build. We want the people building the technology thinking about what we should be doing with the technology. So what should we be doing with that guy's data? Should we be collecting it, gathering it, so we can make his online experience better? So we can make money? So we can protect ourselves if he was up to no good? Or should we respect his privacy, protect his dignity and leave him alone? Which one is it? How should we figure it out? I know: crowdsource. Let's crowdsource this. So to get people warmed up, let's start with an easy question — something I'm sure everybody here has an opinion about: iPhone versus Android. Let's do a show of hands — iPhone. Uh huh. Android. You'd think with a bunch of smart people we wouldn't be such suckers just for the pretty phones. (Laughter) Next question, a little bit harder. Should we be collecting all of that guy's data to make his experiences better and to protect ourselves in case he's up to no good? Or should we leave him alone? Collect his data. Leave him alone. You're safe. It's fine. (Laughter) Okay, last question — harder question — when trying to evaluate what we should do in this case, should we use a Kantian deontological moral framework, or should we use a Millian consequentialist one? Kant. Mill. Not as many votes. (Laughter) Yeah, that's a terrifying result. Terrifying, because we have stronger opinions about our hand-held devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions. How do we know what to do with all the power we have if we don't have a moral framework? We know more about mobile operating systems, but what we really need is a moral operating system. What's a moral operating system? We all know right and wrong, right? You feel good when you do something right, you feel bad when you do something wrong. Our parents teach us that: praise with the good, scold with the bad. But how do we figure out what's right and wrong? And from day to day, we have the techniques that we use. Maybe we just follow our gut. Maybe we take a vote — we crowdsource. Or maybe we punt — ask the legal department, see what they say. In other words, it's kind of random, kind of ad hoc, how we figure out what we should do. And maybe, if we want to be on surer footing, what we really want is a moral framework that will help guide us there, that will tell us what kinds of things are right and wrong in the first place, and how would we know in a given situation what to do. So let's get a moral framework. We're numbers people, living by numbers. How can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework? I know a guy who did exactly that. A brilliant guy — he's been dead 2,500 years. Plato, that's right. Remember him — old philosopher? You were sleeping during that class. And Plato, he had a lot of the same concerns that we did. He was worried about right and wrong. He wanted to know what is just. But he was worried that all we seem to be doing is trading opinions about this. He says something's just. She says something else is just. It's kind of convincing when he talks and when she talks too. I'm just going back and forth; I'm not getting anywhere. I don't want opinions; I want knowledge. I want to know the truth about justice — like we have truths in math. In math, we know the objective facts. Take a number, any number — two. Favorite number. I love that number. There are truths about two. If you've got two of something, you add two more, you get four. That's true no matter what thing you're talking about. It's an objective truth about the form of two, the abstract form. When you have two of anything — two eyes, two ears, two noses, just two protrusions — those all partake of the form of two. They all participate in the truths that two has. They all have two-ness in them. And therefore, it's not a matter of opinion. What if, Plato thought, ethics was like math? What if there were a pure form of justice? What if there are truths about justice, and you could just look around in this world and see which things participated, partook of that form of justice? Then you would know what was really just and what wasn't. It wouldn't be a matter of just opinion or just appearances. That's a stunning vision. I mean, think about that. How grand. How ambitious. That's as ambitious as we are. He wants to solve ethics. He wants objective truths. If you think that way, you have a Platonist moral framework. If you don't think that way, well, you have a lot of company in the history of Western philosophy, because the tidy idea, you know, people criticized it. Aristotle, in particular, he was not amused. He thought it was impractical. Aristotle said, "We should seek only so much precision in each subject as that subject allows." Aristotle thought ethics wasn't a lot like math. He thought ethics was a matter of making decisions in the here-and-now using our best judgment to find the right path. If you think that, Plato's not your guy. But don't give up. Maybe there's another way that we can use numbers as the basis of our moral framework. How about this: What if in any situation you could just calculate, look at the choices, measure out which one's better and know what to do? That sound familiar? That's a utilitarian moral framework. John Stuart Mill was a great advocate of this — nice guy besides — and only been dead 200 years. So basis of utilitarianism — I'm sure you're familiar at least. The three people who voted for Mill before are familiar with this. But here's the way it works. What if morals, what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain? It does something intrinsic to the act. It's not like its relation to some abstract form. It's just a matter of the consequences. You just look at the consequences and see if, overall, it's for the good or for the worse. That would be simple. Then we know what to do. Let's take an example. Suppose I go up and I say, "I'm going to take your phone." Not just because it rang earlier, but I'm going to take it because I made a little calculation. I thought, that guy looks suspicious. And what if he's been sending little messages to Bin Laden's hideout — or whoever took over after Bin Laden — and he's actually like a terrorist, a sleeper cell. I'm going to find that out, and when I find that out, I'm going to prevent a huge amount of damage that he could cause. That has a very high utility to prevent that damage. And compared to the little pain that it's going to cause — because it's going to be embarrassing when I'm looking on his phone and seeing that he has a Farmville problem and that whole bit — that's overwhelmed by the value of looking at the phone. If you feel that way, that's a utilitarian choice. But maybe you don't feel that way either. Maybe you think, it's his phone. It's wrong to take his phone because he's a person and he has rights and he has dignity, and we can't just interfere with that. He has autonomy. It doesn't matter what the calculations are. There are things that are intrinsically wrong — like lying is wrong, like torturing innocent children is wrong. Kant was very good on this point, and he said it a little better than I'll say it. He said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct, and then it is our duty to follow those rules. It's not a matter of calculation. So let's stop. We're right in the thick of it, this philosophical thicket. And this goes on for thousands of years, because these are hard questions, and I've only got 15 minutes. So let's cut to the chase. How should we be making our decisions? Is it Plato, is it Aristotle, is it Kant, is it Mill? What should we be doing? What's the answer? What's the formula that we can use in any situation to determine what we should do, whether we should use that guy's data or not? What's the formula? There's not a formula. There's not a simple answer. Ethics is hard. Ethics requires thinking. And that's uncomfortable. I know; I spent a lot of my career in artificial intelligence, trying to build machines that could do some of this thinking for us, that could give us answers. But they can't. You can't just take human thinking and put it into a machine. We're the ones who have to do it. Happily, we're not machines, and we can do it. Not only can we think, we must. Hannah Arendt said, "The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil. It arises from not thinking." That's what she called the "banality of evil." And the response to that is that we demand the exercise of thinking from every sane person. So let's do that. Let's think. In fact, let's start right now. Every person in this room do this: think of the last time you had a decision to make where you were worried to do the right thing, where you wondered, "What should I be doing?" Bring that to mind, and now reflect on that and say, "How did I come up that decision? What did I do? Did I follow my gut? Did I have somebody vote on it? Or did I punt to legal?" Or now we have a few more choices. "Did I evaluate what would be the highest pleasure like Mill would? Or like Kant, did I use reason to figure out what was intrinsically right?" Think about it. Really bring it to mind. This is important. It is so important we are going to spend 30 seconds of valuable TEDTalk time doing nothing but thinking about this. Are you ready? Go. Stop. Good work. What you just did, that's the first step towards taking responsibility for what we should do with all of our power. Now the next step — try this. Go find a friend and explain to them how you made that decision. Not right now. Wait till I finish talking. Do it over lunch. And don't just find another technologist friend; find somebody different than you. Find an artist or a writer — or, heaven forbid, find a philosopher and talk to them. In fact, find somebody from the humanities. Why? Because they think about problems differently than we do as technologists. Just a few days ago, right across the street from here, there was hundreds of people gathered together. It was technologists and humanists at that big BiblioTech Conference. And they gathered together because the technologists wanted to learn what it would be like to think from a humanities perspective. You have someone from Google talking to someone who does comparative literature. You're thinking about the relevance of 17th century French theater — how does that bear upon venture capital? Well that's interesting. That's a different way of thinking. And when you think in that way, you become more sensitive to the human considerations, which are crucial to making ethical decisions. So imagine that right now you went and you found your musician friend. And you're telling him what we're talking about, about our whole data revolution and all this — maybe even hum a few bars of our theme music. ♫ Dum ta da da dum dum ta da da dum ♫ Well, your musician friend will stop you and say, "You know, the theme music for your data revolution, that's an opera, that's Wagner. It's based on Norse legend. It's Gods and mythical creatures fighting over magical jewelry." That's interesting. Now it's also a beautiful opera, and we're moved by that opera. We're moved because it's about the battle between good and evil, about right and wrong. And we care about right and wrong. We care what happens in that opera. We care what happens in "Apocalypse Now." And we certainly care what happens with our technologies. We have so much power today, it is up to us to figure out what to do, and that's the good news. We're the ones writing this opera. This is our movie. We figure out what will happen with this technology. We determine how this will all end. Thank you. (Applause)

Building a dinosaur from a chicken

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

TED2011

When I was growing up in Montana, I had two dreams. I wanted to be a paleontologist, a dinosaur paleontologist, and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur. And so that's what I've been striving for all of my life. I was very fortunate early in my career. I was fortunate in finding things. I wasn't very good at reading things. In fact, I don't read much of anything. I am extremely dyslexic, and so reading is the hardest thing I do. But instead, I go out and I find things. Then I just pick things up. I basically practice for finding money on the street. (Laughter) And I wander about the hills, and I have found a few things. And I have been fortunate enough to find things like the first eggs in the Western hemisphere and the first baby dinosaurs in nests, the first dinosaur embryos and massive accumulations of bones. And it happened to be at a time when people were just starting to begin to realize that dinosaurs weren't the big, stupid, green reptiles that people had thought for so many years. People were starting to get an idea that dinosaurs were special. And so, at that time, I was able to make some interesting hypotheses along with my colleagues. We were able to actually say that dinosaurs — based on the evidence we had — that dinosaurs built nests and lived in colonies and cared for their young, brought food to their babies and traveled in gigantic herds. So it was pretty interesting stuff. I have gone on to find more things and discover that dinosaurs really were very social. We have found a lot of evidence that dinosaurs changed from when they were juveniles to when they were adults. The appearance of them would have been different — which it is in all social animals. In social groups of animals, the juveniles always look different than the adults. The adults can recognize the juveniles; the juveniles can recognize the adults. And so we're making a better picture of what a dinosaur looks like. And they didn't just all chase Jeeps around. (Laughter) But it is that social thing that I guess attracted Michael Crichton. And in his book, he talked about the social animals. And then Steven Spielberg, of course, depicts these dinosaurs as being very social creatures. The theme of this story is building a dinosaur, and so we come to that part of "Jurassic Park." Michael Crichton really was one of the first people to talk about bringing dinosaurs back to life. You all know the story, right. I mean, I assume everyone here has seen "Jurassic Park." If you want to make a dinosaur, you go out, you find yourself a piece of petrified tree sap — otherwise known as amber — that has some blood-sucking insects in it, good ones, and you get your insect and you drill into it and you suck out some DNA, because obviously all insects that sucked blood in those days sucked dinosaur DNA out. And you take your DNA back to the laboratory and you clone it. And I guess you inject it into maybe an ostrich egg, or something like that, and then you wait, and, lo and behold, out pops a little baby dinosaur. And everybody's happy about that. (Laughter) And they're happy over and over again. They keep doing it; they just keep making these things. And then, then, then, and then ... Then the dinosaurs, being social, act out their socialness, and they get together, and they conspire. And, of course, that's what makes Steven Spielberg's movie — conspiring dinosaurs chasing people around. So I assume everybody knows that if you actually had a piece of amber and it had an insect in it, and you drilled into it, and you got something out of that insect, and you cloned it, and you did it over and over and over again, you'd have a room full of mosquitos. (Laughter) (Applause) And probably a whole bunch of trees as well. Now if you want dinosaur DNA, I say go to the dinosaur. So that's what we've done. Back in 1993 when the movie came out, we actually had a grant from the National Science Foundation to attempt to extract DNA from a dinosaur, and we chose the dinosaur on the left, a Tyrannosaurus rex, which was a very nice specimen. And one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, actually had the background to do this sort of thing. And so she looked into the bone of this T. rex, one of the thigh bones, and she actually found some very interesting structures in there. They found these red circular-looking objects, and they looked, for all the world, like red blood cells. And they're in what appear to be the blood channels that go through the bone. And so she thought, well, what the heck. So she sampled some material out of it. Now it wasn't DNA; she didn't find DNA. But she did find heme, which is the biological foundation of hemoglobin. And that was really cool. That was interesting. That was — here we have 65-million-year-old heme. Well we tried and tried and we couldn't really get anything else out of it. So a few years went by, and then we started the Hell Creek Project. And the Hell Creek Project was this massive undertaking to get as many dinosaurs as we could possibly find, and hopefully find some dinosaurs that had more material in them. And out in eastern Montana there's a lot of space, a lot of badlands, and not very many people, and so you can go out there and find a lot of stuff. And we did find a lot of stuff. We found a lot of Tyrannosaurs, but we found one special Tyrannosaur, and we called it B-rex. And B-rex was found under a thousand cubic yards of rock. It wasn't a very complete T. rex, and it wasn't a very big T. rex, but it was a very special B-rex. And I and my colleagues cut into it, and we were able to determine, by looking at lines of arrested growth, some lines in it, that B-rex had died at the age of 16. We don't really know how long dinosaurs lived, because we haven't found the oldest one yet. But this one died at the age of 16. We gave samples to Mary Schweitzer, and she was actually able to determine that B-rex was a female based on medullary tissue found on the inside of the bone. Medullary tissue is the calcium build-up, the calcium storage basically, when an animal is pregnant, when a bird is pregnant. So here was the character that linked birds and dinosaurs. But Mary went further. She took the bone, and she dumped it into acid. Now we all know that bones are fossilized, and so if you dump it into acid, there shouldn't be anything left. But there was something left. There were blood vessels left. There were flexible, clear blood vessels. And so here was the first soft tissue from a dinosaur. It was extraordinary. But she also found osteocytes, which are the cells that laid down the bones. And try and try, we could not find DNA, but she did find evidence of proteins. But we thought maybe — well, we thought maybe that the material was breaking down after it was coming out of the ground. We thought maybe it was deteriorating very fast. And so we built a laboratory in the back of an 18-wheeler trailer, and actually took the laboratory to the field where we could get better samples. And we did. We got better material. The cells looked better. The vessels looked better. Found the protein collagen. I mean, it was wonderful stuff. But it's not dinosaur DNA. So we have discovered that dinosaur DNA, and all DNA, just breaks down too fast. We're just not going to be able to do what they did in "Jurassic Park." We're not going to be able to make a dinosaur based on a dinosaur. But birds are dinosaurs. Birds are living dinosaurs. We actually classify them as dinosaurs. We now call them non-avian dinosaurs and avian dinosaurs. So the non-avian dinosaurs are the big clunky ones that went extinct. Avian dinosaurs are our modern birds. So we don't have to make a dinosaur because we already have them. (Laughter) I know, you're as bad as the sixth-graders. (Laughter) The sixth-graders look at it and they say, "No." (Laughter) "You can call it a dinosaur, but look at the velociraptor: the velociraptor is cool." (Laughter) "The chicken is not." (Laughter) So this is our problem, as you can imagine. The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean it really is. You can't argue with it because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way. (Laughter) (Applause) But the sixth-graders demand it. "Fix the chicken." (Laughter) So that's what I'm here to tell you about: how we are going to fix a chicken. So we have a number of ways that we actually can fix the chicken. Because evolution works, we actually have some evolutionary tools. We'll call them biological modification tools. We have selection. And we know selection works. We started out with a wolf-like creature and we ended up with a Maltese. I mean, that's — that's definitely genetic modification. Or any of the other funny-looking little dogs. We also have transgenesis. Transgenesis is really cool too. That's where you take a gene out of one animal and stick it in another one. That's how people make GloFish. You take a glow gene out of a coral or a jellyfish and you stick it in a zebrafish, and, puff, they glow. And that's pretty cool. And they obviously make a lot of money off of them. And now they're making Glow-rabbits and Glow-all-sorts-of-things. I guess we could make a glow chicken. (Laughter) But I don't think that'll satisfy the sixth-graders either. But there's another thing. There's what we call atavism activation. And atavism activation is basically — an atavism is an ancestral characteristic. You heard that occasionally children are born with tails, and it's because it's an ancestral characteristic. And so there are a number of atavisms that can happen. Snakes are occasionally born with legs. And here's an example. This is a chicken with teeth. A fellow by the name of Matthew Harris at the University of Wisconsin in Madison actually figured out a way to stimulate the gene for teeth, and so was able to actually turn the tooth gene on and produce teeth in chickens. Now that's a good characteristic. We can save that one. We know we can use that. We can make a chicken with teeth. That's getting closer. That's better than a glowing chicken. (Laughter) A friend of mine, a colleague of mine, Dr. Hans Larsson at McGill University, is actually looking at atavisms. And he's looking at them by looking at the embryo genesis of birds and actually looking at how they develop, and he's interested in how birds actually lost their tail. He's also interested in the transformation of the arm, the hand, to the wing. He's looking for those genes as well. And I said, "Well, if you can find those, I can just reverse them and make what I need to make for the sixth-graders." And so he agreed. And so that's what we're looking into. If you look at dinosaur hands, a velociraptor has that cool-looking hand with the claws on it. Archaeopteryx, which is a bird, a primitive bird, still has that very primitive hand. But as you can see, the pigeon, or a chicken or anything else, another bird, has kind of a weird-looking hand, because the hand is a wing. But the cool thing is that, if you look in the embryo, as the embryo is developing the hand actually looks pretty much like the archaeopteryx hand. It has the three fingers, the three digits. But a gene turns on that actually fuses those together. And so what we're looking for is that gene. We want to stop that gene from turning on, fusing those hands together, so we can get a chicken that hatches out with a three-fingered hand, like the archaeopteryx. And the same goes for the tails. Birds have basically rudimentary tails. And so we know that in embryo, as the animal is developing, it actually has a relatively long tail. But a gene turns on and resorbs the tail, gets rid of it. So that's the other gene we're looking for. We want to stop that tail from resorbing. So what we're trying to do really is take our chicken, modify it and make the chickenosaurus. (Laughter) It's a cooler-looking chicken. But it's just the very basics. So that really is what we're doing. And people always say, "Why do that? Why make this thing? What good is it?" Well, that's a good question. Actually, I think it's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things. And quite frankly, I think if Colonel Sanders was to be careful how he worded it, he could actually advertise an extra piece. (Laughter) Anyway — When our dino-chicken hatches, it will be, obviously, the poster child, or what you might call a poster chick, for technology, entertainment and design. Thank you. (Applause)

Taking imagination seriously

{0: 'American artist Janet Echelman reshapes urban airspace with monumental, fluidly moving sculpture that responds to environmental forces including wind, water, and sunlight.'}

TED2011

This story is about taking imagination seriously. Fourteen years ago, I first encountered this ordinary material, fishnet, used the same way for centuries. Today, I'm using it to create permanent, billowing, voluptuous forms the scale of hard-edged buildings in cities around the world. I was an unlikely person to be doing this. I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven. I went off on my own to become an artist, and I painted for 10 years, when I was offered a Fulbright to India. Promising to give exhibitions of paintings, I shipped my paints and arrived in Mahabalipuram. The deadline for the show arrived — my paints didn't. I had to do something. This fishing village was famous for sculpture. So I tried bronze casting. But to make large forms was too heavy and expensive. I went for a walk on the beach, watching the fishermen bundle their nets into mounds on the sand. I'd seen it every day, but this time I saw it differently — a new approach to sculpture, a way to make volumetric form without heavy solid materials. My first satisfying sculpture was made in collaboration with these fishermen. It's a self-portrait titled "Wide Hips." (Laughter) We hoisted them on poles to photograph. I discovered their soft surfaces revealed every ripple of wind in constantly changing patterns. I was mesmerized. I continued studying craft traditions and collaborating with artisans, next in Lithuania with lace makers. I liked the fine detail it gave my work, but I wanted to make them larger — to shift from being an object you look at to something you could get lost in. Returning to India to work with those fishermen, we made a net of a million and a half hand-tied knots — installed briefly in Madrid. Thousands of people saw it, and one of them was the urbanist Manual Sola-Morales who was redesigning the waterfront in Porto, Portugal. He asked if I could build this as a permanent piece for the city. I didn't know if I could do that and preserve my art. Durable, engineered, permanent — those are in opposition to idiosyncratic, delicate and ephemeral. For two years, I searched for a fiber that could survive ultraviolet rays, salt, air, pollution, and at the same time remain soft enough to move fluidly in the wind. We needed something to hold the net up out there in the middle of the traffic circle. So we raised this 45,000-pound steel ring. We had to engineer it to move gracefully in an average breeze and survive in hurricane winds. But there was no engineering software to model something porous and moving. I found a brilliant aeronautical engineer who designs sails for America's Cup racing yachts named Peter Heppel. He helped me tackle the twin challenges of precise shape and gentle movement. I couldn't build this the way I knew because hand-tied knots weren't going to withstand a hurricane. So I developed a relationship with an industrial fishnet factory, learned the variables of their machines, and figured out a way to make lace with them. There was no language to translate this ancient, idiosyncratic handcraft into something machine operators could produce. So we had to create one. Three years and two children later, we raised this 50,000-square-foot lace net. It was hard to believe that what I had imagined was now built, permanent and had lost nothing in translation. (Applause) This intersection had been bland and anonymous. Now it had a sense of place. I walked underneath it for the first time. As I watched the wind's choreography unfold, I felt sheltered and, at the same time, connected to limitless sky. My life was not going to be the same. I want to create these oases of sculpture in spaces of cities around the world. I'm going to share two directions that are new in my work. Historic Philadelphia City Hall: its plaza, I felt, needed a material for sculpture that was lighter than netting. So we experimented with tiny atomized water particles to create a dry mist that is shaped by the wind and in testing, discovered that it can be shaped by people who can interact and move through it without getting wet. I'm using this sculpture material to trace the paths of subway trains above ground in real time — like an X-ray of the city's circulatory system unfolding. Next challenge, the Biennial of the Americas in Denver asked, could I represent the 35 nations of the Western hemisphere and their interconnectedness in a sculpture? (Laughter) I didn't know where to begin, but I said yes. I read about the recent earthquake in Chile and the tsunami that rippled across the entire Pacific Ocean. It shifted the Earth's tectonic plates, sped up the planet's rotation and literally shortened the length of the day. So I contacted NOAA, and I asked if they'd share their data on the tsunami, and translated it into this. Its title: "1.26" refers to the number of microseconds that the Earth's day was shortened. I couldn't build this with a steel ring, the way I knew. Its shape was too complex now. So I replaced the metal armature with a soft, fine mesh of a fiber 15 times stronger than steel. The sculpture could now be entirely soft, which made it so light it could tie in to existing buildings — literally becoming part of the fabric of the city. There was no software that could extrude these complex net forms and model them with gravity. So we had to create it. Then I got a call from New York City asking if I could adapt these concepts to Times Square or the High Line. This new soft structural method enables me to model these and build these sculptures at the scale of skyscrapers. They don't have funding yet, but I dream now of bringing these to cities around the world where they're most needed. Fourteen years ago, I searched for beauty in the traditional things, in craft forms. Now I combine them with hi-tech materials and engineering to create voluptuous, billowing forms the scale of buildings. My artistic horizons continue to grow. I'll leave you with this story. I got a call from a friend in Phoenix. An attorney in the office who'd never been interested in art, never visited the local art museum, dragged everyone she could from the building and got them outside to lie down underneath the sculpture. There they were in their business suits, laying in the grass, noticing the changing patterns of wind beside people they didn't know, sharing the rediscovery of wonder. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

The world's first charter city?

{0: "Paul Romer's research on catch-up growth in low- and middle-income countries has emphasized the importance of government policies that encourage orderly urban expansion."}

TED2011

In 2007, I decided that we needed to reconceptualize how we thought about economic development. Our new goal should be that when every family thinks about where they want to live and work, they should be able to choose between at least a handful of different cities that were all competing to attract new residents. Now we're a long way away from that goal right now. There are billions of people in developing countries who don't have even a single city that would be willing to welcome them. But the amazing thing about cities is they're worth so much more than it costs to build them. So we could easily supply the world with dozens, maybe hundreds, of new cities. Now this might sound preposterous to you if you've never thought about new cities. But just substitute apartment building for cities. Imagine half the people who wanted to be in apartments already had them; the other half aren't there yet. You could try and expand the capacity by doing additions on all the existing apartments. But you know what you'd run into is those apartments and the surrounding areas have rules to avoid discomfort and the distractions of construction. So it's extremely hard to do all of those additions. But you could go out someplace brand new, build a brand new apartment building, as long as the rules there were ones that facilitated construction rather than getting in the way. So I proposed that governments create new reform zones big enough to hold cities and gave them a name: charter cities. Later I learned that at about this same time, Javier and Octavio were thinking about the challenge of reform in Honduras. They knew that about 75,000 Hondurans every year would leave to go to the United States, and they wanted to ask, what could they do to make sure that those people could stay and do the same things in Honduras. At one point, Javier said to Octavio, "What if we took some of our empty land — what if we just gave it to an embassy — give some to the U.S. embassy; give some to the Canadian embassy — and then if people want to go work under the rules of Canada or under the rules of the United States, they can go get jobs, do everything they do on those embassy grounds that they would otherwise have to go to Canada or the U.S. to do?" In the summer of 2009, Honduras went through a wrenching constitutional crisis. At the next regularly scheduled election, Pepe Lobo won in a landslide on a platform that promised reform, but reconciliation as well. He asked Octavio to be his chief of staff. Meanwhile, I was getting ready to give a talk at TEDGlobal. Through a process of refinement, trial and error, a lot of user testing, I tried to boil this complicated concept of charter city down to the bare essentials. The first point was the importance of rules, like those rules that say you can't come in and disturb all the existing apartment holders. We pay a lot of attention to new technologies, but it takes technologies and rules to get progress, and it's usually the rules that hold us back. In the fall of 2010, a friend from Guatemala sent Octavio a link to the TEDTalk. He showed it to Javier. They called me. They said, "Let's present this to the leaders of our country." So in December we met in Miami, in a hotel conference room. I tried to explain this point about how valuable cities are, how much more valuable they are than they cost. And I used this slide showing how valuable the raw land is in a place like New York City: notice, land that's worth thousands of dollars, in some cases, per square meter. But it was a fairly abstract discussion, and at some point when there was a pause, Octavio said, "Paul, maybe we could watch the TEDTalk." (Laughing) So the TEDTalk laid out in very simple terms, a charter city is a place where you start with uninhabited land, a charter that specifies the rules that will apply there and then a chance for people to opt in, to go live under those rules or not. So I was asked by the president of Honduras who said that we need to do this project, this is important, this could be the way forward for our country. I was asked to come to Tegucigalpa and talk again on January fourth and fifth. So I presented another fact-filled lecture that included a slide like this, which tried to make the point that, if you want to create a lot of value in a city, it has to be very big. This is a picture of Denver, and the outline is the new airport that was built in Denver. This airport alone covers more than 100 square kilometers. So I was trying to persuade the Hondurans, if you build a new city, you've got to start with a site that's at least 1,000 square kilometers. That's more than 250 hundred-thousand acres. Everybody applauded politely. The faces in the audience were very serious and attentive. The leader of the congress came up on stage and said, "Professor Romer, thank you very much for your lecture, but maybe we could watch the TEDTalk. I've got it here on my laptop." So I sat down, and they played the TEDTalk. And it got to the essence, which is that a new city could offer new choices for people. There would be a choice of a city which you could go to which could be in Honduras, instead of hundreds of miles away in the North. And it also involved new choices for leaders. Because the leaders in the government there in Honduras would need help from partner countries, who could benefit from partner countries who help them set up the rules in this charter and the enforcement, so everybody can trust that the charter really will be enforced. And the insight of President Lobo was that that assurance of enforcement that I was thinking about as a way to get the foreign investors to come in and build the city could be equally important for all the different parties in Honduras who had suffered for so many years from fear and distrust. We went and looked at a site. This picture's from there. It easily could hold a thousand square kilometers. And shortly thereafter, on January 19th, they voted in the congress to amend their constitution to have a constitutional provision that allows for special development regions. In a country which had just gone through this wrenching crisis, the vote in the congress in favor of this constitutional amendment was 124 to one. All parties, all factions in society, backed this. To be part of the constitution, you actually have to pass it twice in the congress. On February 17th they passed it again with another vote of 114 to one. Immediately after that vote, on February 21st to the 24th, a delegation of about 30 Hondurans went to the two places in the world that are most interested in getting into the city building business. One is South Korea. This is a picture of a big, new city center that's being built in South Korea — bigger than downtown Boston. Everything you see there was built in four years, after they spent four years getting the permits. The other place that's very interested in city building is Singapore. They've actually built two cities already in China and are preparing the third. So if you think about this practically, here's where we are. They've got a site; they're already thinking about this site for the second city. They're putting in place a legal system that could allow for managers to come in, and also an external legal system. One country has already volunteered to let its supreme court be the court of final appeal for the new judicial system there. There's designers and builders of cities who are very interested. They even can bring with them some financing. But the one thing you know they've already solved is that there's lots of tenants. There's lots of businesses that would like to locate in the Americas, especially in a place with a free trade zone, and there's lots of people who'd like to go there. Around the world, there's 700 million people who say they'd like to move permanently someplace else right now. There's a million a year who leave Latin America to go to the United States. Many of these are a father who has to leave his family behind to go get a job — sometimes a single mother who has to get enough money to even pay for food or clothing. Sadly, sometimes there are even children who are trying to get reunited with their parents that they haven't seen, in some cases, for a decade. So what kind of an idea is it to think about building a brand new city in Honduras? Or to build a dozen of these, or a hundred of these, around the world? What kind of an idea is it to think about insisting that every family have a choice of several cities that are competing to attract new residents? This is an idea worth spreading. And my friends from Honduras asked me to say thank you, TED. (Applause)

Is anatomy destiny?

{0: 'Alice Dreger studies history and anatomy, and acts as a patient advocate.'}

TEDxNorthwesternU

I want you to imagine two couples in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day, at the exact same moment, each conceiving a baby, OK? So two couples each conceiving one baby. Now I don't want you to spend too much time imagining the conception, because if you do, you're not going to listen to me, so just imagine that for a moment. And in this scenario, I want to imagine that, in one case, the sperm is carrying a Y chromosome, meeting that X chromosome of the egg. And in the other case, the sperm is carrying an X chromosome, meeting the X chromosome of the egg. Both are viable; both take off. We'll come back to these people later. So I wear two hats in most of what I do. As the one hat, I do history of anatomy. I'm a historian by training, and what I study in that case is the way that people have dealt with anatomy — meaning human bodies, animal bodies — how they dealt with bodily fluids, concepts of bodies; how have they thought about bodies. The other hat that I've worn in my work is as an activist, as a patient advocate — or, as I sometimes say, as an impatient advocate — for people who are patients of doctors. In that case, what I've worked with is people who have body types that challenge social norms. So some of what I've worked on, for example, is people who are conjoined twins — two people within one body. Some of what I've worked on is people who have dwarfism — so people who are much shorter than typical. And a lot of what I've worked on is people who have atypical sex — so people who don't have the standard male or the standard female body types. And as a general term, we can use the term "intersex" for this. Intersex comes in a lot of different forms. I'll just give you a few examples of the types of ways you can have sex that isn't standard for male or female. So in one instance, you can have somebody who has an XY chromosomal basis, and that SRY gene on the Y chromosome tells the proto-gonads, which we all have in the fetal life, to become testes. So in the fetal life, those testes are pumping out testosterone. But because this individual lacks receptors to hear that testosterone, the body doesn't react to the testosterone. And this is a syndrome called androgen insensitivity syndrome. So lots of levels of testosterone, but no reaction to it. As a consequence, the body develops more along the female typical path. When the child is born, she looks like a girl. She is a girl, she is raised as a girl. And it's often not until she hits puberty and she's growing and developing breasts, but she's not getting her period, that somebody figures out something's up here. And they do some tests and figure out that, instead of having ovaries inside and a uterus, she has testes inside, and she has a Y chromosome. Now what's important to understand is you may think of this person as really being male, but they're really not. Females, like males, have in our bodies something called the adrenal glands. They're in the back of our body. And the adrenal glands make androgens, which are a masculinizing hormone. Most females like me — I believe myself to be a typical female — I don't actually know my chromosomal make-up, but I think I'm probably typical — most females like me are actually androgen-sensitive. We're making androgen, and we're responding to androgens. The consequence is that somebody like me has actually had a brain exposed to more androgens than the woman born with testes who has androgen insensitivity syndrome. So sex is really complicated — it's not just that intersex people are in the middle of all the sex spectrum — in some ways, they can be all over the place. Another example: a few years ago I got a call from a man who was 19 years old, who was born a boy, raised a boy, had a girlfriend, had sex with his girlfriend, had a life as a guy, and had just found out that he had ovaries and a uterus inside. What he had was an extreme form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. He had XX chromosomes, and in the womb, his adrenal glands were in such high gear that it created, essentially, a masculine hormonal environment. And as a consequence, his genitals were masculinized, his brain was subject to the more typical masculine component of hormones. And he was born looking like a boy — nobody suspected anything. And it was only when he had reached the age of 19 that he began to have enough medical problems from menstruating internally, that doctors figured out that, in fact, he was female, internally. OK, so just one more quick example of a way you can have intersex. Some people who have XX chromosomes develop what are called ovotestis, which is when you have ovarian tissue with testicular tissue wrapped around it. And we're not exactly sure why that happens. So sex can come in lots of different varieties. The reason that children with these kinds of bodies — whether it's dwarfism, or it's conjoined twinning, or it's an intersex type — are often "normalized" by surgeons is not because it actually leaves them better off in terms of physical health. In many cases, people are actually perfectly healthy. The reason they're often subject to various kinds of surgeries is because they threaten our social categories. Our system has been based typically on the idea that a particular kind of anatomy comes with a particular identity. So we have the concept that what it means to be a woman is to have a female identity; what it means to be a black person is, allegedly, to have an African anatomy in terms of your history. And so we have this terribly simplistic idea. And when we're faced with a body that actually presents us something quite different, it startles us in terms of those categorizations. So we have a lot of very romantic ideas in our culture about individualism. And our nation's really founded on a very romantic concept of individualism. You can imagine how startling then it is when you have children who are born who are two people inside of one body. Where I ran into the most heat from this most recently was last year when South African runner, Caster Semenya, had her sex called into question at the International Games in Berlin. I had a lot of journalists calling me, asking me, "Which is the test they're going to run that will tell us whether or not Caster Semenya is male or female?" And I had to explain to the journalists there isn't such a test. In fact, we now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit: Nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature. So what we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes, the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories that we thought of as stable anatomical categories, that mapped very simply to stable identity categories are a lot more fuzzy than we thought. And it's not just in terms of sex. It's also in terms of race, which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed. As we look, we get into all sorts of uncomfortable areas. We look, for example, about the fact that we share at least 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. What are we to make of the fact that we differ from them only, really, by a few nucleotides? And as we get farther and farther with our science, we get more and more into a discomforted zone, where we have to acknowledge that the simplistic categories we've had are probably overly simplistic. So we're seeing this in all sorts of places in human life. One of the places we're seeing it, for example, in our culture, in the United States today, is battles over the beginning of life and the end of life. We have difficult conversations about at what point we decide a body becomes a human, such that it has a different right than a fetal life. We have very difficult conversations nowadays — probably not out in the open as much as within medicine — about the question of when somebody's dead. In the past, our ancestors never had to struggle so much with this question of when somebody was dead. At most, they'd stick a feather on somebody's nose, and if it twitched, they didn't bury them yet. If it stopped twitching, you bury them. But today, we have a situation where we want to take vital organs out of beings and give them to other beings. And as a consequence, we have to struggle with this really difficult question about who's dead, and this leads us to a really difficult situation where we don't have such simple categories as we've had before. Now you might think that all this breaking-down of categories would make somebody like me really happy. I'm a political progressive, I defend people with unusual bodies, but I have to admit to you that it makes me nervous. Understanding that these categories are really much more unstable than we thought makes me tense. It makes me tense from the point of view of thinking about democracy. So in order to tell you about that tension, I have to first admit to you a huge fan of the Founding Fathers. I know they were racists, I know they were sexist, but they were great. I mean, they were so brave and so bold and so radical in what they did, that I find myself watching that cheesy musical "1776" every few years, and it's not because of the music, which is totally forgettable. It's because of what happened in 1776 with the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers were, for my point of view, the original anatomical activists, and this is why. What they rejected was an anatomical concept and replaced it with another one that was radical and beautiful and held us for 200 years. So as you all recall, what our Founding Fathers were rejecting was a concept of monarchy, and the monarchy was basically based on a very simplistic concept of anatomy. The monarchs of the old world didn't have a concept of DNA, but they did have a concept of birthright. They had a concept of blue blood. They had the idea that the people who would be in political power should be in political power because of the blood being passed down from grandfather to father to son and so forth. The Founding Fathers rejected that idea, and they replaced it with a new anatomical concept, and that concept was "all men are created equal." They leveled that playing field and decided the anatomy that mattered was the commonality of anatomy, not the difference in anatomy, and that was a really radical thing to do. Now they were doing it in part because they were part of an Enlightenment system where two things were growing up together. And that was democracy growing up, but it was also science growing up at the same time. And it's really clear, if you look at the history of the Founding Fathers, a lot of them were very interested in science, and they were interested in the concept of a naturalistic world. They were moving away from supernatural explanations, and they were rejecting things like a supernatural concept of power, where it transmitted because of a very vague concept of birthright. They were moving towards a naturalistic concept. And if you look, for example, in the Declaration of Independence, they talk about nature and nature's God. They don't talk about God and God's nature. They're talking about the power of nature to tell us who we are. So as part of that, they were coming to us with a concept that was about anatomical commonality. And in doing so, they were really setting up in a beautiful way the Civil Rights Movement of the future. They didn't think of it that way, but they did it for us, and it was great. So what happened years afterwards? What happened was women, for example, who wanted the right to vote, took the Founding Fathers' concept of anatomical commonality being more important than anatomical difference and said, "The fact that we have a uterus and ovaries is not significant enough in terms of a difference to mean that we shouldn't have the right to vote, the right to full citizenship, the right to own property, etc." And women successfully argued that. Next came the successful Civil Rights Movement, where we found people like Sojourner Truth talking about, "Ain't I a woman?" We find men on the marching lines of the Civil Rights Movement saying, "I am a man." Again, people of color appealing to a commonality of anatomy over a difference of anatomy, again, successfully. We see the same thing with the disability rights movement. The problem is, of course, that, as we begin to look at all that commonality, we have to begin to question why we maintain certain divisions. Mind you, I want to maintain some divisions, anatomically, in our culture. For example, I don't want to give a fish the same rights as a human. I don't want to say we give up entirely on anatomy. I don't want to say a five-year-old should be allowed to consent to sex or consent to marry. So there are some anatomical divisions that make sense to me and that I think we should retain. But the challenge is trying to figure out which ones they are and why do we retain them, and do they have meaning. So let's go back to those two beings conceived at the beginning of this talk. We have two beings, both conceived in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day. Let's imagine one of them, Mary, is born three months prematurely, so she's born on June 1, 1980. Henry, by contrast, is born at term, so he's born on March 1, 1980. Simply by virtue of the fact that Mary was born prematurely three months, she comes into all sorts of rights three months earlier than Henry does — the right to consent to sex, the right to vote, the right to drink. Henry has to wait for all of that, not because he's actually any different in age, biologically, except in terms of when he was born. We find other kinds of weirdness in terms of what their rights are. Henry, by virtue of being assumed to be male — although I haven't told you that he's the XY one — by virtue of being assumed to be male is now liable to be drafted, which Mary does not need to worry about. Mary, meanwhile, cannot in all the states have the same right that Henry has in all the states, namely, the right to marry. Henry can marry, in every state, a woman, but Mary can only marry today in a few states, a woman. So we have these anatomical categories that persist, that are in many ways problematic and questionable. And the question to me becomes: What do we do, as our science gets to be so good in looking at anatomy, that we reach the point where we have to admit that a democracy that's been based on anatomy might start falling apart? I don't want to give up the science, but at the same time, it feels sometimes like the science is coming out from under us. So where do we go? It seems like what happens in our culture is a sort of pragmatic attitude: "We have to draw the line somewhere, so we will draw the line somewhere." But a lot of people get stuck in a very strange position. So for example, Texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man is to mean that you don't have a Y chromosome, and what it means to marry a woman means you have a Y chromosome. In practice they don't test people for their chromosomes. But this is also very bizarre, because of the story I told you at the beginning about androgen insensitivity syndrome. If we look at one of the Founding Fathers of modern democracy, Dr. Martin Luther King, he offers us something of a solution in his "I have a dream" speech. He says we should judge people "based not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character," moving beyond anatomy. And I want to say, "Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea." But in practice, how do you do it? How do you judge people based on the content of character? I also want to point out that I'm not sure that is how we should distribute rights in terms of humans, because, I have to admit, that there are some golden retrievers I know that are probably more deserving of social services than some humans I know. I also want to say there are probably also some yellow Labradors that I know that are more capable of informed, intelligent, mature decisions about sexual relations than some 40-year-olds that I know. So how do we operationalize the question of content of character? It turns out to be really difficult. And part of me also wonders, what if content of character turns out to be something that's scannable in the future — able to be seen with an fMRI? Do we really want to go there? I'm not sure where we go. What I do know is that it seems to be really important to think about the idea of the United States being in the lead of thinking about this issue of democracy. We've done a really good job struggling with democracy, and I think we would do a good job in the future. We don't have a situation that Iran has, for example, where a man who's sexually attracted to other men is liable to be murdered, unless he's willing to submit to a sex change, in which case he's allowed to live. We don't have that kind of situation. I'm glad to say we don't have the kind of situation with — a surgeon I talked to a few years ago who had brought over a set of conjoined twins in order to separate them, partly to make a name for himself. But when I was on the phone with him, asking why he'll do this surgery — this was a very high-risk surgery — his answer was that, in this other nation, these children were going to be treated very badly, and so he had to do this. My response to him was, "Well, have you considered political asylum instead of a separation surgery?" The United States has offered tremendous possibility for allowing people to be the way they are, without having them have to be changed for the sake of the state. So I think we have to be in the lead. Well, just to close, I want to suggest to you that I've been talking a lot about the Fathers. And I want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like, or might have looked like, if we had more involved the mothers. And I want to say something a little bit radical for a feminist, and that is that I think that there may be different kinds of insights that can come from different kinds of anatomies, particularly when we have people thinking in groups. For years, because I've been interested in intersex, I've also been interested in sex-difference research. And one of the things that I've been interested in is looking at the differences between males and females in terms of the way they think and operate in the world. And what we know from cross-cultural studies is that females, on average — not everyone, but on average — are more inclined to be very attentive to complex social relations and to taking care of people who are, basically, vulnerable within the group. And so if we think about that, we have an interesting situation in hands. Years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of my graduate advisors who knew I was interested in feminism — I considered myself a feminist, as I still do, asked a really strange question. He said, "Tell me what's feminine about feminism." And I thought, "Well, that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. Feminism is all about undoing stereotypes about gender, so there's nothing feminine about feminism." But the more I thought about his question, the more I thought there might be something feminine about feminism. That is to say, there might be something, on average, different about female brains from male brains that makes us more attentive to deeply complex social relationships, and more attentive to taking care of the vulnerable. So whereas the Fathers were extremely attentive to figuring out how to protect individuals from the state, it's possible that if we injected more mothers into this concept, what we would have is more of a concept of not just how to protect, but how to care for each other. And maybe that's where we need to go in the future, when we take democracy beyond anatomy, is to think less about the individual body in terms of the identity, and think more about those relationships. So that as we the people try to create a more perfect union, we're thinking about what we do for each other. Thank you. (Applause)

Break the silence for suicide attempt survivors

{0: 'JD Schramm teaches future business leaders both the theoretical and practical aspects of communication.'}

TEDActive 2011

From all outward appearances, John had everything going for him. He had just signed the contract to sell his New York apartment at a six-figure profit, and he'd only owned it for five years. The school where he graduated from with his master's had just offered him a teaching appointment, which meant not only a salary, but benefits for the first time in ages. And yet, despite everything going really well for John, he was struggling, fighting addiction and a gripping depression. On the night of June 11th, 2003, he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the Manhattan Bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below. Remarkably — no, miraculously — he lived. The fall shattered his right arm, broke every rib that he had, punctured his lung, and he drifted in and out of consciousness as he drifted down the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge and out into the pathway of the Staten Island Ferry, where passengers on the ferry heard his cries of pain, contacted the boat's captain who contacted the Coast Guard who fished him out of the East River and took him to Bellevue Hospital. And that's actually where our story begins. Because once John committed himself to putting his life back together — first physically, then emotionally, and then spiritually — he found that there were very few resources available to someone who has attempted to end their life in the way that he did. Research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail. But the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time. This truly is an at-risk population with very few resources to support them. And what happens when people try to assemble themselves back into life, because of our taboos around suicide, we're not sure what to say, and so quite often we say nothing. And that furthers the isolation that people like John found themselves in. I know John's story very well because I'm John. And this is, today, the first time in any sort of public setting I've ever acknowledged the journey that I have been on. But after having lost a beloved teacher in 2006 and a good friend last year to suicide, and sitting last year at TEDActive, I knew that I needed to step out of my silence and past my taboos to talk about an idea worth spreading — and that is that people who have made the difficult choice to come back to life need more resources and need our help. As the Trevor Project says, it gets better. It gets way better. And I'm choosing to come out of a totally different kind of closet today to encourage you, to urge you, that if you are someone who has contemplated or attempted suicide, or you know somebody who has, talk about it; get help. It's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause)

Medicine's future? There's an app for that

{0: 'Daniel Kraft explores the impact and potential of rapidly developing technologies as applied to health and medicine.'}

TEDxMaastricht

A couple of years ago, when I was attending the TED conference in Long Beach, I met Harriet. We'd actually met online before — not the way you're thinking. We were introduced because we both knew Linda Avey, one of the founders of the first online personal genomic companies. And because we shared our genetic information with Linda, she could see that Harriet and I shared a very rare type of mitochondrial DNA, haplotype K1a1b1a, which meant we were distantly related. We actually share the same genealogy with Ötzi the Iceman. So — Ötzi, Harriet and me. And being the current day, of course, we started our own Facebook group. You're all welcome to join. When I met Harriet in person the next year at the TED conference, she'd gone online and ordered our own happy haplotype T-shirts. (Laughter) Why am I telling you this story? What does it have to do with the future of health? Well, the way I met Harriet is an example of how leveraging cross-disciplinary, exponentially growing technologies is affecting our future of health and wellness — from low-cost gene analysis to the ability to do powerful bioinformatics to the connection of the Internet and social networking. What I'd like to talk about today is understanding these exponential technologies. We often think linearly. But if you think about it, if you have a lily pad and it just divided every single day — two, four, eight, sixteen — in 15 days, you'd have 32,000. What do you think you'd have in a month? We're at a billion. If we start to think exponentially, we can see how this is starting to affect all the technologies around us. Many of these technologies, speaking as a physician and innovator, we can start to leverage, to impact the future of our own health and of health care, and to address many of the major challenges in health care today, ranging from the exponential costs to the aging population, the way we really don't use information very well today, the fragmentation of care and the often very difficult course of adoption of innovation. And one of the major things we can do is move the curve to the left. We spend most of our money on the last 20 percent of life. What if we could incentivize physicians in the health care system and our own selves to move the curve to the left and improve our health, leveraging technology as well? Now my favorite example of exponential technology, we all have in our pocket. If you think about it, these are really dramatically improving. I mean, this is the iPhone 4. Imagine what the iPhone 8 will be able to do. Now, I've gained some insight into this. I've been the track share for the medicine portion of a new institution called Singularity University, based in Silicon Valley. We bring together each summer about 100 very talented students from around the world. And we look at these exponential technologies from medicine, biotech, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, space, and address how we can cross-train and leverage these to impact major unmet goals. We also have seven-day executive programs. And coming up next month is FutureMed, a program to help cross-train and leverage technologies into medicine. Now, I mentioned the phone. These mobile phones have over 20,000 different mobile apps available. There's one out of the UK where you can pee on a little chip, connect it to your iPhone, and check for an STD. I don't know if I'd try that, but it's available. There are other sorts of applications. Merging your phone and diagnostics, for example, measuring your blood glucose on your iPhone and sending that to your physician, so they can better understand and you can better understand your blood sugars as a diabetic. So let's see how exponential technologies are taking health care. Let's start with faster. It's no secret that computers, through Moore's law, are speeding up faster and faster. We can do more powerful things with them. They're really approaching — in many cases, surpassing — the ability of the human mind. But where I think computational speed is most applicable is in imaging. The ability now to look inside the body in real time with very high resolution is really becoming incredible. And we're layering multiple technologies — PET scans, CT scans and molecular diagnostics — to find and seek things at different levels. Here you're going to see the very highest resolution MRI scan done today, of Marc Hodosh, the curator of TEDMED. And now we can see inside of the brain at a resolution and ability never before available, and essentially learn how to reconstruct and maybe even reengineer or backwards engineer the brain, so we can better understand pathology, disease and therapy. We can look inside with real-time fMRI in the brain at real time. And by understanding these sorts of processes and these connections, we're going to understand the effects of medication or meditation and better personalize and make effective, for example, psychoactive drugs. The scanners for these are getting smaller, less expensive and more portable. And this sort of data explosion available from these is really almost becoming a challenge. The scan of today takes up about 800 books, or 20 gigabytes. The scan in a couple of years will be one terabyte, or 800,000 books. How do you leverage that information? Let's get personal. I won't ask who here's had a colonoscopy, but if you're over age 50, it's time for your screening colonoscopy. How'd you like to avoid the pointy end of the stick? Now there's essentially virtual colonoscopy. Compare those two pictures. As a radiologist, you can basically fly through your patient's colon, and augmenting that with artificial intelligence, potentially identify a lesion that we might have missed, but using AI on top of radiology, we can find lesions that were missed before. Maybe this will encourage people to get colonoscopies that wouldn't have otherwise. This is an example of this paradigm shift. We're moving to this integration of biomedicine, information technology, wireless and, I would say, mobile now — this era of digital medicine. Even my stethoscope is now digital, and of course, there's an app for that. We're moving, obviously, to the era of the tricorder. So the handheld ultrasound is basically surpassing and supplanting the stethoscope. These are now at a price point of what used to be 100,000 euros or a couple hundred-thousand dollars. For about 5,000 dollars, I can have the power of a very powerful diagnostic device in my hand. Merging this now with the advent of electronic medical records — in the US, we're still less than 20 percent electronic; here in the Netherlands, I think it's more than 80 percent. Now that we're switching to merging medical data, making it available electronically, we can crowd-source the information, and as a physician, I can access my patients' data from wherever I am, just through my mobile device. And now, of course, we're in the era of the iPad, even the iPad 2. Just last month, the first FDA-approved application was approved to allow radiologists to do actual reading on these sorts of devices. So certainly, the physicians of today, including myself, are completely reliable on these devices. And as you saw just about a month ago, Watson from IBM beat the two champions in "Jeopardy." So I want you to imagine when, in a couple of years, we've started to apply this cloud-based information, when we really have the AI physician and leverage our brains to connectivity to make decisions and diagnostics at a level never done. Already today, you don't need to go to your physician in many cases. Only in about 20 percent of visits do you need to lay hands on the patient. We're now in the era of virtual visits. From Skype-type visits you can do with American Well, to Cisco, that's developed a very complex health presence system, the ability to interact with your health care provider is different. And these are being augmented even by our devices, again, today. My friend Jessica sent me a picture of her head laceration, so I can save her a trip to the emergency room, and do diagnostics that way. Or maybe we can leverage today's gaming technology, like the Microsoft Kinect, hack that to enable diagnostics, for example, in diagnosing stroke, using simple motion detection, using $100 devices. We can actually now visit our patients robotically. This is the RP7; if I'm a hematologist, I can visit another clinic or hospital. These are being augmented by a whole suite of tools actually in the home now. We already have wireless scales. You step on the scale, tweet your weight to your friends, they can keep you in line. We have wireless blood pressure cuffs. A whole gamut of technologies are being put together. Instead of wearing kludgy devices, we put on a simple patch. This was developed at Stanford. It's called iRhythm; it completely supplants the prior technology at a much lower price point, with much more effectivity. We're also in the era today of quantified self. Consumers now can basically buy $100 devices, like this little Fitbit. I can measure my steps, my caloric outtake. I can get insight into that on a daily basis and share it with my friends or physician. There's watches that measure your heart rate, Zeo sleep monitors, a suite of tools that enable you to leverage and have insight into your own health. As we start to integrate this information, we'll know better what to do with it, and have better insight into our own pathologies, health and wellness. There's even mirrors that can pick up your pulse rate. And I would argue, in the future, we'll have wearable devices in our clothes, monitoring us 24/7. And just like the OnStar system in cars, your red light might go on. It won't say "check engine"; it'll be a "check your body" light, and you'll go get it taken care of. Probably in a few years, you'll look in your mirror and it'll be diagnosing you. (Laughter) For those of you with kiddos at home, how would you like a wireless diaper that supports your — (Laughter) More information, I think, than you might need, but it's going to be here. Now, we've heard a lot today about technology and connection. And I think some of these technologies will enable us to be more connected with our patients, to take more time and do the important human-touch elements of medicine, as augmented by these technologies. Now, we've talked about augmenting the patient. How about augmenting the physician? We're now in the era of super-enabling the surgeon, who can now go into the body and do robotic surgery, which is here today, at a level that was not really possible even five years ago. And now this is being augmented with further layers of technology, like augmented reality. So the surgeon can see inside the patient, through their lens, where the tumor is, where the blood vessels are. This can be integrated with decision support. A surgeon in New York can help a surgeon in Amsterdam, for example. And we're entering an era of truly scarless surgery called NOTES, where the robotic endoscope can come out the stomach and pull out that gallbladder, all in a scarless way and robotically. This is called NOTES, and it's coming — basically scarless surgery, as mediated by robotic surgery. Now, how about controlling other elements? For those who have disabilities — the paraplegic, there's the brain-computer interface, or BCI, where chips have been put on the motor cortex of completely quadriplegic patients, and they can control a cursor or a wheelchair or, potentially, a robotic arm. These devices are getting smaller and going into more and more of these patients. Still in clinical trials, but imagine when we can connect these, for example, to the amazing bionic limb, such as the DEKA Arm, built by Dean Kamen and colleagues, which has 17 degrees of motion and freedom, and can allow the person who's lost a limb to have much higher dexterity or control than they've had in the past. So we're really entering the era of wearable robotics, actually. If you haven't lost a limb but had a stroke, you can wear these augmented limbs. Or if you're a paraplegic — I've visited the folks at Berkeley Bionics — they've developed eLEGS. I took this video last week. Here's a paraplegic patient, walking by strapping on these exoskeletons. He's otherwise completely wheelchair-bound. This is the early era of wearable robotics. And by leveraging these sorts of technologies, we're going to change the definition of disability to, in some cases, be superability, or super-enabling. This is Aimee Mullins, who lost her lower limbs as a young child, and Hugh Herr, who's a professor at MIT, who lost his limbs in a climbing accident. And now both of them can climb better, move faster, swim differently with their prosthetics than us normal-abled persons. How about other exponentials? Clearly the obesity trend is exponentially going in the wrong direction, including with huge costs. But the trend in medicine is to get exponentially smaller. A few examples: we're now in the era of "Fantastic Voyage," the iPill. You can swallow this completely integrated device. It can take pictures of your GI system, help diagnose and treat as it moves through your GI tract. We get into even smaller micro-robots that will eventually, autonomously, move through your system, and be able to do things surgeons can't do in a much less invasive manner. Sometimes these might self-assemble in your GI system, and be augmented in that reality. On the cardiac side, pacemakers are getting smaller and much easier to place, so no need to train an interventional cardiologist to place them. And they'll be wirelessly telemetered to your mobile devices, so you can go places and be monitored remotely. These are shrinking even further. This one is in prototyping by Medtronic; it's smaller than a penny. Artificial retinas, the ability to put arrays on the back of the eyeball and allow the blind to see — also in early trials, but moving into the future. These are going to be game-changing. Or for those of us who are sighted, how about having the assisted-living contact lens? Bluetooth, Wi-Fi available — beams back images to your eye. (Laughter) Now, if you have trouble maintaining your diet, it might help to have some extra imagery to remind you how many calories are going to be coming at you. How about enabling the pathologist to use their cell phone to see at a microscopic level and to lumber that data back to the cloud and make better diagnostics? In fact, the whole era of laboratory medicine is completely changing. We can now leverage microfluidics, like this chip made by Steve Quake at Stanford. Microfluidics can replace an entire lab of technicians; put it on a chip, enable thousands of tests at the point of care, anywhere in the world. This will really leverage technology to the rural and the underserved and enable what used to be thousand-dollar tests to be done for pennies, and at the point of care. If we go down the small pathway a little bit further, we're entering the era of nanomedicine, the ability to make devices super-small, to the point where we can design red blood cells or microrobots that monitor our blood system or immune system, or even those that might clear out the clots from our arteries. Now how about exponentially cheaper? Not something we usually think about in the era of medicine, but hard disks used to be 3,400 dollars for 10 megabytes — exponentially cheaper. In genomics now, the genome cost about a billion dollars about 10 years ago, when the first one came out. We're now approaching essentially a $1,000 genome, probably next year. And in two years, a $100 genome. What will we do with $100 genomes? Soon we'll have millions of these tests available. Then it gets interesting, when we start to crowd-source that information, and enter the era of true personalized medicine: the right drug for the right person at the right time, instead of what we're doing now, which is the same drug for everybody, blockbuster drug medications, which don't work for the individual. Many different companies are working on leveraging these approaches. I'll show you a simple example, from 23andMe again. My data indicates I've got about average risk for developing macular degeneration, a kind of blindness. But if I take that same data, upload it to deCODEme, I can look at my risk for type 2 diabetes; I'm at almost twice the risk. I might want to watch how much dessert I have at lunch, for example. It might change my behavior. Leveraging my knowledge of my pharmacogenomics: how my genes modulate, what my drugs do and what doses I need will become increasingly important, and once in the hands of individuals and patients, will make better drug dosing and selection available. So again, it's not just genes, it's multiple details — our habits, our environmental exposures. When was the last time your doctor asked where you've lived? Geomedicine: where you live, what you've been exposed to, can dramatically affect your health. We can capture that information. Genomics, proteomics, the environment — all this data streaming at us individually and as physicians: How do we manage it? We're now entering the era of systems medicine, systems biology, where we can start to integrate all this information. And by looking at the patterns, for example, in our blood, of 10,000 biomarkers in a single test, we can look at patterns and detect disease at a much earlier stage. This is called by Lee Hood, the father of the field, P4 Medicine. We'll be predictive and know what you're likely to have. We can be preventative; that prevention can be personalized. More importantly, it'll be increasingly participatory. Through websites like PatientsLikeMe or managing your data on Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health, leveraging this together in participatory ways will be increasingly important. I'll finish up with exponentially better. We'd like to get therapies better and more effective. Today we treat high blood pressure mostly with pills. What if we take a new device, knock out the nerve vessels that help mediate blood pressure, and in a single therapy, basically cure hypertension? This is a new device doing essentially that. It should be on the market in a year or two. How about more targeted therapies for cancer? I'm an oncologist and know that most of what we give is essentially poison. We learned at Stanford and other places that we can discover cancer stem cells, the ones that seem to be really responsible for disease relapse. So if you think of cancer as a weed, we often can whack the weed away and it seems to shrink, but it often comes back. So we're attacking the wrong target. The cancer stem cells remain, and the tumor can return months or years later. We're now learning to identify the cancer stem cells and identify those as targets and go for the long-term cure. We're entering the era of personalized oncology, the ability to leverage all of this data together, analyze the tumor and come up with a real, specific cocktail for the individual patient. I'll close with regenerative medicine. I've studied a lot about stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are particularly powerful. We have adult stem cells throughout our body; we use those in bone marrow transplantation. Geron, last year, started the first trial using human embryonic stem cells to treat spinal cord injuries. Still a phase I trial, but evolving. We've been using adult stem cells in clinical trials for about 15 years to approach a whole range of topics, particularly cardiovascular disease. If we take our own bone marrow cells and treat a patient with a heart attack, we can see much improved heart function and better survival using our own bone marrow derived cells after a heart attack. I invented a device called the MarrowMiner, a much less invasive way for harvesting bone marrow. It's now been FDA approved; hopefully on the market in the next year. Hopefully you can appreciate the device going through the patient's body removing bone marrow, not with 200 punctures, but with a single puncture, under local anesthesia. Where is stem-cell therapy going? If you think about it, every cell in your body has the same DNA you had when you were an embryo. We can now reprogram your skin cells to actually act like a pluripotent embryonic stem cell and utilize those, potentially, to treat multiple organs in the same patient, making personalized stem cell lines. I think there'll be a new era of your own stem cell banking to have in the freezer your own cardiac cells, myocytes and neural cells to use them in the future, should you need them. We're integrating this now with a whole era of cellular engineering, and integrating exponential technologies for essentially 3D organ printing, replacing the ink with cells, and essentially building and reconstructing a 3D organ. That's where things are heading. Still very early days, but I think, as integration of exponential technologies, this is the example. So in closing, as you think about technology trends and how to impact health and medicine, we're entering an era of miniaturization, decentralization and personalization. And by pulling these things together, if we start to think about how to understand and leverage them, we're going to empower the patient, enable the doctor, enhance wellness and begin to cure the well before they get sick. Because I know as a doctor, if someone comes to me with stage I disease, I'm thrilled; we can often cure them. But often it's too late, and it's stage III or IV cancer, for example. So by leveraging these technologies together, I think we'll enter a new era that I like to call stage 0 medicine. And as a cancer doctor, I'm looking forward to being out of a job. Thanks very much. (Applause) Host: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Take a bow, take a bow.

How I became 100 artists

{0: 'Shea Hembrey explores patterns from nature and myth. A childhood love of nature, and especially birdlife, informs his vision.'}

TED2011

I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater. And I think it was a great place to grow up as an artist because I grew up around quirky, colorful characters who were great at making with their hands. And my childhood is more hick than I could ever possibly relate to you, and also more intellectual than you would ever expect. For instance, me and my sister, when we were little, we would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains. (Laughter) But on the other side of that, though, we were big readers in our house. And if the TV was on, we were watching a documentary. And my dad is the most voracious reader I know. He can read a novel or two a day. But when I was little, I remember, he would kill flies in our house with my BB gun. And what was so amazing to me about that — well he would be in his recliner, would holler for me to fetch the BB gun, and I'd go get it. And what was amazing to me — well it was pretty kickass; he was killing a fly in the house with a gun — but what was so amazing to me was that he knew just enough how to pump it. And he could shoot it from two rooms away and not damage what it was on because he knew how to pump it just enough to kill the fly and not damage what it landed on. So I should talk about art. (Laughter) Or we'll be here all day with my childhood stories. I love contemporary art, but I'm often really frustrated with the contemporary art world and the contemporary art scene. A few years ago, I spent months in Europe to see the major international art exhibitions that have the pulse of what is supposed to be going on in the art world. And I was struck by going to so many, one after the other, with some clarity of what it was that I was longing for. And I was longing for several things that I wasn't getting, or not getting enough of. But two of the main things: one of it, I was longing for more work that was appealing to a broad public, that was accessible. And the second thing that I was longing for was some more exquisite craftsmanship and technique. So I started thinking and listing what all it was that I thought would make a perfect biennial. So I decided, I'm going to start my own biennial. I'm going to organize it and direct it and get it going in the world. So I thought, okay, I have to have some criteria of how to choose work. So amongst all the criteria I have, there's two main things. One of them, I call my Mimaw's Test. And what that is is I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn't been refined enough yet. It needs to worked on until it can speak fluently. And then my other second set of rules — I hate to say "rules" because it's art — my criteria would be the three H's, which is head, heart and hands. And great art would have "head": it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts. It would have "heart" in that it would have passion and heart and soul. And it would have "hand" in that it would be greatly crafted. So I started thinking about how am I going to do this biennial, how am I going to travel the world and find these artists? And then I realized one day, there's an easier solution to this. I'm just going to make the whole thing myself. (Laughter) And so this is what I did. So I thought, a biennial needs artists. I'm going to do an international biennial; I need artists from all around the world. So what I did was I invented a hundred artists from around the world. I figured out their bios, their passions in life and their art styles, and I started making their work. (Laughter) (Applause) I felt, oh this is the kind of project that I could spend my whole life doing. So I decided, I'm going to make this a real biennial. It's going to be two years of studio work. And I'm going to create this in two years, and I have. So I should start to talk about these guys. Well the range is quite a bit. And I'm such a technician, so I loved this project, getting to play with all the techniques. So for example, in realist paintings, it ranges from this, which is kind of old masters style, to really realistic still-life, to this type of painting where I'm painting with a single hair. And then at the other end, there's performance and short films and indoor installations like this indoor installation and this one, and outdoor installations like this one and this one. I know I should mention: I'm making all these things. This isn't Photoshopped. I'm under the river with those fish. So now let me introduce some of my fictional artists to you. This is Nell Remmel. Nell is interested in agricultural processes, and her work is based in these practices. This piece, which is called "Flipped Earth" — she was interested in taking the sky and using it to cleanse barren ground. And by taking giant mirrors — (Applause) and here she's taking giant mirrors and pulling them into the dirt. And this is 22 feet long. And what I loved about her work is, when I would walk around it and look down into the sky, looking down to watch the sky, and it unfolded in a new way. And probably the best part of this piece is at dusk and dawn when the twilight wedge has fallen and the ground's dark, but there's still the light above, bright above. And so you're standing there and everything else is dark, but there's this portal that you want to jump in. This piece was great. This is in my parents' backyard in Arkansas. And I love to dig a hole. So this piece was great fun because it was two days of digging in soft dirt. The next artist is Kay Overstry, and she's interested in ephemerality and transience. And in her most recent project, it's called "Weather I Made." And she's making weather on her body's scale. And this piece is "Frost." And what she did was she went out on a cold, dry night and breathed back and forth on the lawn to leave — to leave her life's mark, the mark of her life. (Applause) And so this is five-foot, five-inches of frost that she left behind. The sun rises, and it melts away. And that was played by my mom. So the next artist, this is a group of Japanese artists, a collective of Japanese artists — (Laughter) in Tokyo. And they were interested in developing a new, alternative art space, and they needed funding for it, so they decided to come up with some interesting fundraising projects. One of these is scratch-off masterpieces. (Laughter) And so what they're doing — each of these artists on a nine-by-seven-inch card, which they sell for 10 bucks, they drew original works of art. And you buy one, and maybe you get a real piece, and maybe not. Well this has sparked a craze in Japan, because everyone's wanting a masterpiece. And the ones that are the most sought after are the ones that are only barely scratched off. And all these works, in some way, talk about luck or fate or chance. Those first two are portraits of mega-jackpot winners years before and after their win. And in this one it's called "Drawing the Short Stick." (Laughter) I love this piece because I have a little cousin at home who introduced me — which I think is such a great introduction — to a friend one day as, "This is my cousin Shea. He draws sticks real good." (Laughter) Which is one of the best compliments ever. This artist is Gus Weinmueller, and he's doing a project, a large project, called "Art for the Peoples." And within this project, he's doing a smaller project called "Artists in Residence." And what he does is — (Laughter) he spends a week at a time with a family. And he shows up on their porch, their doorstep, with a toothbrush and pajamas, and he's ready to spend the week with them. And using only what's present, he goes in and makes a little abode studio to work out of. And he spends that week talking to the family about what do they think great art is. He has all these discussions with their family, and he digs through everything they have, and he finds materials to make work. And he makes a work that answers what they think great art is. For this family, he made this still-life painting. And whatever he makes somehow references nesting and space and personal property. This next project, this is by Jaochim Parisvega, and he's interested in — he believes art is everywhere waiting — that it just needs a little bit of a push to happen. And he provides this push by harnessing natural forces, like in his series where he used rain to make paintings. This project is called "Love Nests." What he did was to get wild birds to make his art for him. So he put the material in places where the birds were going to collect them, and they crafted his nests for him. And this one's called "Lovelock's Nest." This one's called "Mixtape Love Song's Nest." (Laughter) And this one's called "Lovemaking Nest." (Laughted) Next is Sylvia Slater. Sylvia's interested in art training. She's a very serious Swiss artist. (Laughter) And she was thinking about her friends and family who work in chaos-ridden places and developing countries, and she was thinking, what can I make that would be of value to them, in case something bad happens and they have to buy their way across the border or pay off a gunman? And so she came up with creating these pocket-sized artworks that are portraits of the person that would carry them. And you would carry this around with you, and if everything went to hell, you could make payments and buy your life. So this life price is for an irrigation non-profit director. So hopefully what happens is you never use it, and it's an heirloom that you pass down. And she makes them so they could either be broken up into payments, or they could be like these, which are leaves that can be payments. And so they're valuable. This is precious metals and gemstones. And this one had to get broken up. He had to break off a piece to get out of Egypt recently. This is by a duo, Michael Abernathy and Bud Holland. And they're interested in creating culture, just tradition. So what they do is they move into an area and try to establish a new tradition in a small geographic area. So this is in Eastern Tennessee, and what they decided was that we need a positive tradition that goes with death. So they came up with "dig jigs." And a dig jig — a dig jig is where, for a milestone anniversary or a birthday, you gather all your friends and family together and you dance on where you're going to be buried. (Laughter) And we got a lot of attention when we did it. I talked my family into doing this, and they didn't know what I was doing. And I was like, "Get dressed for a funeral. We're going to go do some work." And so we got to the grave and made this, which was hilarious — the attention that we got. So what happens is you dance on the grave, and after you've done your dance, everyone toasts you and tells you how great you are. And you in essence have a funeral that you get to be present for. That's my mom and dad. This is by Jason Birdsong. He is interested in how we see as an animal, how we are interested in mimicry and camouflage. You know, we look down a dark alley or a jungle path, trying to make out a face or a creature. We just have that natural way of seeing. And he plays with this idea. And this piece: those aren't actually leaves. They're butterfly specimens who have a natural camouflage. So he pairs these up. There's another pile of leaves. Those are actually all real butterfly specimens. And he pairs these up with paintings. Like this is a painting of a snake in a box. So you open the box and you think, "Whoa, there's a snake in there." But it's actually a painting. So he makes these interesting conversations about realism and mimicry and our drive to be fooled by great camouflage. (Laughter) The next artist is Hazel Clausen. Hazel Clausen is an anthropologist who took a sabbatical and decided, "You know, I would learn a lot about culture if I created a culture that doesn't exist from scratch." So that's what she did. She created the Swiss people named the Uvulites, and they have this distinctive yodeling song that they use the uvula for. And also they reference how the uvula — everything they say is fallen because of the forbidden fruit. And that's the symbol of their culture. And this is from a documentary called "Sexual Practices and Populations Control Among the Uvulites." This is a typical angora embroidery for them. This is one of their founders, Gert Schaeffer. (Laughter) And actually this is my Aunt Irene. It was so funny having a fake person who was making fake things. And I crack up at this piece, because when I see it I know that's French angora and all antique German ribbons and wool that I got in a Nebraska mill and carried around for 10 years and then antique Chinese skirts. The next is a collective of artists called the Silver Dobermans, and their motto is to spread pragmatism one person at a time. (Laughter) And they're really interested in how over-coddled we've become. So this is one of their comments on how over-coddled we've become. And what they've done is they put a warning sign on every single barb on this fence. (Laughter) (Applause) And this is called "Horse Sense Fence." The next artist is K. M. Yoon, a really interesting South Korean artist. And he's reworking a Confucian art tradition of scholar stones. Next is Maynard Sipes. And I love Maynard Sipes, but he's off in his own world, and, bless his heart, he's so paranoid. Next is Roy Penig, a really interesting Kentucky artist, and he's the nicest guy. He even once traded a work of art for a block of government cheese because the person wanted it so badly. Next is an Australian artist, Janeen Jackson, and this is from a project of hers called "What an Artwork Does When We're Not Watching." (Laughter) Next is by a Lithuanian fortune teller, Jurgi Petrauskas. Next is Ginger Cheshire. This is from a short film of hers called "The Last Person." And that's my cousin and my sister's dog, Gabby. The next, this is by Sam Sandy. He's an Australian Aboriginal elder, and he's also an artist. And this is from a large traveling sculpture project that he's doing. This is from Estelle Willoughsby. She heals with color. And she's one of the most prolific of all these hundred artists, even though she's going to be 90 next year. (Laughter) This is by Z. Zhou, and he's interested in stasis. Next is by Hilda Singh, and she's doing a whole project called "Social Outfits." Next is by Vera Sokolova. And I have to say, Vera kind of scares me. You can't look her directly in the eyes because she's kind of scary. And it's good that she's not real; she'd be mad that I said that. (Laughter) And she's an optometrist in St. Petersburg, and she plays with optics. Next, this is by Thomas Swifton. This is from a short film, "Adventures with Skinny." (Laughter) And this is by Cicily Bennett, and it's from a series of short films. And after this one, there's 77 other artists. And all together with those other 77 you're not seeing, that's my biennial. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks. (Applause)

A manifesto for play, for Bulgaria and beyond

{0: 'Based in Bulgaria, Steve Keil creates companies around big social and environmental goals.'}

TEDxBG

I'm here today to start a revolution. Now before you get up in arms, or you break into song, or you pick a favorite color, I want to define what I mean by revolution. By revolution, I mean a drastic and far-reaching change in the way we think and behave — the way we think and the way we behave. Now why, Steve, why do we need a revolution? We need a revolution because things aren't working; they're just not working. And that makes me really sad because I'm sick and tired of things not working. You know, I'm sick and tired of us not living up to our potential. I'm sick and tired of us being last. And we are last place in so many things — for example, social factors. We're last place in Europe in innovation. There we are right at the end, right at the bottom, last place as a culture that doesn't value innovation. We're last place in health care, and that's important for a sense of well-being. And there we are, not just last in the E.U., we're last in Europe, at the very bottom. And worst of all, it just came out three weeks ago, many of you have seen it, The Economist. We're the saddest place on Earth, relative to GDP per capita — the saddest place on Earth. That's social. Let's look at education. Where do we rank three weeks ago in another report by the OECD? Last in reading, math and science. Last. Business: The lowest perception in the E.U. that entrepreneurs provide benefits to society. Why as a result, what happens? The lowest percentage of entrepreneurs starting businesses. And this is despite the fact that everybody knows that small business is the engine of economies. We hire the most people; we create the most taxes. So if our engine's broken, guess what? Last in Europe GDP per capita. Last. So it's no surprise, guys, that 62 percent of Bulgarians are not optimistic about the future. We're unhappy, we have bad education, and we have the worst businesses. And these are facts, guys. This isn't story tale; it's not make-believe. It's not. It's not a conspiracy I have got against Bulgaria. These are facts. So I think it should be really, really clear that our system is broken. The way we think, the way we behave, our operating system of behaving is broken. We need a drastic change in the way we think and behave to transform Bulgaria for the better, for ourselves, for our friends, for our family and for our future. How did this happen? Let's be positive now. We're going to get positive. How did this happen? I think we're last because — and this is going to be drastic to some of you — because we are handicapping ourselves. We're holding ourselves back because we don't value play. I said "play," all right. In case some of you forgot what play is, this is what play looks like. Babies play, kids play, adults play. We don't value play. In fact, we devalue play. And we devalue it in three areas. Let's go back to the same three areas. Social: 45 years of what? Of communism — of valuing the society and the state over the individual and squashing, inadvertently, creativity, individual self-expression and innovation. And instead, what do we value? Because it's shown the way we apply, generate and use knowledge is affected by our social and institutional context, which told us what in communism? To be serious. To be really, really serious. It did. (Applause) Be serious. I can't tell you how many times I've been scolded in the park for letting my kids play on the ground. Heaven forbid they play in the dirt, the kal, or even worse, lokvi, water — that will kill them. I have been told by babas and dyados that we shouldn't let our kids play so much because life is serious and we need to train them for the seriousness of life. We have a serious meme running through. It's a social gene running through us. It's a serious gene. It's 45 years of it that's created what I call the "baba factor." (Laughter) (Applause) And here's how it works. Step one: woman says, "I want to have a baby. Iskam baby." Step two: we get the baby. Woohoo! But then what happens in step three? I want to go back to work because I need to further my career or I just want to go have coffees. I'm going to give bebko to baba. But we need to remember that baba's been infected by the serious meme for 45 years. So what happens? She passes that virus on to baby, and it takes a really, really, really long time — as the redwood trees — for that serious meme to get out of our operating system. What happens then? It goes into education where we have an antiquated education system that has little changed for 100 years, that values rote learning, memorization and standardization, and devalues self-expression, self-exploration, questioning, creativity and play. It's a crap system. True story: I went looking for a school for my kid. We went to this prestigious little school and they say they're going to study math 10 times a week and science eight times a week and reading five times a day and all this stuff. And we said, "Well what about play and recess?" And they said, "Ha. There won't be a single moment in the schedule." (Laughter) And we said, "He's five." What a crime. What a crime. And it's a crime that our education system is so serious because education is serious that we're creating mindless, robotic workers to put bolts in pre-drilled holes. But I'm sorry, the problems of today are not the problems of the Industrial Revolution. We need adaptability, the ability to learn how to be creative and innovative. We don't need mechanized workers. But no, now our meme goes into work where we don't value play. We create robotic workers that we treat like assets, to lever and just throw away. What are qualities of a Bulgarian work? Autocratic — do what I say because I'm the chef. I'm the boss and I know better than you. Untrusting — you're obviously a criminal, so I'm going to install cameras. (Laughter) Controlling — you're obviously an idiot, so I'm going to make a zillion little processes for you to follow so you don't step out of the box. So they're restrictive — don't use your mobile phone, don't use your laptop, don't search the Internet, don't be on I.M. That's somehow unprofessional and bad. And at the end of the day, it's unfulfilling because you're controlled, you're restricted, you're not valued and you're not having any fun. In social, in education and in our business, don't value play. And that's why we're last, because we don't value play. And you can say, "That's ridiculous, Steve. What a dumb idea. It can't be because of play. Just play, that's a stupid thing." We have the serious meme in us. Well I'm going to say no. And I will prove it to you in the next part of the speech — that play is the catalyst, it is the revolution, that we can use to transform Bulgaria for the better. Play: our brains are hardwired for play. Evolution has selected, over millions and billions of years, for play in animals and in humans. And you know what? Evolution does a really, really good job of deselecting traits that aren't advantageous to us and selecting traits for competitive advantage. Nature isn't stupid, and it selected for play. Throughout the animal kingdom, for example: ants. Ants play. Maybe you didn't know that. But when they're playing, they're learning the social order and dynamics of things. Rats play, but what you might not have known is that rats that play more have bigger brains and they learn tasks better, skills. Kittens play. We all know kittens play. But what you may not know is that kittens deprived of play are unable to interact socially. They can still hunt, but they can't be social. Bears play. But what you may not know is that bears that play more survive longer. It's not the bears that learn how to fish better. It's the ones that play more. And a final really interesting study — it's been shown, a correlation between play and brain size. The more you play, the bigger the brains there are. Dolphins, pretty big brains, play a lot. But who do you think with the biggest brains are the biggest players? Yours truly: humans. Kids play, we play — of every nationality, of every race, of every color, of every religion. It's a universal thing — we play. And it's not just kids, it's adults too. Really cool term: neoteny — the retention of play and juvenile traits in adults. And who are the biggest neotenists? Humans. We play sports. We do it for fun, or as Olympians, or as professionals. We play musical instruments. We dance, we kiss, we sing, we just goof around. We're designed by nature to play from birth to old age. We're designed to do that continuously — to play and play a lot and not stop playing. It is a huge benefit. Just like there's benefits to animals, there's benefits to humans. For example, it's been shown to stimulate neural growth in the amygdala, in the area where it controls emotions. It's been shown to promote pre-frontal cortex development where a lot of cognition is happening. As a result, what happens? We develop more emotional maturity if we play more. We develop better decision-making ability if we play more. These guys are facts. It's not fiction, it's not story tales, it's not make-believe; it's cold, hard science. These are the benefits to play. It is a genetic birthright that we have, like walking or speaking or seeing. And if we handicap ourselves with play, we handicap ourselves as if we would with any other birthright that we have. We hold ourselves back. Little exercise just for a second: close your eyes and try to imagine a world without play. Imagine a world without theater, without the arts, without song, without dancing, without soccer, without football, without laughter. What does this world look like? It's pretty bleak. It's pretty glum. Now imagine your workplace. Is it fun? Is it playful? Or maybe the workplace of your friends — here we're forward thinking. Is it fun? Is it playful? Or is it crap? Is it autocratic, controlling, restrictive and untrusting and unfulfilling? We have this concept that the opposite of play is work. We even feel guilty if we're seen playing at work. "Oh, my colleagues see me laughing. I must not have enough work," or, "Oh, I've got to hide because my boss might see me. He's going to think I'm not working hard." But I have news for you: our thinking is backwards. The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression. It's depression. In fact, play improves our work. Just like there's benefits for humans and animals, there's benefits for play at work. For example, it stimulates creativity. It increases our openness to change. It improves our ability to learn. It provides a sense of purpose and mastery — two key motivational things that increase productivity, through play. So before you start thinking of play as just not serious, play doesn't mean frivolous. You know, the professional athlete that loves skiing, he's serious about it, but he loves it. He's having fun, he's in the groove, he's in the flow. A doctor might be serious, but laughter's still a great medicine. Our thinking is backwards. We shouldn't be feeling guilty. We should be celebrating play. Quick example from the corporate world. FedEx, easy motto: people, service, profit. If you treat your people like people, if you treat them great, they're happier, they're fulfilled, they have a sense of mastery and purpose. What happens? They give better service — not worse, but better. And when customers call for service and they're dealing with happy people that can make decisions and are fulfilled, how do the customers feel? They feel great. And what do great customers do, great-feeling customers? They buy more of your service and they tell more of their friends, which leads to more profit. People, service, profit. Play increases productivity, not decreases. And you're going to say, "Gee, that can work for FedEx out there in the United States, but it can't work in Bulgaria. No way. We're different." It does work in Bulgaria, you guys. Two reasons. One, play is universal. There's nothing weird about Bulgarians that we can't play, besides the serious meme that we have to kick out. Two, I've tried it. I've tried at Sciant. When I got there, we had zero happy customers. Not one customer would refer us. I asked them all. We had marginal profit — I did. We had marginal profits, and we had unhappy stakeholders. Through some basic change, change like improving transparency, change like promoting self-direction and collaboration, encouraging collaboration, not autocracy, the things like having a results-focus. I don't care when you get in in the morning. I don't care when you leave. I care that your customer and your team is happy and you're organized with that. Why do I care if you get in at nine o'clock? Basically promoting fun. Through promoting fun and a great environment, we were able to transform Sciant and, in just three short years — sounds like a long time, but change is slow — every customer, from zero to every customer referring us, above average profits for the industry and happy stakeholders. And you can say, "Well how do you know they're happy?" Well we did win, every year that we entered, one of the rankings for best employer for small business. Independent analysis from anonymous employees on their surveys. It does, and it can, work in Bulgaria. There's nothing holding us back, except our own mentality about play. So some steps that we can take — to finish up — how to make this revolution through play. First of all, you have to believe me. If you don't believe me, well just go home and think about it some more or something. Second of all, if you don't have the feeling of play in you, you need to rediscover play. Whatever it was that as a kid you used to enjoy, that you enjoyed only six months ago, but now that you've got that promotion you can't enjoy, because you feel like you have to be serious, rediscover it. I don't care if it's mountain biking or reading a book or playing a game. Rediscover that because you're the leaders, the innovation leaders, the thought leaders. You're the ones that have to go back to the office or talk to your friends and ignite the fire of change in the play revolution. You guys have to, and if you're not feeling it, your colleagues, your employees, aren't going to feel it. You've got to go back and say, "Hey, I'm going to trust you." Weird concept: I hired you; I should trust you. I'm going to let you make decisions. I'm going to empower you, and I'm going to delegate to the lowest level, rather than the top. I'm going to encourage constructive criticism. I'm going to let you challenge authority. Because it's by challenging the way things are always done is that we are able to break out of the rut that we're in and create innovative solutions to problems of today. We're not always right as leaders. We're going to eradicate fear. Fear is the enemy of play. And we're going to do things like eliminate restrictions. You know what, let them use their mobile phone for personal calls — heaven forbid. Let them be on the Internet. Let them be on instant messengers. Let them take long lunches. Lunch is like the recess for work. It's when you go out in the world and you recharge your brain, you meet your friends, you have a beer, you have some food, you talk, you get some synergy of ideas that maybe you wouldn't have had before. Let them do it. Give them some freedom, and in general, let them play. Let them have fun at the workplace. We spend so much of our lives at the workplace, and it's supposed to be, what, a miserable grind, so that 20 years from now, we wake up and say, "Is this it? Is that all there was?" Unacceptable. Nepriemliv. (Laughter) So in summary, we need a drastic change in the way we think and behave, but we don't need a workers' revolution. We don't need a workers' revolution. What we need is a players' uprising. What we need is a players' uprising. What we need is a players' uprising. Seriously, we need to band together. Today is the start of the uprising. But what you need to do is fan the flames of the revolution. You need to go and share your ideas and your success stories of what worked about reinvigorating our lives, our schools, and our work with play; about how play promotes a sense of promise and self-fulfillment; of how play promotes innovation and productivity, and, ultimately, how play creates meaning. Because we can't do it alone. We have to do it together, and together, if we do this and share these ideas on play, we can transform Bulgaria for the better. Thank you. (Applause)

Haunting photos of polar ice

{0: 'TED Senior Fellow Camille Seaman photographs big ice and big clouds.'}

TED2011

As an artist, connection is very important to me. Through my work I'm trying to articulate that humans are not separate from nature and that everything is interconnected. I first went to Antarctica almost 10 years ago, where I saw my first icebergs. I was in awe. My heart beat fast, my head was dizzy, trying to comprehend what it was that stood in front of me. The icebergs around me were almost 200 feet out of the water, and I could only help but wonder that this was one snowflake on top of another snowflake, year after year. Icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves. Each iceberg has its own individual personality. They have a distinct way of interacting with their environment and their experiences. Some refuse to give up and hold on to the bitter end, while others can't take it anymore and crumble in a fit of dramatic passion. It's easy to think, when you look at an iceberg, that they're isolated, that they're separate and alone, much like we as humans sometimes view ourselves. But the reality is far from it. As an iceberg melts, I am breathing in its ancient atmosphere. As the iceberg melts, it is releasing mineral-rich fresh water that nourishes many forms of life. I approach photographing these icebergs as if I'm making portraits of my ancestors, knowing that in these individual moments they exist in that way and will never exist that way again. It is not a death when they melt; it is not an end, but a continuation of their path through the cycle of life. Some of the ice in the icebergs that I photograph is very young — a couple thousand years old. And some of the ice is over 100,000 years old. The last pictures I'd like to show you are of an iceberg that I photographed in Qeqetarsuaq, Greenland. It's a very rare occasion that you get to actually witness an iceberg rolling. So here it is. You can see on the left side a small boat. That's about a 15-foot boat. And I'd like you to pay attention to the shape of the iceberg and where it is at the waterline. You can see here, it begins to roll, and the boat has moved to the other side, and the man is standing there. This is an average-size Greenlandic iceberg. It's about 120 feet above the water, or 40 meters. And this video is real time. (Music) And just like that, the iceberg shows you a different side of its personality. Thank you. (Applause)

This is beatjazz

{0: 'Onyx Ashanti is the inventor of "beatjazz" -- a new way to make music.'}

Full Spectrum Auditions

(Music) Text: BeatJazz. BeatJazz is: 1. Live looping, 2. Jazz improvisation And 3. "Gestural" sound design. Accelerometers on each hand read hand position. The color of the lights indicates which sound I am playing. Red = Drums, Blue = Bass, Green = Chords, Orange = Leads, Purple = Pads The mouthpiece consists of ... a button, two guitar picks and lots of hot glue. The heads-up display is a smartphone that displays system parameters. Why? To atomize music culture so that ALL past, present and future genres can be studied and abstracted, live. And "BeatJazzers" become as common as D.J.'s. But mostly ... to MAKE the future rather than wait for it. (Applause)

A cello with many voices

{0: 'Maya Beiser commissions and performs radical new work for the cello. '}

TED2011

(Music) (Applause) Thank you. Imagining a solo cello concert, one would most likely think of Johann Sebastian Bach unaccompanied cello suites. As a child studying these eternal masterpieces, Bach's music would intermingle with the singing voices of Muslim prayers from the neighboring Arab village of the northern Kibbutz in Israel where I grew up. Late at night, after hours of practicing, I would listen to Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday as the sounds of tango music would be creeping from my parents' stereo. It all became music to me. I didn't hear the boundaries. I still start every day practicing playing Bach. His music never ceases to sound fresh and surprising to me. But as I was moving away from the traditional classical repertoire and trying to find new ways of musical expression, I realized that with today's technological resources, there's no reason to limit what can be produced at one time from a single string instrument. The power and coherency that comes from one person hearing, perceiving and playing all the voices makes a very different experience. The excitement of a great orchestra performance comes from the attempt to have a collective of musicians producing one unified whole concept. The excitement from using multi-tracking, the way I did in the piece you will hear next, comes from the attempt to build and create a whole universe with many diverse layers, all generated from a single source. My cello and my voice are layered to create this large sonic canvas. When composers write music for me, I ask them to forget what they know about the cello. I hope to arrive at new territories to discover sounds I have never heard before. I want to create endless possibilities with this cello. I become the medium through which the music is being channeled, and in the process, when all is right, the music is transformed and so am I. (Music) (Applause)

A future beyond traffic gridlock

{0: 'As executive chair of the Ford Motor Company, Bill Ford leads the company that put the world on wheels.'}

TED2011

By birth and by choice, I've been involved with the auto industry my entire life, and for the past 30 years, I've worked at Ford Motor Company. And for most of those years, I worried about, how am I going to sell more cars and trucks? But today I worry about, what if all we do is sell more cars and trucks? What happens when the number of vehicles on the road doubles, triples, or even quadruples? My life is guided by two great passions, and the first is automobiles. I literally grew up with the Ford Motor Company. I thought it was so cool as a little boy when my dad would bring home the latest Ford or Lincoln and leave it in the driveway. And I decided about that time, about age 10, that it would be really cool if I was a test driver. So my parents would go to dinner. They'd sit down; I'd sneak out of the house. I'd jump behind the wheel and take the new model around the driveway, and it was a blast. And that went on for about two years, until — I think I was about 12 — my dad brought home a Lincoln Mark III. And it was snowing that day. So he and mom went to dinner, and I snuck out and thought it'd be really cool to do donuts or even some figure-eights in the snow. My dad finished dinner early that evening. And he was walking to the front hall and out the front door just about the same time I hit some ice and met him at the front door with the car — and almost ended up in the front hall. So it kind of cooled my test-driving for a little while. But I really began to love cars then. And my first car was a 1975 electric-green Mustang. And even though the color was pretty hideous, I did love the car, and it really cemented my love affair with cars that's continued on to this day. But cars are really more than a passion of mine; they're quite literally in my blood. My great grandfather was Henry Ford, and on my mother's side, my great grandfather was Harvey Firestone. So when I was born, I guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me. But my great grandfather, Henry Ford, really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company was to make people's lives better and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them. Because he believed that with mobility comes freedom and progress. And that's a belief that I share. My other great passion is the environment. And as a young boy, I used to go up to Northern Michigan and fish in the rivers that Hemingway fished in and then later wrote about. And it really struck me as the years went by, in a very negative way, when I would go to some stream that I'd loved, and was used to walking through this field that was once filled with fireflies, and now had a strip mall or a bunch of condos on it. And so even at a young age, that really resonated with me, and the whole notion of environmental preservation, at a very basic level, sunk in with me. As a high-schooler, I started to read authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey, and I really began to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world. But it never really occurred to me that my love of cars and trucks would ever be in conflict with nature. And that was true until I got to college. And when I got to college, you can imagine my surprise when I would go to class and a number of my professors would say that Ford Motor Company and my family was everything that was wrong with our country. They thought that we were more interested, as an industry, in profits, rather than progress, and that we filled the skies with smog — and frankly, we were the enemy. I joined Ford after college, after some soul searching whether or not this is really the right thing to do. But I decided that I wanted to go and see if I could affect change there. And as I look back over 30 years ago, it was a little naive to think at that age that I could. But I wanted to. And I really discovered that my professors weren't completely wrong. In fact, when I got back to Detroit, my environmental leanings weren't exactly embraced by those in my own company, and certainly by those in the industry. I had some very interesting conversations, as you can imagine. There were some within Ford who believed that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear and that I needed to stop hanging out with "environmental wackos." I was considered a radical. And I'll never forget the day I was called in by a member of top management and told to stop associating with any known or suspected environmentalists. (Laughter) Of course, I had no intention of doing that, and I kept speaking out about the environment, and it really was the topic that we now today call sustainability. And in time, my views went from controversial to more or less consensus today. I mean, I think most people in the industry understand that we've got to get on with it. And the good news is today we are tackling the big issues, of cars and the environment — not only at Ford, but really as an industry. We're pushing fuel efficiency to new heights. And with new technology, we're reducing — and I believe, someday we'll eliminate — CO2 emissions. We're starting to sell electric cars, which is great. We're developing alternative powertrains that are going to make cars affordable in every sense of the word — economically, socially and environmentally. And actually, although we've got a long way to go and a lot of work to do, I can see the day where my two great passions — cars and the environment — actually come into harmony. But unfortunately, as we're on our way to solving one monstrous problem — and as I said, we're not there yet; we've got a lot of work to do, but I can see where we will — but even as we're in the process of doing that, another huge problem is looming, and people aren't noticing. And that is the freedom of mobility that my great grandfather brought to people is now being threatened, just as the environment is. The problem, put in its simplest terms, is one of mathematics. Today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world, and within our lifetime, that number's going to grow to about nine billion. And at that population level, our planet will be dealing with the limits of growth. And with that growth comes some severe practical problems, one of which is our transportation system simply won't be able to deal with it. When we look at the population growth in terms of cars, it becomes even clearer. Today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide. But with more people and greater prosperity around the world, that number's going to grow to between two and four billion cars by mid century. And this is going to create the kind of global gridlock that the world has never seen before. Now think about the impact that this is going to have on our daily lives. Today the average American spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams, and that's a huge waste of time and resources. But that's nothing compared to what's going on in the nations that are growing the fastest. Today the average driver in Beijing has a five-hour commute. And last summer — many of you probably saw this — there was a hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China. In the decades to come, 75 percent of the world's population will live in cities, and 50 of those cities will be of 10 million people or more. So you can see the size of the issue that we're facing. When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow. Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam. So, if we make no changes today, what does tomorrow look like? Well I think you probably already have the picture. Traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge, and they're really very, very inconvenient, but that's all they are. But the bigger issue is that global gridlock is going to stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and health care, particularly to people that live in city centers. And our quality of life is going to be severely compromised. So what's going to solve this? Well the answer isn't going to be more of the same. My great grandfather once said before he invented the Model T, "If I had asked people then what they wanted, they would have answered, 'We want faster horses.'" So the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads. When America began moving west, we didn't add more wagon trains, we built railroads. And to connect our country after World War II, we didn't build more two-lane highways, we built the interstate highway system. Today we need that same leap in thinking for us to create a viable future. We are going to build smart cars, but we also need to build smart roads, smart parking, smart public transportation systems and more. We don't want to waste our time sitting in traffic, sitting at tollbooths or looking for parking spots. We need an integrated system that uses real time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale without hassle or compromises for travelers. And frankly, that's the kind of system that's going to make the future of personal mobility sustainable. Now the good news is some of this work has already begun in different parts of the world. The city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi uses driverless electric vehicles that can communicate with one another, and they go underneath the city streets. And up above, you've got a series of pedestrian walkways. On New York City's 34th Street, gridlock will soon be replaced with a connected system of vehicle-specific corridors. Pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created, and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute to get across town in New York from about an hour today at rush hour to about 20 minutes. Now if you look at Hong Kong, they have a very interesting system called Octopus there. It's a system that really ties together all the transportation assets into a single payment system. So parking garages, buses, trains, they all operate within the same system. Now shared car services are also springing up around the world, and these efforts, I think, are great. They're relieving congestion, and they're frankly starting to save some fuel. These are all really good ideas that will move us forward. But what really inspires me is what's going to be possible when our cars can begin talking to each other. Very soon, the same systems that we use today to bring music and entertainment and GPS information into our vehicles are going to be used to create a smart vehicle network. Every morning I drive about 30 miles from my home in Ann Arbor to my office in Dearborn, Michigan. And every night I go home, my commute is a total crapshoot. And I often have to leave the freeway and look for different ways for me to try and make it home. But very soon we're going to see the days when cars are essentially talking to each other. So if the car ahead of me on I-94 hits traffic, it will immediately alert my car and tell my car to reroute itself to get me home in the best possible way. And these systems are being tested right now, and frankly they're going to be ready for prime time pretty soon. But the potential of a connected car network is almost limitless. So just imagine: one day very soon, you're going to be able to plan a trip downtown and your car will be connected to a smart parking system. So you get in your car, and as you get in your car, your car will reserve you a parking spot before you arrive — no more driving around looking for one, which frankly is one of the biggest users of fuel in today's cars in urban areas — is looking for parking spots. Or think about being in New York City and tracking down an intelligent cab on your smart phone so you don't have to wait in the cold to hail one. Or being at a future TED Conference and having your car talk to the calendars of everybody here and telling you all the best route to take home and when you should leave so that you can all arrive at your next destination on time. This is the kind of technology that will merge millions of individual vehicles into a single system. So I think it's clear we have the beginnings of a solution to this enormous problem. But as we found out with addressing CO2 issues, and also fossil fuels, there is no one silver bullet. The solution is not going to be more cars, more roads or a new rail system; it can only be found, I believe, in a global network of interconnected solutions. Now I know we can develop the technology that's going to make this work, but we've got to be willing to get out there and seek out the solutions — whether that means vehicle sharing or public transportation or some other way we haven't even thought of yet; our overall transportation-mix and infrastructure must support all the future options. We need our best and our brightest to start entertaining this issue. Companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, they all need to understand this is a huge business opportunity, as well as an enormous social problem. And just as these groups embrace the green energy challenge — and it's really been amazing to me to watch how much brain power, how much money and how much serious thought has, really over the last three years, just poured into the green energy field. We need that same kind of passion and energy to attack global gridlock. But we need people like all of you in this room, leading thinkers. I mean, frankly, I need all of you to think about how you can help solve this huge issue. And we need people from all walks of life; not just inventors, we need policymakers and government officials to also think about how they're going to respond to this challenge. This isn't going to be solved by any one person or one group. It's going to really require a national energy policy, frankly for each country, because the solutions in each country are going to be different based upon income levels, traffic jams and also how integrated the systems already are. But we need to get going, and we need to get going today. And we must have an infrastructure that's designed to support this flexible future. You know, we've come a long way. Since the Model T, most people never traveled more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime. And since then, the automobile has allowed us the freedom to choose where we live, where we work, where we play and frankly when we just go out and want to move around. We don't want to regress and lose that freedom. We're on our way to solving — and as I said earlier, I know we've got a long way to go — the one big issue that we're all focused on that threatens it, and that's the environmental issue, but I believe we all must turn all of our effort and all of our ingenuity and determination to help now solve this notion of global gridlock. Because in doing so, we're going to preserve what we've really come to take for granted, which is the freedom to move and move very effortlessly around the world. And it frankly will enhance our quality of life if we fix this. Because, if you can envision, as I do, a future of zero emissions and freedom to move around the country and around the world like we take for granted today, that's worth the hard work today to preserve that for tomorrow. I believe we're at our best when we're confronted with big issues. This is a big one, and it won't wait. So let's get started now. Thank you. (Applause)

Different ways of knowing

{0: 'Daniel Tammet is the author of "Born on a Blue Day," about his life with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome. He runs the language-learning site Optimnem, and his new book is "Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind."'}

TED2011

I'm a savant, or more precisely, a high-functioning autistic savant. It's a rare condition. And rarer still when accompanied, as in my case, by self-awareness and a mastery of language. Very often when I meet someone and they learn this about me, there's a certain kind of awkwardness. I can see it in their eyes. They want to ask me something. And in the end, quite often, the urge is stronger than they are and they blurt it out: "If I give you my date of birth, can you tell me what day of the week I was born on?" (Laughter) Or they mention cube roots or ask me to recite a long number or long text. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't perform a kind of one-man savant show for you today. I'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots — a little deeper and a lot closer, to my mind, than work. I want to talk to you briefly about perception. When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him — little details that other people seem to miss. Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I too became a writer. In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding. Here are three questions drawn from my work. Rather than try to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them. For example, the calculation: can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall? Or look at the foreign word and the sounds: can you get a sense of the range of meanings that it's pointing you towards? And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit? I'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know. I'm an extreme example of this. My worlds of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality. As Juan said, it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia, an unusual cross-talk between the senses. Here are the numbers one to 12 as I see them — every number with its own shape and character. One is a flash of white light. Six is a tiny and very sad black hole. The sketches are in black and white here, but in my mind they have colors. Three is green. Four is blue. Five is yellow. I paint as well. And here is one of my paintings. It's a multiplication of two prime numbers. Three-dimensional shapes and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape, the answer to the sum. What about bigger numbers? Well you can't get much bigger than Pi, the mathematical constant. It's an infinite number — literally goes on forever. In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi, I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape. But it's not only numbers that I see in colors. Words too, for me, have colors and emotions and textures. And this is an opening phrase from the novel "Lolita." And Nabokov was himself synesthetic. And you can see here how my perception of the sound L helps the alliteration to jump right out. Another example: a little bit more mathematical. And I wonder if some of you will notice the construction of the sentence from "The Great Gatsby." There is a procession of syllables — wheat, one; prairies, two; lost Swede towns, three — one, two, three. And this effect is very pleasant on the mind, and it helps the sentence to feel right. Let's go back to the questions I posed you a moment ago. 64 multiplied by 75. If some of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why chessboards, eight by eight, have 64 squares. So that gives us a form that we can picture, that we can perceive. What about 75? Well if 100, if we think of 100 as being like a square, 75 would look like this. So what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind — something like this. 64 becomes 6,400. And in the right-hand corner, you don't have to calculate anything. Four across, four up and down — it's 16. So what the sum is actually asking you to do is 16, 16, 16. That's a lot easier than the way that the school taught you to do math, I'm sure. It's 16, 16, 16, 48, 4,800 — 4,800, the answer to the sum. Easy when you know how. (Laughter) The second question was an Icelandic word. I'm assuming there are not many people here who speak Icelandic. So let me narrow the choices down to two. Hnugginn: is it a happy word, or a sad word? What do you say? Okay. Some people say it's happy. Most people, a majority of people, say sad. And it actually means sad. (Laughter) Why do, statistically, a majority of people say that a word is sad, in this case, heavy in other cases? In my theory, language evolves in such a way that sounds match, correspond with, the subjective, with the personal, intuitive experience of the listener. Let's have a look at the third question. It's a line from a poem by John Keats. Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world. It stands to reason that we, existing in this world, should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships. And poets, like other artists, play with those intuitive understandings. In the case of hare, it's an ambiguous sound in English. It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head. And if we think of that — let me put the picture up — the fibers represent vulnerability. They yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion. So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension. The hare itself, the animal — not a cat, not a dog, a hare — why a hare? Because think of the picture — not the word, the picture. The overlong ears, the overlarge feet, helps us to picture, to feel intuitively, what it means to limp and to tremble. So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities. The world is richer, vaster than it too often seems to be. I hope that I've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes. Thank you. (Applause)

A circle of caring

{0: 'Jok Church created the science-education comic strip "You Can with Beakman and Jax" and the zany TV series "Beakman\'s World."'}

TED2007

You know, what I do is write for children, and I'm probably America's most widely read children's author, in fact. And I always tell people that I don't want to show up looking like a scientist. You can have me as a farmer, or in leathers, and no one has ever chose farmer. I'm here today to talk to you about circles and epiphanies. And you know, an epiphany is usually something you find that you dropped someplace. You've just got to go around the block to see it as an epiphany. That's a painting of a circle. A friend of mine did that — Richard Bollingbroke. It's the kind of complicated circle that I'm going to tell you about. My circle began back in the '60s in high school in Stow, Ohio where I was the class queer. I was the guy beaten up bloody every week in the boys' room, until one teacher saved my life. She saved my life by letting me go to the bathroom in the teachers' lounge. She did it in secret. She did it for three years. And I had to get out of town. I had a thumb, I had 85 dollars, and I ended up in San Francisco, California — met a lover — and back in the '80s, found it necessary to begin work on AIDS organizations. About three or four years ago, I got a phone call in the middle of the night from that teacher, Mrs. Posten, who said, "I need to see you. I'm disappointed that we never got to know each other as adults. Could you please come to Ohio, and please bring that man that I know you have found by now. And I should mention that I have pancreatic cancer, and I'd like you to please be quick about this." Well, the next day we were in Cleveland. We took a look at her, we laughed, we cried, and we knew that she needed to be in a hospice. We found her one, we got her there, and we took care of her and watched over her family, because it was necessary. It's something we knew how to do. And just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me, she turned into a box of ashes and was placed in my hands. And what had happened was the circle had closed, it had become a circle — and that epiphany I talked about presented itself. The epiphany is that death is a part of life. She saved my life; I and my partner saved hers. And you know, that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does. It needs truth and beauty, and I'm so happy it's been mentioned so much here today. It also needs — it needs dignity, love and pleasure, and it's our job to hand those things out. Thank you. (Applause)

A history of the universe in sound

{0: 'Honor Harger explores the sounds of the sky, using art to connect her audience to the universe.'}

TEDSalon London Spring 2011

Space, we all know what it looks like. We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like. And indeed, most people associate space with silence. But the story of how we came to understand the universe is just as much a story of listening as it is by looking. And yet despite this, hardly any of us have ever heard space. How many of you here could describe the sound of a single planet or star? Well in case you've ever wondered, this is what the Sun sounds like. (Static) (Crackling) (Static) (Crackling) This is the planet Jupiter. (Soft crackling) And this is the space probe Cassini pirouetting through the ice rings of Saturn. (Crackling) This is a a highly condensed clump of neutral matter, spinning in the distant universe. (Tapping) So my artistic practice is all about listening to the weird and wonderful noises emitted by the magnificent celestial objects that make up our universe. And you may wonder, how do we know what these sounds are? How can we tell the difference between the sound of the Sun and the sound of a pulsar? Well the answer is the science of radio astronomy. Radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers, which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky. And just like the signals that we send and receive here on Earth, we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques. And therefore, it's through listening that we've come to uncover some of the universe's most important secrets — its scale, what it's made of and even how old it is. So today, I'm going to tell you a short story of the history of the universe through listening. It's punctuated by three quick anecdotes, which show how accidental encounters with strange noises gave us some of the most important information we have about space. Now this story doesn't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft, but a rather more humble technology — and in fact, the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we're all part of today: the telephone. It's 1876, it's in Boston, and this is Alexander Graham Bell who was working with Thomas Watson on the invention of the telephone. A key part of their technical set up was a half-mile long length of wire, which was thrown across the rooftops of several houses in Boston. The line carried the telephone signals that would later make Bell a household name. But like any long length of charged wire, it also inadvertently became an antenna. Thomas Watson spent hours listening to the strange crackles and hisses and chirps and whistles that his accidental antenna detected. Now you have to remember, this is 10 years before Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves — 15 years before Nikola Tesla's four-tuned circuit — nearly 20 years before Marconi's first broadcast. So Thomas Watson wasn't listening to us. We didn't have the technology to transmit. So what were these strange noises? Watson was in fact listening to very low-frequency radio emissions caused by nature. Some of the crackles and pops were lightning, but the eerie whistles and curiously melodious chirps had a rather more exotic origin. Using the very first telephone, Watson was in fact dialed into the heavens. As he correctly guessed, some of these sounds were caused by activity on the surface of the Sun. It was a solar wind interacting with our ionosphere that he was listening to — a phenomena which we can see at the extreme northern and southern latitudes of our planet as the aurora. So whilst inventing the technology that would usher in the telecommunications revolution, Watson had discovered that the star at the center of our solar system emitted powerful radio waves. He had accidentally been the first person to tune in to them. Fast-forward 50 years, and Bell and Watson's technology has completely transformed global communications. But going from slinging some wire across rooftops in Boston to laying thousands and thousands of miles of cable on the Atlantic Ocean seabed is no easy matter. And so before long, Bell were looking to new technologies to optimize their revolution. Radio could carry sound without wires. But the medium is lossy — it's subject to a lot of noise and interference. So Bell employed an engineer to study those noises, to try and find out where they came from, with a view towards building the perfect hardware codec, which would get rid of them so they could think about using radio for the purposes of telephony. Most of the noises that the engineer, Karl Jansky, investigated were fairly prosaic in origin. They turned out to be lightning or sources of electrical power. But there was one persistent noise that Jansky couldn't identify, and it seemed to appear in his radio headset four minutes earlier each day. Now any astronomer will tell you, this is the telltale sign of something that doesn't originate from Earth. Jansky had made a historic discovery, that celestial objects could emit radio waves as well as light waves. Fifty years on from Watson's accidental encounter with the Sun, Jansky's careful listening ushered in a new age of space exploration: the radio astronomy age. Over the next few years, astronomers connected up their antennas to loudspeakers and learned about our radio sky, about Jupiter and the Sun, by listening. Let's jump ahead again. It's 1964, and we're back at Bell Labs. And once again, two scientists have got a problem with noise. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using the horn antenna at Bell's Holmdel laboratory to study the Milky Way with extraordinary precision. They were really listening to the galaxy in high fidelity. There was a glitch in their soundtrack. A mysterious persistent noise was disrupting their research. It was in the microwave range, and it appeared to be coming from all directions simultaneously. Now this didn't make any sense, and like any reasonable engineer or scientist, they assumed that the problem must be the technology itself, it must be the dish. There were pigeons roosting in the dish. And so perhaps once they cleaned up the pigeon droppings, get the disk kind of operational again, normal operations would resume. But the noise didn't disappear. The mysterious noise that Penzias and Wilson were listening to turned out to be the oldest and most significant sound that anyone had ever heard. It was cosmic radiation left over from the very birth of the universe. This was the first experimental evidence that the Big Bang existed and the universe was born at a precise moment some 14.7 billion years ago. So our story ends at the beginning — the beginning of all things, the Big Bang. This is the noise that Penzias and Wilson heard — the oldest sound that you're ever going to hear, the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. (Fuzz) Thanks. (Applause)

On being just crazy enough

{0: 'Joshua Walters is a bipolar comedian whose work explores language, creativity, beatboxing and madness ...'}

Full Spectrum Auditions

My name is Joshua Walters. I'm a performer. (Beatboxing) (Laughter) (Applause) But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar. I reframe that as a positive because the crazier I get onstage, the more entertaining I become. When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ. Maybe you thought that was scary, but actually there's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you're Jesus Christ. (Laughter) I was sent to a place, a psych ward, and in the psych ward, everyone is doing their own one-man show. (Laughter) There's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time. They're just practicing. One day they'll get here. Now when I got out, I was diagnosed and I was given medications by a psychiatrist. "Okay, Josh, why don't we give you some — why don't we give you some Zyprexa. Okay? Mmhmm? At least that's what it says on my pen." (Laughter) Some of you are in the field, I can see. I can feel your noise. The first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode, and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs, where I was sleeping through high school. The second half was just one big nap, pretty much, in class. When I got out I had a choice. I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness. (Bugle sound) There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive — at least the hypomanic edge part of it. Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks. Many of the speakers here, many of you in the audience, have that creative edge, if you know what I'm talking about. You're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible. And there's a book — John Gartner. John Gartner wrote this book called "The Hypomanic Edge" in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete. A different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called "Touched With Fire" by Kay Redfield Jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which Mozart and Beethoven and Van Gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with. Some of them committed suicide. So it wasn't all the good side of the illness. Now recently, there's been development in this field. And there was an article written in the New York Times, September 2010, that stated: "Just Manic Enough." Just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum — you know what I'm talking about — not maybe full bipolar, but they're in the bipolar spectrum — where on one side, maybe you think you're Jesus, and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money. (Laughter) Your call. Your call. And everyone's somewhere in the middle. Everyone's somewhere in the middle. So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy. But maybe it just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel. Maybe no one's really crazy. Everyone is just a little bit mad. How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum. How much depends on how lucky you are. Thank you. (Applause)

A Rosetta Stone for a lost language

{0: 'Rajesh Rao seeks to understand the human brain through computational modeling, on two fronts: developing computer models of our minds, and using tech to decipher the 4,000-year-old lost script of the Indus Valley civilization.\r\n'}

TED2011

I'd like to begin with a thought experiment. Imagine that it's 4,000 years into the future. Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist — no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter. All knowledge of the English language and the English alphabet has been lost. Now imagine archeologists digging through the rubble of one of our cities. What might they find? Well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them. Perhaps some circular pieces of metal. Maybe some cylindrical containers with some symbols on them. And perhaps one archeologist becomes an instant celebrity when she discovers — buried in the hills somewhere in North America — massive versions of these same symbols. Now let's ask ourselves, what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future? This is no hypothetical question. In fact, this is exactly the kind of question we're faced with when we try to understand the Indus Valley civilization, which existed 4,000 years ago. The Indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations. It occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran. Given that it was such a vast civilization, you might expect to find really powerful rulers, kings, and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings. In fact, what archeologists have found is none of that. They've found small objects such as these. Here's an example of one of these objects. Well obviously this is a replica. But who is this person? A king? A god? A priest? Or perhaps an ordinary person like you or me? We don't know. But the Indus people also left behind artifacts with writing on them. Well no, not pieces of plastic, but stone seals, copper tablets, pottery and, surprisingly, one large sign board, which was found buried near the gate of a city. Now we don't know if it says Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter. In fact, we don't even know what any of these objects say, and that's because the Indus script is undeciphered. We don't know what any of these symbols mean. The symbols are most commonly found on seals. So you see up there one such object. It's the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it. Now that's a magnificent piece of art. So how big do you think that is? Perhaps that big? Or maybe that big? Well let me show you. Here's a replica of one such seal. It's only about one inch by one inch in size — pretty tiny. So what were these used for? We know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other. So you know those packing slips you get on your FedEx boxes? These were used to make those kinds of packing slips. You might wonder what these objects contain in terms of their text. Perhaps they're the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other — we don't know. We need to decipher the script to answer that question. Deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle; it's actually become a question that's become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of South Asia. In fact, the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people. First, there's a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the Indus script does not represent a language at all. These people believe that the symbols are very similar to the kind of symbols you find on traffic signs or the emblems you find on shields. There's a second group of people who believe that the Indus script represents an Indo-European language. If you look at a map of India today, you'll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family. So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit. There's a last group of people who believe that the Indus people were the ancestors of people living in South India today. These people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today. And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian. Which of these hypotheses can be true? We don't know, but perhaps if you deciphered the script, you would be able to answer this question. But deciphering the script is a very challenging task. First, there's no Rosetta Stone. I don't mean the software; I mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text. We don't have such an artifact for the Indus script. And furthermore, we don't even know what language they spoke. And to make matters even worse, most of the text that we have are extremely short. So as I showed you, they're usually found on these seals that are very, very tiny. And so given these formidable obstacles, one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the Indus script. In the rest of my talk, I'd like to tell you about how I learned to stop worrying and love the challenge posed by the Indus script. I've always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read about it in a middle school textbook. And why was I fascinated? Well it's the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world. My career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist, so in my day job, I create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictions, how the brain makes decisions, how the brain learns and so on. But in 2007, my path crossed again with the Indus script. That's when I was in India, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some Indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script. And so it was then that I realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists, and so I jumped at that opportunity. And I'd like to describe some of the results that we have found. Or better yet, let's all collectively decipher. Are you ready? The first thing that you need to do when you have an undeciphered script is try to figure out the direction of writing. Here are two texts that contain some symbols on them. Can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right? I'll give you a couple of seconds. Okay. Right to left, how many? Okay. Okay. Left to right? Oh, it's almost 50/50. Okay. The answer is: if you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, you'll notice that there's a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. And so they had to cram the sign. One of the signs is also below the text on the top. This suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left, and so that's one of the first things we know, that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts. And the Indus script now has this particular property. What other properties of language does the script show? Languages contain patterns. If I give you the letter Q and ask you to predict the next letter, what do you think that would be? Most of you said U, which is right. Now if I asked you to predict one more letter, what do you think that would be? Now there's several thoughts. There's E. It could be I. It could be A, but certainly not B, C or D, right? The Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns. There's a lot of text that start with this diamond-shaped symbol. And this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol. And this is very similar to a Q and U example. This symbol can in turn be followed by these fish-like symbols and some other signs, but never by these other signs at the bottom. And furthermore, there's some signs that really prefer the end of texts, such as this jar-shaped sign, and this sign, in fact, happens to be the most frequently occurring sign in the script. Given such patterns, here was our idea. The idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns, and so we gave the computer the existing texts. And the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which symbols tend to follow each other. Given the computer model, we can test the model by essentially quizzing it. So we could deliberately erase some symbols, and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols. Here are some examples. You may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of Wheel of Fortune. What we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol. In the rest of the cases, typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer. There's also practical use for this particular procedure. There's a lot of these texts that are damaged. Here's an example of one such text. And we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction. Here's an example of a symbol that was predicted. And this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze. Now here's one other thing you can do with the computer model. So imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard. I think you might get a random jumble of letters that looks like this. Such a random jumble of letters is said to have a very high entropy. This is a physics and information theory term. But just imagine it's a really random jumble of letters. How many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard? You might have encountered the stuck-key problem — so basically the same symbol being repeated over and over again. This kind of a sequence is said to have a very low entropy because there's no variation at all. Language, on the other hand, has an intermediate level of entropy; it's neither too rigid, nor is it too random. What about the Indus script? Here's a graph that plots the entropies of a whole bunch of sequences. At the very top you find the uniformly random sequence, which is a random jumble of letters — and interestingly, we also find the DNA sequence from the human genome and instrumental music. And both of these are very, very flexible, which is why you find them in the very high range. At the lower end of the scale, you find a rigid sequence, a sequence of all A's, and you also find a computer program, in this case in the language Fortran, which obeys really strict rules. Linguistic scripts occupy the middle range. Now what about the Indus script? We found that the Indus script actually falls within the range of the linguistic scripts. When this result was first published, it was highly controversial. There were people who raised a hue and cry, and these people were the ones who believed that the Indus script does not represent language. I even started to get some hate mail. My students said that I should really seriously consider getting some protection. Who'd have thought that deciphering could be a dangerous profession? What does this result really show? It shows that the Indus script shares an important property of language. So, as the old saying goes, if it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script, then perhaps we may have a linguistic script on our hands. What other evidence is there that the script could actually encode language? Well linguistic scripts can actually encode multiple languages. So for example, here's the same sentence written in English and the same sentence written in Dutch using the same letters of the alphabet. If you don't know Dutch and you only know English and I give you some words in Dutch, you'll tell me that these words contain some very unusual patterns. Some things are not right, and you'll say these words are probably not English words. The same thing happens in the case of the Indus script. The computer found several texts — two of them are shown here — that have very unusual patterns. So for example the first text: there's a doubling of this jar-shaped sign. This sign is the most frequently-occurring sign in the Indus script, and it's only in this text that it occurs as a doubling pair. Why is that the case? We went back and looked at where these particular texts were found, and it turns out that they were found very, very far away from the Indus Valley. They were found in present day Iraq and Iran. And why were they found there? What I haven't told you is that the Indus people were very, very enterprising. They used to trade with people pretty far away from where they lived, and so in this case, they were traveling by sea all the way to Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. And what seems to have happened here is that the Indus traders, the merchants, were using this script to write a foreign language. It's just like our English and Dutch example. And that would explain why we have these strange patterns that are very different from the kinds of patterns you see in the text that are found within the Indus Valley. This suggests that the same script, the Indus script, could be used to write different languages. The results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the Indus script probably does represent language. If it does represent language, then how do we read the symbols? That's our next big challenge. So you'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans, of insects, of fishes, of birds. Most ancient scripts use the rebus principle, which is, using pictures to represent words. So as an example, here's a word. Can you write it using pictures? I'll give you a couple seconds. Got it? Okay. Great. Here's my solution. You could use the picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf — and that's "belief," right. There could be other solutions. In the case of the Indus script, the problem is the reverse. You have to figure out the sounds of each of these pictures such that the entire sequence makes sense. So this is just like a crossword puzzle, except that this is the mother of all crossword puzzles because the stakes are so high if you solve it. My colleagues, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola, have been making some headway on this particular problem. And I'd like to give you a quick example of Parpola's work. Here's a really short text. It contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign. And I want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods, so it's quite likely that these tags, at least some of them, contain names of merchants. And it turns out that in India there's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth. In Dravidian languages, the word for fish is "meen" which happens to sound just like the word for star. And so seven stars would stand for "elu meen," which is the Dravidian word for the Big Dipper star constellation. Similarly, there's another sequence of six stars, and that translates to "aru meen," which is the old Dravidian name for the star constellation Pleiades. And finally, there's other combinations, such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it. And that could be translated into "mey meen," which is the old Dravidian name for the planet Saturn. So that was pretty exciting. It looks like we're getting somewhere. But does this prove that these seals contain Dravidian names based on planets and star constellations? Well not yet. So we have no way of validating these particular readings, but if more and more of these readings start making sense, and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct, then we know that we are on the right track. Today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century. The decipherment of these two scripts enabled these civilizations to speak to us again directly. The Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent. Why should we care? The Indus civilization does not belong to just the South Indians or the North Indians or the Pakistanis; it belongs to all of us. These are our ancestors — yours and mine. They were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history. If we decipher the script, we would enable them to speak to us again. What would they tell us? What would we find out about them? About us? I can't wait to find out. Thank you. (Applause)

Meet e-Patient Dave

{0: 'Dave deBronkart wants to help patients help themselves -- by owning their medical data, connecting to fellow patients and making medical care better.'}

TEDxMaastricht

It's an amazing thing that we're here to talk about the year of patients rising. You heard stories earlier today about patients who are taking control of their cases, patients who are saying, "You know what, I know what the odds are, but I'm going to look for more information. I'm going to define what the terms of my success are." I'm going to be sharing with you how, four years ago, I almost died — found out I was, in fact, already almost dead — and what I then found out about what's called the e-Patient movement. I'll explain what that term means. I had been blogging under the name "Patient Dave," and when I discovered this, I just renamed myself e-Patient Dave. Regarding the word "patient": When I first started a few years ago getting involved in health care and attending meetings as just a casual observer, I noticed that people would talk about patients as if it was somebody who's not in the room here — somebody out there. Some of our talks today, we still act like that. But I'm here to tell you: "patient" is not a third-person word. All right? You yourself will find yourself in a hospital bed — or your mother, your child — there are heads nodding, people who say, "Yes, I know exactly what you mean." So when you hear what I'm going to talk about here today, first of all, I want to say that I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met. This is about letting patients play a more active role in helping health care, in fixing health care. One of the senior doctors at my hospital, Charlie Safran, and his colleague, Warner Slack, have been saying for decades that the most underutilized resource in all of health care is the patient. They have been saying that since the 1970s. Now, I'm going to step back in history. This is from July, 1969. I was a freshman in college, and this was when we first landed on the Moon. And it was the first time we had ever seen from another surface — that's the place where you and I are right now, where we live. The world was changing. It was about to change in ways that nobody could foresee. A few weeks later, Woodstock happened. Three days of fun and music. Here, just for historical authenticity, is a picture of me in that year. (Laughter) Yeah, the wavy hair, the blue eyes — it was really something. That fall of 1969, the Whole Earth Catalog came out. It was a hippie journal of self-sufficiency. We think of hippies of being just hedonists, but there's a very strong component — I was in that movement — a very strong component of being responsible for yourself. This book's title's subtitle is "Access to Tools." It talked about how to build your own house, how to grow your own food, all kinds of things. In the 1980s, this young doctor, Tom Ferguson, was the medical editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He saw that the great majority of what we do in medicine and health care is taking care of ourselves. In fact, he said it was 70 to 80 percent of how we actually take care of our bodies. Well, he also saw that when health care turns to medical care because of a more serious disease, the key thing that holds us back is access to information. And when the Web came along, that changed everything, because not only could we find information, we could find other people like ourselves who could gather, who could bring us information. And he coined this term "e-Patients" — equipped, engaged, empowered, enabled. Obviously, at this stage of life he was in a somewhat more dignified form than he was back then. Now, I was an engaged patient long before I ever heard of the term. In 2006, I went to my doctor for a regular physical, and I had said, "I have a sore shoulder." Well, I got an X-ray, and the next morning — you may have noticed, those of you who have been through a medical crisis will understand this. This morning, some of the speakers named the date when they found out about their condition. For me, it was 9am on January 3, 2007. I was at the office; my desk was clean. I had the blue partition carpet on the walls. The phone rang and it was my doctor. He said, "Dave, I pulled up the X-ray image on the screen on the computer at home." He said, "Your shoulder is going to be fine, but Dave, there's something in your lung." And if you look in that red oval, that shadow was not supposed to be there. To make a long story short, I said, "So you need me to get back in there?" He said, "Yeah, we're going to need to do a CT scan of your chest." In parting, I said, "Is there anything I should do?" He said — think about this one, this is the advice your doctor gives you: "Just go home and have a glass of wine with your wife." I went in for the CAT scan. It turns out there were five of these things in both my lungs. So at that point we knew that it was cancer. We knew it wasn't lung cancer. That meant it was metastasized from somewhere. The question was, where from? So I went in for an ultrasound. I got to do what many women have — the jelly on the belly and the, "Bzzzz!" My wife came with me. She's a veterinarian, so she's seen lots of ultrasounds. I mean, she knows I'm not a dog. (Laughter) This is an MRI image. This is much sharper than an ultrasound would be. What we saw in that kidney was that big blob there. There were actually two of these: one was growing out the front and had already erupted and latched onto the bowel. One was growing out the back and it attached to the psoas muscle, which is a big muscle in the back that I'd never heard of, but all of a sudden I cared about it. (Laughter) I went home. Now, I've been Googling — I've been online since 1989, on CompuServe. I went home, and I know you can't read the details here; that's not important. My point is, I went to a respected medical website, WebMD, because I know how to filter out junk. I also found my wife online. Before I met her, I went through some suboptimal search results. (Laughter) So I looked for quality information. There's so much about trust — what sources of information can we trust? Where does my body end and an invader start? A cancer, a tumor, is something you grow out of your own tissue. How does that happen? Where does medical ability end and start? Well, so what I read on WebMD: "The prognosis is poor for progressing renal cell cancer. Almost all patients are incurable." I've been online long enough to know if I don't like the first results I get, I go look for more. And what I found on other websites was, even by the third page of Google results: "Outlook is bleak." "Prognosis is grim." And I'm thinking, "What the heck?" I didn't feel sick at all. I mean, I'd been getting tired in the evening, but I was 56 years old, you know? I was slowly losing weight, but for me, that was what the doctor told me to do. It was really something. And this is the diagram of stage 4 kidney cancer from the drug I eventually got. Totally by coincidence, there's that thing in my lung. In the left femur, the left thigh bone, there's another one. I had one. My leg eventually snapped. I fainted and landed on it, and it broke. There's one in the skull, and then for good measure, I had these other tumors, including, by the time my treatment started, one was growing out of my tongue. I had kidney cancer growing out of my tongue. And what I read was that my median survival was 24 weeks. This was bad. I was facing the grave. I thought, "What's my mother's face going to look like on the day of my funeral?" I had to sit down with my daughter and say, "Here's the situation." Her boyfriend was with her. I said, "I don't want you guys to get married prematurely, just so you can do it while Dad's still alive." It's really serious. If you wonder why patients are motivated and want to help, think about this. Well, my doctor prescribed a patient community, ACOR.org, a network of cancer patients, of all amazing things. Very quickly they told me, "Kidney cancer is an uncommon disease. Get yourself to a specialist center. There is no cure, but there's something that sometimes works — it usually doesn't — called high-dosage interleukin. Most hospitals don't offer it, so they won't even tell you it exists. Don't let them give you anything else first. And by the way, here are four doctors in your part of the United States who offer it, and their phone numbers." How amazing is that? (Applause) Here's the thing: Here we are, four years later — you can't find a website that gives patients that information. Government-approved, American Cancer Society, but patients know what patients want to know. It's the power of patient networks. This amazing substance — again, I mentioned: Where does my body end? My oncologist and I talk a lot these days because I try to keep my talks technically accurate. And he said, "You know, the immune system is good at detecting invaders, bacteria coming from outside, but when it's your own tissue that you've grown, it's a whole different thing." And I went through a mental exercise, actually, because I started a patient support community of my own on a website, and one of my friends — one of my relatives, actually — said, "Look, Dave, who grew this thing? Are you going to set yourself up as mentally attacking yourself?" So we went into it. The story of how all that happened is in the book. Anyway, this is the way the numbers unfolded. Me being me, I put the numbers from my hospital's website, for my tumor sizes, into a spreadsheet. Don't worry about the numbers. You see, that's the immune system. Amazing thing, those two yellow lines are where I got the two doses of interleukin two months apart. And look at how the tumor sizes plummeted in between. Just incredible. Who knows what we'll be able to do when we learn to make more use of it? The punch line is that a year and a half later, I was there when this magnificent young woman, my daughter, got married. And when she came down those steps, and it was just her and me for that moment, I was so glad that she didn't have to say to her mother, "I wish Dad could have been here." And this is what we're doing when we make health care better. Now, I want to talk briefly about a couple of other patients who are doing everything in their power to improve health care. This is Regina Holliday, a painter in Washington DC, whose husband died of kidney cancer a year after my disease. She's painting, here, a mural of his horrible final weeks in the hospital. One of the things that she discovered was that her husband's medical record in this paper folder was just disorganized. And she thought, "You know, if I have a nutrition facts label on the side of a cereal box, why can't there be something that simple telling every new nurse who comes on duty, every new doctor, the basics about my husband's condition?" So she painted this medical facts mural with a nutrition label, something like that, in a diagram of him. She then, last year, painted this diagram. She studied health care like me. She came to realize there were a lot of people who'd written patient-advocate books that you just don't hear about at medical conferences. Patients are such an underutilized resource. Well, as it said in my introduction, I've gotten somewhat known for saying that patients should have access to their data. I actually said at one conference a couple of years ago, "Give me my damn data, because you people can't be trusted to keep it clean." And here, she has our "damned" data — it's a pun — which is starting to break out, starting to break through — the water symbolizes our data. And in fact, I want to do a little something improvisational for you. There's a guy on Twitter that I know, a health IT guy outside Boston, and he wrote the e-Patient rap. And it goes like this. (Laughter) (Beatboxing) (Rapping) Gimme my damn data I wanna be an e-Patient just like Dave Gimme my damn data, 'cause it's my life to save (Normal voice) Now, I'm not going to go any further — (Applause) (Cheering) Well, thank you. That shot the timing. (Laughter) Think about the possibility. Why is it that iPhones and iPads advance far faster than the health tools that are available to you to help take care of your family? Here's a website, VisibleBody.com, that I stumbled across. And I thought, "You know, I wonder what my psoas muscle is?" So you can click on things and remove it. And I saw, "Aha! That's the kidney and the psoas muscle." I was rotating it in 3D and saying, "I understand now." And then I realized it reminded me of Google Earth, where you can fly to any address. And I thought, "Why not take this and connect it to my digital scan data and have Google Earth for my body?" What did Google come out with this year? Now there's Google Body browser. But you see, it's still generic. It's not my data. But if we can get that data out from behind the dam so software innovators can pounce on it the way software innovators like to do, who knows what we'll be able to come up with. One final story. This is Kelly Young, a rheumatoid arthritis patient from Florida. This is a live story, unfolding just in the last few weeks. RA patients, as they call themselves — her blog is "RA Warrior" — have a big problem, because 40 percent of them have no visible symptoms. And that makes it really hard to tell how the disease is going, and some doctors think, "Yeah right, you're really in pain." Well, she found, through her online research, a nuclear bone scan that's usually used for cancer, but it can also reveal inflammation. And she saw that if there is no inflammation, then the scan is a uniform gray. So she took it. And the radiologist's report said, "No cancer found." Well, that's not what he was supposed to do with it. So she wanted to have it read again, and her doctor fired her. She pulled up the CD. He said, "If you don't want to follow my instructions, go away." So she pulled up the CD of the scan images, and look at all those hot spots. And she's now actively engaged on her blog in looking for assistance in getting better care. See, that is an empowered patient — no medical training. We are, you are, the most underused resource in health care. What she was able to do was because she had access to the raw data. How big a deal was this? Well at TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee himself, inventor of the Web, gave a talk where he said the next big thing is not to have your browser find other people's articles about the data, but the raw data. And he got them chanting by the end of the talk, "Raw data now! Raw data now!" And I ask you, three words, please, to improve health care: Let patients help! Let patients help! Let patients help! Let patients help! Thank you. (Applause) For all the patients around the world watching this on the Webcast, God bless you, everyone. Let patients help. Host: And bless yourself. Thank you very much.

Building a park in the sky

{0: 'The co-founder of Friends of the High Line, Robert Hammond helped lead the effort to build an elevated park on an abandoned railway line in Manhattan.'}

TED2011

The Highline is an old, elevated rail line that runs for a mile and a half right through Manhattan. And it was originally a freight line that ran down 10th Ave. And it became known as "Death Avenue" because so many people were run over by the trains that the railroad hired a guy on horseback to run in front, and he became known as the "West Side Cowboy." But even with a cowboy, about one person a month was killed and run over. So they elevated it. They built it 30 ft. in the air, right through the middle of the city. But with the rise of interstate trucking, it was used less and less. And by 1980, the last train rode. It was a train loaded with frozen turkeys — they say, at Thanksgiving — from the meatpacking district. And then it was abandoned. And I live in the neighborhood, and I first read about it in the New York Times, in an article that said it was going to be demolished. And I assumed someone was working to preserve it or save it and I could volunteer, but I realized no one was doing anything. I went to my first community board meeting — which I'd never been to one before — and sat next to another guy named Joshua David, who's a travel writer. And at the end of the meeting, we realized we were the only two people that were sort of interested in the project; most people wanted to tear it down. So we exchanged business cards, and we kept calling each other and decided to start this organization, Friends of the High Line. And the goal at first was just saving it from demolition, but then we also wanted to figure out what we could do with it. And what first attracted me, or interested me, was this view from the street — which is this steel structure, sort of rusty, this industrial relic. But when I went up on top, it was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the middle of Manhattan with views of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River. And that's really where we started, the idea coalesced around, let's make this a park, and let's have it be sort of inspired by this wildscape. At the time, there was a lot of opposition. Mayor Giuliani wanted to tear it down. I'm going to fast-forward through a lot of lawsuits and a lot of community engagement. Mayor Bloomberg came in office, he was very supportive, but we still had to make the economic case. This was after 9/11; the city was in tough times. So we commissioned an economic feasibility study to try to make the case. And it turns out, we got those numbers wrong. We thought it would cost 100 million dollars to build. So far it's cost about 150 million. And the main case was, this is going to make good economic sense for the city. So we said over a 20-year time period, the value to the city in increased property values and increased taxes would be about 250 million. That was enough. It really got the city behind it. It turns out we were wrong on that. Now people estimate it's created about a half a billion dollars, or will create about a half a billion dollars, in tax revenues for the city. We did a design competition, selected a design team. We worked with them to really create a design that was inspired by that wildscape. There's three sections. We opened the fist section in 2009. It's been successful beyond our dreams. Last year we had about two million people, which is about 10 times what we ever estimated. This is one of my favorite features in section one. It's this amphitheater right over 10th Ave. And the first section ends at 20th St. right now. The other thing, it's generated, obviously, a lot of economic value; it's also inspired, I think, a lot of great architecture. There's a point, you can stand here and see buildings by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Neil Denari. And the Whitney is moving downtown and is building their new museum right at the base of the High Line. And this has been designed by Renzo Piano. And they're going to break ground in May. And we've already started construction on section two. This is one of my favorite features, this flyover where you're eight feet off the surface of the High Line, running through a canopy of trees. The High Line used to be covered in billboards, and so we've taken a playful take where, instead of framing advertisements, it's going to frame people in views of the city. This was just installed last month. And then the last section was going to go around the rail yards, which is the largest undeveloped site in Manhattan. And the city has planned — for better or for worse — 12 million square-feet of development that the High Line is going to ring around. But what really, I think, makes the High Line special is the people. And honestly, even though I love the designs that we were building, I was always frightened that I wouldn't really love it, because I fell in love with that wildscape — and how could you recreate that magic? But what I found is it's in the people and how they use it that, to me, makes it so special. Just one quick example is I realized right after we opened that there were all these people holding hands on the High Line. And I realized New Yorkers don't hold hands; we just don't do that outside. But you see that happening on the High Line, and I think that's the power that public space can have to transform how people experience their city and interact with each other. Thanks. (Applause)

Try something new for 30 days

{0: 'An early employee at Google, Matt Cutts works to modernize the US government as an administrator at U.S. Digital Service (USDS).'}

TED2011

A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days. The idea is actually pretty simple. Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. It turns out 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit — like watching the news — from your life. There's a few things I learned while doing these 30-day challenges. The first was, instead of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable. This was part of a challenge I did to take a picture every day for a month. And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day. I also noticed that as I started to do more and harder 30-day challenges, my self-confidence grew. I went from desk-dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work. For fun! (Laughter) Even last year, I ended up hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. I would never have been that adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges. I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days. Have you ever wanted to write a novel? Every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days. It turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month. So I did. By the way, the secret is not to go to sleep until you've written your words for the day. You might be sleep-deprived, but you'll finish your novel. Now is my book the next great American novel? No. I wrote it in a month. It's awful. (Laughter) But for the rest of my life, if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party, I don't have to say, "I'm a computer scientist." No, no, if I want to, I can say, "I'm a novelist." (Laughter) So here's one last thing I'd like to mention. I learned that when I made small, sustainable changes, things I could keep doing, they were more likely to stick. There's nothing wrong with big, crazy challenges. In fact, they're a ton of fun. But they're less likely to stick. When I gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this. (Laughter) So here's my question to you: What are you waiting for? I guarantee you the next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot! For the next 30 days. Thanks. (Applause)

Cooking as never seen before

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

TED2011

So I'm going to tell you a little bit about reimagining food. I've been interested in food for a long time. I taught myself to cook with a bunch of big books like this. I went to chef school in France. And there is a way the world both envisions food, the way the world writes about food and learns about food. And it's largely what you would find in these books. And it's a wonderful thing. But there's some things that have been going on since this idea of food was established. In the last 20 years, people have realized that science has a tremendous amount to do with food. In fact, understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking — some of the chemistry, some of the physics and so forth. But that's not in any of those books. There's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed, some about new aesthetics, new approaches to food. There's a chef in Spain named Ferran Adria. He's developed a very avant-garde cuisine. A guy in England called Heston Blumenthal, he's developed his avant-garde cuisine. None of the techniques that these people have developed over the course of the last 20 years is in any of those books. None of them are taught in cooking schools. In order to learn them, you have to go work in those restaurants. And finally, there's the old way of viewing food is the old way. And so a few years ago — fours years ago, actually — I set out to say, is there a way we can communicate science and technique and wonder? Is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before? So we tried, and I'll show you what we came up with. This is a picture called a cutaway. This is actually the first picture I took in the book. The idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli. And this magic view allows you to see all of what's happening while the broccoli steams. Then each of the different little pieces around it explain some fact. And the hope was two-fold. One is you can actually explain what happens when you steam broccoli. But the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people into stuff that was a little more technical, maybe a little bit more scientific, maybe a little bit more chef-y than they otherwise would have. Because with that beautiful photo, maybe I can also package this little box here that talks about how steaming and boiling actually take different amounts of time. Steaming ought to be faster. It turns out it isn't because of something called film condensation, and this explains that. Well, that first cutaway picture worked, so we said, "Okay, let's do some more." So here's another one. We discovered why woks are the shape they are. This shaped wok doesn't work very well; this caught fire three times. But we had a philosophy, which is it only has to look good for a thousandth of a second. (Laughter) And one of our canning cutaways. Once you start cutting things in half, you kind of get carried away, so you see we cut the jars in half as well as the pan. And each of these text blocks explains a key thing that's going on. In this case, boiling water canning is for canning things that are already pretty acidic. You don't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores can't grow in the acid. So this is great for pickled vegetables, which is what we're canning here. Here's our hamburger cutaway. One of our philosophies in the book is that no dish is really intrinsically any better than any other dish. So you can lavish all the same care, all the same technique, on a hamburger as you would on some much more fancy dish. And if you do lavish as much technique as possible, and you try to make the highest quality hamburger, it gets to be a little bit involved. The New York Times ran a piece after my book was delayed and it was called "The Wait for the 30-Hour Hamburger Just Got Longer." Because our hamburger recipe, our ultimate hamburger recipe, if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff, it does take about 30 hours. Of course, you're not actually working the whole time. Most of the time is kind of sitting there. The point of this cutaway is to show people a view of hamburgers they haven't seen before and to explain the physics of hamburgers and the chemistry of hamburgers, because, believe it or not, there is something to the physics and chemistry — in particular, those flames underneath the burger. Most of the characteristic char-grilled taste doesn't come from the wood or the charcoal. Buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference. Mostly it comes from fat pyrolyzing, or burning. So it's the fat that drips down and flares up that causes the characteristic taste. Now you might wonder, how do we make these cutaways? Most people assume we use Photoshop. And the answer is: no, not really; we use a machine shop. And it turns out, the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half. So we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world. (Laughter) We cut a $5,000 restaurant oven in half. The manufacturer said, "What would it take for you to cut one in half?" I said, "It would have to show up free." And so it showed up, we used it a little while, we cut it in half. Now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots. We would glue a piece of Pyrex or heat-resistant glass in front. We used a red, very high-temperature silicon to do that. The great thing is, when you cut something in half, you have another half. So you photograph that in exactly the same position, and then you can substitute in — and that part does use Photoshop — just the edges. So it's very much like in a Hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air, supported by wires, and then they take the wires away digitally so you're flying through the air. In most cases, though, there was no glass. Like for the hamburger, we just cut the damn barbecue. And so those coals that kept falling off the edge, we kept having to put them back up. But again, it only has to work for a thousandth of a second. The wok shot caught fire three times. What happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire and whoosh! One of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way. But hey, they grow back. In addition to cutaways, we also explain physics. This is Fourier's law of heat conduction. It's a partial differential equation. We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it. But to make them palatable, we cut it out of a steel plate and put it in front of a fire and photographed it like this. We've got lots of little tidbits in the book. Everybody knows that your various appliances have wattage, right? But you probably don't know that much about James Watt. But now you will; we put a biography of James Watt in. It's a little couple paragraphs to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt, and where he got his inspiration. It turned out he was hired by a Scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey. We also did a lot of calculation. I personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook. Here's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue, or other radiant heat source, goes as you move away from it. So as you move vertically away from this surface, the heat falls off. As you move side to side, it moves off. That horn-shaped region is what we call the sweet spot. That's the place where the heat is even to within 10 percent. So that's the place where you really want to cook. And it's got this funny horn-shaped thing, which as far as I know, again, the first cookbook to ever do this. Now it may also be the last cookbook that ever does it. You know, there's two ways you can make a product. You can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want, or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it. Here's a step-by-step that shows grinding hamburger. If you really want great hamburger, it turns out it makes a difference if you align the grain. And it's really simple, as you can see here. As it comes out of the grinder, you just have a little tray, and you just take it off in little passes, build it up, slice it vertically. Here's the final hamburger. This is the 30-hour hamburger. We make every aspect of this burger. The lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it. We also have things about how to make the bun. There's a mushroom, ketchup — it goes on and on. Now watch closely. This is popcorn. I'll explain it here. The popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics. Isn't that beautiful? We have a very high-speed camera, which we had lots of fun with on the book. The key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of 1,600. That's what's happening to the water inside that popcorn. So it's a great illustration of that. Now I'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual. We have a chapter on gels. And because people watch Mythbusters and CSI, I thought, well, let's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin. Well, if you have a high-speed camera, and you have a block of ballistics gelatin lying around, pretty soon somebody does this. (Gasps) Now the amazing thing here is that a ballistics gelatin is supposed to mimic what happens to human flesh when you get shot — that's why you shouldn't get shot. The other amazing thing is, when this ballistics gelatin comes down, it falls back down as a nice block. Anyway, here's the book. Here it is. 2,438 pages. And they're nice big pages too. (Applause) A friend of mine complained that this was too big and too pretty to go in the kitchen, so there's a sixth volume that has washable, waterproof paper. (Applause)

The beautiful tricks of flowers

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

TEDSalon London Spring 2011

Do you know how many species of flowering plants there are? There are a quarter of a million — at least those are the ones we know about — a quarter of a million species of flowering plants. And flowers are a real bugger. They're really difficult for plants to produce. They take an enormous amount of energy and a lot of resources. Why would they go to that bother? And the answer of course, like so many things in the world, is sex. I know what's on your mind when you're looking at these pictures. And the reason that sexual reproduction is so important — there are lots of other things that plants can do to reproduce. You can take cuttings; they can sort of have sex with themselves; they can pollinate themselves. But they really need to spread their genes to mix with other genes so that they can adapt to environmental niches. Evolution works that way. Now the way that plants transmit that information is through pollen. Some of you may have seen some of these pictures before. As I say, every home should have a scanning electron microscope to be able to see these. And there is as many different kinds of pollen as there are flowering plants. And that's actually rather useful for forensics and so on. Most pollen that causes hay fever for us is from plants that use the wind to disseminate the pollen, and that's a very inefficient process, which is why it gets up our noses so much. Because you have to chuck out masses and masses of it, hoping that your sex cells, your male sex cells, which are held within the pollen, will somehow reach another flower just by chance. So all the grasses, which means all of the cereal crops, and most of the trees have wind-borne pollen. But most species actually use insects to do their bidding, and that's more intelligent in a way, because the pollen, they don't need so much of it. The insects and other species can take the pollen, transfer it directly to where it's required. So we're aware, obviously, of the relationship between insects and plants. There's a symbiotic relationship there, whether it's flies or birds or bees, they're getting something in return, and that something in return is generally nectar. Sometimes that symbiosis has led to wonderful adaptations — the hummingbird hawk-moth is beautiful in its adaptation. The plant gets something, and the hawk-moth spreads the pollen somewhere else. Plants have evolved to create little landing strips here and there for bees that might have lost their way. There are markings on many plants that look like other insects. These are the anthers of a lily, cleverly done so that when the unsuspecting insect lands on it, the anther flips up and whops it on the back with a great load of pollen that it then goes to another plant with. And there's an orchid that might look to you as if it's got jaws, and in a way, it has; it forces the insect to crawl out, getting covered in pollen that it takes somewhere else. Orchids: there are 20,000, at least, species of orchids — amazingly, amazingly diverse. And they get up to all sorts of tricks. They have to try and attract pollinators to do their bidding. This orchid, known as Darwin's orchid, because it's one that he studied and made a wonderful prediction when he saw it — you can see that there's a very long nectar tube that descends down from the orchid. And basically what the insect has to do — we're in the middle of the flower — it has to stick its little proboscis right into the middle of that and all the way down that nectar tube to get to the nectar. And Darwin said, looking at this flower, "I guess something has coevolved with this." And sure enough, there's the insect. And I mean, normally it kind of rolls it away, but in its erect form, that's what it looks like. Now you can imagine that if nectar is such a valuable thing and expensive for the plant to produce and it attracts lots of pollinators, then, just as in human sex, people might start to deceive. They might say, "I've got a bit of nectar. Do you want to come and get it?" Now this is a plant. This is a plant here that insects in South Africa just love, and they've evolved with a long proboscis to get the nectar at the bottom. And this is the mimic. So this is a plant that is mimicking the first plant. And here is the long-probosced fly that has not gotten any nectar from the mimic, because the mimic doesn't give it any nectar. It thought it would get some. So not only has the fly not got the nectar from the mimic plant, it's also — if you look very closely just at the head end, you can see that it's got a bit of pollen that it would be transmitting to another plant, if only some botanist hadn't come along and stuck it to a blue piece of card. (Laughter) Now deceit carries on through the plant kingdom. This flower with its black dots: they might look like black dots to us, but if I tell you, to a male insect of the right species, that looks like two females who are really, really hot to trot. (Laughter) And when the insect gets there and lands on it, dousing itself in pollen, of course, that it's going to take to another plant, if you look at the every-home-should-have-one scanning electron microscope picture, you can see that there are actually some patterning there, which is three-dimensional. So it probably even feels good for the insect, as well as looking good. And these electron microscope pictures — here's one of an orchid mimicking an insect — you can see that different parts of the structure have different colors and different textures to our eye, have very, very different textures to what an insect might perceive. And this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles. And under the scanning electron microscope, you can see the surface there — really quite different from the other surfaces we looked at. Sometimes the whole plant mimics an insect, even to us. I mean, I think that looks like some sort of flying animal or beast. It's a wonderful, amazing thing. This one's clever. It's called obsidian. I think of it as insidium sometimes. To the right species of bee, this looks like another very aggressive bee, and it goes and bonks it on the head lots and lots of times to try and drive it away, and, of course, covers itself with pollen. The other thing it does is that this plant mimics another orchid that has a wonderful store of food for insects. And this one doesn't have anything for them. So it's deceiving on two levels — fabulous. (Laughter) Here we see ylang ylang, the component of many perfumes. I actually smelt someone with some on earlier. And the flowers don't really have to be that gaudy. They're sending out a fantastic array of scent to any insect that'll have it. This one doesn't smell so good. This is a flower that really, really smells pretty nasty and is designed, again, evolved, to look like carrion. So flies love this. They fly in and they pollinate. This, which is helicodiceros, is also known as dead horse arum. I don't know what a dead horse actually smells like, but this one probably smells pretty much like it. It's really horrible. And blowflies just can't help themselves. They fly into this thing, and they fly all the way down it. They lay their eggs in it, thinking it's a nice bit of carrion, and not realizing that there's no food for the eggs, that the eggs are going to die, but the plant, meanwhile, has benefited, because the bristles release and the flies disappear to pollinate the next flower — fantastic. Here's arum, arum maculatum, "lords and ladies," or "cuckoo-pint" in this country. I photographed this thing last week in Dorset. This thing heats up by about 15 degrees above ambient temperature — amazing. And if you look down into it, there's this sort of dam past the spadix, flies get attracted by the heat — which is boiling off volatile chemicals, little midges — and they get trapped underneath in this container. They drink this fabulous nectar and then they're all a bit sticky. At night they get covered in pollen, which showers down over them, and then the bristles that we saw above, they sort of wilt and allow all these midges out, covered in pollen — fabulous thing. Now if you think that's fabulous, this is one of my great favorites. This is the philodendron selloum. For anyone here from Brazil, you'll know about this plant. This is the most amazing thing. That sort of phallic bit there is about a foot long. And it does something that no other plant that I know of does, and that is that when it flowers — that's the spadix in the middle there — for a period of about two days, it metabolizes in a way which is rather similar to mammals. So instead of having starch, which is the food of plants, it takes something rather similar to brown fat and burns it at such a rate that it's burning fat, metabolizing, about the rate of a small cat. And that's twice the energy output, weight for weight, than a hummingbird — absolutely astonishing. This thing does something else which is unusual. Not only will it raise itself to 115 Fahrenheit, 43 or 44 degrees Centigrade, for two days, but it keeps constant temperature. There's a thermoregulation mechanism in there that keeps constant temperature. "Now why does it do this," I hear you ask. Now wouldn't you know it, there's some beetles that just love to make love at that temperature. And they get inside, and they get it all on. (Laughter) And the plant showers them with pollen, and off they go and pollinate. And what a wonderful thing it is. Now most pollinators that we think about are insects, but actually in the tropics, many birds and butterflies pollinate. And many of the tropical flowers are red, and that's because butterflies and birds see similarly to us, we think, and can see the color red very well. But if you look at the spectrum, birds and us, we see red, green and blue and see that spectrum. Insects see green, blue and ultraviolet, and they see various shades of ultraviolet. So there's something that goes on off the end there. "And wouldn't it be great if we could somehow see what that is," I hear you ask. Well yes we can. So what is an insect seeing? Last week I took these pictures of rock rose, helianthemum, in Dorset. These are little yellow flowers like we all see, little yellow flowers all over the place. And this is what it looks like with visible light. This is what it looks like if you take out the red. Most bees don't perceive red. And then I put some ultraviolet filters on my camera and took a very, very long exposure with the particular frequencies of ultraviolet light and this is what I got. And that's a real fantastic bull's eye. Now we don't know exactly what a bee sees, any more than you know what I'm seeing when I call this red. We can't know what's going on in — let alone an insect's — another human being's mind. But the contrast will look something like that, so standing out a lot from the background. Here's another little flower — different range of ultraviolet frequencies, different filters to match the pollinators. And that's the sort of thing that it would be seeing. Just in case you think that all yellow flowers have this property — no flower was damaged in the process of this shot; it was just attached to the tripod, not killed — then under ultraviolet light, look at that. And that could be the basis of a sunscreen because sunscreens work by absorbing ultraviolet light. So maybe the chemical in that would be useful. Finally, there's one of evening primrose that Bjorn Rorslett from Norway sent me — fantastic hidden pattern. And I love the idea of something hidden. I think there's something poetic here, that these pictures taken with ultraviolet filter, the main use of that filter is for astronomers to take pictures of Venus — actually the clouds of Venus. That's the main use of that filter. Venus, of course, is the god of love and fertility, which is the flower story. And just as flowers spend a lot of effort trying to get pollinators to do their bidding, they've also somehow managed to persuade us to plant great fields full of them and give them to each other at times of birth and death, and particularly at marriage, which, when you think of it, is the moment that encapsulates the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Don't take consciousness for granted

{0: 'Simon Lewis is the author of "Rise and Shine," a memoir about his remarkable recovery from a car accident and coma, and his new approach to our own consciousness.'}

INK Conference

There was a time in my life when everything seemed perfect. Everywhere I went, I felt at home. Everyone I met, I felt I knew them for as long as I could remember. And I want to share with you how I came to that place and what I've learned since I left it. This is where it began. And it raises an existential question, which is, if I'm having this experience of complete connection and full consciousness, why am I not visible in the photograph, and where is this time and place? This is Los Angeles, California, where I live. This is a police photo. That's actually my car. We're less than a mile from one of the largest hospitals in Los Angeles, called Cedars-Sinai. And the situation is that a car full of paramedics on their way home from the hospital after work have run across the wreckage, and they've advised the police that there were no survivors inside the car, that the driver's dead, that I'm dead. And the police are waiting for the fire department to arrive to cut apart the vehicle to extract the body of the driver. And when they do, they find that behind the glass, they find me. And my skull's crushed and my collar bone is crushed; all but two of my ribs, my pelvis and both arms — they're all crushed, but there is still a pulse. And they get me to that nearby hospital, Cedars-Sinai, where that night I receive, because of my internal bleeding, 45 units of blood — which means full replacements of all the blood in me — before they're able to staunch the flow. I'm put on full life support, and I have a massive stroke, and my brain drops into a coma. Now comas are measured on a scale from 15 down to three. Fifteen is a mild coma. Three is the deepest. And if you look, you'll see that there's only one way you can score three. It's essentially there's no sign of life from outside at all. I spent more than a month in a Glasgow Coma Scale three, and it is inside that deepest level of coma, on the rim between my life and my death, that I'm experiencing the full connection and full consciousness of inner space. From my family looking in from outside, what they're trying to figure out is a different kind of existential question, which is, how far is it going to be possible to bridge from the comatose potential mind that they're looking at to an actual mind, which I define simply as the functioning of the brain that is remaining inside my head. Now to put this into a broader context, I want you to imagine that you are an eternal alien watching the Earth from outer space, and your favorite show on intergalactic satellite television is the Earth channel, and your favorite show is the Human Show. And the reason I think it would be so interesting to you is because consciousness is so interesting. It's so unpredictable and so fragile. And this is how we began. We all began in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia. The show began with tremendous special effects, because there were catastrophic climate shifts — which sort of sounds interesting as a parallel to today. Because of the Earth tilting on its axis and those catastrophic climate shifts, we had to figure out how to find better food, and we had to learn — there's Lucy; that's how we all began — we had to learn how to crack open animal bones, use tools to do that, to feed on the marrow, to grow our brains more. So we actually grew our consciousness in response to this global threat. Now you also continue to watch as consciousness evolved to the point that here in India, in Madhya Pradesh, there's one of the two oldest known pieces of rock art found. It's a cupule that took 40 to 50,000 blows with a stone tool to create, and it's the first known expression of art on the planet. And the reason it connects us with consciousness today is that all of us still today, the very first shape we draw as a child is a circle. And then the next thing we do is we put a dot in the center of the circle. We create an eye — and the eye that evolves through all of our history. There's the Egyptian god Horus, which symbolizes prosperity, wisdom and health. And that comes down right way to the present with the dollar bill in the United States, which has on it an eye of providence. So watching all of this show from outer space, you think we get it, we understand that the most precious resource on the blue planet is our consciousness. Because it's the first thing we draw; we surround ourselves with images of it; it's probably the most common image on the planet. But we don't. We take our consciousness for granted. While I was producing in Los Angeles, I never thought about it for a second. Until it was stripped from me, I never thought about it. And what I've learned since that event and during my recovery is that consciousness is under threat on this planet in ways it's never been under threat before. These are just some examples. And the reason I'm so honored to be here to talk today in India is because India has the sad distinction of being the head injury capital of the world. That statistic is so sad. There is no more drastic and sudden gap created between potential and actual mind than a severe head injury. Each one can entail up to a decade of rehabilitation, which means that India, unless something changes, is accumulating a need for millennia of rehabilitation. What you find in the United States is an injury every 20 seconds — that's one and a half million every year — stroke every 40 seconds, Alzheimer's disease, every 70 seconds somebody succumbs to that. All of these represent gaps between potential mind and actual mind. And here are some of the other categories, if you look at the whole planet. The World Health Organization tells us that depression is the number one disease on Earth in terms of years lived with disability. We find that the number two source of disability is depression in the age group of 15 to 44. Our children are becoming depressed at an alarming rate. I discovered during my recovery the third leading cause of death amongst teenagers is suicide. If you look at some of these other items — concussions. Half of E.R. admissions from adolescents are for concussions. If I talk about migraine, 40 percent of the population suffer episodic headaches. Fifteen percent suffer migraines that wipe them out for days on end. All of this is leading — computer addiction, just to cover that: the most frequent thing we do is use digital devices. The average teenager sends 3,300 texts every [month]. We're talking about a society that is retreating into depression and disassociation when we are potentially confronting the next great catastrophic climate shift. So what you'd be wondering, watching the Human Show, is are we going to confront and address the catastrophic climate shift that may be heading our way by growing our consciousness, or are we going to continue to retreat? And that then might lead you to watch an episode one day of Cedars-Sinai medical center and a consideration of the difference between potential mind and actual mind. This is a dense array EEG MRI tracking 156 channels of information. It's not my EEG at Cedars; it's your EEG tonight and last night. It's the what our minds do every night to digest the day and to prepare to bridge from the potential mind when we're asleep to the actual mind when we awaken the following morning. This is how I was when I returned from the hospital after nearly four months. The horseshoe shape you can see on my skull is where they operated and went inside my brain to do the surgeries they needed to do to rescue my life. But if you look into the eye of consciousness, that single eye you can see, I'm looking down, but let me tell you how I felt at that point. I didn't feel empty; I felt everything simultaneously. I felt empty and full, hot and cold, euphoric and depressed because the brain is the world's first fully functional quantum computer; it can occupy multiple states at the same time. And with all the internal regulators of my brain damaged, I felt everything simultaneously. But let's swivel around and look at me frontally. This is now flash-forward to the point in time where I've been discharged by the health system. Look into those eyes. I'm not able to focus those eyes. I'm not able to follow a line of text in a book. But the system has moved me on because, as my family started to discover, there is no long-term concept in the health care system. Neurological damage, 10 years of rehab, requires a long-term perspective. But let's take a look behind my eyes. This is a gamma radiation spec scan that uses gamma radiation to map three-dimensional function within the brain. It requires a laboratory to see it in three dimension, but in two dimensions I think you can see the beautiful symmetry and illumination of a normal mind at work. Here's my brain. That is the consequence of more than a third of the right side of my brain being destroyed by the stroke. So my family, as we moved forward and discovered that the health care system had moved us by, had to try to find solutions and answers. And during that process — it took many years — one of the doctors said that my recovery, my degree of advance, since the amount of head injury I'd suffered, was miraculous. And that was when I started to write a book, because I didn't think it was miraculous. I thought there were miraculous elements, but I also didn't think it was right that one should have to struggle and search for answers when this is a pandemic within our society. So from this experience of my recovery, I want to share four particular aspects — I call them the four C's of consciousness — that helped me grow my potential mind back towards the actual mind that I work with every day. The first C is cognitive training. Unlike the smashed glass of my car, plasticity of the brain means that there was always a possibility, with treatment, to train the brain so that you can regain and raise your level of awareness and consciousness. Plasticity means that there was always hope for our reason — hope for our ability to rebuild that function. Indeed, the mind can redefine itself, and this is demonstrated by two specialists called Hagen and Silva back in the 1970's. The global perspective is that up to 30 percent of children in school have learning weaknesses that are not self-correcting, but with appropriate treatment, they can be screened for and detected and corrected and avoid their academic failure. But what I discovered is it's almost impossible to find anyone who provides that treatment or care. Here's what my neuropsychologist provided for me when I actually found somebody who could apply it. I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to talk about the various subtests. Let's just talk about full-scale I.Q. Full-scale I.Q. is the mental processing — how fast you can acquire information, retain it and retrieve it — that is essential for success in life today. And you can see here there are three columns. Untestable — that's when I'm in my coma. And then I creep up to the point that I get a score of 79, which is just below average. In the health care system, if you touch average, you're done. That's when I was discharged from the system. What does average I.Q. really mean? It meant that when I was given two and a half hours to take a test that anyone here would take in 50 minutes, I might score an F. This is a very, very low level in order to be kicked out of the health care system. Then I underwent cognitive training. And let me show you what happened to the right-hand column when I did my cognitive training over a period of time. This is not supposed to occur. I.Q. is supposed to stabilize and solidify at the age of eight. Now the Journal of the National Medical Association gave my memoir a full clinical review, which is very unusual. I'm not a doctor. I have no medical background whatsoever. But they felt the evidences that there was important, valuable information in the book, and they commented about it when they gave the full peer review to it. But they asked one question. They said, "Is this repeatable?" That was a fair question because my memoir was simply how I found solutions that worked for me. The answer is yes, and for the first time, it's my pleasure to be able to share two examples. Here's somebody, what they did as they went through cognitive training at ages seven and 11. And here's another person in, call it, high school and college. And this person is particularly interesting. I won't go into the intrascatter that's in the subtests, but they still had a neurologic issue. But that person could be identified as having a learning disability. And with accommodation, they went on to college and had a full life in terms of their opportunities. Second aspect: I still had crushing migraine headaches. Two elements that worked for me here are — the first is 90 percent, I learned, of head and neck pain is through muscular-skeletal imbalance. The craniomandibular system is critical to that. And when I underwent it and found solutions, this is the interrelationship between the TMJ and the teeth. Up to 30 percent of the population have a disorder, disease or dysfunction in the jaw that affects the entire body. I was fortunate to find a dentist who applied this entire universe of technology you're about to see to establish that if he repositioned my jaw, the headaches pretty much resolved, but that then my teeth weren't in the right place. He then held my jaw in the right position while orthodontically he put my teeth into correct alignment. So my teeth actually hold my jaw in the correct position. This affected my entire body. If that sounds like a very, very strange thing to say and rather a bold statement — How can the jaw affect the entire body? — let me simply point out to you, if I ask you tomorrow to put one grain of sand between your teeth and go for a nice long walk, how far would you last before you had to remove that grain of sand? That tiny misalignment. Bear in mind, there are no nerves in the teeth. That's why the same between the before and after that this shows, it's hard to see the difference. Now just trying putting a few grains of sand between your teeth and see the difference it makes. I still had migraine headaches. The next issue that resolved was that, if 90 percent of head and neck pain is caused by imbalance, the other 10 percent, largely — if you set aside aneurysms, brain cancer and hormonal issues — is the circulation. Imagine the blood flowing through your body — I was told at UCLA Medical Center — as one sealed system. There's a big pipe with the blood flowing through it, and around that pipe are the nerves drawing their nutrient supply from the blood. That's basically it. If you press on a hose pipe in a sealed system, it bulges someplace else. If that some place else where it bulges is inside the biggest nerve in your body, your brain, you get a vascular migraine. This is a level of pain that's only known to other people who suffer vascular migraines. Using this technology, this is mapping in three dimensions. This is an MRI MRA MRV, a volumetric MRI. Using this technology, the specialists at UCLA Medical Center were able to identify where that compression in the hose pipe was occurring. A vascular surgeon removed most of the first rib on both sides of my body. And in the following months and years, I felt the neurological flow of life itself returning. Communication, the next C. This is critical. All consciousness is about communication. And here, by great fortune, one of my father's clients had a husband who worked at the Alfred Mann Foundation for Scientific Research. Alfred Mann is a brilliant physicist and innovator who's fascinated with bridging gaps in consciousness, whether to restore hearing to the deaf, vision to the blind or movement to the paralyzed. And I'm just going to give you an example today of movement to the paralyzed. I've brought with me, from Southern California, the FM device. This is it being held in the hand. It weighs less than a gram. So two of them implanted in the body would weigh less than a dime. Five of them would still weigh less than a rupee coin. Where does it go inside the body? It has been simulated and tested to endure in the body corrosion-free for over 80 years. So it goes in and it stays there. Here are the implantation sites. The concept that they're working towards — and they have working prototypes — is that we placed it throughout the motor points of the body where they're needed. The main unit will then go inside the brain. An FM device in the cortex of the brain, the motor cortex, will send signals in real time to the motor points in the relevant muscles so that the person will be able to move their arm, let's say, in real time, if they've lost control of their arm. And other FM devices implanted in fingertips, on contacting a surface, will send a message back to the sensory cortex of the brain, so that the person feels a sense of touch. Is this science fiction? No, because I'm wearing the first application of this technology. I don't have the ability to control my left foot. A radio device is controlling every step I take, and a sensor picks up my foot for me every time I walk. And in closing, I want to share the personal reason why this meant so much to me and changed the direction of my life. In my coma, one of the presences I sensed was someone I felt was a protector. And when I came out of my coma, I recognized my family, but I didn't remember my own past. Gradually, I remembered the protector was my wife. And I whispered the good news through my broken jaw, which was wired shut, to my night nurse. And the following morning, my mother came to explain that I'd not always been in this bed, in this room, that I'd been working in film and television and that I had been in a crash and that, yes, I was married, but Marcy had been killed instantly in the crash. And during my time in coma, she had been laid to rest in her hometown of Phoenix. Now in the dark years that followed, I had to work out what remained for me if everything that made today special was gone. And as I discovered these threats to consciousness and how they are surrounding the world and enveloping the lives of more and more people every day, I discovered what truly remained. I believe that we can overcome the threats to our consciousness, that the Human Show can stay on the air for millennia to come. I believe that we can all rise and shine. Thank you very much. (Applause) Lakshmi Pratury: Just stay for a second. Just stay here for a second. (Applause) You know, when I heard Simon's — please sit down; I just want to talk to him for a second — when I read his book, I went to LA to meet him. And so I was sitting in this restaurant, waiting for a man to come by who obviously would have some difficulty ... I don't know what I had in my mind. And he was walking around. I didn't expect that person that I was going to meet to be him. And then we met and we talked, and I'm like, he doesn't look like somebody who was built out of nothing. And then I was amazed at what role technology played in your recovery. And we have his book outside in the bookshop. The thing that amazed me is the painstaking detail with which he has written every hospital he has been to, every treatment he got, every near-miss he had, and how accidentally he stumbled upon innovations. So I think this one detail went past people really quick. Tell a little bit about what you're wearing on your leg. Simon Lewis: I knew when I was timing this that there wouldn't be time for me to do anything about — Well this is it. This is the control unit. And this records every single step I've taken for, ooh, five or six years now. And if I do this, probably the mic won't hear it. That little chirp followed by two chirps is now switched on. When I press it again, it'll chirp three times, and that'll mean that it's armed and ready to go. And that's my friend. I mean, I charge it every night. And it works. It works. And what I would love to add because I didn't have time ... What does it do? Well actually, I'll show you down here. This down here, if the camera can see that, that is a small antenna. Underneath my heel, there is a sensor that detects when my foot leaves the ground — what's called the heel lift. This thing blinks all the time; I'll leave it out, so you might be able to see it. But this is blinking all the time. It's sending signals in real time. And if you walk faster, if I walk faster, it detects what's called the time interval, which is the interval between each heel lift. And it accelerates the amount and level of the stimulation. The other things they've worked on — I didn't have time to say this in my talk — is they've restored functional hearing to thousands of deaf people. I could tell you the story: this was going to be an abandoned technology, but Alfred Mann met the doctor who was going to retire, [Dr. Schindler.] And he was going to retire — all the technology was going to be lost, because not a single medical manufacturer would take it on because it was a small issue. But there's millions of deaf people in the world, and the Cochlear implant has given hearing to thousands of deaf people now. It works. And the other thing is they're working on artificial retinas for the blind. And this, this is the implantable generation. Because what I didn't say in my talk is this is actually exoskeletal. I should clarify that. Because the first generation is exoskeletal, it's wrapped around the leg, around the affected limb. I must tell you, they're an amazing — there's a hundred people who work in that building — engineers, scientists, and other team members — all the time. Alfred Mann has set up this foundation to advance this research because he saw there's no way venture capital would come in for something like this. The audience is too small. You'd think, there's plenty of paralyzed people in the world, but the audience is too small, and the amount of research, the time it takes, the FDA clearances, the payback time is too long for V.C. to be interested. So he saw a need and he stepped in. He's a very, very remarkable man. He's done a lot of very cutting-edge science. LP: So when you get a chance, spend some time with Simon. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

Caring for engineered tissue

{0: 'Nina Tandon studies ways to use electrical signals to grow artificial tissues for transplants and other therapies.'}

TED2011

Good morning everybody. I work with really amazing, little, itty-bitty creatures called cells. And let me tell you what it's like to grow these cells in the lab. I work in a lab where we take cells out of their native environment. We plate them into dishes that we sometimes call petri dishes. And we feed them — sterilely of course — with what we call cell culture media — which is like their food — and we grow them in incubators. Why do I do this? We observe the cells in a plate, and they're just on the surface. But what we're really trying to do in my lab is to engineer tissues out of them. What does that even mean? Well it means growing an actual heart, let's say, or grow a piece of bone that can be put into the body. Not only that, but they can also be used for disease models. And for this purpose, traditional cell culture techniques just really aren't enough. The cells are kind of homesick; the dish doesn't feel like their home. And so we need to do better at copying their natural environment to get them to thrive. We call this the biomimetic paradigm — copying nature in the lab. Let's take the example of the heart, the topic of a lot of my research. What makes the heart unique? Well, the heart beats, rhythmically, tirelessly, faithfully. We copy this in the lab by outfitting cell culture systems with electrodes. These electrodes act like mini pacemakers to get the cells to contract in the lab. What else do we know about the heart? Well, heart cells are pretty greedy. Nature feeds the heart cells in your body with a very, very dense blood supply. In the lab, we micro-pattern channels in the biomaterials on which we grow the cells, and this allows us to flow the cell culture media, the cells' food, through the scaffolds where we're growing the cells — a lot like what you might expect from a capillary bed in the heart. So this brings me to lesson number one: life can do a lot with very little. Let's take the example of electrical stimulation. Let's see how powerful just one of these essentials can be. On the left, we see a tiny piece of beating heart tissue that I engineered from rat cells in the lab. It's about the size of a mini marshmallow. And after one week, it's beating. You can see it in the upper left-hand corner. But don't worry if you can't see it so well. It's amazing that these cells beat at all. But what's really amazing is that the cells, when we electrically stimulate them, like with a pacemaker, that they beat so much more. But that brings me to lesson number two: cells do all the work. In a sense, tissue engineers have a bit of an identity crisis here, because structural engineers build bridges and big things, computer engineers, computers, but what we are doing is actually building enabling technologies for the cells themselves. What does this mean for us? Let's do something really simple. Let's remind ourselves that cells are not an abstract concept. Let's remember that our cells sustain our lives in a very real way. "We are what we eat," could easily be described as, "We are what our cells eat." And in the case of the flora in our gut, these cells may not even be human. But it's also worth noting that cells also mediate our experience of life. Behind every sound, sight, touch, taste and smell is a corresponding set of cells that receive this information and interpret it for us. It begs the question: shall we expand our sense of environmental stewardship to include the ecosystem of our own bodies? I invite you to talk about this with me further, and in the meantime, I wish you luck. May none of your non-cancer cells become endangered species. Thank you. (Applause)

Let's take back the Internet!

{0: 'Rebecca MacKinnon looks at issues of free expression, governance and democracy (or lack of) in the digital networks, platforms and services on which we are all more and more dependent.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

So I begin with an advertisement inspired by George Orwell that Apple ran in 1984. (Video) Big Brother: We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will fight them with their own confusion. We shall prevail. Narrator: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984." Rebecca MacKinnon: So the underlying message of this video remains very powerful even today. Technology created by innovative companies will set us all free. Fast-forward more than two decades: Apple launches the iPhone in China and censors the Dalai Lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the Chinese government for its Chinese app store. The American political cartoonist Mark Fiore also had his satire application censored in the United States because some of Apple's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups. His app wasn't reinstated until he won the Pulitzer Prize. The German magazine Stern, a news magazine, had its app censored because the Apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users, and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout Germany. And more controversially, recently, Apple censored a Palestinian protest app after the Israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks. So here's the thing. We have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies. Or they're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed. Or they're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many, or most, of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question. So here's the situation. In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states. But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace. And their decisions about software coding, engineering, design, terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives. And their sovereignties, cross-cutting, globally interlinked, can in some ways challenge the sovereignties of nation-states in very exciting ways, but sometimes also act to project and extend it at a time when control over what people can and cannot do with information has more effect than ever on the exercise of power in our physical world. After all, even the leader of the free world needs a little help from the sultan of Facebookistan if he wants to get reelected next year. And these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in Tunisia and Egypt this past spring and beyond. As Wael Ghonim, the Google-Egyptian-executive by day, secret-Facebook-activist by night, famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down, "If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet." But overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated. On the left there's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the Egyptian state security offices in March. And many of the agents shredded as many of the documents as they could and left them behind in piles. But some of the files were left behind intact, and activists, some of them, found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges, their cellphone text message exchanges, even Skype conversations. And one activist actually found a contract from a Western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the Egyptian security forces. And Egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there. And in Tunisia, censorship actually began to return in May — not nearly as extensively as under President Ben Ali. But you'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain Facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence. In protest over this, blogger Slim Amamou, who had been jailed under Ben Ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution, he resigned in protest from the cabinet. But there's been a lot of debate in Tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem. In fact, on Twitter, there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said, "Well actually, we do want democracy and free expression, but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy. But the problem is, how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power? As Riadh Guerfali, the veteran digital activist from Tunisia, remarked over this incident, "Before, things were simple: you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. Today, things are a lot more subtle." Welcome to democracy, our Tunisian and Egyptian friends. The reality is that even in democratic societies today, we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks. In fact, in the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks. Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime. So we assume that the Internet is a border-busting technology. This is a map of social networks worldwide, and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world — which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you like the way Facebook manages its service. But borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace. In Brazil and Japan, it's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons. But if you look at China, Vietnam and a number of the former Soviet states, what's happening there is more troubling. You have a situation where the relationship between government and local social networking companies is creating a situation where, effectively, the empowering potential of these platforms is being constrained because of these relationships between companies and government. Now in China, you have the "great firewall," as it's well-known, that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google+ and many of the other overseas websites. And that's done in part with the help from Western technology. But that's only half of the story. The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese Internet, known as a system of self-discipline. In plain English, that means censorship and surveillance of their users. And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 Chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline — i.e. policing their content. And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's dominant search engine, was one of the recipients. In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites. But this is a website called Rospil that's an anti-corruption site. And earlier this year, there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to Rospil through a payments processing system called Yandex Money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to Rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at Yandex Money. This has a chilling effect on people's ability to use the Internet to hold government accountable. So we have a situation in the world today where in more and more countries the relationship between citizens and governments is mediated through the Internet, which is comprised primarily of privately owned and operated services. So the important question, I think, is not this debate over whether the Internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys. Of course, it's going to empower whoever is most skilled at using the technology and best understands the Internet in comparison with whoever their adversary is. The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner. Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us. So the question is, we know how to hold government accountable. We don't necessarily always do it very well, but we have a sense of what the models are, politically and institutionally, to do that. How do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to the public interest when most CEO's argue that their main obligation is to maximize shareholder profit? And government regulation often isn't helping all that much. You have situations, for instance, in France where president Sarkozy tells the CEO's of Internet companies, "We're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest." But then he goes and champions laws like the infamous "three-strikes" law that would disconnect citizens from the Internet for file sharing, which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens' right to communications, and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens. And here in the United Kingdom there's also concern over a law called the Digital Economy Act that's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior. So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future, we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement. After all, companies didn't stop polluting groundwater as a matter of course, or employing 10-year-olds as a matter of course, just because executives woke up one day and decided it was the right thing to do. It was the result of decades of sustained activism, shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy. Similarly, governments don't enact intelligent environmental and labor laws just because politicians wake up one day. It's the result of very sustained and prolonged political activism that you get the right regulations, and that you get the right corporate behavior. We need to make the same approach with the Internet. We also are going to need political innovation. Eight hundred years ago, approximately, the barons of England decided that the Divine Right of Kings was no longer working for them so well, and they forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which recognized that even the king who claimed to have divine rule still had to abide by a basic set of rules. This set off a cycle of what we can call political innovation, which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed — which was implemented for the first time by that radical revolutionary government in America across the pond. So now we need to figure out how to build consent of the networked. And what does that look like? At the moment, we still don't know. But it's going to require innovation that's not only going to need to focus on politics, on geopolitics, but it's also going to need to deal with questions of business management, investor behavior, consumer choice and even software design and engineering. Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around. Thank you very much. (Applause)

A global culture to fight extremism

{0: 'Maajid Nawaz works to promote conversation, tolerance and democracy in Muslim and non-Muslim communities.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade? Have you ever wondered how such a situation can be turned around? Have you ever looked at the Arab uprisings and thought, "How could we have predicted that?" or "How could we have better prepared for that?" Well my personal story, my personal journey, what brings me to the TED stage here today, is a demonstration of exactly what's been happening in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades, at least, and beyond. I want to share some of that story with you, but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in Muslim-majority societies. So let me begin by first of all giving a very, very brief history of time, if I may indulge. In medieval societies there were defined allegiances. An identity was defined primarily by religion. And then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a European nation-state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity. So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity, and the nation-state reflected that. In the age of globalization, we moved on. I call it the era of citizenship — where people could be from multi-racial, multi-ethnic backgrounds, but all be equal as citizens in a state. You could be American-Italian; you could be American-Irish; you could be British-Pakistani. But I believe now that we're moving into a new age, and that age The New York Times dubbed recently as "the age of behavior." How I define the age of behavior is a period of transnational allegiances, where identity is defined more so by ideas and narratives. And these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave. Now this is not all necessarily good news, because it's also my belief that hatred has gone global just as much as love. But actually it's my belief that the people who've been truly capitalizing on this age of behavior, up until now, up until recent times, up until the last six months, the people who have been capitalizing most on the age of behavior and the transnational allegiances, using digital activism and other sorts of borderless technologies, those who've been benefiting from this have been extremists. And that's something which I'd like to elaborate on. If we look at Islamists, if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists, one thing they've been very good at, one thing that they've actually been exceeding in, is communicating across borders, using technologies to organize themselves, to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena. Now I should know, because for 13 years of my life, I was involved in an extreme Islamist organization. And I was actually a potent force in spreading ideas across borders, and I witnessed the rise of Islamist extremism as distinct from Islam the faith, and the way in which it influenced my co-religionists across the world. And my story, my personal story, is truly evidence for the age of behavior that I'm attempting to elaborate upon here. I was, by the way — I'm an Essex lad, born and raised in Essex in the U.K. Anyone who's from England knows the reputation we have from Essex. But having been born in Essex, at the age of 16, I joined an organization. At the age of 17, I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization. At the age of 19, I was on the national leadership of this organization in the U.K. At the age of 21, I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan. At the age of 22, I was co-founding this organization in Denmark. By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience. Now that journey, and what took me from Essex all the way across the world — by the way, we were laughing at democratic activists. We felt they were from the age of yesteryear. We felt that they were out of date. I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used. I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected. Eventually I was detected, of course, in Egypt. But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state. The age of behavior: where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances. So as I said, we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it. And it's not just Islamist extremists that did this. But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late, far-right fascism is also on the rise. A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it's transnational. And the consequences that this is having is that it's affecting the political climate across Europe. What's actually happening is that what were previously localized parochialisms, individual or groupings of extremists who were isolated from one another, have become interconnected in a globalized way and have thus become, or are becoming, mainstream. Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world. If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late, you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics, yet the phenomenon is transnational. In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned. In others, headscarves are being banned. In others, kosher and halal meat are being banned, as we speak. And on the flip side, we have transnational Islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies. And so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream. Now that never would have been possible before. They would have felt isolated, until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon. Where does that leave democracy aspirants? Well I believe they're getting left far behind. And I'll give you an example here at this stage. If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot: there's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki. As an American citizen, ethnically a Yemeni, in hiding currently in Yemen, who inspired a Nigerian, son of the head of Nigeria's national bank. This Nigerian student studied in London, trained in Yemen, boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America. In the meanwhile, the Old mentality with a capital O, was represented by his father, the head of the Nigerian bank, warning the CIA that his own son was about to attack, and this warning fell on deaf ears. The Old mentality with a capital O, as represented by the nation-state, not yet fully into the age of behavior, not recognizing the power of transnational social movements, got left behind. And the Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the United States of America. Again with the example of the far right: that we find, ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization. So why are they succeeding? And why are democracy aspirants falling behind? Well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this. And a social movement is comprised, in my view, it's comprised of four main characteristics. It's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders. I'll talk you through one example, and that's the example that everyone here will be aware of, and that's the example of Al-Qaeda. If I asked you to think of the ideas of Al-Qaeda, that's something that comes to your mind immediately. If I ask you to think of their narratives — the West being at war with Islam, the need to defend Islam against the West — these narratives, they come to your mind immediately. Incidentally, the difference between ideas and narratives: the idea is the cause that one believes in; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause — the propaganda, if you like, of the cause. So the ideas and the narratives of Al-Qaeda come to your mind immediately. If I ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders, they come to your mind immediately. One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently. So these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately. And that's the power of social movements. They're transnational, and they bond around these ideas and narratives and these symbols and these leaders. However, if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan, and I ask you to think of the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today, you'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Which means, by definition, that particular leader no longer exists. One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda, without the terrorism, for democracy across Muslim-majority societies. There are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground. So that begs the next question. Why is it that extremist organizations, whether of the far-right or of the Islamist extremism — Islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of Islam over the rest of society — why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way, whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind? And I believe that's for four reasons. I believe, number one, it's complacency. Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries. And that level of complacency means they don't feel the need to advocate for that culture. The second, I believe, is political correctness. That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture because we are associating that — we associate believing in the universality of our values — with extremists. Yet actually, whenever we talk about human rights, we do say that human rights are universal. But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism. To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism. And the third, democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice, meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party, but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party — wanting to rule by military dictatorship. And then you have a third party saying, "Vote for us; we'll establish a theocracy." So democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies. And what happens as a result of this is, when those parties are elected, and inevitably they fail, or inevitably they make political mistakes, democracy takes the blame for their political mistakes. And then people say, "We've tried democracy. It doesn't really work. Let's bring the military back again." And the fourth reason, I believe, is what I've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance. What I mean by that is, if the world superpower today was a communist, it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism, than it is today with the world superpower being America, occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals. So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice, not merely as a political choice. When talking about those reasons, let's break down certain preconceptions. Is it just about grievances? Is it just about a lack of education? Well statistically, the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated. Statistically, they are educated, on average, above the education levels of Western society. Anecdotally, we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor, well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a pediatrician — not an ill-educated man. International aid and development has been going on for years, but extremism in those societies, in many of those societies, has been on the rise. And what I believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground, in addition to international aid, in addition to education, in addition to health. Not exclusive to these things, but in addition to them, is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground. And this is where I believe neoconservatism had it upside-down. Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots. They've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots, and we've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of Islamism. Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy, rather than for a democratic uprising. Because since pre-partition, they've been building demand for their ideology on the ground. And what's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture — which is necessarily more than just elections. But without freedom of speech, you can't have free and fair elections. Without human rights, you don't have the protection granted to you to campaign. Without freedom of belief, you don't have the right to join organizations. So what's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture. What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier, where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy. Whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level, rather than merely on a political level, a level above politics — movements that are not political parties, but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture. What we'll have in the end is this ideal that you see on the slide here — the ideal that people should vote in an existing democracy, not for a democracy. But to get to that stage, where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric, but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship — i.e. you're voting in a democracy, in an existing democracy, and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box. To get to that stage, we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground. Now to conclude, how does that happen? Well, Egypt is a good starting point. The Arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning. But what happened in the Arab uprisings and what happened in Egypt was particularly cathartic for me. What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal, and that was to remove the leader. We need to move one step beyond that now. We need to see how we can help those societies move from political coalitions, loosely based political coalitions, to civilizational coalitions that are working for the ideals and narratives of the democratic culture on the ground. Because it's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator. That doesn't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values. But generally, the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region. So when Arab socialism started in Egypt, it spread across the region. In the '80s and '90s when Islamism started in the region, it spread across the MENA region as a whole. And the aspiration that we have at the moment — as young Arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism — is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that. But that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture. And we've made a start for that in Pakistan with a movement called Khudi, where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture. And it's with that thought that I'll end. And my time is up, and thank you for your time. (Applause)

Trial, error and the God complex

{0: "Tim Harford's writings reveal the economic ideas behind everyday experiences."}

TEDGlobal 2011

It's the Second World War. A German prison camp. And this man, Archie Cochrane, is a prisoner of war and a doctor, and he has a problem. The problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that Archie doesn't really understand. The symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin. But he doesn't know whether it's an infection, whether it's to do with malnutrition. He doesn't know how to cure it. And he's operating in a hostile environment. And people do terrible things in wars. The German camp guards, they've got bored. They've taken to just firing into the prison camp at random for fun. On one particular occasion, one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners' lavatory while it was full of prisoners. He said he heard suspicious laughter. And Archie Cochrane, as the camp doctor, was one of the first men in to clear up the mess. And one more thing: Archie was suffering from this illness himself. So the situation seemed pretty desperate. But Archie Cochrane was a resourceful person. He'd already smuggled vitamin C into the camp, and now he managed to get hold of supplies of marmite on the black market. Now some of you will be wondering what marmite is. Marmite is a breakfast spread beloved of the British. It looks like crude oil. It tastes ... zesty. And importantly, it's a rich source of vitamin B12. So Archie splits the men under his care as best he can into two equal groups. He gives half of them vitamin C. He gives half of them vitamin B12. He very carefully and meticulously notes his results in an exercise book. And after just a few days, it becomes clear that whatever is causing this illness, marmite is the cure. So Cochrane then goes to the Germans who are running the prison camp. Now you've got to imagine at the moment — forget this photo, imagine this guy with this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair. He hasn't been able to shave — a sort of Billy Connolly figure. Cochrane, he starts ranting at these Germans in this Scottish accent — in fluent German, by the way, but in a Scottish accent — and explains to them how German culture was the culture that gave Schiller and Goethe to the world. And he can't understand how this barbarism can be tolerated, and he vents his frustrations. And then he goes back to his quarters, breaks down and weeps because he's convinced that the situation is hopeless. But a young German doctor picks up Archie Cochrane's exercise book and says to his colleagues, "This evidence is incontrovertible. If we don't supply vitamins to the prisoners, it's a war crime." And the next morning, supplies of vitamin B12 are delivered to the camp, and the prisoners begin to recover. Now I'm not telling you this story because I think Archie Cochrane is a dude, although Archie Cochrane is a dude. I'm not even telling you the story because I think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public policy, although I think that would also be completely awesome. I'm telling you this story because Archie Cochrane, all his life, fought against a terrible affliction, and he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies. And he had a name for it. He called it the God complex. Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very, very easily. So the symptoms of the complex are, no matter how complicated the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution. Now Archie was a doctor, so he hung around with doctors a lot. And doctors suffer from the God complex a lot. Now I'm an economist, I'm not a doctor, but I see the God complex around me all the time in my fellow economists. I see it in our business leaders. I see it in the politicians we vote for — people who, in the face of an incredibly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works. And you know, with the future billions that we've been hearing about, the world is simply far too complex to understand in that way. Well let me give you an example. Imagine for a moment that, instead of Tim Harford in front of you, there was Hans Rosling presenting his graphs. You know Hans: the Mick Jagger of TED. (Laughter) And he'd be showing you these amazing statistics, these amazing animations. And they are brilliant; it's wonderful work. But a typical Hans Rosling graph: think for a moment, not what it shows, but think instead about what it leaves out. So it'll show you GDP per capita, population, longevity, that's about it. So three pieces of data for each country — three pieces of data. Three pieces of data is nothing. I mean, have a look at this graph. This is produced by the physicist Cesar Hidalgo. He's at MIT. Now you won't be able to understand a word of it, but this is what it looks like. Cesar has trolled the database of over 5,000 different products, and he's used techniques of network analysis to interrogate this database and to graph relationships between the different products. And it's wonderful, wonderful work. You show all these interconnections, all these interrelations. And I think it'll be profoundly useful in understanding how it is that economies grow. Brilliant work. Cesar and I tried to write a piece for The New York Times Magazine explaining how this works. And what we learned is Cesar's work is far too good to explain in The New York Times Magazine. Five thousand products — that's still nothing. Five thousand products — imagine counting every product category in Cesar Hidalgo's data. Imagine you had one second per product category. In about the length of this session, you would have counted all 5,000. Now imagine doing the same thing for every different type of product on sale in Walmart. There are 100,000 there. It would take you all day. Now imagine trying to count every different specific product and service on sale in a major economy such as Tokyo, London or New York. It's even more difficult in Edinburgh because you have to count all the whisky and the tartan. If you wanted to count every product and service on offer in New York — there are 10 billion of them — it would take you 317 years. This is how complex the economy we've created is. And I'm just counting toasters here. I'm not trying to solve the Middle East problem. The complexity here is unbelievable. And just a piece of context — the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services. You could count them in five minutes. So this is the complexity of the world that surrounds us. This perhaps is why we find the God complex so tempting. We tend to retreat and say, "We can draw a picture, we can post some graphs, we get it, we understand how this works." And we don't. We never do. Now I'm not trying to deliver a nihilistic message here. I'm not trying to say we can't solve complicated problems in a complicated world. We clearly can. But the way we solve them is with humility — to abandon the God complex and to actually use a problem-solving technique that works. And we have a problem-solving technique that works. Now you show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error. Here's an example. This baby was produced through trial and error. I realize that's an ambiguous statement. Maybe I should clarify it. This baby is a human body: it evolved. What is evolution? Over millions of years, variation and selection, variation and selection — trial and error, trial and error. And it's not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error. You could use it in an industrial context. So let's say you wanted to make detergent. Let's say you're Unilever and you want to make detergent in a factory near Liverpool. How do you do it? Well you have this great big tank full of liquid detergent. You pump it at a high pressure through a nozzle. You create a spray of detergent. Then the spray dries. It turns into powder. It falls to the floor. You scoop it up. You put it in cardboard boxes. You sell it at a supermarket. You make lots of money. How do you design that nozzle? It turns out to be very important. Now if you ascribe to the God complex, what you do is you find yourself a little God. You find yourself a mathematician; you find yourself a physicist — somebody who understands the dynamics of this fluid. And he will, or she will, calculate the optimal design of the nozzle. Now Unilever did this and it didn't work — too complicated. Even this problem, too complicated. But the geneticist Professor Steve Jones describes how Unilever actually did solve this problem — trial and error, variation and selection. You take a nozzle and you create 10 random variations on the nozzle. You try out all 10; you keep the one that works best. You create 10 variations on that one. You try out all 10. You keep the one that works best. You try out 10 variations on that one. You see how this works, right? And after 45 generations, you have this incredible nozzle. It looks a bit like a chess piece — functions absolutely brilliantly. We have no idea why it works, no idea at all. And the moment you step back from the God complex — let's just try to have a bunch of stuff; let's have a systematic way of determining what's working and what's not — you can solve your problem. Now this process of trial and error is actually far more common in successful institutions than we care to recognize. And we've heard a lot about how economies function. The U.S. economy is still the world's greatest economy. How did it become the world's greatest economy? I could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the U.S. economy, but I think the most salient one is this: ten percent of American businesses disappear every year. That is a huge failure rate. It's far higher than the failure rate of, say, Americans. Ten percent of Americans don't disappear every year. Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans, and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans. And eventually, they'll have evolved to such a high peak of perfection that they will make us all their pets — (Laughter) if, of course, they haven't already done so. I sometimes wonder. But it's this process of trial and error that explains this great divergence, this incredible performance of Western economies. It didn't come because you put some incredibly smart person in charge. It's come through trial and error. Now I've been sort of banging on about this for the last couple of months, and people sometimes say to me, "Well Tim, it's kind of obvious. Obviously trial and error is very important. Obviously experimentation is very important. Now why are you just wandering around saying this obvious thing?" So I say, okay, fine. You think it's obvious? I will admit it's obvious when schools start teaching children that there are some problems that don't have a correct answer. Stop giving them lists of questions every single one of which has an answer. And there's an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher's desk who knows all the answers. And if you can't find the answers, you must be lazy or stupid. When schools stop doing that all the time, I will admit that, yes, it's obvious that trial and error is a good thing. When a politician stands up campaigning for elected office and says, "I want to fix our health system. I want to fix our education system. I have no idea how to do it. I have half a dozen ideas. We're going to test them out. They'll probably all fail. Then we'll test some other ideas out. We'll find some that work. We'll build on those. We'll get rid of the ones that don't." — when a politician campaigns on that platform, and more importantly, when voters like you and me are willing to vote for that kind of politician, then I will admit that it is obvious that trial and error works, and that — thank you. (Applause) Until then, until then I'm going to keep banging on about trial and error and why we should abandon the God complex. Because it's so hard to admit our own fallibility. It's so uncomfortable. And Archie Cochrane understood this as well as anybody. There's this one trial he ran many years after World War II. He wanted to test out the question of, where is it that patients should recover from heart attacks? Should they recover in a specialized cardiac unit in hospital, or should they recover at home? All the cardiac doctors tried to shut him down. They had the God complex in spades. They knew that their hospitals were the right place for patients, and they knew it was very unethical to run any kind of trial or experiment. Nevertheless, Archie managed to get permission to do this. He ran his trial. And after the trial had been running for a little while, he gathered together all his colleagues around his table, and he said, "Well, gentlemen, we have some preliminary results. They're not statistically significant. But we have something. And it turns out that you're right and I'm wrong. It is dangerous for patients to recover from heart attacks at home. They should be in hospital." And there's this uproar, and all the doctors start pounding the table and saying, "We always said you were unethical, Archie. You're killing people with your clinical trials. You need to shut it down now. Shut it down at once." And there's this huge hubbub. Archie lets it die down. And then he says, "Well that's very interesting, gentlemen, because when I gave you the table of results, I swapped the two columns around. It turns out your hospitals are killing people, and they should be at home. Would you like to close down the trial now, or should we wait until we have robust results?" Tumbleweed rolls through the meeting room. But Cochrane would do that kind of thing. And the reason he would do that kind of thing is because he understood it feels so much better to stand there and say, "Here in my own little world, I am a god, I understand everything. I do not want to have my opinions challenged. I do not want to have my conclusions tested." It feels so much more comfortable simply to lay down the law. Cochrane understood that uncertainty, that fallibility, that being challenged, they hurt. And you sometimes need to be shocked out of that. Now I'm not going to pretend that this is easy. It isn't easy. It's incredibly painful. And since I started talking about this subject and researching this subject, I've been really haunted by something a Japanese mathematician said on the subject. So shortly after the war, this young man, Yutaka Taniyama, developed this amazing conjecture called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. It turned out to be absolutely instrumental many decades later in proving Fermat's Last Theorem. In fact, it turns out it's equivalent to proving Fermat's Last Theorem. You prove one, you prove the other. But it was always a conjecture. Taniyama tried and tried and tried and he could never prove that it was true. And shortly before his 30th birthday in 1958, Yutaka Taniyama killed himself. His friend, Goro Shimura — who worked on the mathematics with him — many decades later, reflected on Taniyama's life. He said, "He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to emulate him, but I realized it is very difficult to make good mistakes." Thank you. (Applause)

See Yemen through my eyes

{0: 'Nadia Al-Sakkaf is the editor-in-chief of the Yemen Times, the most widely read English-language newspaper in Yemen.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Pat Mitchell: You have brought us images from the Yemen Times. And take us through those, and introduce us to another Yemen. Nadia Al-Sakkaf: Well, I'm glad to be here. And I would like to share with you all some of the pictures that are happening today in Yemen. This picture shows a revolution started by women, and it shows women and men leading a mixed protest. The other picture is the popularity of the real need for change. So many people are there. The intensity of the upspring. This picture shows that the revolution has allowed opportunities for training, for education. These women are learning about first aid and their rights according to the constitution. I love this picture. I just wanted to show that over 60 percent of the Yemeni population are 15 years and below. And they were excluded from decision-making, and now they are in the forefront of the news, raising the flag. English — you will see, this is jeans and tights, and an English expression — the ability to share with the world what is going on in our own country. And expression also, it has brought talents. Yemenis are using cartoons and art, paintings, comics, to tell the world and each other about what's going on. Obviously, there's always the dark side of it. And this is just one of the less-gruesome pictures of the revolution and the cost that we have to pay. The solidarity of millions of Yemenis across the country just demanding the one thing. And finally, lots of people are saying that Yemen's revolution is going to break the country. Is it going to be so many different countries? Is it going to be another Somalia? But we want to tell the world that, no, under the one flag, we'll still remain as Yemeni people. PM: Thank you for those images, Nadia. And they do, in many ways, tell a different story than the story of Yemen, the one that is often in the news. And yet, you yourself defy all those characterizations. So let's talk about the personal story for a moment. Your father is murdered. The Yemen Times already has a strong reputation in Yemen as an independent English language newspaper. How did you then make the decision and assume the responsibilities of running a newspaper, especially in such times of conflict? NA: Well, let me first warn you that I'm not the traditional Yemeni girl. I've guessed you've already noticed this by now. (Laughter) In Yemen, most women are veiled and they are sitting behind doors and not very much part of the public life. But there's so much potential. I wish I could show you my Yemen. I wish you could see Yemen through my eyes. Then you would know that there's so much to it. And I was privileged because I was born into a family, my father would always encourage the boys and the girls. He would say we are equal. And he was such an extraordinary man. And even my mother — I owe it to my family. A story: I studied in India. And in my third year, I started becoming confused because I was Yemeni, but I was also mixing up with a lot of my friends in college. And I went back home and I said, "Daddy, I don't know who I am. I'm not a Yemeni; I'm not an Indian." And he said, "You are the bridge." And that is something I will keep in my heart forever. So since then I've been the bridge, and a lot of people have walked over me. PM: I don't think so. (Laughter) NA: But it just helps tell that some people are change agents in the society. And when I became editor-in-chief after my brother actually — my father passed away in 1999, and then my brother until 2005 — and everybody was betting that I will not be able to do it. "What's this young girl coming in and showing off because it's her family business," or something. It was very hard at first. I didn't want to clash with people. But with all due respect to all the men, and the older men especially, they did not want me around. It was very hard, you know, to impose my authority. But a woman's got to do what a woman's got to do. (Applause) And in the first year, I had to fire half of the men. (Laughter) (Applause) Brought in more women. Brought in younger men. And we have a more gender-balanced newsroom today. The other thing is that it's about professionalism. It's about proving who you are and what you can do. And I don't know if I'm going to be boasting now, but in 2006 alone, we won three international awards. One of them is the IPI Free Media Pioneer Award. So that was the answer to all the Yemeni people. And I want to score a point here, because my husband is in the room over there. If you could please stand up, [unclear]. He has been very supportive of me. (Applause) PM: And we should point out that he works with you as well at the paper. But in assuming this responsibility and going about it as you have, you have become a bridge between an older and traditional society and the one that you are now creating at the paper. And so along with changing who worked there, you must have come up against another positioning that we always run into, in particular with women, and it has to do with outside image, dress, the veiled woman. So how have you dealt with this on a personal level as well as the women who worked for you? NA: As you know, the image of a lot of Yemeni women is a lot of black and covered, veiled women. And this is true. And a lot of it is because women are not able, are not free, to show their face to their self. It's a lot of traditional imposing coming by authority figures such as the men, the grandparents and so on. And it's economic empowerment and the ability for a woman to say, "I am as much contributing to this family, or more, than you are." And the more empowered the women become, the more they are able to remove the veil, for example, or to drive their own car or to have a job or to be able to travel. So the other face of Yemen is actually one that lies behind the veil, and it's economic empowerment mostly that allows the woman to just uncover it. And I have done this throughout my work. I've tried to encourage young girls. We started with, you can take it off in the office. And then after that, you can take it off on assignments. Because I didn't believe a journalist can be a journalist with — how can you talk to people if you have your face covered? — and so on; it's just a movement. And I am a role model in Yemen. A lot of people look up to me. A lot of young girls look up to me. And I need to prove to them that, yes, you can still be married, you can still be a mother, and you can still be respected within the society, but at the same time, that doesn't mean you [should] just be one of the crowd. You can be yourself and have your face. PM: But by putting yourself personally out there — both projecting a different image of Yemeni women, but also what you have made possible for the women who work at the paper — has this put you in personal danger? NA: Well the Yemen Times, across 20 years, has been through so much. We've suffered prosecution; the paper was closed down more than three times. It's an independent newspaper, but tell that to the people in charge. They think that if there's anything against them, then we are being an opposition newspaper. And very, very difficult times. Some of my reporters were arrested. We had some court cases. My father was assassinated. Today, we are in a much better situation. We've created the credibility. And in times of revolution or change like today, it is very important for independent media to have a voice. It's very important for you to go to YemenTimes.com, and it's very important to listen to our voice. And this is probably something I'm going to share with you in Western media probably — and how there's a lot of stereotypes — thinking of Yemen in one single frame: this is what Yemen is all about. And that's not fair. It's not fair for me; it's not fair for my country. A lot of reporters come to Yemen and they want to write a story on Al-Qaeda or terrorism. And I just wanted to share with you: there's one reporter that came. He wanted to do a documentary on what his editors wanted. And he ended up writing about a story that even surprised me — hip hop — that there are young Yemeni men who express themselves through dancing and puchu puchu. (Laughter) That thing. (PM: Rap. Break dancing.) Yeah, break dancing. I'm not so old. I'm just not in touch. (Laughter) (Applause) PM: Yes, you are. Actually, that's a documentary that's available online; the video's online. NA: ShaketheDust.org. PM: "Shake the Dust." (NA: "Shake the Dust.") PM: ShaketheDust.org. And it definitely does give a different image of Yemen. You spoke about the responsibility of the press. And certainly, when we look at the ways in which we have separated ourselves from others and we've created fear and danger, often from lack of knowledge, lack of real understanding, how do you see the way that the Western press in particular is covering this and all other stories out of the region, but in particular, in your country? NA: Well there is a saying that says, "You fear what you don't know, and you hate what you fear." So it's about the lack of research, basically. It's almost, "Do your homework," — some involvement. And you cannot do parachute reporting — just jump into a country for two days and think that you've done your homework and a story. So I wish that the world would know my Yemen, my country, my people. I am an example, and there are others like me. We may not be that many, but if we are promoted as a good, positive example, there will be others — men and women — who can eventually bridge the gap — again, coming to the bridge — between Yemen and the world and telling first about recognition and then about communication and compassion. I think Yemen is going to be in a very bad situation in the next two or three years. It's natural. But after the two years, which is a price we are willing to pay, we are going to stand up again on our feet, but in the new Yemen with a younger and more empowered people — democratic. (Applause) PM: Nadia, I think you've just given us a very different view of Yemen. And certainly you yourself and what you do have given us a view of the future that we will embrace and be grateful for. And the very best of luck to you. YemenTimes.com. NA: On Twitter also. PM: So you are plugged in. (Applause)

Fighting viruses, defending the net

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

TEDGlobal 2011

I love the Internet. It's true. Think about everything it has brought us. Think about all the services we use, all the connectivity, all the entertainment, all the business, all the commerce. And it's happening during our lifetimes. I'm pretty sure that one day we'll be writing history books hundreds of years from now. This time our generation will be remembered as the generation that got online, the generation that built something really and truly global. But yes, it's also true that the Internet has problems, very serious problems, problems with security and problems with privacy. I've spent my career fighting these problems. So let me show you something. This here is Brain. This is a floppy disk — five and a quarter-inch floppy disk infected by Brain.A. It's the first virus we ever found for PC computers. And we actually know where Brain came from. We know because it says so inside the code. Let's take a look. All right. That's the boot sector of an infected floppy, and if we take a closer look inside, we'll see that right there, it says, "Welcome to the dungeon." And then it continues, saying, 1986, Basit and Amjad. And Basit and Amjad are first names, Pakistani first names. In fact, there's a phone number and an address in Pakistan. (Laughter) Now, 1986. Now it's 2011. That's 25 years ago. The PC virus problem is 25 years old now. So half a year ago, I decided to go to Pakistan myself. So let's see, here's a couple of photos I took while I was in Pakistan. This is from the city of Lahore, which is around 300 kilometers south from Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was caught. Here's a typical street view. And here's the street or road leading to this building, which is 730 Nizam block at Allama Iqbal Town. And I knocked on the door. (Laughter) You want to guess who opened the door? Basit and Amjad; they are still there. (Laughter) (Applause) So here standing up is Basit. Sitting down is his brother Amjad. These are the guys who wrote the first PC virus. Now of course, we had a very interesting discussion. I asked them why. I asked them how they feel about what they started. And I got some sort of satisfaction from learning that both Basit and Amjad had had their computers infected dozens of times by completely unrelated other viruses over these years. So there is some sort of justice in the world after all. Now, the viruses that we used to see in the 1980s and 1990s obviously are not a problem any more. So let me just show you a couple of examples of what they used to look like. What I'm running here is a system that enables me to run age-old programs on a modern computer. So let me just mount some drives. Go over there. What we have here is a list of old viruses. So let me just run some viruses on my computer. For example, let's go with the Centipede virus first. And you can see at the top of the screen, there's a centipede scrolling across your computer when you get infected by this one. You know that you're infected because it actually shows up. Here's another one. This is the virus called Crash, invented in Russia in 1992. Let me show you one which actually makes some sound. (Siren noise) And the last example, guess what the Walker virus does? Yes, there's a guy walking across your screen once you get infected. So it used to be fairly easy to know that you're infected by a virus, when the viruses were written by hobbyists and teenagers. Today, they are no longer being written by hobbyists and teenagers. Today, viruses are a global problem. What we have here in the background is an example of our systems that we run in our labs, where we track virus infections worldwide. So we can actually see in real time that we've just blocked viruses in Sweden and Taiwan and Russia and elsewhere. In fact, if I just connect back to our lab systems through the Web, we can see in real time just some kind of idea of how many viruses, how many new examples of malware we find every single day. Here's the latest virus we've found, in a file called Server.exe. And we found it right over here three seconds ago — the previous one, six seconds ago. And if we just scroll around, it's just massive. We find tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands. And that's the last 20 minutes of malware every single day. So where are all these coming from then? Well today, it's the organized criminal gangs writing these viruses because they make money with their viruses. It's gangs like — let's go to GangstaBucks.com. This is a website operating in Moscow where these guys are buying infected computers. So if you are a virus writer and you're capable of infecting Windows computers, but you don't know what to do with them, you can sell those infected computers — somebody else's computers — to these guys. And they'll actually pay you money for those computers. So how do these guys then monetize those infected computers? Well there's multiple different ways, such as banking trojans, which will steal money from your online banking accounts when you do online banking, or keyloggers. Keyloggers silently sit on your computer, hidden from view, and they record everything you type. So you're sitting on your computer and you're doing Google searches. Every single Google search you type is saved and sent to the criminals. Every single email you write is saved and sent to the criminals. Same thing with every single password and so on. But the thing that they're actually looking for most are sessions where you go online and do online purchases in any online store. Because when you do purchases in online stores, you will be typing in your name, the delivery address, your credit card number and the credit card security codes. And here's an example of a file we found from a server a couple of weeks ago. That's the credit card number, that's the expiration date, that's the security code, and that's the name of the owner of the card. Once you gain access to other people's credit card information, you can just go online and buy whatever you want with this information. And that, obviously, is a problem. We now have a whole underground marketplace and business ecosystem built around online crime. One example of how these guys actually are capable of monetizing their operations: we go and have a look at the pages of INTERPOL and search for wanted persons. We find guys like Bjorn Sundin, originally from Sweden, and his partner in crime, also listed on the INTERPOL wanted pages, Mr. Shaileshkumar Jain, a U.S. citizen. These guys were running an operation called I.M.U., a cybercrime operation through which they netted millions. They are both right now on the run. Nobody knows where they are. U.S. officials, just a couple of weeks ago, froze a Swiss bank account belonging to Mr. Jain, and that bank account had 14.9 million U.S. dollars on it. So the amount of money online crime generates is significant. And that means that the online criminals can actually afford to invest into their attacks. We know that online criminals are hiring programmers, hiring testing people, testing their code, having back-end systems with SQL databases. And they can afford to watch how we work — like how security people work — and try to work their way around any security precautions we can build. They also use the global nature of Internet to their advantage. I mean, the Internet is international. That's why we call it the Internet. And if you just go and take a look at what's happening in the online world, here's a video built by Clarified Networks, which illustrates how one single malware family is able to move around the world. This operation, believed to be originally from Estonia, moves around from one country to another as soon as the website is tried to shut down. So you just can't shut these guys down. They will switch from one country to another, from one jurisdiction to another — moving around the world, using the fact that we don't have the capability to globally police operations like this. So the Internet is as if someone would have given free plane tickets to all the online criminals of the world. Now, criminals who weren't capable of reaching us before can reach us. So how do you actually go around finding online criminals? How do you actually track them down? Let me give you an example. What we have here is one exploit file. Here, I'm looking at the Hex dump of an image file, which contains an exploit. And that basically means, if you're trying to view this image file on your Windows computer, it actually takes over your computer and runs code. Now, if you'll take a look at this image file — well there's the image header, and there the actual code of the attack starts. And that code has been encrypted, so let's decrypt it. It has been encrypted with XOR function 97. You just have to believe me, it is, it is. And we can go here and actually start decrypting it. Well the yellow part of the code is now decrypted. And I know, it doesn't really look much different from the original. But just keep staring at it. You'll actually see that down here you can see a Web address: unionseek.com/d/ioo.exe And when you view this image on your computer it actually is going to download and run that program. And that's a backdoor which will take over your computer. But even more interestingly, if we continue decrypting, we'll find this mysterious string, which says O600KO78RUS. That code is there underneath the encryption as some sort of a signature. It's not used for anything. And I was looking at that, trying to figure out what it means. So obviously I Googled for it. I got zero hits; wasn't there. So I spoke with the guys at the lab. And we have a couple of Russian guys in our labs, and one of them mentioned, well, it ends in RUS like Russia. And 78 is the city code for the city of St. Petersburg. For example, you can find it from some phone numbers and car license plates and stuff like that. So I went looking for contacts in St. Petersburg, and through a long road, we eventually found this one particular website. Here's this Russian guy who's been operating online for a number of years who runs his own website, and he runs a blog under the popular Live Journal. And on this blog, he blogs about his life, about his life in St. Petersburg — he's in his early 20s — about his cat, about his girlfriend. And he drives a very nice car. In fact, this guy drives a Mercedes-Benz S600 V12 with a six-liter engine with more than 400 horsepower. Now that's a nice car for a 20-something year-old kid in St. Petersburg. How do I know about this car? Because he blogged about the car. He actually had a car accident. In downtown St. Petersburg, he actually crashed his car into another car. And he put blogged images about the car accident — that's his Mercedes — right here is the Lada Samara he crashed into. And you can actually see that the license plate of the Samara ends in 78RUS. And if you actually take a look at the scene picture, you can see that the plate of the Mercedes is O600KO78RUS. Now I'm not a lawyer, but if I would be, this is where I would say, "I rest my case." (Laughter) So what happens when online criminals are caught? Well in most cases it never gets this far. The vast majority of the online crime cases, we don't even know which continent the attacks are coming from. And even if we are able to find online criminals, quite often there is no outcome. The local police don't act, or if they do, there's not enough evidence, or for some reason we can't take them down. I wish it would be easier; unfortunately it isn't. But things are also changing at a very rapid pace. You've all heard about things like Stuxnet. So if you look at what Stuxnet did is that it infected these. That's a Siemens S7-400 PLC, programmable logic [controller]. And this is what runs our infrastructure. This is what runs everything around us. PLC's, these small boxes which have no display, no keyboard, which are programmed, are put in place, and they do their job. For example, the elevators in this building most likely are controlled by one of these. And when Stuxnet infects one of these, that's a massive revolution on the kinds of risks we have to worry about. Because everything around us is being run by these. I mean, we have critical infrastructure. You go to any factory, any power plant, any chemical plant, any food processing plant, you look around — everything is being run by computers. Everything is being run by computers. Everything is reliant on these computers working. We have become very reliant on Internet, on basic things like electricity, obviously, on computers working. And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us. We must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail. (Laughter) (Applause) So preparedness means that we can do stuff even when the things we take for granted aren't there. It's actually very basic stuff — thinking about continuity, thinking about backups, thinking about the things that actually matter. Now I told you — (Laughter) I love the Internet. I do. Think about all the services we have online. Think about if they are taken away from you, if one day you don't actually have them for some reason or another. I see beauty in the future of the Internet, but I'm worried that we might not see that. I'm worried that we are running into problems because of online crime. Online crime is the one thing that might take these things away from us. (Laughter) I've spent my life defending the Net, and I do feel that if we don't fight online crime, we are running a risk of losing it all. We have to do this globally, and we have to do it right now. What we need is more global, international law enforcement work to find online criminal gangs — these organized gangs that are making millions out of their attacks. That's much more important than running anti-viruses or running firewalls. What actually matters is actually finding the people behind these attacks, and even more importantly, we have to find the people who are about to become part of this online world of crime, but haven't yet done it. We have to find the people with the skills, but without the opportunities and give them the opportunities to use their skills for good. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Embracing otherness, embracing myself

{0: 'Swinging from Hollywood blockbusters to sensitive indie films, Thandie Newton brings thoughtfulness and delicate beauty to her work. '}

TEDGlobal 2011

Embracing otherness. When I first heard this theme, I thought, well, embracing otherness is embracing myself. And the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me, and it's given me an insight into the whole notion of self, which I think is worth sharing with you today. We each have a self, but I don't think that we're born with one. You know how newborn babies believe they're part of everything; they're not separate? Well that fundamental sense of oneness is lost on us very quickly. It's like that initial stage is over — oneness: infancy, unformed, primitive. It's no longer valid or real. What is real is separateness, and at some point in early babyhood, the idea of self starts to form. Our little portion of oneness is given a name, is told all kinds of things about itself, and these details, opinions and ideas become facts, which go towards building ourselves, our identity. And that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world. But the self is a projection based on other people's projections. Is it who we really are? Or who we really want to be, or should be? So this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult one for me growing up. The self that I attempted to take out into the world was rejected over and over again. And my panic at not having a self that fit, and the confusion that came from my self being rejected, created anxiety, shame and hopelessness, which kind of defined me for a long time. But in retrospect, the destruction of my self was so repetitive that I started to see a pattern. The self changed, got affected, broken, destroyed, but another one would evolve — sometimes stronger, sometimes hateful, sometimes not wanting to be there at all. The self was not constant. And how many times would my self have to die before I realized that it was never alive in the first place? I grew up on the coast of England in the '70s. My dad is white from Cornwall, and my mom is black from Zimbabwe. Even the idea of us as a family was challenging to most people. But nature had its wicked way, and brown babies were born. But from about the age of five, I was aware that I didn't fit. I was the black atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly, and my self was rooting around for definition and trying to plug in. Because the self likes to fit, to see itself replicated, to belong. That confirms its existence and its importance. And it is important. It has an extremely important function. Without it, we literally can't interface with others. We can't hatch plans and climb that stairway of popularity, of success. But my skin color wasn't right. My hair wasn't right. My history wasn't right. My self became defined by otherness, which meant that, in that social world, I didn't really exist. And I was "other" before being anything else — even before being a girl. I was a noticeable nobody. Another world was opening up around this time: performance and dancing. That nagging dread of self-hood didn't exist when I was dancing. I'd literally lose myself. And I was a really good dancer. I would put all my emotional expression into my dancing. I could be in the movement in a way that I wasn't able to be in my real life, in myself. And at 16, I stumbled across another opportunity, and I earned my first acting role in a film. I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting. My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self, not my own, and it felt so good. It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self — one that I controlled, that I steered, that I gave life to. But the shooting day would end, and I'd return to my gnarly, awkward self. By 19, I was a fully-fledged movie actor, but still searching for definition. I applied to read anthropology at university. Dr. Phyllis Lee gave me my interview, and she asked me, "How would you define race?" Well, I thought I had the answer to that one, and I said, "Skin color." "So biology, genetics?" she said. "Because, Thandie, that's not accurate. Because there's actually more genetic difference between a black Kenyan and a black Ugandan than there is between a black Kenyan and, say, a white Norwegian. Because we all stem from Africa. So in Africa, there's been more time to create genetic diversity." In other words, race has no basis in biological or scientific fact. On the one hand, result. Right? On the other hand, my definition of self just lost a huge chunk of its credibility. But what was credible, what is biological and scientific fact, is that we all stem from Africa — in fact, from a woman called Mitochondrial Eve who lived 160,000 years ago. And race is an illegitimate concept which our selves have created based on fear and ignorance. Strangely, these revelations didn't cure my low self-esteem, that feeling of otherness. My desire to disappear was still very powerful. I had a degree from Cambridge; I had a thriving career, but my self was a car crash, and I wound up with bulimia and on a therapist's couch. And of course I did. I still believed my self was all I was. I still valued self-worth above all other worth, and what was there to suggest otherwise? We've created entire value systems and a physical reality to support the worth of self. Look at the industry for self-image and the jobs it creates, the revenue it turns over. We'd be right in assuming that the self is an actual living thing. But it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death. But there is something that can give the self ultimate and infinite connection — and that thing is oneness, our essence. The self's struggle for authenticity and definition will never end unless it's connected to its creator — to you and to me. And that can happen with awareness — awareness of the reality of oneness and the projection of self-hood. For a start, we can think about all the times when we do lose ourselves. It happens when I dance, when I'm acting. I'm earthed in my essence, and my self is suspended. In those moments, I'm connected to everything — the ground, the air, the sounds, the energy from the audience. All my senses are alert and alive in much the same way as an infant might feel — that feeling of oneness. And when I'm acting a role, I inhabit another self, and I give it life for awhile, because when the self is suspended so is divisiveness and judgment. And I've played everything from a vengeful ghost in the time of slavery to Secretary of State in 2004. And no matter how other these selves might be, they're all related in me. And I honestly believe the key to my success as an actor and my progress as a person has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel so anxious and insecure. I always wondered why I could feel others' pain so deeply, why I could recognize the somebody in the nobody. It's because I didn't have a self to get in the way. I thought I lacked substance, and the fact that I could feel others' meant that I had nothing of myself to feel. The thing that was a source of shame was actually a source of enlightenment. And when I realized and really understood that my self is a projection and that it has a function, a funny thing happened. I stopped giving it so much authority. I give it its due. I take it to therapy. I've become very familiar with its dysfunctional behavior. But I'm not ashamed of my self. In fact, I respect my self and its function. And over time and with practice, I've tried to live more and more from my essence. And if you can do that, incredible things happen. I was in Congo in February, dancing and celebrating with women who've survived the destruction of their selves in literally unthinkable ways — destroyed because other brutalized, psychopathic selves all over that beautiful land are fueling our selves' addiction to iPods, Pads, and bling, which further disconnect ourselves from ever feeling their pain, their suffering, their death. Because, hey, if we're all living in ourselves and mistaking it for life, then we're devaluing and desensitizing life. And in that disconnected state, yeah, we can build factory farms with no windows, destroy marine life and use rape as a weapon of war. So here's a note to self: The cracks have started to show in our constructed world, and oceans will continue to surge through the cracks, and oil and blood, rivers of it. Crucially, we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness with the Earth and every other living thing. We've just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other — billions of each other. Only we're not living with each other; our crazy selves are living with each other and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection. Let's live with each other and take it a breath at a time. If we can get under that heavy self, light a torch of awareness, and find our essence, our connection to the infinite and every other living thing. We knew it from the day we were born. Let's not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness. It's more a reality than the ones our selves have created. Imagine what kind of existence we can have if we honor inevitable death of self, appreciate the privilege of life and marvel at what comes next. Simple awareness is where it begins. Thank you for listening. (Applause)

How algorithms shape our world

{0: 'Kevin Slavin navigates in the algoworld, the expanding space in our lives that’s determined and run by algorithms.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

This is a photograph by the artist Michael Najjar, and it's real, in the sense that he went there to Argentina to take the photo. But it's also a fiction. There's a lot of work that went into it after that. And what he's done is he's actually reshaped, digitally, all of the contours of the mountains to follow the vicissitudes of the Dow Jones index. So what you see, that precipice, that high precipice with the valley, is the 2008 financial crisis. The photo was made when we were deep in the valley over there. I don't know where we are now. This is the Hang Seng index for Hong Kong. And similar topography. I wonder why. And this is art. This is metaphor. But I think the point is that this is metaphor with teeth, and it's with those teeth that I want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the role of contemporary math — not just financial math, but math in general. That its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it — the world around us and the world inside us. And it's specifically algorithms, which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff. They acquire the sensibility of truth because they repeat over and over again, and they ossify and calcify, and they become real. And I was thinking about this, of all places, on a transatlantic flight a couple of years ago, because I happened to be seated next to a Hungarian physicist about my age and we were talking about what life was like during the Cold War for physicists in Hungary. And I said, "So what were you doing?" And he said, "Well we were mostly breaking stealth." And I said, "That's a good job. That's interesting. How does that work?" And to understand that, you have to understand a little bit about how stealth works. And so — this is an over-simplification — but basically, it's not like you can just pass a radar signal right through 156 tons of steel in the sky. It's not just going to disappear. But if you can take this big, massive thing, and you could turn it into a million little things — something like a flock of birds — well then the radar that's looking for that has to be able to see every flock of birds in the sky. And if you're a radar, that's a really bad job. And he said, "Yeah." He said, "But that's if you're a radar. So we didn't use a radar; we built a black box that was looking for electrical signals, electronic communication. And whenever we saw a flock of birds that had electronic communication, we thought, 'Probably has something to do with the Americans.'" And I said, "Yeah. That's good. So you've effectively negated 60 years of aeronautic research. What's your act two? What do you do when you grow up?" And he said, "Well, financial services." And I said, "Oh." Because those had been in the news lately. And I said, "How does that work?" And he said, "Well there's 2,000 physicists on Wall Street now, and I'm one of them." And I said, "What's the black box for Wall Street?" And he said, "It's funny you ask that, because it's actually called black box trading. And it's also sometimes called algo trading, algorithmic trading." And algorithmic trading evolved in part because institutional traders have the same problems that the United States Air Force had, which is that they're moving these positions — whether it's Proctor & Gamble or Accenture, whatever — they're moving a million shares of something through the market. And if they do that all at once, it's like playing poker and going all in right away. You just tip your hand. And so they have to find a way — and they use algorithms to do this — to break up that big thing into a million little transactions. And the magic and the horror of that is that the same math that you use to break up the big thing into a million little things can be used to find a million little things and sew them back together and figure out what's actually happening in the market. So if you need to have some image of what's happening in the stock market right now, what you can picture is a bunch of algorithms that are basically programmed to hide, and a bunch of algorithms that are programmed to go find them and act. And all of that's great, and it's fine. And that's 70 percent of the United States stock market, 70 percent of the operating system formerly known as your pension, your mortgage. And what could go wrong? What could go wrong is that a year ago, nine percent of the entire market just disappears in five minutes, and they called it the Flash Crash of 2:45. All of a sudden, nine percent just goes away, and nobody to this day can even agree on what happened because nobody ordered it, nobody asked for it. Nobody had any control over what was actually happening. All they had was just a monitor in front of them that had the numbers on it and just a red button that said, "Stop." And that's the thing, is that we're writing things, we're writing these things that we can no longer read. And we've rendered something illegible, and we've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world that we've made. And we're starting to make our way. There's a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don't know what, and they reach into all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. And they do what we've always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don't understand — which is that they give them a name and a story. So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight. And the gag is that, of course, these aren't just running through the market. You can find these kinds of things wherever you look, once you learn how to look for them. You can find it here: this book about flies that you may have been looking at on Amazon. You may have noticed it when its price started at 1.7 million dollars. It's out of print — still ... (Laughter) If you had bought it at 1.7, it would have been a bargain. A few hours later, it had gone up to 23.6 million dollars, plus shipping and handling. And the question is: Nobody was buying or selling anything; what was happening? And you see this behavior on Amazon as surely as you see it on Wall Street. And when you see this kind of behavior, what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict, algorithms locked in loops with each other, without any human oversight, without any adult supervision to say, "Actually, 1.7 million is plenty." (Laughter) And as with Amazon, so it is with Netflix. And so Netflix has gone through several different algorithms over the years. They started with Cinematch, and they've tried a bunch of others — there's Dinosaur Planet; there's Gravity. They're using Pragmatic Chaos now. Pragmatic Chaos is, like all of Netflix algorithms, trying to do the same thing. It's trying to get a grasp on you, on the firmware inside the human skull, so that it can recommend what movie you might want to watch next — which is a very, very difficult problem. But the difficulty of the problem and the fact that we don't really quite have it down, it doesn't take away from the effects Pragmatic Chaos has. Pragmatic Chaos, like all Netflix algorithms, determines, in the end, 60 percent of what movies end up being rented. So one piece of code with one idea about you is responsible for 60 percent of those movies. But what if you could rate those movies before they get made? Wouldn't that be handy? Well, a few data scientists from the U.K. are in Hollywood, and they have "story algorithms" — a company called Epagogix. And you can run your script through there, and they can tell you, quantifiably, that that's a 30 million dollar movie or a 200 million dollar movie. And the thing is, is that this isn't Google. This isn't information. These aren't financial stats; this is culture. And what you see here, or what you don't really see normally, is that these are the physics of culture. And if these algorithms, like the algorithms on Wall Street, just crashed one day and went awry, how would we know? What would it look like? And they're in your house. They're in your house. These are two algorithms competing for your living room. These are two different cleaning robots that have very different ideas about what clean means. And you can see it if you slow it down and attach lights to them, and they're sort of like secret architects in your bedroom. And the idea that architecture itself is somehow subject to algorithmic optimization is not far-fetched. It's super-real and it's happening around you. You feel it most when you're in a sealed metal box, a new-style elevator; they're called destination-control elevators. These are the ones where you have to press what floor you're going to go to before you get in the elevator. And it uses what's called a bin-packing algorithm. So none of this mishegas of letting everybody go into whatever car they want. Everybody who wants to go to the 10th floor goes into car two, and everybody who wants to go to the third floor goes into car five. And the problem with that is that people freak out. People panic. And you see why. You see why. It's because the elevator is missing some important instrumentation, like the buttons. (Laughter) Like the things that people use. All it has is just the number that moves up or down and that red button that says, "Stop." And this is what we're designing for. We're designing for this machine dialect. And how far can you take that? How far can you take it? You can take it really, really far. So let me take it back to Wall Street. Because the algorithms of Wall Street are dependent on one quality above all else, which is speed. And they operate on milliseconds and microseconds. And just to give you a sense of what microseconds are, it takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse. But if you're a Wall Street algorithm and you're five microseconds behind, you're a loser. So if you were an algorithm, you'd look for an architect like the one that I met in Frankfurt who was hollowing out a skyscraper — throwing out all the furniture, all the infrastructure for human use, and just running steel on the floors to get ready for the stacks of servers to go in — all so an algorithm could get close to the Internet. And you think of the Internet as this kind of distributed system. And of course, it is, but it's distributed from places. In New York, this is where it's distributed from: the Carrier Hotel located on Hudson Street. And this is really where the wires come right up into the city. And the reality is that the further away you are from that, you're a few microseconds behind every time. These guys down on Wall Street, Marco Polo and Cherokee Nation, they're eight microseconds behind all these guys going into the empty buildings being hollowed out up around the Carrier Hotel. And that's going to keep happening. We're going to keep hollowing them out, because you, inch for inch and pound for pound and dollar for dollar, none of you could squeeze revenue out of that space like the Boston Shuffler could. But if you zoom out, if you zoom out, you would see an 825-mile trench between New York City and Chicago that's been built over the last few years by a company called Spread Networks. This is a fiber optic cable that was laid between those two cities to just be able to traffic one signal 37 times faster than you can click a mouse — just for these algorithms, just for the Carnival and the Knife. And when you think about this, that we're running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications framework that no human will ever know, that's a kind of manifest destiny; and we'll always look for a new frontier. Unfortunately, we have our work cut out for us. This is just theoretical. This is some mathematicians at MIT. And the truth is I don't really understand a lot of what they're talking about. It involves light cones and quantum entanglement, and I don't really understand any of that. But I can read this map, and what this map says is that, if you're trying to make money on the markets where the red dots are, that's where people are, where the cities are, you're going to have to put the servers where the blue dots are to do that most effectively. And the thing that you might have noticed about those blue dots is that a lot of them are in the middle of the ocean. So that's what we'll do: we'll build bubbles or something, or platforms. We'll actually part the water to pull money out of the air, because it's a bright future if you're an algorithm. (Laughter) And it's not the money that's so interesting actually. It's what the money motivates, that we're actually terraforming the Earth itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency. And in that light, you go back and you look at Michael Najjar's photographs, and you realize that they're not metaphor, they're prophecy. They're prophecy for the kind of seismic, terrestrial effects of the math that we're making. And the landscape was always made by this sort of weird, uneasy collaboration between nature and man. But now there's this third co-evolutionary force: algorithms — the Boston Shuffler, the Carnival. And we will have to understand those as nature, and in a way, they are. Thank you. (Applause)

A robot that flies like a bird

{0: 'Markus Fischer led the team at Festo that developed the first ultralight artificial bird capable of flying like a real bird.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

It is a dream of mankind to fly like a bird. Birds are very agile. They fly, not with rotating components, so they fly only by flapping their wings. So we looked at the birds, and we tried to make a model that is powerful, ultralight, and it must have excellent aerodynamic qualities that would fly by its own and only by flapping its wings. So what would be better than to use the herring gull, in its freedom, circling and swooping over the sea, and to use this as a role model? So we bring a team together. There are generalists and also specialists in the field of aerodynamics, in the field of building gliders. And the task was to build an ultralight indoor-flying model that is able to fly over your heads. So be careful later on. (Laughter) And this was one issue: to build it that lightweight that no one would be hurt if it fell down. So why do we do all this? We are a company in the field of automation, and we'd like to do very lightweight structures because that's energy efficient, and we'd like to learn more about pneumatics and air flow phenomena. So I now would like you to put your seat belts on and put your hats on. So maybe we'll try it once — to fly a SmartBird. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) (Applause ends) (Applause) So we can now look at the SmartBird. So here is one without a skin. We have a wingspan of about two meters. The length is one meter and six, and the weight is only 450 grams. And it is all out of carbon fiber. In the middle we have a motor, and we also have a gear in it, and we use the gear to transfer the circulation of the motor. So within the motor, we have three Hall sensors, so we know exactly where the wing is. And if we now beat up and down — (Mechanical sounds) We have the possibility to fly like a bird. So if you go down, you have the large area of propulsion, and if you go up, the wings are not that large, and it is easier to get up. So, the next thing we did, or the challenges we did, was to coordinate this movement. We have to turn it, go up and go down. We have a split wing. With the split wing, we get the lift at the upper wing, and we get the propulsion at the lower wing. Also, we see how we measure the aerodynamic efficiency. We had knowledge about the electromechanical efficiency and then we can calculate the aerodynamic efficiency. So therefore, it rises up from passive torsion to active torsion, from 30 percent up to 80 percent. Next thing we have to do, we have to control and regulate the whole structure. Only if you control and regulate it, you will get that aerodynamic efficiency. So the overall consumption of energy is about 25 watts at takeoff and 16 to 18 watts in flight. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Markus, we should fly it once more. Markus Fischer: Yeah, sure. (Audience) Yeah! (Laughter) (Gasps) (Cheers) (Applause)

Time to end the war in Afghanistan

{0: 'Rory Stewart -- a perpetual pedestrian, a diplomat, an adventurer and an author -- is the member of British Parliament for Penrith and the Border.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

The question today is not: Why did we invade Afghanistan? The question is: why are we still in Afghanistan one decade later? Why are we spending $135 billion? Why have we got 130,000 troops on the ground? Why were more people killed last month than in any preceding month of this conflict? How has this happened? The last 20 years has been the age of intervention, and Afghanistan is simply one act in a five-act tragedy. We came out of the end of the Cold War in despair. We faced Rwanda; we faced Bosnia, and then we rediscovered our confidence. In the third act, we went into Bosnia and Kosovo and we seemed to succeed. In the fourth act, with our hubris, our overconfidence developing, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the fifth act, we plunged into a humiliating mess. So the question is: What are we doing? Why are we still stuck in Afghanistan? And the answer, of course, that we keep being given is as follows: we're told that we went into Afghanistan because of 9/11, and that we remain there because the Taliban poses an existential threat to global security. In the words of President Obama, "If the Taliban take over again, they will invite back Al-Qaeda, who will try to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." The story that we're told is that there was a "light footprint" initially — in other words, that we ended up in a situation where we didn't have enough troops, we didn't have enough resources, that Afghans were frustrated — they felt there wasn't enough progress and economic development and security, and therefore the Taliban came back — that we responded in 2005 and 2006 with troop deployments, but we still didn't put enough troops on the ground. And that it wasn't until 2009, when President Obama signed off on a surge, that we finally had, in the words of Secretary Clinton, "the strategy, the leadership and the resources." So, as the president now reassures us, we are on track to achieve our goals. All of this is wrong. Every one of those statements is wrong. Afghanistan does not pose an existential threat to global security. It is extremely unlikely the Taliban would ever be able to take over the country — extremely unlikely they'd be able to seize Kabul. They simply don't have a conventional military option. And even if they were able to do so, even if I'm wrong, it's extremely unlikely the Taliban would invite back Al-Qaeda. From the Taliban's point of view, that was their number one mistake last time. If they hadn't invited back Al-Qaeda, they would still be in power today. And even if I'm wrong about those two things, even if they were able to take back the country, even if they were to invite back Al-Qaeda, it's extremely unlikely that Al-Qaeda would significantly enhance its ability to harm the United States or harm Europe. Because this isn't the 1990s anymore. If the Al-Qaeda base was to be established near Ghazni, we would hit them very hard, and it would be very, very difficult for the Taliban to protect them. Furthermore, it's simply not true that what went wrong in Afghanistan is the light footprint. In my experience, in fact, the light footprint was extremely helpful. And these troops that we brought in — it's a great picture of David Beckham there on the sub-machine gun — made the situation worse, not better. When I walked across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002, what I saw was scenes like this. A girl, if you're lucky, in the corner of a dark room — lucky to be able to look at the Koran. But in those early days when we're told we didn't have enough troops and enough resources, we made a lot of progress in Afghanistan. Within a few months, there were two and a half million more girls in school. In Sangin where I was sick in 2002, the nearest health clinic was within three days walk. Today, there are 14 health clinics in that area alone. There was amazing improvements. We went from almost no Afghans having mobile telephones during the Taliban to a situation where, almost overnight, three million Afghans had mobile telephones. And we had progress in the free media. We had progress in elections — all of this with the so-called light footprint. But when we began to bring more money, when we began to invest more resources, things got worse, not better. How? Well first see, if you put 125 billion dollars a year into a country like Afghanistan where the entire revenue of the Afghan state is one billion dollars a year, you drown everything. It's not simply corruption and waste that you create; you essentially replace the priorities of the Afghan government, the elected Afghan government, with the micromanaging tendencies of foreigners on short tours with their own priorities. And the same is true for the troops. When I walked across Afghanistan, I stayed with people like this. This is Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj. Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj was a great host. He was very generous, like many of the Afghans I stayed with. But he was also considerably more conservative, considerably more anti-foreign, considerably more Islamist than we'd like to acknowledge. This man, for example, Mullah Mustafa, tried to shoot me. And the reason I'm looking a little bit perplexed in this photograph is I was somewhat frightened, and I was too afraid on this occasion to ask him, having run for an hour through the desert and taken refuge in this house, why he had turned up and wanted to have his photograph taken with me. But 18 months later, I asked him why he had tried to shoot me. And Mullah Mustafa — he's the man with the pen and paper — explained that the man sitting immediately to the left as you look at the photograph, Nadir Shah had bet him that he couldn't hit me. Now this is not to say Afghanistan is a place full of people like Mullah Mustafa. It's not; it's a wonderful place full of incredible energy and intelligence. But it is a place where the putting-in of the troops has increased the violence rather than decreased it. 2005, Anthony Fitzherbert, an agricultural engineer, could travel through Helmand, could stay in Nad Ali, Sangin and Ghoresh, which are now the names of villages where fighting is taking place. Today, he could never do that. So the idea that we deployed the troops to respond to the Taliban insurgency is mistaken. Rather than preceding the insurgency, the Taliban followed the troop deployment, and as far as I'm concerned, the troop deployment caused their return. Now is this a new idea? No, there have been any number of people saying this over the last seven years. I ran a center at Harvard from 2008 to 2010, and there were people like Michael Semple there who speak Afghan languages fluently, who've traveled to almost every district in the country. Andrew Wilder, for example, born on the Pakistan-Iranian border, served his whole life in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Paul Fishstein who began working there in 1978 — worked for Save the Children, ran the Afghan research and evaluation unit. These are people who were able to say consistently that the increase in development aid was making Afghanistan less secure, not more secure — that the counter-insurgency strategy was not working and would not work. And yet, nobody listened to them. Instead, there was a litany of astonishing optimism. Beginning in 2004, every general came in saying, "I've inherited a dismal situation, but finally I have the right resources and the correct strategy, which will deliver," in General Barno's word in 2004, the "decisive year." Well guess what? It didn't. But it wasn't sufficient to prevent General Abuzaid saying that he had the strategy and the resources to deliver, in 2005, the "decisive year." Or General David Richards to come in 2006 and say he had the strategy and the resources to deliver the "crunch year." Or in 2007, the Norwegian deputy foreign minister, Espen Eide, to say that that would deliver the "decisive year." Or in 2008, Major General Champoux to come in and say he would deliver the "decisive year." Or in 2009, my great friend, General Stanley McChrystal, who said that he was "knee-deep in the decisive year." Or in 2010, the U.K. foreign secretary, David Miliband, who said that at last we would deliver the "decisive year." And you'll be delighted to hear in 2011, today, that Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, assures us that we are in the "decisive year." (Applause) How do we allow any of this to happen? Well the answer, of course, is, if you spend 125 billion or 130 billion dollars a year in a country, you co-opt almost everybody. Even the aid agencies, who begin to receive an enormous amount of money from the U.S. and the European governments to build schools and clinics, are somewhat disinclined to challenge the idea that Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security. They're worried, in other words, that if anybody believes that it wasn't such a threat — Oxfam, Save the Children wouldn't get the money to build their hospitals and schools. It's also very difficult to confront a general with medals on his chest. It's very difficult for a politician, because you're afraid that many lives have been lost in vain. You feel deep, deep guilt. You exaggerate your fears, and you're terrified about the humiliation of defeat. What is the solution to this? Well the solution to this is we need to find a way that people like Michael Semple, or those other people, who are telling the truth, who know the country, who've spent 30 years on the ground — and most importantly of all, the missing component of this — Afghans themselves, who understand what is going on. We need to somehow get their message to the policymakers. And this is very difficult to do because of our structures. The first thing we need to change is the structures of our government. Very, very sadly, our foreign services, the United Nations, the military in these countries have very little idea of what's going on. The average British soldier is on a tour of only six months; Italian soldiers, on tours of four months; the American military, on tours of 12 months. Diplomats are locked in embassy compounds. When they go out, they travel in these curious armored vehicles with these somewhat threatening security teams who ready 24 hours in advance who say you can only stay on the ground for an hour. In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level. And there was not a single Pashto speaker. In the Afghan section in London responsible for governing Afghan policy on the ground, I was told last year that there was not a single staff member of the foreign office in that section who had ever served on a posting in Afghanistan. So we need to change that institutional culture. And I could make the same points about the United States and the United Nations. Secondly, we need to aim off of the optimism of the generals. We need to make sure that we're a little bit suspicious, that we understand that optimism is in the DNA of the military, that we don't respond to it with quite as much alacrity. And thirdly, we need to have some humility. We need to begin from the position that our knowledge, our power, our legitimacy is limited. This doesn't mean that intervention around the world is a disaster. It isn't. Bosnia and Kosovo were signal successes, great successes. Today when you go to Bosnia it is almost impossible to believe that what we saw in the early 1990s happened. It's almost impossible to believe the progress we've made since 1994. Refugee return, which the United Nations High Commission for Refugees thought would be extremely unlikely, has largely happened. A million properties have been returned. Borders between the Bosniak territory and the Bosnian-Serb territory have calmed down. The national army has shrunk. The crime rates in Bosnia today are lower than they are in Sweden. This has been done by an incredible, principled effort by the international community, and, of course, above all, by Bosnians themselves. But you need to look at context. And this is what we've lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. You need to understand that in those places what really mattered was, firstly, the role of Tudman and Milosevic in coming to the agreement, and then the fact those men went, that the regional situation improved, that the European Union could offer Bosnia something extraordinary: the chance to be part of a new thing, a new club, a chance to join something bigger. And finally, we need to understand that in Bosnia and Kosovo, a lot of the secret of what we did, a lot of the secret of our success, was our humility — was the tentative nature of our engagement. We criticized people a lot in Bosnia for being quite slow to take on war criminals. We criticized them for being quite slow to return refugees. But that slowness, that caution, the fact that President Clinton initially said that American troops would only be deployed for a year, turned out to be a strength, and it helped us to put our priorities right. One of the saddest things about our involvement in Afghanistan is that we've got our priorities out of sync. We're not matching our resources to our priorities. Because if what we're interested in is terrorism, Pakistan is far more important than Afghanistan. If what we're interested in is regional stability, Egypt is far more important. If what we're worried about is poverty and development, sub-Saharan Africa is far more important. This doesn't mean that Afghanistan doesn't matter, but that it's one of 40 countries in the world with which we need to engage. So if I can finish with a metaphor for intervention, what we need to think of is something like mountain rescue. Why mountain rescue? Because when people talk about intervention, they imagine that some scientific theory — the Rand Corporation goes around counting 43 previous insurgencies producing mathematical formula saying you need one trained counter-insurgent for every 20 members of the population. This is the wrong way of looking at it. You need to look at it in the way that you look at mountain rescue. When you're doing mountain rescue, you don't take a doctorate in mountain rescue, you look for somebody who knows the terrain. It's about context. You understand that you can prepare, but the amount of preparation you can do is limited — you can take some water, you can have a map, you can have a pack. But what really matters is two kinds of problems — problems that occur on the mountain which you couldn't anticipate, such as, for example, ice on a slope, but which you can get around, and problems which you couldn't anticipate and which you can't get around, like a sudden blizzard or an avalanche or a change in the weather. And the key to this is a guide who has been on that mountain, in every temperature, at every period — a guide who, above all, knows when to turn back, who doesn't press on relentlessly when conditions turn against them. What we look for in firemen, in climbers, in policemen, and what we should look for in intervention, is intelligent risk takers — not people who plunge blind off a cliff, not people who jump into a burning room, but who weigh their risks, weigh their responsibilities. Because the worst thing we have done in Afghanistan is this idea that failure is not an option. It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable. And if we can resist this crazy slogan, we shall discover — in Egypt, in Syria, in Libya, and anywhere else we go in the world — that if we can often do much less than we pretend, we can do much more than we fear. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Rory, you mentioned Libya at the end. Just briefly, what's your take on the current events there and the intervention? Rory Stewart: Okay, I think Libya poses the classic problem. The problem in Libya is that we are always pushing for the black or white. We imagine there are only two choices: either full engagement and troop deployment or total isolation. And we are always being tempted up to our neck. We put our toes in and we go up to our neck. What we should have done in Libya is we should have stuck to the U.N. resolution. We should have limited ourselves very, very strictly to the protection of the civilian population in Benghazi. We could have done that. We set up a no-fly zone within 48 hours because Gaddafi had no planes within 48 hours. Instead of which, we've allowed ourselves to be tempted towards regime change. In doing so, we've destroyed our credibility with the Security Council, which means it's very difficult to get a resolution on Syria, and we're setting ourselves up again for failure. Once more, humility, limits, honesty, realistic expectations and we could have achieved something to be proud of. BG: Rory, thank you very much. RS: Thank you. (BG: Thank you.)

The surprising math of cities and corporations

{0: 'Physicist Geoffrey West believes that complex systems from organisms to cities are in many ways governed by simple laws -- laws that can be discovered and analyzed.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Cities are the crucible of civilization. They have been expanding, urbanization has been expanding, at an exponential rate in the last 200 years so that by the second part of this century, the planet will be completely dominated by cities. Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy — they're all problems that are confronted by having cities. That's where all these problems come from. And the tsunami of problems that we feel we're facing in terms of sustainability questions are actually a reflection of the exponential increase in urbanization across the planet. Here's some numbers. Two hundred years ago, the United States was less than a few percent urbanized. It's now more than 82 percent. The planet has crossed the halfway mark a few years ago. China's building 300 new cities in the next 20 years. Now listen to this: Every week for the foreseeable future, until 2050, every week more than a million people are being added to our cities. This is going to affect everything. Everybody in this room, if you stay alive, is going to be affected by what's happening in cities in this extraordinary phenomenon. However, cities, despite having this negative aspect to them, are also the solution. Because cities are the vacuum cleaners and the magnets that have sucked up creative people, creating ideas, innovation, wealth and so on. So we have this kind of dual nature. And so there's an urgent need for a scientific theory of cities. Now these are my comrades in arms. This work has been done with an extraordinary group of people, and they've done all the work, and I'm the great bullshitter that tries to bring it all together. (Laughter) So here's the problem: This is what we all want. The 10 billion people on the planet in 2050 want to live in places like this, having things like this, doing things like this, with economies that are growing like this, not realizing that entropy produces things like this, this, this and this. And the question is: Is that what Edinburgh and London and New York are going to look like in 2050, or is it going to be this? That's the question. I must say, many of the indicators look like this is what it's going to look like, but let's talk about it. So my provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities. And scientific theory means quantifiable — relying on underlying generic principles that can be made into a predictive framework. That's the quest. Is that conceivable? Are there universal laws? So here's two questions that I have in my head when I think about this problem. The first is: Are cities part of biology? Is London a great big whale? Is Edinburgh a horse? Is Microsoft a great big anthill? What do we learn from that? We use them metaphorically — the DNA of a company, the metabolism of a city, and so on — is that just bullshit, metaphorical bullshit, or is there serious substance to it? And if that is the case, how come that it's very hard to kill a city? You could drop an atom bomb on a city, and 30 years later it's surviving. Very few cities fail. All companies die, all companies. And if you have a serious theory, you should be able to predict when Google is going to go bust. So is that just another version of this? Well we understand this very well. That is, you ask any generic question about this — how many trees of a given size, how many branches of a given size does a tree have, how many leaves, what is the energy flowing through each branch, what is the size of the canopy, what is its growth, what is its mortality? We have a mathematical framework based on generic universal principles that can answer those questions. And the idea is can we do the same for this? So the route in is recognizing one of the most extraordinary things about life, is that it is scalable, it works over an extraordinary range. This is just a tiny range actually: It's us mammals; we're one of these. The same principles, the same dynamics, the same organization is at work in all of these, including us, and it can scale over a range of 100 million in size. And that is one of the main reasons life is so resilient and robust — scalability. We're going to discuss that in a moment more. But you know, at a local level, you scale; everybody in this room is scaled. That's called growth. Here's how you grew. Rat, that's a rat — could have been you. We're all pretty much the same. And you see, you're very familiar with this. You grow very quickly and then you stop. And that line there is a prediction from the same theory, based on the same principles, that describes that forest. And here it is for the growth of a rat, and those points on there are data points. This is just the weight versus the age. And you see, it stops growing. Very, very good for biology — also one of the reasons for its great resilience. Very, very bad for economies and companies and cities in our present paradigm. This is what we believe. This is what our whole economy is thrusting upon us, particularly illustrated in that left-hand corner: hockey sticks. This is a bunch of software companies — and what it is is their revenue versus their age — all zooming away, and everybody making millions and billions of dollars. Okay, so how do we understand this? So let's first talk about biology. This is explicitly showing you how things scale, and this is a truly remarkable graph. What is plotted here is metabolic rate — how much energy you need per day to stay alive — versus your weight, your mass, for all of us bunch of organisms. And it's plotted in this funny way by going up by factors of 10, otherwise you couldn't get everything on the graph. And what you see if you plot it in this slightly curious way is that everybody lies on the same line. Despite the fact that this is the most complex and diverse system in the universe, there's an extraordinary simplicity being expressed by this. It's particularly astonishing because each one of these organisms, each subsystem, each cell type, each gene, has evolved in its own unique environmental niche with its own unique history. And yet, despite all of that Darwinian evolution and natural selection, they've been constrained to lie on a line. Something else is going on. Before I talk about that, I've written down at the bottom there the slope of this curve, this straight line. It's three-quarters, roughly, which is less than one — and we call that sublinear. And here's the point of that. It says that, if it were linear, the steepest slope, then doubling the size you would require double the amount of energy. But it's sublinear, and what that translates into is that, if you double the size of the organism, you actually only need 75 percent more energy. So a wonderful thing about all of biology is that it expresses an extraordinary economy of scale. The bigger you are systematically, according to very well-defined rules, less energy per capita. Now any physiological variable you can think of, any life history event you can think of, if you plot it this way, looks like this. There is an extraordinary regularity. So you tell me the size of a mammal, I can tell you at the 90 percent level everything about it in terms of its physiology, life history, etc. And the reason for this is because of networks. All of life is controlled by networks — from the intracellular through the multicellular through the ecosystem level. And you're very familiar with these networks. That's a little thing that lives inside an elephant. And here's the summary of what I'm saying. If you take those networks, this idea of networks, and you apply universal principles, mathematizable, universal principles, all of these scalings and all of these constraints follow, including the description of the forest, the description of your circulatory system, the description within cells. One of the things I did not stress in that introduction was that, systematically, the pace of life decreases as you get bigger. Heart rates are slower; you live longer; diffusion of oxygen and resources across membranes is slower, etc. The question is: Is any of this true for cities and companies? So is London a scaled up Birmingham, which is a scaled up Brighton, etc., etc.? Is New York a scaled up San Francisco, which is a scaled up Santa Fe? Don't know. We will discuss that. But they are networks, and the most important network of cities is you. Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals. Here's just a symbolic picture of that. And here's scaling of cities. This shows that in this very simple example, which happens to be a mundane example of number of petrol stations as a function of size — plotted in the same way as the biology — you see exactly the same kind of thing. There is a scaling. That is that the number of petrol stations in the city is now given to you when you tell me its size. The slope of that is less than linear. There is an economy of scale. Less petrol stations per capita the bigger you are — not surprising. But here's what's surprising. It scales in the same way everywhere. This is just European countries, but you do it in Japan or China or Colombia, always the same with the same kind of economy of scale to the same degree. And any infrastructure you look at — whether it's the length of roads, length of electrical lines — anything you look at has the same economy of scale scaling in the same way. It's an integrated system that has evolved despite all the planning and so on. But even more surprising is if you look at socio-economic quantities, quantities that have no analog in biology, that have evolved when we started forming communities eight to 10,000 years ago. The top one is wages as a function of size plotted in the same way. And the bottom one is you lot — super-creatives plotted in the same way. And what you see is a scaling phenomenon. But most important in this, the exponent, the analog to that three-quarters for the metabolic rate, is bigger than one — it's about 1.15 to 1.2. Here it is, which says that the bigger you are the more you have per capita, unlike biology — higher wages, more super-creative people per capita as you get bigger, more patents per capita, more crime per capita. And we've looked at everything: more AIDS cases, flu, etc. And here, they're all plotted together. Just to show you what we plotted, here is income, GDP — GDP of the city — crime and patents all on one graph. And you can see, they all follow the same line. And here's the statement. If you double the size of a city from 100,000 to 200,000, from a million to two million, 10 to 20 million, it doesn't matter, then systematically you get a 15 percent increase in wages, wealth, number of AIDS cases, number of police, anything you can think of. It goes up by 15 percent, and you have a 15 percent savings on the infrastructure. This, no doubt, is the reason why a million people a week are gathering in cities. Because they think that all those wonderful things — like creative people, wealth, income — is what attracts them, forgetting about the ugly and the bad. What is the reason for this? Well I don't have time to tell you about all the mathematics, but underlying this is the social networks, because this is a universal phenomenon. This 15 percent rule is true no matter where you are on the planet — Japan, Chile, Portugal, Scotland, doesn't matter. Always, all the data shows it's the same, despite the fact that these cities have evolved independently. Something universal is going on. The universality, to repeat, is us — that we are the city. And it is our interactions and the clustering of those interactions. So there it is, I've said it again. So if it is those networks and their mathematical structure, unlike biology, which had sublinear scaling, economies of scale, you had the slowing of the pace of life as you get bigger. If it's social networks with super-linear scaling — more per capita — then the theory says that you increase the pace of life. The bigger you are, life gets faster. On the left is the heart rate showing biology. On the right is the speed of walking in a bunch of European cities, showing that increase. Lastly, I want to talk about growth. This is what we had in biology, just to repeat. Economies of scale gave rise to this sigmoidal behavior. You grow fast and then stop — part of our resilience. That would be bad for economies and cities. And indeed, one of the wonderful things about the theory is that if you have super-linear scaling from wealth creation and innovation, then indeed you get, from the same theory, a beautiful rising exponential curve — lovely. And in fact, if you compare it to data, it fits very well with the development of cities and economies. But it has a terrible catch, and the catch is that this system is destined to collapse. And it's destined to collapse for many reasons — kind of Malthusian reasons — that you run out of resources. And how do you avoid that? Well we've done it before. What we do is, as we grow and we approach the collapse, a major innovation takes place and we start over again, and we start over again as we approach the next one, and so on. So there's this continuous cycle of innovation that is necessary in order to sustain growth and avoid collapse. The catch, however, to this is that you have to innovate faster and faster and faster. So the image is that we're not only on a treadmill that's going faster, but we have to change the treadmill faster and faster. We have to accelerate on a continuous basis. And the question is: Can we, as socio-economic beings, avoid a heart attack? So lastly, I'm going to finish up in this last minute or two asking about companies. See companies, they scale. The top one, in fact, is Walmart on the right. It's the same plot. This happens to be income and assets versus the size of the company as denoted by its number of employees. We could use sales, anything you like. There it is: after some little fluctuations at the beginning, when companies are innovating, they scale beautifully. And we've looked at 23,000 companies in the United States, may I say. And I'm only showing you a little bit of this. What is astonishing about companies is that they scale sublinearly like biology, indicating that they're dominated, not by super-linear innovation and ideas; they become dominated by economies of scale. In that interpretation, by bureaucracy and administration, and they do it beautifully, may I say. So if you tell me the size of some company, some small company, I could have predicted the size of Walmart. If it has this sublinear scaling, the theory says we should have sigmoidal growth. There's Walmart. Doesn't look very sigmoidal. That's what we like, hockey sticks. But you notice, I've cheated, because I've only gone up to '94. Let's go up to 2008. That red line is from the theory. So if I'd have done this in 1994, I could have predicted what Walmart would be now. And then this is repeated across the entire spectrum of companies. There they are. That's 23,000 companies. They all start looking like hockey sticks, they all bend over, and they all die like you and me. Thank you. (Applause)

The origins of pleasure

{0: 'Paul Bloom explores some of the most puzzling aspects of human nature, including pleasure, religion, and morality.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

I'm going to talk today about the pleasures of everyday life. But I want to begin with a story of an unusual and terrible man. This is Hermann Goering. Goering was Hitler's second in command in World War II, his designated successor. And like Hitler, Goering fancied himself a collector of art. He went through Europe, through World War II, stealing, extorting and occasionally buying various paintings for his collection. And what he really wanted was something by Vermeer. Hitler had two of them, and he didn't have any. So he finally found an art dealer, a Dutch art dealer named Han van Meegeren, who sold him a wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars. And it was his favorite artwork ever. World War II came to an end, and Goering was captured, tried at Nuremberg and ultimately sentenced to death. Then the Allied forces went through his collections and found the paintings and went after the people who sold it to him. And at some point the Dutch police came into Amsterdam and arrested Van Meegeren. Van Meegeren was charged with the crime of treason, which is itself punishable by death. Six weeks into his prison sentence, van Meegeren confessed. But he didn't confess to treason. He said, "I did not sell a great masterpiece to that Nazi. I painted it myself; I'm a forger." Now nobody believed him. And he said, "I'll prove it. Bring me a canvas and some paint, and I will paint a Vermeer much better than I sold that disgusting Nazi. I also need alcohol and morphine, because it's the only way I can work." (Laughter) So they brought him in. He painted a beautiful Vermeer. And then the charges of treason were dropped. He had a lesser charge of forgery, got a year sentence and died a hero to the Dutch people. There's a lot more to be said about van Meegeren, but I want to turn now to Goering, who's pictured here being interrogated at Nuremberg. Now Goering was, by all accounts, a terrible man. Even for a Nazi, he was a terrible man. His American interrogators described him as an amicable psychopath. But you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery. According to his biographer, "He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world." (Laughter) And he killed himself soon afterwards. He had discovered after all that the painting he thought was this was actually that. It looked the same, but it had a different origin, it was a different artwork. It wasn't just him who was in for a shock. Once van Meegeren was on trial, he couldn't stop talking. And he boasted about all the great masterpieces that he himself had painted that were attributed to other artists. In particular, "The Supper at Emmaus" which was viewed as Vermeer's finest masterpiece, his best work — people would come [from] all over the world to see it — was actually a forgery. It was not that painting, but that painting. And when that was discovered, it lost all its value and was taken away from the museum. Why does this matter? I'm a psychologists — why do origins matter so much? Why do we respond so much to our knowledge of where something comes from? Well there's an answer that many people would give. Many sociologists like Veblen and Wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we're snobs, because we're focused on status. Among other things, if you want to show off how rich you are, how powerful you are, it's always better to own an original than a forgery because there's always going to be fewer originals than forgeries. I don't doubt that that plays some role, but what I want to convince you of today is that there's something else going on. I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is. I want to suggest that this is true, not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things. So I want to suggest that pleasure is deep — and that this isn't true just for higher level pleasures like art, but even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about hidden essences. So take food. Would you eat this? Well, a good answer is, "It depends. What is it?" Some of you would eat it if it's pork, but not beef. Some of you would eat it if it's beef, but not pork. Few of you would eat it if it's a rat or a human. Some of you would eat it only if it's a strangely colored piece of tofu. That's not so surprising. But what's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically on what you think you're eating. So one demonstration of this was done with young children. How do you make children not just be more likely to eat carrots and drink milk, but to get more pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk — to think they taste better? It's simple, you tell them they're from McDonald's. They believe McDonald's food is tastier, and it leads them to experience it as tastier. How do you get adults to really enjoy wine? It's very simple: pour it from an expensive bottle. There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds of studies showing that if you believe you're drinking the expensive stuff, it tastes better to you. This was recently done with a neuroscientific twist. They get people into a fMRI scanner, and while they're lying there, through a tube, they get to sip wine. In front of them on a screen is information about the wine. Everybody, of course, drinks exactly the same wine. But if you believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree. It's not just that you say it's more pleasurable, you say you like it more, you really experience it in a different way. Or take sex. These are stimuli I've used in some of my studies. And if you simply show people these pictures, they'll say these are fairly attractive people. But how attractive you find them, how sexually or romantically moved you are by them, rests critically on who you think you're looking at. You probably think the picture on the left is male, the one on the right is female. If that belief turns out to be mistaken, it will make a difference. (Laughter) It will make a difference if they turn out to be much younger or much older than you think they are. It will make a difference if you were to discover that the person you're looking at with lust is actually a disguised version of your son or daughter, your mother or father. Knowing somebody's your kin typically kills the libido. Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do. (Laughter) A particularly dramatic example of this comes from a neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome. So Capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a specific delusion. Sufferers of Capgras syndrome believe that the people they love most in the world have been replaced by perfect duplicates. Now often, a result of Capgras syndrome is tragic. People have murdered those that they loved, believing that they were murdering an imposter. But there's at least one case where Capgras syndrome had a happy ending. This was recorded in 1931. "Research described a woman with Capgras syndrome who complained about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate lover." But that was before she got Capgras syndrome. After she got it, "She was happy to report that she has discovered that he possessed a double who was rich, virile, handsome and aristocratic." Of course, it was the same man, but she was seeing him in different ways. As a third example, consider consumer products. So one reason why you might like something is its utility. You can put shoes on your feet; you can play golf with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum doesn't do anything at all for you. But each of these three objects has value above and beyond what it can do for you based on its history. The golf clubs were owned by John F. Kennedy and sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at auction. The bubble gum was chewed up by pop star Britney Spears and sold for several hundreds of dollars. And in fact, there's a thriving market in the partially eaten food of beloved people. (Laughter) The shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all. According to an unconfirmed report, a Saudi millionaire offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes. They were the ones thrown at George Bush at an Iraqi press conference several years ago. (Applause) Now this attraction to objects doesn't just work for celebrity objects. Each one of us, most people, have something in our life that's literally irreplaceable, in that it has value because of its history — maybe your wedding ring, maybe your child's baby shoes — so that if it was lost, you couldn't get it back. You could get something that looked like it or felt like it, but you couldn't get the same object back. With my colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck, we've looked to see what sort of factors, what sort of history, matters for the objects that people like. So in one of our experiments, we asked people to name a famous person who they adored, a living person they adored. So one answer was George Clooney. Then we asked them, "How much would you pay for George Clooney's sweater?" And the answer is a fair amount — more than you would pay for a brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody who you didn't adore. Then we asked other groups of subjects — we gave them different restrictions and different conditions. So for instance, we told some people, "Look, you can buy the sweater, but you can't tell anybody you own it, and you can't resell it." That drops the value of it, suggesting that that's one reason why we like it. But what really causes an effect is you tell people, "Look, you could resell it, you could boast about it, but before it gets to you, it's thoroughly washed." That causes a huge drop in the value. As my wife put it, "You've washed away the Clooney cooties." (Laughter) So let's go back to art. I would love a Chagall. I love the work of Chagall. If people want to get me something at the end of the conference, you could buy me a Chagall. But I don't want a duplicate, even if I can't tell the difference. That's not because, or it's not simply because, I'm a snob and want to boast about having an original. Rather, it's because I want something that has a specific history. In the case of artwork, the history is special indeed. The philosopher Denis Dutton in his wonderful book "The Art Instinct" makes the case that, "The value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation." And that could explain the difference between an original and a forgery. They may look alike, but they have a different history. The original is typically the product of a creative act, the forgery isn't. I think this approach can explain differences in people's taste in art. This is a work by Jackson Pollock. Who here likes the work of Jackson Pollock? Okay. Who here, it does nothing for them? They just don't like it. I'm not going to make a claim about who's right, but I will make an empirical claim about people's intuitions, which is that, if you like the work of Jackson Pollock, you'll tend more so than the people who don't like it to believe that these works are difficult to create, that they require a lot of time and energy and creative energy. I use Jackson Pollock on purpose as an example because there's a young American artist who paints very much in the style of Jackson Pollock, and her work was worth many tens of thousands of dollars — in large part because she's a very young artist. This is Marla Olmstead who did most of her work when she was three years old. The interesting thing about Marla Olmstead is her family made the mistake of inviting the television program 60 Minutes II into their house to film her painting. And they then reported that her father was coaching her. When this came out on television, the value of her art dropped to nothing. It was the same art, physically, but the history had changed. I've been focusing now on the visual arts, but I want to give two examples from music. This is Joshua Bell, a very famous violinist. And the Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment. The question is: How much would people like Joshua Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, if they didn't know they were listening to Joshua Bell? So he got Joshua Bell to take his million dollar violin down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make. And here's a brief clip of this. (Violin music) After being there for three-quarters of an hour, he made 32 dollars. Not bad. It's also not good. Apparently to really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell. He actually made 20 dollars more than that, but he didn't count it. Because this woman comes up — you see at the end of the video — she comes up. She had heard him at the Library of Congress a few weeks before at this extravagant black-tie affair. So she's stunned that he's standing in a subway station. So she's struck with pity. She reaches into her purse and hands him a 20. (Laughter) (Applause) The second example from music is from John Cage's modernist composition, "4'33"." As many of you know, this is the composition where the pianist sits at a bench, opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds — that period of silence. And people have different views on this. But what I want to point out is you can buy this from iTunes. (Laughter) For a dollar 99, you can listen to that silence, which is different than other forms of silence. (Laughter) Now I've been talking so far about pleasure, but what I want to suggest is that everything I've said applies as well to pain. And how you think about what you're experiencing, your beliefs about the essence of it, affect how it hurts. One lovely experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan Wegner. What they did was they hooked up Harvard undergraduates to an electric shock machine. And they gave them a series of painful electric shocks. So it was a series of five painful shocks. Half of them are told that they're being given the shocks by somebody in another room, but the person in the other room doesn't know they're giving them shocks. There's no malevolence, they're just pressing a button. The first shock is recorded as very painful. The second shock feels less painful, because you get a bit used to it. The third drops, the fourth, the fifth. The pain gets less. In the other condition, they're told that the person in the next room is shocking them on purpose — knows they're shocking them. The first shock hurts like hell. The second shock hurts just as much, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose. The most extreme example of this is that in some cases, pain under the right circumstances can transform into pleasure. Humans have this extraordinarily interesting property that will often seek out low-level doses of pain in controlled circumstances and take pleasure from it — as in the eating of hot chili peppers and roller coaster rides. The point was nicely summarized by the poet John Milton who wrote, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." And I'll end with that. Thank you. (Applause)

Ending hunger now

{0: 'Our generation is the first in history with enough resources to eradicate hunger worldwide. Josette Sheeran, the former head of the UN World Food Programme, shares a plan.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Well after many years working in trade and economics, four years ago, I found myself working on the front lines of human vulnerability. And I found myself in the places where people are fighting every day to survive and can't even obtain a meal. This red cup comes from Rwanda from a child named Fabian. And I carry this around as a symbol, really, of the challenge and also the hope. Because one cup of food a day changes Fabian's life completely. But what I'd like to talk about today is the fact that this morning, about a billion people on Earth — or one out of every seven — woke up and didn't even know how to fill this cup. One out of every seven people. First, I'll ask you: Why should you care? Why should we care? For most people, if they think about hunger, they don't have to go far back on their own family history — maybe in their own lives, or their parents' lives, or their grandparents' lives — to remember an experience of hunger. I rarely find an audience where people can go back very far without that experience. Some are driven by compassion, feel it's perhaps one of the fundamental acts of humanity. As Gandhi said, "To a hungry man, a piece of bread is the face of God." Others worry about peace and security, stability in the world. We saw the food riots in 2008, after what I call the silent tsunami of hunger swept the globe when food prices doubled overnight. The destabilizing effects of hunger are known throughout human history. One of the most fundamental acts of civilization is to ensure people can get enough food. Others think about Malthusian nightmares. Will we be able to feed a population that will be nine billion in just a few decades? This is not a negotiable thing, hunger. People have to eat. There's going to be a lot of people. This is jobs and opportunity all the way up and down the value chain. But I actually came to this issue in a different way. This is a picture of me and my three children. In 1987, I was a new mother with my first child and was holding her and feeding her when an image very similar to this came on the television. And this was yet another famine in Ethiopia. One two years earlier had killed more than a million people. But it never struck me as it did that moment, because on that image was a woman trying to nurse her baby, and she had no milk to nurse. And the baby's cry really penetrated me, as a mother. And I thought, there's nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that cannot be returned with food — the most fundamental expectation of every human being. And it was at that moment that I just was filled with the challenge and the outrage that actually we know how to fix this problem. This isn't one of those rare diseases that we don't have the solution for. We know how to fix hunger. A hundred years ago, we didn't. We actually have the technology and systems. And I was just struck that this is out of place. At our time in history, these images are out of place. Well guess what? This is last week in northern Kenya. Yet again, the face of starvation at large scale with more than nine million people wondering if they can make it to the next day. In fact, what we know now is that every 10 seconds we lose a child to hunger. This is more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. And we know that the issue is not just production of food. One of my mentors in life was Norman Borlaug, my hero. But today I'm going to talk about access to food, because actually this year and last year and during the 2008 food crisis, there was enough food on Earth for everyone to have 2,700 kilocalories. So why is it that we have a billion people who can't find food? And I also want to talk about what I call our new burden of knowledge. In 2008, Lancet compiled all the research and put forward the compelling evidence that if a child in its first thousand days — from conception to two years old — does not have adequate nutrition, the damage is irreversible. Their brains and bodies will be stunted. And here you see a brain scan of two children — one who had adequate nutrition, another, neglected and who was deeply malnourished. And we can see brain volumes up to 40 percent less in these children. And in this slide you see the neurons and the synapses of the brain don't form. And what we know now is this has huge impact on economies, which I'll talk about later. But also the earning potential of these children is cut in half in their lifetime due to the stunting that happens in early years. So this burden of knowledge drives me. Because actually we know how to fix it very simply. And yet, in many places, a third of the children, by the time they're three already are facing a life of hardship due to this. I'd like to talk about some of the things I've seen on the front lines of hunger, some of the things I've learned in bringing my economic and trade knowledge and my experience in the private sector. I'd like to talk about where the gap of knowledge is. Well first, I'd like to talk about the oldest nutritional method on Earth, breastfeeding. You may be surprised to know that a child could be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first six months of life. But in Niger, for example, less than seven percent of the children are breastfed for the first six months of life, exclusively. In Mauritania, less than three percent. This is something that can be transformed with knowledge. This message, this word, can come out that this is not an old-fashioned way of doing business; it's a brilliant way of saving your child's life. And so today we focus on not just passing out food, but making sure the mothers have enough enrichment, and teaching them about breastfeeding. The second thing I'd like to talk about: If you were living in a remote village somewhere, your child was limp, and you were in a drought, or you were in floods, or you were in a situation where there wasn't adequate diversity of diet, what would you do? Do you think you could go to the store and get a choice of power bars, like we can, and pick the right one to match? Well I find parents out on the front lines very aware their children are going down for the count. And I go to those shops, if there are any, or out to the fields to see what they can get, and they cannot obtain the nutrition. Even if they know what they need to do, it's not available. And I'm very excited about this, because one thing we're working on is transforming the technologies that are very available in the food industry to be available for traditional crops. And this is made with chickpeas, dried milk and a host of vitamins, matched to exactly what the brain needs. It costs 17 cents for us to produce this as, what I call, food for humanity. We did this with food technologists in India and Pakistan — really about three of them. But this is transforming 99 percent of the kids who get this. One package, 17 cents a day — their malnutrition is overcome. So I am convinced that if we can unlock the technologies that are commonplace in the richer world to be able to transform foods. And this is climate-proof. It doesn't need to be refrigerated, it doesn't need water, which is often lacking. And these types of technologies, I see, have the potential to transform the face of hunger and nutrition, malnutrition out on the front lines. The next thing I want to talk about is school feeding. Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net. When disaster strikes — the economy gets blown, people lose a job, floods, war, conflict, bad governance, all of those things — there is nothing to fall back on. And usually the institutions — churches, temples, other things — do not have the resources to provide a safety net. What we have found working with the World Bank is that the poor man's safety net, the best investment, is school feeding. And if you fill the cup with local agriculture from small farmers, you have a transformative effect. Many kids in the world can't go to school because they have to go beg and find a meal. But when that food is there, it's transformative. It costs less than 25 cents a day to change a kid's life. But what is most amazing is the effect on girls. In countries where girls don't go to school and you offer a meal to girls in school, we see enrollment rates about 50 percent girls and boys. We see a transformation in attendance by girls. And there was no argument, because it's incentive. Families need the help. And we find that if we keep girls in school later, they'll stay in school until they're 16, and won't get married if there's food in school. Or if they get an extra ration of food at the end of the week — it costs about 50 cents — will keep a girl in school, and they'll give birth to a healthier child, because the malnutrition is sent generation to generation. We know that there's boom and bust cycles of hunger. We know this. Right now on the Horn of Africa, we've been through this before. So is this a hopeless cause? Absolutely not. I'd like to talk about what I call our warehouses for hope. Cameroon, northern Cameroon, boom and bust cycles of hunger every year for decades. Food aid coming in every year when people are starving during the lean seasons. Well two years ago, we decided, let's transform the model of fighting hunger, and instead of giving out the food aid, we put it into food banks. And we said, listen, during the lean season, take the food out. You manage, the village manages these warehouses. And during harvest, put it back with interest, food interest. So add in five percent, 10 percent more food. For the past two years, 500 of these villages where these are have not needed any food aid — they're self-sufficient. And the food banks are growing. And they're starting school feeding programs for their children by the people in the village. But they've never had the ability to build even the basic infrastructure or the resources. I love this idea that came from the village level: three keys to unlock that warehouse. Food is gold there. And simple ideas can transform the face, not of small areas, of big areas of the world. I'd like to talk about what I call digital food. Technology is transforming the face of food vulnerability in places where you see classic famine. Amartya Sen won his Nobel Prize for saying, "Guess what, famines happen in the presence of food because people have no ability to buy it." We certainly saw that in 2008. We're seeing that now in the Horn of Africa where food prices are up 240 percent in some areas over last year. Food can be there and people can't buy it. Well this picture — I was in Hebron in a small shop, this shop, where instead of bringing in food, we provide digital food, a card. It says "bon appetit" in Arabic. And the women can go in and swipe and get nine food items. They have to be nutritious, and they have to be locally produced. And what's happened in the past year alone is the dairy industry — where this card's used for milk and yogurt and eggs and hummus — the dairy industry has gone up 30 percent. The shopkeepers are hiring more people. It is a win-win-win situation that starts the food economy moving. We now deliver food in over 30 countries over cell phones, transforming even the presence of refugees in countries, and other ways. Perhaps most exciting to me is an idea that Bill Gates, Howard Buffett and others have supported boldly, which is to ask the question: What if, instead of looking at the hungry as victims — and most of them are small farmers who cannot raise enough food or sell food to even support their own families — what if we view them as the solution, as the value chain to fight hunger? What if from the women in Africa who cannot sell any food — there's no roads, there's no warehouses, there's not even a tarp to pick the food up with — what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere? And Purchasing for Progress today is in 21 countries. And guess what? In virtually every case, when poor farmers are given a guaranteed market — if you say, "We will buy 300 metric tons of this. We'll pick it up. We'll make sure it's stored properly." — their yields have gone up two-, three-, fourfold and they figure it out, because it's the first guaranteed opportunity they've had in their life. And we're seeing people transform their lives. Today, food aid, our food aid — huge engine — 80 percent of it is bought in the developing world. Total transformation that can actually transform the very lives that need the food. Now you'd ask, can this be done at scale? These are great ideas, village-level ideas. Well I'd like to talk about Brazil, because I've taken a journey to Brazil over the past couple of years, when I read that Brazil was defeating hunger faster than any nation on Earth right now. And what I've found is, rather than investing their money in food subsidies and other things, they invested in a school feeding program. And they require that a third of that food come from the smallest farmers who would have no opportunity. And they're doing this at huge scale after President Lula declared his goal of ensuring everyone had three meals a day. And this zero hunger program costs .5 percent of GDP and has lifted many millions of people out of hunger and poverty. It is transforming the face of hunger in Brazil, and it's at scale, and it's creating opportunities. I've gone out there; I've met with the small farmers who have built their livelihoods on the opportunity and platform provided by this. Now if we look at the economic imperative here, this isn't just about compassion. The fact is studies show that the cost of malnutrition and hunger — the cost to society, the burden it has to bear — is on average six percent, and in some countries up to 11 percent, of GDP a year. And if you look at the 36 countries with the highest burden of malnutrition, that's 260 billion lost from a productive economy every year. Well, the World Bank estimates it would take about 10 billion dollars — 10.3 — to address malnutrition in those countries. You look at the cost-benefit analysis, and my dream is to take this issue, not just from the compassion argument, but to the finance ministers of the world, and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate, affordable nutrition for all of humanity. The amazing thing I've found is nothing can change on a big scale without the determination of a leader. When a leader says, "Not under my watch," everything begins to change. And the world can come in with enabling environments and opportunities to do this. And the fact that France has put food at the center of the G20 is really important. Because food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person, nation by nation. We have to stand together. And we're seeing nations in Africa. WFP's been able to leave 30 nations because they have transformed the face of hunger in their nations. What I would like to offer here is a challenge. I believe we're living at a time in human history where it's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don't know where to find a cup of food. Not only that, transforming hunger is an opportunity, but I think we have to change our mindsets. I am so honored to be here with some of the world's top innovators and thinkers. And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, "No more. No more are we going to accept this." And we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted, but that exists no more. Thank you. (Applause)

5 ways to listen better

{0: 'Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

We are losing our listening. We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it. We retain just 25 percent of what we hear. Now — not you, not this talk, but that is generally true. (Laughter) Let's define listening as making meaning from sound. It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction. We use some pretty cool techniques to do this. One of them is pattern recognition. (Crowd noises) So in a cocktail party like this, if I say, "David, Sara, pay attention" — some of you just sat up. We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal, and especially our name. Differencing is another technique we use. If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes, (Pink noise) you would literally cease to hear it. We listen to differences; we discount sounds that remain the same. And then there is a whole range of filters. These filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to. Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters. But they actually create our reality in a way, because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now. I'll give you one example of that. Intention is very important in sound, in listening. When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis. (Laughter) But it's a great intention to have in a relationship. (Laughter) But that's not all. Sound places us in space and in time. If you close your eyes right now in this room, you're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces; you're aware of how many people are around you, because of the micro-noises you're receiving. And sound places us in time as well, because sound always has time embedded in it. In fact, I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future. So, "Sonority is time and meaning" — a great quote. I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening. Why did I say that? Well, there are a lot of reasons for this. First of all, we invented ways of recording — first writing, then audio recording and now video recording as well. The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared. Secondly, the world is now so noisy, (Noise) with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily, it's just hard to listen; it's tiring to listen. Many people take refuge in headphones, but they turn big, public spaces like this, shared soundscapes, into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles. In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody. We're becoming impatient. We don't want oratory anymore; we want sound bites. And the art of conversation is being replaced — dangerously, I think — by personal broadcasting. I don't know how much listening there is in this conversation, which is sadly very common, especially in the UK. We're becoming desensitized. Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention. And that means it's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet, the subtle, the understated. This is a serious problem that we're losing our listening. This is not trivial, because listening is our access to understanding. Conscious listening always creates understanding, and only without conscious listening can these things happen. A world where we don't listen to each other at all is a very scary place indeed. So I'd like to share with you five simple exercises, tools you can take away with you, to improve your own conscious listening. Would you like that? Audience: Yes! Good. The first one is silence. Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate, so that you can hear the quiet again. If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet, that's absolutely fine. Second, I call this "the mixer." (Noise) So even if you're in a noisy environment like this — and we all spend a lot of time in places like this — listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can I hear? How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to? You can do it in a beautiful place as well, like in a lake. How many birds am I hearing? Where are they? Where are those ripples? It's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening. Third, this exercise I call "savoring," and this is a beautiful exercise. It's about enjoying mundane sounds. This, for example, is my tumble dryer. (Dryer) It's a waltz — one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three. I love it! Or just try this one on for size. (Coffee grinder) Wow! So, mundane sounds can be really interesting — if you pay attention. I call that the "hidden choir" — it's around us all the time. The next exercise is probably the most important of all of these, if you just take one thing away. This is listening positions — the idea that you can move your listening position to what's appropriate to what you're listening to. This is playing with those filters. Remember I gave you those filters? It's starting to play with them as levers, to get conscious about them and to move to different places. These are just some of the listening positions, or scales of listening positions, that you can use. There are many. Have fun with that. It's very exciting. And finally, an acronym. You can use this in listening, in communication. If you're in any one of those roles — and I think that probably is everybody who's listening to this talk — the acronym is RASA, which is the Sanskrit word for "juice" or "essence." And RASA stands for "Receive," which means pay attention to the person; "Appreciate," making little noises like "hmm," "oh," "OK"; "Summarize" — the word "so" is very important in communication; and "Ask," ask questions afterwards. Now sound is my passion, it's my life. I wrote a whole book about it. So I live to listen. That's too much to ask for most people. But I believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully — connected in space and in time to the physical world around us, connected in understanding to each other, not to mention spiritually connected, because every spiritual path I know of has listening and contemplation at its heart. That's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill. Why is it not taught? It's crazy. And if we can teach listening in our schools, we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous, scary world that I talked about, and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time, or at least capable of doing it. Now, I don't know how to do that, but this is TED, and I think the TED community is capable of anything. So I invite you to connect with me, connect with each other, take this mission out. And let's get listening taught in schools, and transform the world in one generation to a conscious, listening world — a world of connection, a world of understanding and a world of peace. Thank you for listening to me today. (Applause)

After your final status update

{0: 'As editor in chief at Mashable, Adam Ostrow covers the tech, trends and people driving the evolution of the Web.\r\n'}

TEDGlobal 2011

By the end of this year, there'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites. The one thing that all of them have in common is that they're going to die. While that might be a somewhat morbid thought, I think it has some really profound implications that are worth exploring. What first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by Derek K. Miller, who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer. And what Miller did was have his family and friends write a post that went out shortly after he died. Here's what he wrote in starting that out. He said, "Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote — the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive." Now, while as a journalist, Miller's archive may have been better written and more carefully curated than most, the fact of the matter is that all of us today are creating an archive that's something completely different than anything that's been created by any previous generation. Consider a few stats for a moment. Right now there are 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute. There are 200 million Tweets being posted every day. And the average Facebook user is creating 90 pieces of content each month. So when you think about your parents or your grandparents, at best they may have created some photos or home videos, or a diary that lives in a box somewhere. But today we're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive that's going to live in the cloud indefinitely, years after we're gone. And I think that's going to create some incredibly intriguing opportunities for technologists. Now to be clear, I'm a journalist and not a technologist, so what I'd like to do briefly is paint a picture of what the present and the future are going to look like. Now we're already seeing some services that are designed to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die. One of them actually, fittingly enough, found me when I checked into a deli at a restaurant in New York on foursquare. (Recording) Adam Ostrow: Hello. Death: Adam? AO: Yeah. Death: Death can catch you anywhere, anytime, even at the Organic. AO: Who is this? Death: Go to ifidie.net before it's too late. (Laughter) Adam Ostrow: Kind of creepy, right? So what that service does, quite simply, is let you create a message or a video that can be posted to Facebook after you die. Another service right now is called 1,000 Memories. And what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones, complete with photos and videos and stories that they can post after you die. But what I think comes next is far more interesting. Now a lot of you are probably familiar with Deb Roy who, back in March, demonstrated how he was able to analyze more than 90,000 hours of home video. I think as machines' ability to understand human language and process vast amounts of data continues to improve, it's going to become possible to analyze an entire life's worth of content — the Tweets, the photos, the videos, the blog posts — that we're producing in such massive numbers. And I think as that happens, it's going to become possible for our digital personas to continue to interact in the real world long after we're gone thanks to the vastness of the amount of content we're creating and technology's ability to make sense of it all. Now we're already starting to see some experiments here. One service called My Next Tweet analyzes your entire Twitter stream, everything you've posted onto Twitter, to make some predictions as to what you might say next. Well right now, as you can see, the results can be somewhat comical. You can imagine what something like this might look like five, 10 or 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve. Taking it a step further, MIT's media lab is working on robots that can interact more like humans. But what if those robots were able to interact based on the unique characteristics of a specific person based on the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that person produces in their lifetime? Finally, think back to this famous scene from election night 2008 back in the United States, where CNN beamed a live hologram of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio for an interview with Anderson Cooper. What if we were able to use that same type of technology to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms — interacting in a very lifelike way based on all the content they created while they were alive? I think that's going to become completely possible as the amount of data we're producing and technology's ability to understand it both expand exponentially. Now in closing, I think what we all need to be thinking about is if we want that to become our reality — and if so, what it means for a definition of life and everything that comes after it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Wireless data from every light bulb

{0: 'Harald Haas is the pioneer behind a new technology that can communicate as well as illuminate.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Do you know that we have 1.4 million cellular radio masts deployed worldwide? And these are base stations. And we also have more than five billion of these devices here. These are cellular mobile phones. And with these mobile phones, we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month. This is a 6 with 14 zeroes — a very large number. And wireless communications has become a utility like electricity and water. We use it everyday. We use it in our everyday lives now — in our private lives, in our business lives. And we even have to be asked sometimes, very kindly, to switch off the mobile phone at events like this for good reasons. And it's this importance why I decided to look into the issues that this technology has, because it's so fundamental to our lives. And one of the issues is capacity. The way we transmit wireless data is by using electromagnetic waves — in particular, radio waves. And radio waves are limited. They are scarce; they are expensive; and we only have a certain range of it. And it's this limitation that doesn't cope with the demand of wireless data transmissions and the number of bytes and data which are transmitted every month. And we are simply running out of spectrum. There's another problem. That is efficiency. These 1.4 million cellular radio masts, or base stations, consume a lot of energy. And mind you, most of the energy is not used to transmit the radio waves, it is used to cool the base stations. Then the efficiency of such a base station is only at about five percent. And that creates a big problem. Then there's another issue that you're all aware of. You have to switch off your mobile phone during flights. In hospitals, they are security issues. And security is another issue. These radio waves penetrate through walls. They can be intercepted, and somebody can make use of your network if he has bad intentions. So these are the main four issues. But on the other hand, we have 14 billion of these: light bulbs, light. And light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. So let's look at this in the context of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, where we have gamma rays. You don't want to get close to gamma rays, it could be dangerous. X-rays, useful when you go to hospitals. Then there's ultraviolet light. it's good for a nice suntan, but otherwise dangerous for the human body. Infrared — due to eye safety regulations, can be only used with low power. And then we have the radio waves, they have the issues I've just mentioned. And in the middle there, we have this visible light spectrum. It's light, and light has been around for many millions of years. And in fact, it has created us, has created life, has created all the stuff of life. So it's inherently safe to use. And wouldn't it be great to use that for wireless communications? Not only that, I compared [it to] the entire spectrum. I compared the radio waves spectrum — the size of it — with the size of the visible light spectrum. And guess what? We have 10,000 times more of that spectrum, which is there for us to use. So not only do we have this huge amount of spectrum, let's compare that with a number I've just mentioned. We have 1.4 million expensively deployed, inefficient radio cellular base stations. And multiply that by 10,000, then you end up at 14 billion. 14 billion is the number of light bulbs installed already. So we have the infrastructure there. Look at the ceiling, you see all these light bulbs. Go to the main floor, you see these light bulbs. Can we use them for communications? Yes. What do we need to do? The one thing we need to do is we have to replace these inefficient incandescent light bulbs, florescent lights, with this new technology of LED, LED light bulbs. An LED is a semiconductor. It's an electronic device. And it has a very nice acute property. Its intensity can be modulated at very high speeds, and it can be switched off at very high speeds. And this is a fundamental basic property that we exploit with our technology. So let's show how we do that. Let's go to the closest neighbor to the visible light spectrum — go to remote controls. You all know remote controls have an infrared LED — basically you switch on the LED, and if it's off, you switch it off. And it creates a simple, low-speed data stream in 10,000 bits per second, 20,000 bits per second. Not usable for a YouTube video. What we have done is we have developed a technology with which we can furthermore replace the remote control of our light bulb. We transmit with our technology, not only a single data stream, we transmit thousands of data streams in parallel, at even higher speeds. And the technology we have developed — it's called SIM OFDM. And it's spacial modulation — these are the only technical terms, I'm not going into details — but this is how we enabled that light source to transmit data. You will say, "Okay, this is nice — a slide created in 10 minutes." But not only that. What we've done is we have also developed a demonstrator. And I'm showing for the first time in public this visible light demonstrator. And what we have here is no ordinary desk lamp. We fit in an LED light bulb, worth three U.S. dollars, put in our signal processing technology. And then what we have here is a little hole. And the light goes through that hole. There's a receiver. The receiver will convert these little, subtle changes in the amplitude that we create there into an electrical signal. And that signal is then converted back to a high-speed data stream. In the future we hope that we can integrate this little hole into these smart phones. And not only integrate a photo detector here, but maybe use the camera inside. So what happens when I switch on that light? As you would expect, it's a light, a desk lamp. Put your book beneath it and you can read. It's illuminating the space. But at the same time, you see this video coming up here. And that's a video, a high-definition video that is transmitted through that light beam. You're critical. You think, "Ha, ha, ha. This is a smart academic doing a little bit of tricks here." But let me do this. (Applause) Once again. Still don't believe? It is this light that transmits this high-definition video in a split stream. And if you look at the light, it is illuminating as you would expect. You don't notice with your human eye. You don't notice the subtle changes in the amplitude that we impress onto this light bulb. It's serving the purpose of illumination, but at the same time, we are able to transmit this data. And you see, even light from the ceiling comes down here to the receiver. It can ignore that constant light, because all the receiver's interested in are subtle changes. You also have a critical question now, and you say, "Okay, do I have to have the light on all the time to have this working?" And the answer is yes. But, you can dim down the light to a level that it appears to be off. And you are still able to transmit data — that's possible. So I've mentioned to you the four challenges. Capacity: We have 10,000 times more spectrum, 10,000 times more LEDs installed already in the infrastructure there. You would agree with me, hopefully, there's no issue of capacity anymore. Efficiency: This is data through illumination — it's first of all an illumination device. And if you do the energy budget, the data transmission comes for free — highly energy efficient. I don't mention the high energy efficiency of these LED light bulbs. If the whole world would deploy them, you would save hundreds of power plants. That's aside. And then I've mentioned the availability. You will agree with me that we have lights in the hospital. You need to see what to do. You have lights in an aircraft. So it's everywhere in a day there is light. Look around. Everywhere. Look at your smart phone. It has a flashlight, an LED flashlight. These are potential sources for high-speed data transmission. And then there's security. You would agree with me that light doesn't penetrate through walls. So no one, if I have a light here, if I have secure data, no one on the other side of this room through that wall would be able to read that data. And there's only data where there is light. So if I don't want that receiver to receive the data, then what I could do, turn it away. So the data goes in that direction, not there anymore. Now we can in fact see where the data is going to. So for me, the applications of it, to me, are beyond imagination at the moment. We have had a century of very nice, smart application developers. And you only have to notice, where we have light, there is a potential way to transmit data. But I can give you a few examples. Well you may see the impact already now. This is a remote operated vehicle beneath the ocean. And they use light to illuminate space down there. And this light can be used to transmit wireless data that these things [use] to communicate with each other. Intrinsically safe environments like this petrochemical plant — you can't use RF, it may generate antenna sparks, but you can use light — you see plenty of light there. In hospitals, for new medical instruments; in streets for traffic control. Cars have LED-based headlights, LED-based back lights, and cars can communicate with each other and prevent accidents in the way that they exchange information. Traffic lights can communicate to the car and so on. And then you have these millions of street lamps deployed around the world. And every street lamp could be a free access point. We call it, in fact, a Li-Fi, light-fidelity. And then we have these aircraft cabins. There are hundreds of lights in an aircraft cabin, and each of these lights could be a potential transmitter of wireless data. So you could enjoy your most favorite TED video on your long flight back home. Online life. So that is a vision, I think, that is possible. So, all we would need to do is to fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device. And this would then combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission. And it's this symbiosis that I personally believe could solve the four essential problems that face us in wireless communication these days. And in the future, you would not only have 14 billion light bulbs, you may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide — for a cleaner, a greener, and even a brighter future. Thank you. (Applause)

How language transformed humanity

{0: 'Using biological evolution as a template, Mark Pagel wonders how languages evolve.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language, of course, because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery. Instead, when you speak, you're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television. It's just that, whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light, your language relies on pulses, discrete pulses, of sound. And just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood, you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else's brain to suit your interests. Languages are genes talking, getting things that they want. And just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that, merely by uttering a sound, it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic, and maybe even into its mouth. Now language's subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship, in books you can't read, phrases you can't use and words you can't say. In fact, the Tower of Babel story in the Bible is a fable and warning about the power of language. According to that story, early humans developed the conceit that, by using their language to work together, they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven. Now God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower, and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt, he scattered the people by giving them different languages — confused them by giving them different languages. And this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating. Even today, we know that there are words we cannot use, phrases we cannot say, because if we do so, we might be accosted, jailed, or even killed. And all of this from a puff of air emanating from our mouths. Now all this fuss about a single one of our traits tells us there's something worth explaining. And that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve, and why did it evolve only in our species? Now it's a little bit of a surprise that to get an answer to that question, we have to go to tool use in the chimpanzees. Now these chimpanzees are using tools, and we take that as a sign of their intelligence. But if they really were intelligent, why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel? And if they really were intelligent, why would they crack open nuts with a rock? Why wouldn't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them? Why not? I mean, that's what we do. Now the reason the chimpanzees don't do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning. They seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching. As a result, they can't improve on others' ideas or learn from others' mistakes — benefit from others' wisdom. And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again. In fact, we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts. Now this may sound arrogant, or even full of hubris. How do we know this? Because this is exactly what our ancestors, the Homo erectus, did. These upright apes evolved on the African savanna about two million years ago, and they made these splendid hand axes that fit wonderfully into your hands. But if we look at the fossil record, we see that they made the same hand axe over and over and over again for one million years. You can follow it through the fossil record. Now if we make some guesses about how long Homo erectus lived, what their generation time was, that's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring, and other individuals watching, in which that hand axe didn't change. It's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives, the Neanderthals, had social learning. Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus, but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species, the Neanderthals, lived in Eurasia. Okay, so what this tells us is that, contrary to the old adage, "monkey see, monkey do," the surprise really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that — at least not very much. And even this picture has the suspicious taint of being rigged about it — something from a Barnum & Bailey circus. But by comparison, we can learn. We can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do. We can then choose, from among a range of options, the best one. We can benefit from others' ideas. We can build on their wisdom. And as a result, our ideas do accumulate, and our technology progresses. And this cumulative cultural adaptation, as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas, is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives. I mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. And all of this because of cumulative cultural adaptation. The chairs you're sitting in, the lights in this auditorium, my microphone, the iPads and iPods that you carry around with you — all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation. Now to many commentators, cumulative cultural adaptation, or social learning, is job done, end of story. Our species can make stuff, therefore we prospered in a way that no other species has. In fact, we can even make the "stuff of life" — as I just said, all the stuff around us. But in fact, it turns out that some time around 200,000 years ago, when our species first arose and acquired social learning, that this was really the beginning of our story, not the end of our story. Because our acquisition of social learning would create a social and evolutionary dilemma, the resolution of which, it's fair to say, would determine not only the future course of our psychology, but the future course of the entire world. And most importantly for this, it'll tell us why we have language. And the reason that dilemma arose is, it turns out, that social learning is visual theft. If I can learn by watching you, I can steal your best ideas, and I can benefit from your efforts, without having to put in the time and energy that you did into developing them. If I can watch which lure you use to catch a fish, or I can watch how you flake your hand axe to make it better, or if I follow you secretly to your mushroom patch, I can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom and skills, and maybe even catch that fish before you do. Social learning really is visual theft. And in any species that acquired it, it would behoove you to hide your best ideas, lest somebody steal them from you. And so some time around 200,000 years ago, our species confronted this crisis. And we really had only two options for dealing with the conflicts that visual theft would bring. One of those options was that we could have retreated into small family groups. Because then the benefits of our ideas and knowledge would flow just to our relatives. Had we chosen this option, sometime around 200,000 years ago, we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40,000 years ago. And this is because in small groups there are fewer ideas, there are fewer innovations. And small groups are more prone to accidents and bad luck. So if we'd chosen that path, our evolutionary path would have led into the forest — and been a short one indeed. The other option we could choose was to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others. Choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of accumulated knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own. Well, we chose the second option, and language is the result. Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft. Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation — for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities. And you can see that, in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language, not having language would be a like a bird without wings. Just as wings open up this sphere of air for birds to exploit, language opened up the sphere of cooperation for humans to exploit. And we take this utterly for granted, because we're a species that is so at home with language, but you have to realize that even the simplest acts of exchange that we engage in are utterly dependent upon language. And to see why, consider two scenarios from early in our evolution. Let's imagine that you are really good at making arrowheads, but you're hopeless at making the wooden shafts with the flight feathers attached. Two other people you know are very good at making the wooden shafts, but they're hopeless at making the arrowheads. So what you do is — one of those people has not really acquired language yet. And let's pretend the other one is good at language skills. So what you do one day is you take a pile of arrowheads, and you walk up to the one that can't speak very well, and you put the arrowheads down in front of him, hoping that he'll get the idea that you want to trade your arrowheads for finished arrows. But he looks at the pile of arrowheads, thinks they're a gift, picks them up, smiles and walks off. Now you pursue this guy, gesticulating. A scuffle ensues and you get stabbed with one of your own arrowheads. Okay, now replay this scene now, and you're approaching the one who has language. You put down your arrowheads and say, "I'd like to trade these arrowheads for finished arrows. I'll split you 50/50." The other one says, "Fine. Looks good to me. We'll do that." Now the job is done. Once we have language, we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity that we couldn't have before we acquired it. And this is why our species has prospered around the world while the rest of the animals sit behind bars in zoos, languishing. That's why we build space shuttles and cathedrals while the rest of the world sticks sticks into the ground to extract termites. All right, if this view of language and its value in solving the crisis of visual theft is true, any species that acquires it should show an explosion of creativity and prosperity. And this is exactly what the archeological record shows. If you look at our ancestors, the Neanderthals and the Homo erectus, our immediate ancestors, they're confined to small regions of the world. But when our species arose about 200,000 years ago, sometime after that we quickly walked out of Africa and spread around the entire world, occupying nearly every habitat on Earth. Now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to, with social learning and language, we could transform the environment to suit our needs. And so we prospered in a way that no other animal has. Language really is the most potent trait that has ever evolved. It is the most valuable trait we have for converting new lands and resources into more people and their genes that natural selection has ever devised. Language really is the voice of our genes. Now having evolved language, though, we did something peculiar, even bizarre. As we spread out around the world, we developed thousands of different languages. Currently, there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on Earth. Now you might say, well, this is just natural. As we diverge, our languages are naturally going to diverge. But the real puzzle and irony is that the greatest density of different languages on Earth is found where people are most tightly packed together. If we go to the island of Papua New Guinea, we can find about 800 to 1,000 distinct human languages, different human languages, spoken on that island alone. There are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles. Now, incredible as this sounds, I once met a Papuan man, and I asked him if this could possibly be true. And he said to me, "Oh no. They're far closer together than that." And it's true; there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language in under a mile. And this is also true of some remote oceanic islands. And so it seems that we use our language, not just to cooperate, but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities, and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside. And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures, we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups. They slow the flow of technologies. And they even slow the flow of genes. Now I can't speak for you, but it seems to be the case that we don't have sex with people we can't talk to. (Laughter) Now we have to counter that, though, against the evidence we've heard that we might have had some rather distasteful genetic dalliances with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. (Laughter) Okay, this tendency we have, this seemingly natural tendency we have, towards isolation, towards keeping to ourselves, crashes head first into our modern world. This remarkable image is not a map of the world. In fact, it's a map of Facebook friendship links. And when you plot those friendship links by their latitude and longitude, it literally draws a map of the world. Our modern world is communicating with itself and with each other more than it has at any time in its past. And that communication, that connectivity around the world, that globalization now raises a burden. Because these different languages impose a barrier, as we've just seen, to the transfer of goods and ideas and technologies and wisdom. And they impose a barrier to cooperation. And nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the European Union, whose 27 member countries speak 23 official languages. The European Union is now spending over one billion euros annually translating among their 23 official languages. That's something on the order of 1.45 billion U.S. dollars on translation costs alone. Now think of the absurdity of this situation. If 27 individuals from those 27 member states sat around table, speaking their 23 languages, some very simple mathematics will tell you that you need an army of 253 translators to anticipate all the pairwise possibilities. The European Union employs a permanent staff of about 2,500 translators. And in 2007 alone — and I'm sure there are more recent figures — something on the order of 1.3 million pages were translated into English alone. And so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft, if language really is the conduit of our cooperation, the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas, in our modern world, we confront a question. And that question is whether in this modern, globalized world we can really afford to have all these different languages. To put it this way, nature knows no other circumstance in which functionally equivalent traits coexist. One of them always drives the other extinct. And we see this in the inexorable march towards standardization. There are lots and lots of ways of measuring things — weighing them and measuring their length — but the metric system is winning. There are lots and lots of ways of measuring time, but a really bizarre base 60 system known as hours and minutes and seconds is nearly universal around the world. There are many, many ways of imprinting CDs or DVDs, but those are all being standardized as well. And you can probably think of many, many more in your own everyday lives. And so our modern world now is confronting us with a dilemma. And it's the dilemma that this Chinese man faces, who's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language, and yet he is sitting at his blackboard, converting Chinese phrases into English language phrases. And what this does is it raises the possibility to us that in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange, and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity, his actions suggest to us it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language. Thank you. (Applause) Matt Ridley: Mark, one question. Svante found that the FOXP2 gene, which seems to be associated with language, was also shared in the same form in Neanderthals as us. Do we have any idea how we could have defeated Neanderthals if they also had language? Mark Pagel: This is a very good question. So many of you will be familiar with the idea that there's this gene called FOXP2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that's associated with language. The reason why I don't believe that tells us that the Neanderthals had language is — here's a simple analogy: Ferraris are cars that have engines. My car has an engine, but it's not a Ferrari. Now the simple answer then is that genes alone don't, all by themselves, determine the outcome of very complicated things like language. What we know about this FOXP2 and Neanderthals is that they may have had fine motor control of their mouths — who knows. But that doesn't tell us they necessarily had language. MR: Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)

Are we filtering the wrong microbes?

{0: 'Jessica Green wants people to understand the important role microbes play in every facet of our lives: climate change, building ecosystems, human health, even roller derby -- using nontraditional tools like art, animation and film to help people visualize the invisible world.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye: microorganisms. Buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us, and some that are bad for us. What determines the types and distributions of microbes indoors? Buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems. And they are brought inside by humans and other creatures. The fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans, and with the human-built environment. And today, architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us. We spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments, like this building here — environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering, heating and air conditioning. Given the amount of time that we spend indoors, it's important to understand how this affects our health. At the Biology and the Built Environment Center, we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the DNA out of microbes in the air. And we looked at three different types of rooms. We looked at rooms that were mechanically ventilated, which are the data points in the blue. We looked at rooms that were naturally ventilated, where the hospital let us turn off the mechanical ventilation in a wing of the building and pry open the windows that were no longer operable, but they made them operable for our study. And we also sampled the outdoor air. If you look at the x-axis of this graph, you'll see that what we commonly want to do — which is keeping the outdoors out — we accomplished that with mechanical ventilation. So if you look at the green data points, which is air that's outside, you'll see that there's a large amount of microbial diversity, or variety of microbial types. But if you look at the blue data points, which is mechanically ventilated air, it's not as diverse. But being less diverse is not necessarily good for our health. If you look at the y-axis of this graph, you'll see that, in the mechanically ventilated air, you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen, or germ, than if you're outdoors. So to understand why this was the case, we took our data and put it into an ordination diagram, which is a statistical map that tells you something about how related the microbial communities are in the different samples. The data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart. And the first things that you can see from this graph is, if you look at the blue data points, which are the mechanically ventilated air, they're not simply a subset of the green data points, which are the outdoor air. What we've found is that mechanically ventilated air looks like humans. It has microbes on it that are commonly associated with our skin and with our mouth, our spit. And this is because we're all constantly shedding microbes. So all of you right now are sharing your microbes with one another. And when you're outdoors, that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt. Why does this matter? It matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the United States. Hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings. And the model that we're working with in hospitals, and also with many, many different buildings, is to keep the outdoors out. And this model may not necessarily be the best for our health. And given the extraordinary amount of nosocomial infections, or hospital-acquired infections, this is a clue that it's a good time to reconsider our current practices. So just as we manage national parks, where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others, we're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors. I've heard somebody say that you're as healthy as your gut. And for this reason, many people eat probiotic yogurt so they can promote a healthy gut flora. And what we ultimately want to do is to be able to use this concept to promote a healthy group of microorganisms inside. Thank you. (Applause)

Suddenly, my body

{0: 'Eve Ensler created the groundbreaking "Vagina Monologues," whose success propelled her to found V-Day -- a movement to end violence against women and girls everywhere.'}

TEDWomen 2010

For a long time, there was me, and my body. Me was composed of stories, of cravings, of strivings, of desires of the future. Me was trying not to be an outcome of my violent past, but the separation that had already occurred between me and my body was a pretty significant outcome. Me was always trying to become something, somebody. Me only existed in the trying. My body was often in the way. Me was a floating head. For years, I actually only wore hats. It was a way of keeping my head attached. It was a way of locating myself. I worried that [if] I took my hat off I wouldn't be here anymore. I actually had a therapist who once said to me, "Eve, you've been coming here for two years, and, to be honest, it never occurred to me that you had a body." All this time I lived in the city because, to be honest, I was afraid of trees. I never had babies because heads cannot give birth. Babies actually don't come out of your mouth. As I had no reference point for my body, I began to ask other women about their bodies — in particular, their vaginas, because I thought vaginas were kind of important. This led to me writing "The Vagina Monologues," which led to me obsessively and incessantly talking about vaginas everywhere I could. I did this in front of many strangers. One night on stage, I actually entered my vagina. It was an ecstatic experience. It scared me, it energized me, and then I became a driven person, a driven vagina. I began to see my body like a thing, a thing that could move fast, like a thing that could accomplish other things, many things, all at once. I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself. I didn't heed it; no, I organized it and I directed it. I didn't have patience for my body; I snapped it into shape. I was greedy. I took more than my body had to offer. If I was tired, I drank more espressos. If I was afraid, I went to more dangerous places. Oh sure, sure, I had moments of appreciation of my body, the way an abusive parent can sometimes have a moment of kindness. My father was really kind to me on my 16th birthday, for example. I heard people murmur from time to time that I should love my body, so I learned how to do this. I was a vegetarian, I was sober, I didn't smoke. But all that was just a more sophisticated way to manipulate my body — a further disassociation, like planting a vegetable field on a freeway. As a result of me talking so much about my vagina, many women started to tell me about theirs — their stories about their bodies. Actually, these stories compelled me around the world, and I've been to over 60 countries. I heard thousands of stories, and I have to tell you, there was always this moment where the women shared with me that particular moment when she separated from her body — when she left home. I heard about women being molested in their beds, flogged in their burqas, left for dead in parking lots, acid burned in their kitchens. Some women became quiet and disappeared. Other women became mad, driven machines like me. In the middle of my traveling, I turned 40 and I began to hate my body, which was actually progress, because at least my body existed enough to hate it. Well my stomach — it was my stomach I hated. It was proof that I had not measured up, that I was old and not fabulous and not perfect or able to fit into the predetermined corporate image in shape. My stomach was proof that I had failed, that it had failed me, that it was broken. My life became about getting rid of it and obsessing about getting rid of it. In fact, it became so extreme I wrote a play about it. But the more I talked about it, the more objectified and fragmented my body became. It became entertainment; it became a new kind of commodity, something I was selling. Then I went somewhere else. I went outside what I thought I knew. I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo. And I heard stories that shattered all the other stories. I heard stories that got inside my body. I heard about a little girl who couldn't stop peeing on herself because so many grown soldiers had shoved themselves inside her. I heard an 80-year-old woman whose legs were broken and pulled out of her sockets and twisted up on her head as the soldiers raped her like that. There are thousands of these stories, and many of the women had holes in their bodies — holes, fistula — that were the violation of war — holes in the fabric of their souls. These stories saturated my cells and nerves, and to be honest, I stopped sleeping for three years. All the stories began to bleed together. The raping of the Earth, the pillaging of minerals, the destruction of vaginas — none of these were separate anymore from each other or me. Militias were raping six-month-old babies so that countries far away could get access to gold and coltan for their iPhones and computers. My body had not only become a driven machine, but it was responsible now for destroying other women's bodies in its mad quest to make more machines to support the speed and efficiency of my machine. Then I got cancer — or I found out I had cancer. It arrived like a speeding bird smashing into a windowpane. Suddenly, I had a body, a body that was pricked and poked and punctured, a body that was cut wide open, a body that had organs removed and transported and rearranged and reconstructed, a body that was scanned and had tubes shoved down it, a body that was burning from chemicals. Cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection. I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis in the world, and it wasn't happening later, it was happening now. Suddenly, my cancer was a cancer that was everywhere, the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live down the streets from chemical plants — and they're usually poor — the cancer inside the coal miner's lungs, the cancer of stress for not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma, the cancer in caged chickens and polluted fish, the cancer in women's uteruses from being raped, the cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness. In his new and visionary book, "New Self, New World," the writer Philip Shepherd says, "If you are divided from your body, you are also divided from the body of the world, which then appears to be other than you or separate from you, rather than the living continuum to which you belong." Before cancer, the world was something other. It was as if I was living in a stagnant pool and cancer dynamited the boulder that was separating me from the larger sea. Now I am swimming in it. Now I lay down in the grass and I rub my body in it, and I love the mud on my legs and feet. Now I make a daily pilgrimage to visit a particular weeping willow by the Seine, and I hunger for the green fields in the bush outside Bukavu. And when it rains hard rain, I scream and I run in circles. I know that everything is connected, and the scar that runs the length of my torso is the markings of the earthquake. And I am there with the three million in the streets of Port-au-Prince. And the fire that burned in me on day three through six of chemo is the fire that is burning in the forests of the world. I know that the abscess that grew around my wound after the operation, the 16 ounces of puss, is the contaminated Gulf of Mexico, and there were oil-drenched pelicans inside me and dead floating fish. And the catheters they shoved into me without proper medication made me scream out the way the Earth cries out from the drilling. In my second chemo, my mother got very sick and I went to see her. And in the name of connectedness, the only thing she wanted before she died was to be brought home by her beloved Gulf of Mexico. So we brought her home, and I prayed that the oil wouldn't wash up on her beach before she died. And gratefully, it didn't. And she died quietly in her favorite place. And a few weeks later, I was in New Orleans, and this beautiful, spiritual friend told me she wanted to do a healing for me. And I was honored. And I went to her house, and it was morning, and the morning New Orleans sun was filtering through the curtains. And my friend was preparing this big bowl, and I said, "What is it?" And she said, "It's for you. The flowers make it beautiful, and the honey makes it sweet." And I said, "But what's the water part?" And in the name of connectedness, she said, "Oh, it's the Gulf of Mexico." And I said, "Of course it is." And the other women arrived and they sat in a circle, and Michaela bathed my head with the sacred water. And she sang — I mean her whole body sang. And the other women sang and they prayed for me and my mother. And as the warm Gulf washed over my naked head, I realized that it held the best and the worst of us. It was the greed and recklessness that led to the drilling explosion. It was all the lies that got told before and after. It was the honey in the water that made it sweet, it was the oil that made it sick. It was my head that was bald — and comfortable now without a hat. It was my whole self melting into Michaela's lap. It was the tears that were indistinguishable from the Gulf that were falling down my cheek. It was finally being in my body. It was the sorrow that's taken so long. It was finding my place and the huge responsibility that comes with connection. It was the continuing devastating war in the Congo and the indifference of the world. It was the Congolese women who are now rising up. It was my mother leaving, just at the moment that I was being born. It was the realization that I had come very close to dying — in the same way that the Earth, our mother, is barely holding on, in the same way that 75 percent of the planet are hardly scraping by, in the same way that there is a recipe for survival. What I learned is it has to do with attention and resources that everybody deserves. It was advocating friends and a doting sister. It was wise doctors and advanced medicine and surgeons who knew what to do with their hands. It was underpaid and really loving nurses. It was magic healers and aromatic oils. It was people who came with spells and rituals. It was having a vision of the future and something to fight for, because I know this struggle isn't my own. It was a million prayers. It was a thousand hallelujahs and a million oms. It was a lot of anger, insane humor, a lot of attention, outrage. It was energy, love and joy. It was all these things. It was all these things. It was all these things in the water, in the world, in my body. (Applause)

The demise of guys?

{0: 'Philip Zimbardo was the leader of the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment -- and an expert witness at Abu Ghraib. His book The Lucifer Effect explores the nature of evil; now, in his new work, he studies the nature of heroism.'}

TED2011

So today, I want us to reflect on the demise of guys. Guys are flaming out academically; they're wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women. Other than that, there's not much of a problem. So what's the data? So the data on dropping out is amazing. Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school. In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school. There's a 10 percent differential between getting BA's and all graduate programs, with guys falling behind girls. Two-thirds of all students in special ed. remedial programs are guys. And as you all know, boys are five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention deficit disorder — and therefore we drug them with Ritalin. What's the evidence of wiping out? First, it's a new fear of intimacy. Intimacy means physical, emotional connection with somebody else — and especially with somebody of the opposite sex who gives off ambiguous, contradictory, phosphorescent signals. (Laughter) And every year there's research done on self-reported shyness among college students. And we're seeing a steady increase among males. And this is two kinds. It's a social awkwardness. The old shyness was a fear of rejection. It's a social awkwardness like you're a stranger in a foreign land. They don't know what to say, they don't know what to do, especially one-on-one [with the] opposite sex. They don't know the language of face contact, the non-verbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk to somebody else, listen to somebody else. There's something I'm developing here called social intensity syndrome, which tries to account for why guys really prefer male bonding over female mating. It turns out, from earliest childhood, boys, and then men, prefer the company of guys — physical company. And there's actually a cortical arousal we're looking at, because guys have been with guys in teams, in clubs, in gangs, in fraternities, especially in the military, and then in pubs. And this peaks at Super Bowl Sunday when guys would rather be in a bar with strangers, watching a totally overdressed Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers, rather than Jennifer Lopez totally naked in the bedroom. The problem is they now prefer [the] asynchronistic Internet world to the spontaneous interaction in social relationships. What are the causes? Well, it's an unintended consequence. I think it's excessive Internet use in general, excessive video gaming, excessive new access to pornography. The problem is these are arousal addictions. Drug addiction, you simply want more. Arousal addiction, you want different. Drugs, you want more of the same — different. So you need the novelty in order for the arousal to be sustained. And the problem is the industry is supplying it. Jane McGonigal told us last year that by the time a boy is 21, he's played 10,000 hours of video games, most of that in isolation. As you remember, Cindy Gallop said men don't know the difference between making love and doing porn. The average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week. And there's some guy watching a hundred, obviously. (Laughter) And the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America — 15 billion annually. For every 400 movies made in Hollywood, there are 11,000 now made porn videos. So the effect, very quickly, is it's a new kind of arousal. Boys' brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive. They're also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which build gradually and subtly. So what's the solution? It's not my job. I'm here to alarm. It's your job to solve. (Laughter) (Applause) But who should care? The only people who should care about this is parents of boys and girls, educators, gamers, filmmakers and women who would like a real man who they can talk to, who can dance, who can make love slowly and contribute to the evolutionary pressures to keep our species above banana slugs. No offense to banana slug owners. Thank you. (Applause)

The shareable future of cities

{0: "Alex Steffen explores our planet's future, telling powerful, inspiring stories about the hard choices facing humanity ... and our opportunity to create a much better tomorrow."}

TEDGlobal 2011

Climate change is already a heavy topic, and it's getting heavier because we're understanding that we need to do more than we are. We're understanding, in fact, that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions. That's, to put it mildly, not what's on the table now. And it tends to feel a little overwhelming when we look at what is there in reality today and the magnitude of the problem that we face. And when we have overwhelming problems in front of us, we tend to seek simple answers. And I think this is what we've done with climate change. We look at where the emissions are coming from — they're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth, and we say, okay, well the problem is that they're coming out of fossil fuels that we're burning, so therefore, the answer must be to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy. And while, of course, we do need clean energy, I would put to you that it's possible that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we're in fact setting ourselves up not to solve it. And the reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing. That shouldn't be news to any of us. However, it's hard sometimes to remember the extent of that urbanization. By mid-century, we're going to have about eight billion — perhaps more — people living in cities or within a day's travel of one. We will be an overwhelmingly urban species. In order to provide the kind of energy that it would take for eight billion people living in cities that are even somewhat like the cities that those of us in the global North live in today, we would have to generate an absolutely astonishing amount of energy. It may be possible that we are not even able to build that much clean energy. So if we're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet, we need to look somewhere else for the solution. The solution, in fact, may be closer to hand than we think, because all of those cities we're building are opportunities. Every city determines to a very large extent the amount of energy used by its inhabitants. We tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing — I choose to turn this light switch on — but really, enormous amounts of our energy use are predestined by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in. I won't show you very many graphs today, but if I can just focus on this one for a moment, it really tells us a lot of what we need to know — which is, quite simply, that if you look, for example, at transportation, a major category of climate emissions, there is a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions that its residents spew out into the air. And the correlation, of course, is that denser places tend to have lower emissions — which isn't really all that difficult to figure out, if you think about it. Basically, we substitute, in our lives, access to the things we want. We go out there and we hop in our cars and we drive from place to place. And we're basically using mobility to get the access we need. But when we live in a denser community, suddenly what we find, of course, is that the things we need are close by. And since the most sustainable trip is the one that you never had to make in the first place, suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable. And it is possible, of course, to increase the density of the communities around us. Some places are doing this with new eco districts, developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods, which is nice work if you can get it, but most of the time, what we're talking about is, in fact, reweaving the urban fabric that we already have. So we're talking about things like infill development: really sharp little changes to where we have buildings, where we're developing. Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there. Increasingly, we're realizing that we don't even need to densify an entire city. What we need instead is an average density that rises to a level where we don't drive as much and so on. And that can be done by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot. So you can think of it as tent poles that actually raise the density of the entire city. And we find that when we do that, we can, in fact, have a few places that are really hyper-dense within a wider fabric of places that are perhaps a little more comfortable and achieve the same results. Now we may find that there are places that are really, really dense and still hold onto their cars, but the reality is that, by and large, what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect, where people simply stop driving as much, and increasingly, more and more people, if they're surrounded by places that make them feel at home, give up their cars altogether. And this is a huge, huge energy savings, because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars. We have the manufacture of the car, the disposal of the car, all of the parking and freeways and so on. When you can get rid of all of those because somebody doesn't use any of them really, you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions as much as 90 percent. And people are embracing this. All around the world, we're seeing more and more people embrace this walkshed life. People are saying that it's moving from the idea of the dream home to the dream neighborhood. And when you layer that over with the kind of ubiquitous communications that we're starting to see, what you find is, in fact, even more access suffused into spaces. Some of it's transportation access. This is a Mapnificent map that shows me, in this case, how far I can get from my home in 30 minutes using public transportation. Some of it is about walking. It's not all perfect yet. This is Google Walking Maps. I asked how to do the greater Ridgeway, and it told me to go via Guernsey. It did tell me that this route maybe missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths, though. (Laughter) But the technologies are getting better, and we're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation. And as we just heard earlier, of course, we're also learning how to put information on dumb objects. Things that don't have any wiring in them at all, we're learning how to include in these systems of notation and navigation. Part of what we're finding with this is that what we thought was the major point of manufacturing and consumption, which is to get a bunch of stuff, is not, in fact, how we really live best in dense environments. What we're finding is that what we want is access to the capacities of things. My favorite example is a drill. Who here owns a drill, a home power drill? Okay. I do too. The average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes in its entire lifetime, depending on who you ask. And so what we do is we buy these drills that have a potential capacity of thousands of hours of drill time, use them once or twice to put a hole in the wall and let them sit. Our cities, I would put to you, are stockpiles of these surplus capacities. And while we could try and figure out new ways to use those capacities — such as cooking or making ice sculptures or even a mafia hit — what we probably will find is that, in fact, turning those products into services that we have access to when we want them, is a far smarter way to go. And in fact, even space itself is turning into a service. We're finding that people can share the same spaces, do stuff with vacant space. Buildings are becoming bundles of services. So we have new designs that are helping us take mechanical things that we used to spend energy on — like heating, cooling etc. — and turn them into things that we avoid spending energy on. So we light our buildings with daylight. We cool them with breezes. We heat them with sunshine. In fact, when we use all these things, what we've found is that, in some cases, energy use in a building can drop as much as 90 percent. Which brings on another threshold effect I like to call furnace dumping, which is, quite simply, if you have a building that doesn't need to be heated with a furnace, you save a whole bunch of money up front. These things actually become cheaper to build than the alternatives. Now when we look at being able to slash our product use, slash our transportation use, slash our building energy use, all of that is great, but it still leaves something behind. And if we're going to really, truly become sustainable cities, we need to think a little differently. This is one way to do it. This is Vancouver's propaganda about how green a city they are. And certainly lots of people have taken to heart this idea that a sustainable city is covered in greenery. So we have visions like this. We have visions like this. We have visions like this. Now all of these are fine projects, but they really have missed an essential point, which is it's not about the leaves above, it's about the systems below. Do they, for instance, capture rainwater so that we can reduce water use? Water is energy intensive. Do they, perhaps, include green infrastructure, so that we can take runoff and water that's going out of our houses and clean it and filter it and grow urban street trees? Do they connect us back to the ecosystems around us by, for example, connecting us to rivers and allowing for restoration? Do they allow for pollination, pollinator pathways that bees and butterflies and such can come back into our cities? Do they even take the very waste matter that we have from food and fiber and so forth, and turn it back into soil and sequester carbon — take carbon out of the air in the process of using our cities? I would submit to you that all of these things are not only possible, they're being done right now, and that it's a darn good thing. Because right now, our economy by and large operates as Paul Hawken said, "by stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP." And if we have another eight billion or seven billion, or six billion, even, people, living on a planet where their cities also steal the future, we're going to run out of future really fast. But if we think differently, I think that, in fact, we can have cities that are not only zero emissions, but have unlimited possibilities as well. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The great penguin rescue

{0: 'Call her "the Penguin Lady." Dyan deNapoli educates the world about these fascinating birds.'}

TEDxBoston 2011

For as long as I can remember, I have felt a very deep connection to animals and to the ocean. And at this age, my personal idol was Flipper the dolphin. And when I first learned about endangered species, I was truly distressed to know that every day, animals were being wiped off the face of this Earth forever. And I wanted to do something to help, but I always wondered: What could one person possibly do to make a difference? And it would be 30 years, but I would eventually get the answer to that question. When these heartbreaking images of oiled birds finally began to emerge from the Gulf of Mexico last year during the horrific BP oil spill, a German biologist by the name of Silvia Gaus was quoted as saying, "We should just euthanize all oiled birds, because studies have shown that fewer than one percent of them survive after being released." And I could not disagree more. In addition, I believe that every oiled animal deserves a second chance at life. And I want to tell you why I feel so strongly about this. On June 23, 2000, a ship named the Treasure sank off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, spilling 1,300 tons of fuel, which polluted the habitats of nearly half the entire world population of African penguins. Now, the ship sank between Robben Island to the south, and Dassen Island to the north — two of the penguins' main breeding islands. And exactly six years and three days earlier, on June 20, 1994, a ship named the Apollo Sea sank near Dassen Island, oiling 10,000 penguins, half of which died. Now when the Treasure sank in 2000, it was the height of the best breeding season scientists had ever recorded for the African penguin, which at the time, was listed as a threatened species. And soon, nearly 20,000 penguins were covered with this toxic oil. The local seabird rescue center, named SANCCOB, immediately launched a massive rescue operation, and this soon would become the largest animal rescue ever undertaken. At the time, I was working down the street. I was a penguin aquarist at the New England Aquarium. And exactly 11 years ago yesterday, the phone rang in the penguin office. And with that call, my life would change forever. It was Estelle van Der Merwe calling from SANCCOB, saying, "Please come help. We have thousands of oiled penguins and thousands of willing but completely inexperienced volunteers. And we need penguin experts to come train and supervise them." So two days later, I was on a plane headed for Cape Town with a team of penguin specialists. And the scene inside of this building was devastating and surreal. In fact, many people compared it to a war zone. Last week, a 10-year-old girl asked me: "What did it feel like when you first walked into that building and saw so many oiled penguins?" And this is what happened. I was instantly transported back to that moment in time. Penguins are very vocal birds and really, really noisy, so I expected to walk into this building and be met with this cacophony of honking and braying and squawking. But instead, when we stepped through those doors and into the building, it was eerily silent. So it was very clear these were stressed, sick, traumatized birds. The other thing that was so striking was the sheer number of volunteers. Up to 1,000 people a day came to the rescue center. Eventually, over the course of this rescue, more than 12-and-a-half thousand volunteers came from all over the world to Cape Town, to help save these birds. And the amazing thing was that not one of them had to be there. Yet they were. So for the few of us that were there in a professional capacity, this extraordinary volunteer response to this animal crisis was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring. So the day after we arrived, two of us from the aquarium were put in charge of room two. Room two had more than 4,000 oiled penguins in it. Now, mind you — three days earlier, we had 60 penguins under our care, so we were definitely overwhelmed and just a bit terrified — at least I was. Personally, I really didn't know if I was capable of handling such a monstrous task. And collectively, we really didn't know if we could pull this off. Because we all knew that just six years earlier, half as many penguins had been oiled and rescued, and only half of them had survived. So would it be humanly possible to save this many oiled penguins? We just did not know. But what gave us hope were these incredibly dedicated and brave volunteers, three of whom here are force-feeding penguins. You may notice they're wearing very thick gloves. And what you should know about African penguins is that they have razor-sharp beaks. And before long, our bodies were covered head to toe with these nasty wounds inflicted by the terrified penguins. Now the day after we arrived, a new crisis began to unfold. The oil slick was now moving north towards Dassen Island, and the rescuers despaired, because they knew if the oil hit, it would not be possible to rescue any more oiled birds. And there really were no good solutions. But then finally, one of the researchers threw out this crazy idea. He said, "OK, why don't we try and collect the birds at the greatest risk of getting oiled" — they collected 20,000 — "and we'll ship them 500 miles up the coast to Port Elizabeth in these open-air trucks, and release them into the clean waters there and let them swim back home?" (Laughter) So three of those penguins — Peter, Pamela and Percy — wore satellite tags, and the researchers crossed their fingers and hoped that by the time they got back home, the oil would be cleaned up from their islands. And luckily, the day they arrived, it was. So it had been a huge gamble, but it had paid off. And so they know now that they can use this strategy in future oil spills. So in wildlife rescue as in life, we learn from each previous experience, and we learn from both our successes and our failures. And the main thing learned during the Apollo Sea rescue in '94 was that most of those penguins had died due to the unwitting use of poorly ventilated transport boxes and trucks, because they just had not been prepared to deal with so many oiled penguins at once. So in these six years between these two oil spills, they've built thousands of these well-ventilated boxes. And as a result, during the Treasure rescue, just 160 penguins died during the transport process, as opposed to 5,000. So this alone was a huge victory. Something else learned during the Apollo rescue was how to train the penguins to take fish freely from their hands, using these training boxes. And we used this technique again during the Treasure rescue. But an interesting thing was noted during the training process. The first penguins to make that transition to free feeding were the ones that had a metal band on their wing from the Apollo Sea spill six years earlier. So penguins learn from previous experience, too. So all of those penguins had to have the oil meticulously cleaned from their bodies. It would take two people at least an hour just to clean one penguin. When you clean a penguin, you first have to spray it with a degreaser. And this brings me to my favorite story from the Treasure rescue. About a year prior to this oil spill, a 17-year-old student had invented a degreaser. And they'd been using it at SANCCOB with great success, so they began using it during the Treasure rescue. But partway through, they ran out. So in a panic, Estelle from SANCCOB called the student and said, "Please, you have to make more!" So he raced to the lab and made enough to clean the rest of the birds. So I just think it is the coolest thing that a teenager invented a product that helped save the lives of thousands of animals. So what happened to those 20,000 oiled penguins? And was Silvia Gaus right? Should we routinely euthanize all oiled birds because most of them are going to die anyway? Well, she could not be more wrong. After half a million hours of grueling volunteer labor, more than 90 percent of those oiled penguins were successfully returned to the wild. And we know from follow-up studies that they have lived just as long as never-oiled penguins, and bred nearly as successfully. And in addition, about 3,000 penguin chicks were rescued and hand raised. And again, we know from long-term monitoring that more of these hand-raised chicks survive to adulthood and breeding age than do parent-raised chicks. Armed with this knowledge, SANCCOB has a chick-bolstering project, and every year, they rescue and raise abandoned chicks, and they have a very impressive, 80 percent success rate. This is critically important, because one year ago, the African penguin was declared endangered. And they could be extinct in less than 10 years if we don't do something now to protect them. So what did I learn from this intense and unforgettable experience? Personally, I learned that I am capable of handling so much more than I ever dreamed possible. And I learned that one person can make a huge difference. Just look at that 17-year-old. And when we come together and work as one, we can achieve extraordinary things. And truly, to be a part of something so much larger than yourself is the most rewarding experience you can possibly have. So I'd like to leave you with one final thought and a challenge, if you will. My mission as The Penguin Lady is to raise awareness and funding to protect penguins. But why should any of you care about penguins? Well, you should care because they're an indicator species. And simply put: if penguins are dying, it means our oceans are dying. And we ultimately will be affected, because, as Sylvia Earle says, "The oceans are our life-support system." And the two main threats to penguins today are overfishing and global warming. And these are two things that each one of us actually has the power to do something about. So if we each do our part, together, we can make a difference, and we can help keep penguins from going extinct. Humans have always been the greatest threat to penguins, but we are now their only hope. Thank you. (Applause)

One day of peace

{0: "Filmmaker Jeremy Gilley founded Peace One Day to create an annual day without conflict. And ... it's happening. What will you do to make peace on September 21?"}

TEDGlobal 2011

I was basically concerned about what was going on in the world. I couldn't understand the starvation, the destruction, the killing of innocent people. Making sense of those things is a very difficult thing to do. And when I was 12, I became an actor. I was bottom of the class. I haven't got any qualifications. I was told I was dyslexic. In fact, I have got qualifications. I got a D in pottery, which was the one thing that I did get — which was useful, obviously. And so concern is where all of this comes from. And then, being an actor, I was doing these different kinds of things, and I felt the content of the work that I was involved in really wasn't cutting it, that there surely had to be more. And at that point, I read a book by Frank Barnaby, this wonderful nuclear physicist, and he said that media had a responsibility, that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward. And that fascinated me, because I'd been messing around with a camera most of my life. And then I thought, well maybe I could do something. Maybe I could become a filmmaker. Maybe I can use the form of film constructively to in some way make a difference. Maybe there's a little change I can get involved in. So I started thinking about peace, and I was obviously, as I said to you, very much moved by these images, trying to make sense of that. Could I go and speak to older and wiser people who would tell me how they made sense of the things that are going on? Because it's obviously incredibly frightening. But I realized that, having been messing around with structure as an actor, that a series of sound bites in itself wasn't enough, that there needed to be a mountain to climb, there needed to be a journey that I had to take. And if I took that journey, no matter whether it failed or succeeded, it would be completely irrelevant. The point was that I would have something to hook the questions of — is humankind fundamentally evil? Is the destruction of the world inevitable? Should I have children? Is that a responsible thing to do? Etc., etc. So I was thinking about peace, and then I was thinking, well where's the starting point for peace? And that was when I had the idea. There was no starting point for peace. There was no day of global unity. There was no day of intercultural cooperation. There was no day when humanity came together, separate in all of those things and just shared it together — that we're in this together, and that if we united and we interculturally cooperated, then that might be the key to humanity's survival. That might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces — if we did it just for a day. So obviously we didn't have any money. I was living at my mom's place. And we started writing letters to everybody. You very quickly work out what is it that you've got to do to fathom that out. How do you create a day voted by every single head of state in the world to create the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September? And I wanted it to be the 21st of September because it was my granddad's favorite number. He was a prisoner of war. He saw the bomb go off at Nagasaki. It poisoned his blood. He died when I was 11. So he was like my hero. And the reason why 21 was the number is 700 men left, 23 came back, two died on the boat and 21 hit the ground. And that's why we wanted it to be the 21st of September as the date of peace. So we began this journey, and we launched it in 1999. And we wrote to heads of state, their ambassadors, Nobel Peace laureates, NGOs, faiths, various organizations — literally wrote to everybody. And very quickly, some letters started coming back. And we started to build this case. And I remember the first letter. One of the first letters was from the Dalai Lama. And of course we didn't have the money; we were playing guitars and getting the money for the stamps that we were sending out all of [this mail]. A letter came through from the Dalai Lama saying, "This is an amazing thing. Come and see me. I'd love to talk to you about the first ever day of peace." And we didn't have money for the flight. And I rang Sir Bob Ayling, who was CEO of BA at the time, and said, "Mate, we've got this invitation. Could you give me a flight? Because we're going to go see him." And of course, we went and saw him and it was amazing. And then Dr. Oscar Arias came forward. And actually, let me go back to that slide, because when we launched it in 1999 — this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence — we invited thousands of people. Well not thousands — hundreds of people, lots of people — all the press, because we were going to try and create the first ever World Peace Day, a peace day. And we invited everybody, and no press showed up. There were 114 people there — they were mostly my friends and family. And that was kind of like the launch of this thing. But it didn't matter because we were documenting, and that was the thing. For me, it was really about the process. It wasn't about the end result. And that's the beautiful thing about the camera. They used to say the pen is mightier than the sword. I think the camera is. And just staying in the moment with it was a beautiful thing and really empowering actually. So anyway, we began the journey. And here you see people like Mary Robinson, I went to see in Geneva. I'm cutting my hair, it's getting short and long, because every time I saw Kofi Annan, I was so worried that he thought I was a hippie that I cut it, and that was kind of what was going on. (Laughter) Yeah, I'm not worried about it now. So Mary Robinson, she said to me, "Listen, this is an idea whose time has come. This must be created." Kofi Annan said, "This will be beneficial to my troops on the ground." The OAU at the time, led by Salim Ahmed Salim, said, "I must get the African countries involved." Dr. Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace laureate, president now of Costa Rica, said, "I'll do everything that I can." So I went and saw Amr Moussa at the League of Arab States. I met Mandela at the Arusha peace talks, and so on and so on and so on — while I was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense. And then we were listening to the people. We were documenting everywhere. 76 countries in the last 12 years, I've visited. And I've always spoken to women and children wherever I've gone. I've recorded 44,000 young people. I've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts. I'm really clear about how young people feel when you talk to them about this idea of having a starting point for their actions for a more peaceful world through their poetry, their art, their literature, their music, their sport, whatever it might be. And we were listening to everybody. And it was an incredibly thing, working with the U.N. and working with NGOs and building this case. I felt that I was presenting a case on behalf of the global community to try and create this day. And the stronger the case and the more detailed it was, the better chance we had of creating this day. And it was this stuff, this, where I actually was in the beginning kind of thinking no matter what happened, it didn't actually matter. It didn't matter if it didn't create a day of peace. The fact is that, if I tried and it didn't work, then I could make a statement about how unwilling the global community is to unite — until, it was in Somalia, picking up that young girl. And this young child who'd taken about an inch and a half out of her leg with no antiseptic, and that young boy who was a child soldier, who told me he'd killed people — he was about 12 — these things made me realize that this was not a film that I could just stop. And that actually, at that moment something happened to me, which obviously made me go, "I'm going to document. If this is the only film that I ever make, I'm going to document until this becomes a reality." Because we've got to stop, we've got to do something where we unite — separate from all the politics and religion that, as a young person, is confusing me. I don't know how to get involved in that process. And then on the seventh of September, I was invited to New York. The Costa Rican government and the British government had put forward to the United Nations General Assembly, with 54 co-sponsors, the idea of the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September, as a fixed calendar date, and it was unanimously adopted by every head of state in the world. (Applause) Yeah, but there were hundreds of individuals, obviously, who made that a reality. And thank you to all of them. That was an incredible moment. I was at the top of the General Assembly just looking down into it and seeing it happen. And as I mentioned, when it started, we were at the Globe, and there was no press. And now I was thinking, "Well, the press it really going to hear this story." And suddenly, we started to institutionalize this day. Kofi Annan invited me on the morning of September the 11th to do a press conference. And it was 8:00 AM when I stood there. And I was waiting for him to come down, and I knew that he was on his way. And obviously he never came down. The statement was never made. The world was never told there was a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence. And it was obviously a tragic moment for the thousands of people who lost their lives, there and then subsequently all over the world. It never happened. And I remember thinking, "This is exactly why, actually, we have to work even harder. And we have to make this day work. It's been created; nobody knows. But we have to continue this journey, and we have to tell people, and we have to prove it can work." And I left New York freaked, but actually empowered. And I felt inspired by the possibilities that if it did, then maybe we wouldn't see things like that. I remember putting that film out and going to cynics. I was showing the film, and I remember being in Israel and getting it absolutely slaughtered by some guys having watched the film — that it's just a day of peace, it doesn't mean anything. It's not going to work; you're not going to stop the fighting in Afghanistan; the Taliban won't listen, etc., etc. It's just symbolism. And that was even worse than actually what had just happened in many ways, because it couldn't not work. I'd spoken in Somalia, Burundi, Gaza, the West Bank, India, Sri Lanka, Congo, wherever it was, and they'd all tell me, "If you can create a window of opportunity, we can move aid, we can vaccinate children. Children can lead their projects. They can unite. They can come together. If people would stop, lives will be saved." That's what I'd heard. And I'd heard that from the people who really understood what conflict was about. And so I went back to the United Nations. I decided that I'd continue filming and make another movie. And I went back to the U.N. for another couple of years. We started moving around the corridors of the U.N. system, governments and NGOs, trying desperately to find somebody to come forward and have a go at it, see if we could make it possible. And after lots and lots of meetings obviously, I'm delighted that this man, Ahmad Fawzi, one of my heroes and mentors really, he managed to get UNICEF involved. And UNICEF, God bless them, they said, "Okay, we'll have a go." And then UNAMA became involved in Afghanistan. It was historical. Could it work in Afghanistan with UNAMA and WHO and civil society, etc., etc., etc.? And I was getting it all on film and I was recording it, and I was thinking, "This is it. This is the possibility of it maybe working. But even if it doesn't, at least the door is open and there's a chance." And so I went back to London, and I went and saw this chap, Jude Law. And I saw him because he was an actor, I was an actor, I had a connection to him, because we needed to get to the press, we needed this attraction, we needed the media to be involved. Because if we start pumping it up a bit maybe more people would listen and there'd be more — when we got into certain areas, maybe there would be more people interested. And maybe we'd be helped financially a little bit more, which had been desperately difficult. I won't go into that. So Jude said, "Okay, I'll do some statements for you." While I was filming these statements, he said to me, "Where are you going next?" I said, "I'm going to go to Afghanistan." He said, "Really?" And I could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest. So I said to him, "Do you want to come with me? It'd be really interesting if you came. It would help and bring attention. And that attention would help leverage the situation, as well as all of the other sides of it." I think there's a number of pillars to success. One is you've got to have a great idea. The other is you've got to have a constituency, you've got to have finance, and you've got to be able to raise awareness. And actually I could never raise awareness by myself, no matter what I'd achieved. So these guys were absolutely crucial. So he said yes, and we found ourselves in Afghanistan. It was a really incredible thing that when we landed there, I was talking to various people, and they were saying to me, "You've got to get everybody involved here. You can't just expect it to work. You have to get out and work." And we did, and we traveled around, and we spoke to elders, we spoke to doctors, we spoke to nurses, we held press conferences, we went out with soldiers, we sat down with ISAF, we sat down with NATO, we sat down with the U.K. government. I mean, we basically sat down with everybody — in and out of schools with ministers of education, holding these press conferences, which of course, now were loaded with press, everybody was there. There was an interest in what was going on. This amazing woman, Fatima Gailani, was absolutely instrumental in what went on as she was the spokesperson for the resistance against the Russians. And her Afghan network was just absolutely everywhere. And she was really crucial in getting the message in. And then we went home. We'd sort of done it. We had to wait now and see what happened. And I got home, and I remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the Taliban. And that letter basically said, "We'll observe this day. We will observe this day. We see it as a window of opportunity. And we will not engage. We're not going to engage." And that meant that humanitarian workers wouldn't be kidnapped or killed. And then suddenly, I obviously knew at this point, there was a chance. And days later, 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping. (Applause) And like the General Assembly, obviously the most wonderful, wonderful moment. And so then we wrapped the film up and we put it together because we had to go back. We put it into Dari and Pashto. We put it in the local dialects. We went back to Afghanistan, because the next year was coming, and we wanted to support. But more importantly, we wanted to go back, because these people in Afghanistan were the heroes. They were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it, etc., etc. — and they made it real. And we wanted to go back and show them the film and say, "Look, you guys made this possible. And thank you very much." And we gave the film over. Obviously it was shown, and it was amazing. And then that year, that year, 2008, this ISAF statement from Kabul, Afghanistan, September 17th: "General Stanley McChrystal, commander of international security assistance forces in Afghanistan, announced today ISAF will not conduct offensive military operations on the 21st of September." They were saying they would stop. And then there was this other statement that came out from the U.N. Department of Security and Safety saying that, in Afghanistan, because of this work, the violence was down by 70 percent. 70 percent reduction in violence on this day at least. And that completely blew my mind almost more than anything. And I remember being stuck in New York, this time because of the volcano, which was obviously much less harmful. And I was there thinking about what was going on. And I kept thinking about this 70 percent. 70 percent reduction in violence — in what everyone said was completely impossible and you couldn't do. And that made me think that, if we can get 70 percent in Afghanistan, then surely we can get 70 percent reduction everywhere. We have to go for a global truce. We have to utilize this day of ceasefire and nonviolence and go for a global truce, go for the largest recorded cessation of hostilities, both domestically and internationally, ever recorded. That's exactly what we must do. And on the 21st of September this year, we're going to launch that campaign at the O2 Arena to go for that process, to try and create the largest recorded cessation of hostilities. And we will utilize all kinds of things — have a dance and social media and visiting on Facebook and visit the website, sign the petition. And it's in the six official languages of the United Nations. And we'll globally link with government, inter-government, non-government, education, unions, sports. And you can see the education box there. We've got resources at the moment in 174 countries trying to get young people to be the driving force behind the vision of that global truce. And obviously the life-saving is increased, the concepts help. Linking up with the Olympics — I went and saw Seb Coe. I said, "London 2012 is about truce. Ultimately, that's what it's about." Why don't we all team up? Why don't we bring truce to life? Why don't you support the process of the largest ever global truce? We'll make a new film about this process. We'll utilize sport and football. On the Day of Peace, there's thousands of football matches all played, from the favelas of Brazil to wherever it might be. So, utilizing all of these ways to inspire individual action. And ultimately, we have to try that. We have to work together. And when I stand here in front of all of you, and the people who will watch these things, I'm excited, on behalf of everybody I've met, that there is a possibility that our world could unite, that we could come together as one, that we could lift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues, brought about by individuals. I was with Brahimi, Ambassador Brahimi. I think he's one of the most incredible men in relation to international politics — in Afghanistan, in Iraq. He's an amazing man. And I sat with him a few weeks ago. And I said to him, "Mr. Brahimi, is this nuts, going for a global truce? Is this possible? Is it really possible that we could do this?" He said, "It's absolutely possible." I said, "What would you do? Would you go to governments and lobby and use the system?" He said, "No, I'd talk to the individuals." It's all about the individuals. It's all about you and me. It's all about partnerships. It's about your constituencies; it's about your businesses. Because together, by working together, I seriously think we can start to change things. And there's a wonderful man sitting in this audience, and I don't know where he is, who said to me a few days ago — because I did a little rehearsal — and he said, "I've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares, and one of them is white." And it then made me think about a glass of water, which is clear. If you put one drop, one drop of something, in that water, it'll change it forever. By working together, we can create peace one day. Thank you TED. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thanks a lot. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you.

Finding planets around other stars

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

TEDGlobal 2011

Planetary systems outside our own are like distant cities whose lights we can see twinkling, but whose streets we can't walk. By studying those twinkling lights though, we can learn about how stars and planets interact to form their own ecosystem and make habitats that are amenable to life. In this image of the Tokyo skyline, I've hidden data from the newest planet-hunting space telescope on the block, the Kepler Mission. Can you see it? There we go. This is just a tiny part of the sky the Kepler stares at, where it searches for planets by measuring the light from over 150,000 stars, all at once, every half hour, and very precisely. And what we're looking for is the tiny dimming of light that is caused by a planet passing in front of one of these stars and blocking some of that starlight from getting to us. In just over two years of operations, we've found over 1,200 potential new planetary systems around other stars. To give you some perspective, in the previous two decades of searching, we had only known about 400 prior to Kepler. When we see these little dips in the light, we can determine a number of things. For one thing, we can determine that there's a planet there, but also how big that planet is and how far it is away from its parent star. That distance is really important because it tells us how much light the planet receives overall. And that distance and knowing that amount of light is important because it's a little like you or I sitting around a campfire: You want to be close enough to the campfire so that you're warm, but not so close that you're too toasty and you get burned. However, there's more to know about your parent star than just how much light you receive overall. And I'll tell you why. This is our star. This is our Sun. It's shown here in visible light. That's the light that you can see with your own human eyes. You'll notice that it looks pretty much like the iconic yellow ball — that Sun that we all draw when we're children. But you'll notice something else, and that's that the face of the Sun has freckles. These freckles are called sunspots, and they are just one of the manifestations of the Sun's magnetic field. They also cause the light from the star to vary. And we can measure this very, very precisely with Kepler and trace their effects. However, these are just the tip of the iceberg. If we had UV eyes or X-ray eyes, we would really see the dynamic and dramatic effects of our Sun's magnetic activity — the kind of thing that happens on other stars as well. Just think, even when it's cloudy outside, these kind of events are happening in the sky above you all the time. So when we want to learn whether a planet is habitable, whether it might be amenable to life, we want to know not only how much total light it receives and how warm it is, but we want to know about its space weather — this high-energy radiation, the UV and the X-rays that are created by its star and that bathe it in this bath of high-energy radiation. And so, we can't really look at planets around other stars in the same kind of detail that we can look at planets in our own solar system. I'm showing here Venus, Earth and Mars — three planets in our own solar system that are roughly the same size, but only one of which is really a good place to live. But what we can do in the meantime is measure the light from our stars and learn about this relationship between the planets and their parent stars to suss out clues about which planets might be good places to look for life in the universe. Kepler won't find a planet around every single star it looks at. But really, every measurement it makes is precious, because it's teaching us about the relationship between stars and planets, and how it's really the starlight that sets the stage for the formation of life in the universe. While it's Kepler the telescope, the instrument that stares, it's we, life, who are searching. Thank you. (Applause)

The magic of truth and lies (and iPods)

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

TEDGlobal 2011

So the type of magic I like, and I'm a magician, is magic that uses technology to create illusions. So I would like to show you something I've been working on. It's an application that I think will be useful for artists — multimedia artists in particular. It synchronizes videos across multiple screens of mobile devices. I borrowed these three iPods from people here in the audience to show you what I mean. And I'm going to use them to tell you a little bit about my favorite subject: deception. (Music) One of my favorite magicians is Karl Germain. He had this wonderful trick where a rosebush would bloom right in front of your eyes. But it was his production of a butterfly that was the most beautiful. (Recording) Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the creation of life. (Applause) (Music) Marco Tempest: When asked about deception, he said this: Announcer: Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you — and he does. MT: I like to think of myself as an honest magician. I use a lot of tricks, which means that sometimes I have to lie to you. Now I feel bad about that. But people lie every day. (Ringing) Hold on. Phone: Hey, where are you? MT: Stuck in traffic. I'll be there soon. You've all done it. (Laughter) (Music) Right: I'll be ready in just a minute, darling. Center: It's just what I've always wanted. Left: You were great. MT: Deception, it's a fundamental part of life. Now polls show that men tell twice as many lies as women — assuming the women they asked told the truth. (Laughing) We deceive to gain advantage and to hide our weaknesses. The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception. Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance. Some people deceive for money. Let's play a game. Three cards, three chances. Announcer: One five will get you 10, 10 will get you 20. Now, where's the lady? Where is the queen? MT: This one? Sorry. You lose. Well, I didn't deceive you. You deceived yourself. Self-deception. That's when we convince ourselves that a lie is the truth. Sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart. Compulsive gamblers are experts at self-deception. (Slot machine) They believe they can win. They forget the times they lose. The brain is very good at forgetting. Bad experiences are quickly forgotten. Bad experiences quickly disappear. Which is why in this vast and lonely cosmos, we are so wonderfully optimistic. Our self-deception becomes a positive illusion — why movies are able to take us onto extraordinary adventures; why we believe Romeo when he says he loves Juliet; and why single notes of music, when played together, become a sonata and conjure up meaning. That's "Clair De lune." Its composer, called Debussy, said that art was the greatest deception of all. Art is a deception that creates real emotions — a lie that creates a truth. And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic. [MAGIC] (Music fades slowly) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Beware conflicts of interest

{0: 'The dismal science of economics is not as firmly grounded in actual behavior as was once supposed. In "Predictably Irrational," Dan Ariely told us why.'}

TED2011

So, I was in the hospital for a long time. And a few years after I left, I went back, and the chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me — said, "Dan, I have a fantastic new treatment for you." I was very excited. I walked with him to his office. And he explained to me that, when I shave, I have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is, but on the right side of my face I was badly burned so I have no hair, and this creates lack of symmetry. And what's the brilliant idea he had? He was going to tattoo little black dots on the right side of my face and make me look very symmetric. It sounded interesting. He asked me to go and shave. Let me tell you, this was a strange way to shave, because I thought about it and I realized that the way I was shaving then would be the way I would shave for the rest of my life — because I had to keep the width the same. When I got back to his office, I wasn't really sure. I said, "Can I see some evidence for this?" So he showed me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots — not very informative. I said, "What happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white? What would happen then?" "Oh, don't worry about it," he said. "We have lasers; we can whiten it out." But I was still concerned, so I said, "You know what, I'm not going to do it." And then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life. This is coming from a Jewish guy, all right, so that means a lot. (Laughter) And he said, "Dan, what's wrong with you? Do you enjoy looking non-symmetric? Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this? Do women feel pity for you and have sex with you more frequently?" None of those happened. And this was very surprising to me, because I've gone through many treatments — there were many treatments I decided not to do — and I never got this guilt trip to this extent. But I decided not to have this treatment. And I went to his deputy and asked him, "What was going on? Where was this guilt trip coming from?" And he explained that they have done this procedure on two patients already, and they need the third patient for a paper they were writing. (Laughter) Now you probably think that this guy's a schmuck. Right, that's what he seems like. But let me give you a different perspective on the same story. A few years ago, I was running some of my own experiments in the lab. And when we run experiments, we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another. So we had one group that I hoped their performance would be very high, another group that I thought their performance would be very low, and when I got the results, that's what we got — I was very happy — aside from one person. There was one person in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly. And he pulled the whole mean down, destroying my statistical significance of the test. So I looked carefully at this guy. He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample. And I remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to make some easy cash and this was the guy. "Fantastic!" I thought. "Let's throw him out. Who would ever include a drunken guy in a sample?" But a couple of days later, we thought about it with my students, and we said, "What would have happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition? What would have happened if he was in the other group? Would we have thrown him out then?" We probably wouldn't have looked at the data at all, and if we did look at the data, we'd probably have said, "Fantastic! What a smart guy who is performing this low," because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower, giving us even stronger statistical results than we could. So we decided not to throw the guy out and to rerun the experiment. But you know, these stories, and lots of other experiments that we've done on conflicts of interest, basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me. The first one is that in life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces. They just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased. And I'm sure that it's something that we all recognize, and we see that it happens. Maybe we don't recognize it every time, but we understand that it happens. The most difficult thing, of course, is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. And that's a much, much more difficult lesson to take into account. Because we don't see how conflicts of interest work on us. When I was doing these experiments, in my mind, I was helping science. I was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through. I wasn't doing something bad. In my mind, I was actually a knight trying to help science move along. But this was not the case. I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions. And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us, and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it, but to try to do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviors, because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances. I do want to leave you with one positive thought. I mean, this is all very depressing, right — people have conflicts of interest, we don't see it, and so on. The positive perspective, I think, of all of this is that, if we do understand when we go wrong, if we understand the deep mechanisms of why we fail and where we fail, we can actually hope to fix things. And that, I think, is the hope. Thank you very much. (Applause)

DNA clues to our inner neanderthal

{0: 'Svante Pääbo explores human genetic evolution by analyzing DNA extracted from ancient sources, including mummies, an Ice Age hunter and the bone fragments of Neanderthals.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

What I want to talk to you about is what we can learn from studying the genomes of living people and extinct humans. But before doing that, I just briefly want to remind you about what you already know: that our genomes, our genetic material, are stored in almost all cells in our bodies in chromosomes in the form of DNA, which is this famous double-helical molecule. And the genetic information is contained in the form of a sequence of four bases abbreviated with the letters A, T, C and G. And the information is there twice — one on each strand — which is important, because when new cells are formed, these strands come apart, new strands are synthesized with the old ones as templates in an almost perfect process. But nothing, of course, in nature is totally perfect, so sometimes an error is made and a wrong letter is built in. And we can then see the result of such mutations when we compare DNA sequences among us here in the room, for example. If we compare my genome to the genome of you, approximately every 1,200, 1,300 letters will differ between us. And these mutations accumulate approximately as a function of time. So if we add in a chimpanzee here, we will see more differences. Approximately one letter in a hundred will differ from a chimpanzee. And if you're then interested in the history of a piece of DNA, or the whole genome, you can reconstruct the history of the DNA with those differences you observe. And generally we depict our ideas about this history in the form of trees like this. In this case, it's very simple. The two human DNA sequences go back to a common ancestor quite recently. Farther back is there one shared with chimpanzees. And because these mutations happen approximately as a function of time, you can transform these differences to estimates of time, where the two humans, typically, will share a common ancestor about half a million years ago, and with the chimpanzees, it will be in the order of five million years ago. So what has now happened in the last few years is that there are account technologies around that allow you to see many, many pieces of DNA very quickly. So we can now, in a matter of hours, determine a whole human genome. Each of us, of course, contains two human genomes — one from our mothers and one from our fathers. And they are around three billion such letters long. And we will find that the two genomes in me, or one genome of mine we want to use, will have about three million differences in the order of that. And what you can then also begin to do is to say, "How are these genetic differences distributed across the world?" And if you do that, you find a certain amount of genetic variation in Africa. And if you look outside Africa, you actually find less genetic variation. This is surprising, of course, because in the order of six to eight times fewer people live in Africa than outside Africa. Yet the people inside Africa have more genetic variation. Moreover, almost all these genetic variants we see outside Africa have closely related DNA sequences that you find inside Africa. But if you look in Africa, there is a component of the genetic variation that has no close relatives outside. So a model to explain this is that a part of the African variation, but not all of it, [has] gone out and colonized the rest of the world. And together with the methods to date these genetic differences, this has led to the insight that modern humans — humans that are essentially indistinguishable from you and me — evolved in Africa, quite recently, between 100 and 200,000 years ago. And later, between 100 and 50,000 years ago or so, went out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world. So what I often like to say is that, from a genomic perspective, we are all Africans. We either live inside Africa today, or in quite recent exile. Another consequence of this recent origin of modern humans is that genetic variants are generally distributed widely in the world, in many places, and they tend to vary as gradients, from a bird's-eye perspective at least. And since there are many genetic variants, and they have different such gradients, this means that if we determine a DNA sequence — a genome from one individual — we can quite accurately estimate where that person comes from, provided that its parents or grandparents haven't moved around too much. But does this then mean, as many people tend to think, that there are huge genetic differences between groups of people — on different continents, for example? Well we can begin to ask those questions also. There is, for example, a project that's underway to sequence a thousand individuals — their genomes — from different parts of the world. They've sequenced 185 Africans from two populations in Africa. [They've] sequenced approximately equally [as] many people in Europe and in China. And we can begin to say how much variance do we find, how many letters that vary in at least one of those individual sequences. And it's a lot: 38 million variable positions. But we can then ask: Are there any absolute differences between Africans and non-Africans? Perhaps the biggest difference most of us would imagine existed. And with absolute difference — and I mean a difference where people inside Africa at a certain position, where all individuals — 100 percent — have one letter, and everybody outside Africa has another letter. And the answer to that, among those millions of differences, is that there is not a single such position. This may be surprising. Maybe a single individual is misclassified or so. So we can relax the criterion a bit and say: How many positions do we find where 95 percent of people in Africa have one variant, 95 percent another variant, and the number of that is 12. So this is very surprising. It means that when we look at people and see a person from Africa and a person from Europe or Asia, we cannot, for a single position in the genome with 100 percent accuracy, predict what the person would carry. And only for 12 positions can we hope to be 95 percent right. This may be surprising, because we can, of course, look at these people and quite easily say where they or their ancestors came from. So what this means now is that those traits we then look at and so readily see — facial features, skin color, hair structure — are not determined by single genes with big effects, but are determined by many different genetic variants that seem to vary in frequency between different parts of the world. There is another thing with those traits that we so easily observe in each other that I think is worthwhile to consider, and that is that, in a very literal sense, they're really on the surface of our bodies. They are what we just said — facial features, hair structure, skin color. There are also a number of features that vary between continents like that that have to do with how we metabolize food that we ingest, or that have to do with how our immune systems deal with microbes that try to invade our bodies. But so those are all parts of our bodies where we very directly interact with our environment, in a direct confrontation, if you like. It's easy to imagine how particularly those parts of our bodies were quickly influenced by selection from the environment and shifted frequencies of genes that are involved in them. But if we look on other parts of our bodies where we don't directly interact with the environment — our kidneys, our livers, our hearts — there is no way to say, by just looking at these organs, where in the world they would come from. So there's another interesting thing that comes from this realization that humans have a recent common origin in Africa, and that is that when those humans emerged around 100,000 years ago or so, they were not alone on the planet. There were other forms of humans around, most famously perhaps, Neanderthals — these robust forms of humans, compared to the left here with a modern human skeleton on the right — that existed in Western Asia and Europe since several hundreds of thousands of years. So an interesting question is, what happened when we met? What happened to the Neanderthals? And to begin to answer such questions, my research group — since over 25 years now — works on methods to extract DNA from remains of Neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old. So this involves a lot of technical issues in how you extract the DNA, how you convert it to a form you can sequence. You have to work very carefully to avoid contamination of experiments with DNA from yourself. And this then, in conjunction with these methods that allow very many DNA molecules to be sequenced very rapidly, allowed us last year to present the first version of the Neanderthal genome, so that any one of you can now look on the Internet, on the Neanderthal genome, or at least on the 55 percent of it that we've been able to reconstruct so far. And you can begin to compare it to the genomes of people who live today. And one question that you may then want to ask is, what happened when we met? Did we mix or not? And the way to ask that question is to look at the Neanderthal that comes from Southern Europe and compare it to genomes of people who live today. So we then look to do this with pairs of individuals, starting with two Africans, looking at the two African genomes, finding places where they differ from each other, and in each case ask: What is a Neanderthal like? Does it match one African or the other African? We would expect there to be no difference, because Neanderthals were never in Africa. They should be equal, have no reason to be closer to one African than another African. And that's indeed the case. Statistically speaking, there is no difference in how often the Neanderthal matches one African or the other. But this is different if we now look at the European individual and an African. Then, significantly more often, does a Neanderthal match the European rather than the African. The same is true if we look at a Chinese individual versus an African, the Neanderthal will match the Chinese individual more often. This may also be surprising because the Neanderthals were never in China. So the model we've proposed to explain this is that when modern humans came out of Africa sometime after 100,000 years ago, they met Neanderthals. Presumably, they did so first in the Middle East, where there were Neanderthals living. If they then mixed with each other there, then those modern humans that became the ancestors of everyone outside Africa carried with them this Neanderthal component in their genome to the rest of the world. So that today, the people living outside Africa have about two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals. So having now a Neanderthal genome on hand as a reference point and having the technologies to look at ancient remains and extract the DNA, we can begin to apply them elsewhere in the world. And the first place we've done that is in Southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains at a place called Denisova, a cave site in this mountain here, where archeologists in 2008 found a tiny little piece of bone — this is a copy of it — that they realized came from the last phalanx of a little finger of a pinky of a human. And it was well enough preserved so we could determine the DNA from this individual, even to a greater extent than for the Neanderthals actually, and start relating it to the Neanderthal genome and to people today. And we found that this individual shared a common origin for his DNA sequences with Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago. And further back, 800,000 years ago is there a common origin with present day humans. So this individual comes from a population that shares an origin with Neanderthals, but far back and then have a long independent history. We call this group of humans, that we then described for the first time from this tiny, tiny little piece of bone, the Denisovans, after this place where they were first described. So we can then ask for Denisovans the same things as for the Neanderthals: Did they mix with ancestors of present day people? If we ask that question, and compare the Denisovan genome to people around the world, we surprisingly find no evidence of Denisovan DNA in any people living even close to Siberia today. But we do find it in Papua New Guinea and in other islands in Melanesia and the Pacific. So this presumably means that these Denisovans had been more widespread in the past, since we don't think that the ancestors of Melanesians were ever in Siberia. So from studying these genomes of extinct humans, we're beginning to arrive at a picture of what the world looked like when modern humans started coming out of Africa. In the West, there were Neanderthals; in the East, there were Denisovans — maybe other forms of humans too that we've not yet described. We don't know quite where the borders between these people were, but we know that in Southern Siberia, there were both Neanderthals and Denisovans at least at some time in the past. Then modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa, came out of Africa, presumably in the Middle East. They meet Neanderthals, mix with them, continue to spread over the world, and somewhere in Southeast Asia, they meet Denisovans and mix with them and continue on out into the Pacific. And then these earlier forms of humans disappear, but they live on a little bit today in some of us — in that people outside of Africa have two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals, and people in Melanesia actually have an additional five percent approximately from the Denisovans. Does this then mean that there is after all some absolute difference between people outside Africa and inside Africa in that people outside Africa have this old component in their genome from these extinct forms of humans, whereas Africans do not? Well I don't think that is the case. Presumably, modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa. They spread across Africa also, of course, and there were older, earlier forms of humans there. And since we mixed elsewhere, I'm pretty sure that one day, when we will perhaps have a genome of also these earlier forms in Africa, we will find that they have also mixed with early modern humans in Africa. So to sum up, what have we learned from studying genomes of present day humans and extinct humans? We learn perhaps many things, but one thing that I find sort of important to mention is that I think the lesson is that we have always mixed. We mixed with these earlier forms of humans, wherever we met them, and we mixed with each other ever since. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)

Pay attention to nonviolence

{0: 'Julia Bacha is the creative director at Just Vision, an organization that uses film and multimedia storytelling to foster constructive conversations on some of the most divisive issues of our times.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

I'm a filmmaker. For the last 8 years, I have dedicated my life to documenting the work of Israelis and Palestinians who are trying to end the conflict using peaceful means. When I travel with my work across Europe and the United States, one question always comes up: Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Why aren't Palestinians using nonviolent resistance? The challenge I face when I hear this question is that often I have just returned from the Middle East where I spent my time filming dozens of Palestinians who are using nonviolence to defend their lands and water resources from Israeli soldiers and settlers. These leaders are trying to forge a massive national nonviolent movement to end the occupation and build peace in the region. Yet, most of you have probably never heard about them. This divide between what's happening on the ground and perceptions abroad is one of the key reasons why we don't have yet a Palestinian peaceful resistance movement that has been successful. So I'm here today to talk about the power of attention, the power of your attention, and the emergence and development of nonviolent movements in the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere — but today, my case study is going to be Palestine. I believe that what's mostly missing for nonviolence to grow is not for Palestinians to start adopting nonviolence, but for us to start paying attention to those who already are. Allow me to illustrate this point by taking you to this village called Budrus. About seven years ago, they faced extinction, because Israel announced it would build a separation barrier, and part of this barrier would be built on top of the village. They would lose 40 percent of their land and be surrounded, so they would lose free access to the rest of the West Bank. Through inspired local leadership, they launched a peaceful resistance campaign to stop that from happening. Let me show you some brief clips, so you have a sense for what that actually looked like on the ground. (Music) Palestinian Woman: We were told the wall would separate Palestine from Israel. Here in Budrus, we realized the wall would steal our land. Israeli Man: The fence has, in fact, created a solution to terror. Man: Today you're invited to a peaceful march. You are joined by dozens of your Israeli brothers and sisters. Israeli Activist: Nothing scares the army more than nonviolent opposition. Woman: We saw the men trying to push the soldiers, but none of them could do that. But I think the girls could do it. Fatah Party Member: We must empty our minds of traditional thinking. Hamas Party Member: We were in complete harmony, and we wanted to spread it to all of Palestine. Chanting: One united nation. Fatah, Hamas and the Popular Front! News Anchor: The clashes over the fence continue. Reporter: Israeli border police were sent to disperse the crowd. They were allowed to use any force necessary. (Gunshots) Man: These are live bullets. It's like Fallujah. Shooting everywhere. Israeli Activist: I was sure we were all going to die. But there were others around me who weren't even cowering. Israeli Soldier: A nonviolent protest is not going to stop the [unclear]. Protester: This is a peaceful march. There is no need to use violence. Chanting: We can do it! We can do it! We can do it! Julia Bacha: When I first heard about the story of Budrus, I was surprised that the international media had failed to cover the extraordinary set of events that happened seven years ago, in 2003. What was even more surprising was the fact that Budrus was successful. The residents, after 10 months of peaceful resistance, convinced the Israeli government to move the route of the barrier off their lands and to the green line, which is the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The resistance in Budrus has since spread to villages across the West Bank and to Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Yet the media remains mostly silent on these stories. This silence carries profound consequences for the likelihood that nonviolence can grow, or even survive, in Palestine. Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common; they are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause. If violent actors are the only ones constantly getting front-page covers and attracting international attention to the Palestinian issue, it becomes very hard for nonviolent leaders to make the case to their communities that civil disobedience is a viable option in addressing their plight. The power of attention is probably going to come as no surprise to the parents in the room. The surest way to make your child throw increasingly louder tantrums is by giving him attention the first time he throws a fit. The tantrum will become what childhood psychologists call a functional behavior, since the child has learned that he can get parental attention out of it. Parents can incentivize or disincentivize behavior simply by giving or withdrawing attention to their children. But that's true for adults too. In fact, the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced, depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention. I believe that at the core of ending the conflict in the Middle East and bringing peace is for us to transform nonviolence into a functional behavior by giving a lot more attention to the nonviolent leaders on the ground today. In the course of taking my film to villages in the West Bank, in Gaza and in East Jerusalem, I have seen the impact that even one documentary film can have in influencing the transformation. In a village called Wallajeh, which sits very close to Jerusalem, the community was facing a very similar plight to Budrus. They were going to be surrounded, lose a lot of their lands and not have freedom of access, either to the West Bank or Jerusalem. They had been using nonviolence for about two years but had grown disenchanted since nobody was paying attention. So we organized a screening. A week later, they held the most well-attended and disciplined demonstration to date. The organizers say that the villagers, upon seeing the story of Budrus documented in a film, felt that there were indeed people following what they were doing, that people cared. So they kept on going. On the Israeli side, there is a new peace movement called Solidariot, which means solidarity in Hebrew. The leaders of this movement have been using Budrus as one of their primary recruiting tools. They report that Israelis who had never been active before, upon seeing the film, understand the power of nonviolence and start joining their activities. The examples of Wallajeh and the Solidariot movement show that even a small-budget independent film can play a role in transforming nonviolence into a functional behavior. Now imagine the power that big media players could have if they started covering the weekly nonviolent demonstrations happening in villages like Bil'in, Ni'lin, Wallajeh, in Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan — the nonviolent leaders would become more visible, valued and effective in their work. I believe that the most important thing is to understand that if we don't pay attention to these efforts, they are invisible, and it's as if they never happened. But I have seen first hand that if we do, they will multiply. If they multiply, their influence will grow in the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And theirs is the kind of influence that can finally unblock the situation. These leaders have proven that nonviolence works in places like Budrus. Let's give them attention so they can prove it works everywhere. Thank you. (Applause)

Can we make things that make themselves?

TED2011

Today I'd like to show you the future of the way we make things. I believe that soon our buildings and machines will be self-assembling, replicating and repairing themselves. So I'm going to show you what I believe is the current state of manufacturing, and then compare that to some natural systems. So in the current state of manufacturing, we have skyscrapers — two and a half years [of assembly time], 500,000 to a million parts, fairly complex, new, exciting technologies in steel, concrete, glass. We have exciting machines that can take us into space — five years [of assembly time], 2.5 million parts. But on the other side, if you look at the natural systems, we have proteins that have two million types, can fold in 10,000 nanoseconds, or DNA with three billion base pairs we can replicate in roughly an hour. So there's all of this complexity in our natural systems, but they're extremely efficient, far more efficient than anything we can build, far more complex than anything we can build. They're far more efficient in terms of energy. They hardly ever make mistakes. And they can repair themselves for longevity. So there's something super interesting about natural systems. And if we can translate that into our built environment, then there's some exciting potential for the way that we build things. And I think the key to that is self-assembly. So if we want to utilize self-assembly in our physical environment, I think there's four key factors. The first is that we need to decode all of the complexity of what we want to build — so our buildings and machines. And we need to decode that into simple sequences — basically the DNA of how our buildings work. Then we need programmable parts that can take that sequence and use that to fold up, or reconfigure. We need some energy that's going to allow that to activate, allow our parts to be able to fold up from the program. And we need some type of error correction redundancy to guarantee that we have successfully built what we want. So I'm going to show you a number of projects that my colleagues and I at MIT are working on to achieve this self-assembling future. The first two are the MacroBot and DeciBot. So these projects are large-scale reconfigurable robots — 8 ft., 12 ft. long proteins. They're embedded with mechanical electrical devices, sensors. You decode what you want to fold up into, into a sequence of angles — so negative 120, negative 120, 0, 0, 120, negative 120 — something like that; so a sequence of angles, or turns, and you send that sequence through the string. Each unit takes its message — so negative 120 — it rotates to that, checks if it got there and then passes it to its neighbor. So these are the brilliant scientists, engineers, designers that worked on this project. And I think it really brings to light: Is this really scalable? I mean, thousands of dollars, lots of man hours made to make this eight-foot robot. Can we really scale this up? Can we really embed robotics into every part? The next one questions that and looks at passive nature, or passively trying to have reconfiguration programmability. But it goes a step further, and it tries to have actual computation. It basically embeds the most fundamental building block of computing, the digital logic gate, directly into your parts. So this is a NAND gate. You have one tetrahedron which is the gate that's going to do your computing, and you have two input tetrahedrons. One of them is the input from the user, as you're building your bricks. The other one is from the previous brick that was placed. And then it gives you an output in 3D space. So what this means is that the user can start plugging in what they want the bricks to do. It computes on what it was doing before and what you said you wanted it to do. And now it starts moving in three-dimensional space — so up or down. So on the left-hand side, [1,1] input equals 0 output, which goes down. On the right-hand side, [0,0] input is a 1 output, which goes up. And so what that really means is that our structures now contain the blueprints of what we want to build. So they have all of the information embedded in them of what was constructed. So that means that we can have some form of self-replication. In this case I call it self-guided replication, because your structure contains the exact blueprints. If you have errors, you can replace a part. All the local information is embedded to tell you how to fix it. So you could have something that climbs along and reads it and can output at one to one. It's directly embedded; there's no external instructions. So the last project I'll show is called Biased Chains, and it's probably the most exciting example that we have right now of passive self-assembly systems. So it takes the reconfigurability and programmability and makes it a completely passive system. So basically you have a chain of elements. Each element is completely identical, and they're biased. So each chain, or each element, wants to turn right or left. So as you assemble the chain, you're basically programming it. You're telling each unit if it should turn right or left. So when you shake the chain, it then folds up into any configuration that you've programmed in — so in this case, a spiral, or in this case, two cubes next to each other. So you can basically program any three-dimensional shape — or one-dimensional, two-dimensional — up into this chain completely passively. So what does this tell us about the future? I think that it's telling us that there's new possibilities for self-assembly, replication, repair in our physical structures, our buildings, machines. There's new programmability in these parts. And from that you have new possibilities for computing. We'll have spatial computing. Imagine if our buildings, our bridges, machines, all of our bricks could actually compute. That's amazing parallel and distributed computing power, new design possibilities. So it's exciting potential for this. So I think these projects I've showed here are just a tiny step towards this future, if we implement these new technologies for a new self-assembling world. Thank you. (Applause)

Compassion and the true meaning of empathy

{0: 'Known for her compassionate work with the terminally ill, Joan Halifax is a driving force of socially engaged Buddhism.'}

TEDWomen 2010

I want to address the issue of compassion. Compassion has many faces. Some of them are fierce; some of them are wrathful; some of them are tender; some of them are wise. A line that the Dalai Lama once said, he said, "Love and compassion are necessities. They are not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive." And I would suggest, it is not only humanity that won't survive, but it is all species on the planet, as we've heard today. It is the big cats, and it's the plankton. Two weeks ago, I was in Bangalore in India. I was so privileged to be able to teach in a hospice on the outskirts of Bangalore. And early in the morning, I went into the ward. In that hospice, there were 31 men and women who were actively dying. And I walked up to the bedside of an old woman who was breathing very rapidly, fragile, obviously in the latter phase of active dying. I looked into her face. I looked into the face of her son sitting next to her, and his face was just riven with grief and confusion. And I remembered a line from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic: "What is the most wondrous thing in the world, Yudhisthira?" And Yudhisthira replied, "The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we don't realize it can happen to us." I looked up. Tending those 31 dying people were young women from villages around Bangalore. I looked into the face of one of these women, and I saw in her face the strength that arises when natural compassion is really present. I watched her hands as she bathed an old man. My gaze went to another young woman as she wiped the face of another dying person. And it reminded me of something that I had just been present for. Every year or so, I have the privilege of taking clinicians into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. And we run clinics in these very remote regions where there's no medical care whatsoever. And on the first day at Simikot in Humla, far west of Nepal, the most impoverished region of Nepal, an old man came in clutching a bundle of rags. And he walked in, and somebody said something to him, we realized he was deaf, and we looked into the rags, and there was this pair of eyes. The rags were unwrapped from a little girl whose body was massively burned. Again, the eyes and hands of Avalokiteshvara. It was the young women, the health aids, who cleaned the wounds of this baby and dressed the wounds. I know those hands and eyes; they touched me as well. They touched me at that time. They have touched me throughout my 68 years. They touched me when I was four and I lost my eyesight and was partially paralyzed. And my family brought in a woman whose mother had been a slave to take care of me. And that woman did not have sentimental compassion. She had phenomenal strength. And it was really her strength, I believe, that became the kind of mudra and imprimatur that has been a guiding light in my life. So we can ask: What is compassion comprised of? And there are various facets. And there's referential and non-referential compassion. But first, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering. It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that I'm not separate from this suffering. But that is not enough, because compassion, which activates the motor cortex, means that we aspire, we actually aspire to transform suffering. And if we're so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering. But compassion has another component, and that component is really essential. That component is that we cannot be attached to outcome. Now I worked with dying people for over 40 years. I had the privilege of working on death row in a maximum security [prison] for six years. And I realized so clearly in bringing my own life experience, from working with dying people and training caregivers, that any attachment to outcome would distort deeply my own capacity to be fully present to the whole catastrophe. And when I worked in the prison system, it was so clear to me, this: that many of us in this room, and almost all of the men that I worked with on death row, the seeds of their own compassion had never been watered. That compassion is actually an inherent human quality. It is there within every human being. But the conditions for compassion to be activated, to be aroused, are particular conditions. I had that condition, to a certain extent, from my own childhood illness. Eve Ensler, whom you'll hear later, has had that condition activated amazingly in her through the various waters of suffering that she has been through. And what is fascinating is that compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear. And you know, we have a society, a world, that is paralyzed by fear. And in that paralysis, of course, our capacity for compassion is also paralyzed. The very word terror is global. The very feeling of terror is global. So our work, in a certain way, is to address this imago, this kind of archetype that has pervaded the psyche of our entire globe. Now we know from neuroscience that compassion has some very extraordinary qualities. For example: A person who is cultivating compassion, when they are in the presence of suffering, they feel that suffering a lot more than many other people do. However, they return to baseline a lot sooner. This is called resilience. Many of us think that compassion drains us, but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us. Another thing about compassion is that it really enhances what's called neural integration. It hooks up all parts of the brain. Another, which has been discovered by various researchers at Emory and at Davis and so on, is that compassion enhances our immune system. Hey, we live in a very noxious world. (Laughter) Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity. You know, if compassion is so good for us, I have a question. Why don't we train our children in compassion? (Applause) If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to really transform suffering? And if compassion is so good for us, why don't we vote on compassion? Why don't we vote for people in our government based on compassion, so that we can have a more caring world? In Buddhism, we say, "it takes a strong back and a soft front." It takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions. And that is the mental quality of equanimity. But it also takes a soft front — the capacity to really be open to the world as it is, to have an undefended heart. And the archetype of this in Buddhism is Avalokiteshvara, Kuan-Yin. It's a female archetype: she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world. She stands with 10,000 arms, and in every hand, there is an instrument of liberation, and in the palm of every hand, there are eyes, and these are the eyes of wisdom. I say that, for thousands of years, women have lived, exemplified, met in intimacy, the archetype of Avalokitesvara, of Kuan-Yin, she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world. Women have manifested for thousands of years the strength arising from compassion in an unfiltered, unmediated way in perceiving suffering as it is. They have infused societies with kindness, and we have really felt that as woman after woman has stood on this stage in the past day and a half. And they have actualized compassion through direct action. Jody Williams called it: It's good to meditate. I'm sorry, you've got to do a little bit of that, Jody. Step back, give your mother a break, okay. (Laughter) But the other side of the equation is you've got to come out of your cave. You have to come into the world like Asanga did, who was looking to realize Maitreya Buddha after 12 years sitting in the cave. He said, "I'm out of here." He's going down the path. He sees something in the path. He looks, it's a dog, he drops to his knees. He sees that the dog has this big wound on its leg. The wound is just filled with maggots. He puts out his tongue in order to remove the maggots, so as not to harm them. And at that moment, the dog transformed into the Buddha of love and kindness. I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men — with their fathers, with their sons, with their brothers, with the plumbers, the road builders, the caregivers, the doctors, the lawyers, with our president, and with all beings. The women in this room are lotuses in a sea of fire. May we actualize that capacity for women everywhere. Thank you. (Applause)

Unintended consequences

{0: 'Edward Tenner is an independent writer, speaker and editor who analyzes the cultural aspects of technological change.'}

TED2011

I didn't always love unintended consequences, but I've really learned to appreciate them. I've learned that they're really the essence of what makes for progress, even when they seem to be terrible. And I'd like to review just how unintended consequences play the part that they do. Let's go to 40,000 years before the present, to the time of the cultural explosion, when music, art, technology, so many of the things that we're enjoying today, so many of the things that are being demonstrated at TED were born. And the anthropologist Randall White has made a very interesting observation: that if our ancestors 40,000 years ago had been able to see what they had done, they wouldn't have really understood it. They were responding to immediate concerns. They were making it possible for us to do what they do, and yet, they didn't really understand how they did it. Now let's advance to 10,000 years before the present. And this is when it really gets interesting. What about the domestication of grains? What about the origins of agriculture? What would our ancestors 10,000 years ago have said if they really had technology assessment? And I could just imagine the committees reporting back to them on where agriculture was going to take humanity, at least in the next few hundred years. It was really bad news. First of all, worse nutrition, maybe shorter life spans. It was simply awful for women. The skeletal remains from that period have shown that they were grinding grain morning, noon and night. And politically, it was awful. It was the beginning of a much higher degree of inequality among people. If there had been rational technology assessment then, I think they very well might have said, "Let's call the whole thing off." Even now, our choices are having unintended effects. Historically, for example, chopsticks — according to one Japanese anthropologist who wrote a dissertation about it at the University of Michigan — resulted in long-term changes in the dentition, in the teeth, of the Japanese public. And we are also changing our teeth right now. There is evidence that the human mouth and teeth are growing smaller all the time. That's not necessarily a bad unintended consequence. But I think from the point of view of a Neanderthal, there would have been a lot of disapproval of the wimpish choppers that we now have. So these things are kind of relative to where you or your ancestors happen to stand. In the ancient world there was a lot of respect for unintended consequences, and there was a very healthy sense of caution, reflected in the Tree of Knowledge, in Pandora's Box, and especially in the myth of Prometheus that's been so important in recent metaphors about technology. And that's all very true. The physicians of the ancient world — especially the Egyptians, who started medicine as we know it — were very conscious of what they could and couldn't treat. And the translations of the surviving texts say, "This I will not treat. This I cannot treat." They were very conscious. So were the followers of Hippocrates. The Hippocratic manuscripts also — repeatedly, according to recent studies — show how important it is not to do harm. More recently, Harvey Cushing, who really developed neurosurgery as we know it, who changed it from a field of medicine that had a majority of deaths resulting from surgery to one in which there was a hopeful outlook, he was very conscious that he was not always going to do the right thing. But he did his best, and he kept meticulous records that let him transform that branch of medicine. Now if we look forward a bit to the 19th century, we find a new style of technology. What we find is, no longer simple tools, but systems. We find more and more complex arrangements of machines that make it harder and harder to diagnose what's going on. And the first people who saw that were the telegraphers of the mid-19th century, who were the original hackers. Thomas Edison would have been very, very comfortable in the atmosphere of a software firm today. And these hackers had a word for those mysterious bugs in telegraph systems that they called bugs. That was the origin of the word "bug." This consciousness, though, was a little slow to seep through the general population, even people who were very, very well informed. Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, was a big investor in the most complex machine of all times — at least until 1918 — registered with the U.S. Patent Office. That was the Paige typesetter. The Paige typesetter had 18,000 parts. The patent had 64 pages of text and 271 figures. It was such a beautiful machine because it did everything that a human being did in setting type — including returning the type to its place, which was a very difficult thing. And Mark Twain, who knew all about typesetting, really was smitten by this machine. Unfortunately, he was smitten in more ways than one, because it made him bankrupt, and he had to tour the world speaking to recoup his money. And this was an important thing about 19th century technology, that all these relationships among parts could make the most brilliant idea fall apart, even when judged by the most expert people. Now there is something else, though, in the early 20th century that made things even more complicated. And that was that safety technology itself could be a source of danger. The lesson of the Titanic, for a lot of the contemporaries, was that you must have enough lifeboats for everyone on the ship. And this was the result of the tragic loss of lives of people who could not get into them. However, there was another case, the Eastland, a ship that capsized in Chicago Harbor in 1915, and it killed 841 people — that was 14 more than the passenger toll of the Titanic. The reason for it, in part, was the extra life boats that were added that made this already unstable ship even more unstable. And that again proves that when you're talking about unintended consequences, it's not that easy to know the right lessons to draw. It's really a question of the system, how the ship was loaded, the ballast and many other things. So the 20th century, then, saw how much more complex reality was, but it also saw a positive side. It saw that invention could actually benefit from emergencies. It could benefit from tragedies. And my favorite example of that — which is not really widely known as a technological miracle, but it may be one of the greatest of all times, was the scaling up of penicillin in the Second World War. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but even by 1940, no commercially and medically useful quantities of it were being produced. A number of pharmaceutical companies were working on it. They were working on it independently, and they weren't getting anywhere. And the Government Research Bureau brought representatives together and told them that this is something that has to be done. And not only did they do it, but within two years, they scaled up penicillin from preparation in one-liter flasks to 10,000-gallon vats. That was how quickly penicillin was produced and became one of the greatest medical advances of all time. In the Second World War, too, the existence of solar radiation was demonstrated by studies of interference that was detected by the radar stations of Great Britain. So there were benefits in calamities — benefits to pure science, as well as to applied science and medicine. Now when we come to the period after the Second World War, unintended consequences get even more interesting. And my favorite example of that occurred beginning in 1976, when it was discovered that the bacteria causing Legionnaires disease had always been present in natural waters, but it was the precise temperature of the water in heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems that raised the right temperature for the maximum reproduction of Legionella bacillus. Well, technology to the rescue. So chemists got to work, and they developed a bactericide that became widely used in those systems. But something else happened in the early 1980s, and that was that there was a mysterious epidemic of failures of tape drives all over the United States. And IBM, which made them, just didn't know what to do. They commissioned a group of their best scientists to investigate, and what they found was that all these tape drives were located near ventilation ducts. What happened was the bactericide was formulated with minute traces of tin. And these tin particles were deposited on the tape heads and were crashing the tape heads. So they reformulated the bactericide. But what's interesting to me is that this was the first case of a mechanical device suffering, at least indirectly, from a human disease. So it shows that we're really all in this together. (Laughter) In fact, it also shows something interesting, that although our capabilities and technology have been expanding geometrically, unfortunately, our ability to model their long-term behavior, which has also been increasing, has been increasing only arithmetically. So one of the characteristic problems of our time is how to close this gap between capabilities and foresight. One other very positive consequence of 20th century technology, though, was the way in which other kinds of calamities could lead to positive advances. There are two historians of business at the University of Maryland, Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch, who have done some extremely interesting work, much of it still unpublished, on the history of major innovations. They have combined the list of major innovations, and they've discovered that the greatest number, the greatest decade, for fundamental innovations, as reflected in all of the lists that others have made — a number of lists that they have merged — was the Great Depression. And nobody knows just why this was so, but one story can reflect something of it. It was the origin of the Xerox copier, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. And Chester Carlson, the inventor, was a patent attorney. He really was not intending to work in patent research, but he couldn't really find an alternative technical job. So this was the best job he could get. He was upset by the low quality and high cost of existing patent reproductions, and so he started to develop a system of dry photocopying, which he patented in the late 1930s — and which became the first dry photocopier that was commercially practical in 1960. So we see that sometimes, as a result of these dislocations, as a result of people leaving their original intended career and going into something else where their creativity could make a difference, that depressions and all kinds of other unfortunate events can have a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity. What does this mean? It means, I think, that we're living in a time of unexpected possibilities. Think of the financial world, for example. The mentor of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, developed his system of value investing as a result of his own losses in the 1929 crash. And he published that book in the early 1930s, and the book still exists in further editions and is still a fundamental textbook. So many important creative things can happen when people learn from disasters. Now think of the large and small plagues that we have now — bed bugs, killer bees, spam — and it's very possible that the solutions to those will really extend well beyond the immediate question. If we think, for example, of Louis Pasteur, who in the 1860s was asked to study the diseases of silk worms for the silk industry, and his discoveries were really the beginning of the germ theory of disease. So very often, some kind of disaster — sometimes the consequence, for example, of over-cultivation of silk worms, which was a problem in Europe at the time — can be the key to something much bigger. So this means that we need to take a different view of unintended consequences. We need to take a really positive view. We need to see what they can do for us. We need to learn from those figures that I mentioned. We need to learn, for example, from Dr. Cushing, who killed patients in the course of his early operations. He had to have some errors. He had to have some mistakes. And he learned meticulously from his mistakes. And as a result, when we say, "This isn't brain surgery," that pays tribute to how difficult it was for anyone to learn from their mistakes in a field of medicine that was considered so discouraging in its prospects. And we can also remember how the pharmaceutical companies were willing to pool their knowledge, to share their knowledge, in the face of an emergency, which they hadn't really been for years and years. They might have been able to do it earlier. The message, then, for me, about unintended consequences is chaos happens; let's make better use of it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

My father the forger

{0: 'Sarah Kaminsky writes about her father, Adolfo Kaminsky, a forger with a mission.'}

TEDxParis 2010

I am the daughter of a forger, not just any forger ... When you hear the word "forger," you often understand "mercenary." You understand "forged currency," "forged pictures." My father is no such man. For 30 years of his life, he made false papers — never for himself, always for other people, and to come to the aid of the persecuted and the oppressed. Let me introduce him. Here is my father at age 19. It all began for him during World War II, when at age 17 he found himself thrust into a forged documents workshop. He quickly became the false papers expert of the Resistance. And it's not a banal story — after the liberation he continued to make false papers until the '70s. When I was a child I knew nothing about this, of course. This is me in the middle making faces. I grew up in the Paris suburbs and I was the youngest of three children. I had a "normal" dad like everybody else, apart from the fact that he was 30 years older than ... well, he was basically old enough to be my grandfather. Anyway, he was a photographer and a street educator, and he always taught us to obey the law very strictly. And, of course, he never talked about his past life when he was a forger. There was, however, an incident I'm going to tell you about, that perhaps could have led me suspect something. I was in high school and got a bad grade, a rare event for me, so I decided to hide it from my parents. In order to do that, I set out to forge their signature. I started working on my mother's signature, because my father's is absolutely impossible to forge. So, I got working. I took some sheets of paper and started practicing, practicing, practicing, until I reached what I thought was a steady hand, and went into action. Later, while checking my school bag, my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged. She yelled at me like she never had before. I went to hide in my bedroom, under the blankets, and then I waited for my father to come back from work with, one could say, much apprehension. I heard him come in. I remained under the blankets. He entered my room, sat on the corner of the bed, and he was silent, so I pulled the blanket from my head, and when he saw me he started laughing. He was laughing so hard, he could not stop and he was holding my assignment in his hand. Then he said, "But really, Sarah, you could have worked harder! Can't you see it's really too small?" Indeed, it's rather small. I was born in Algeria. There I would hear people say my father was a "moudjahid" and that means "fighter." Later on, in France, I loved eavesdropping on grownups' conversations, and I would hear all sorts of stories about my father's previous life, especially that he had "done" World War II, that he had "done" the Algerian war. And in my head I would be thinking that "doing" a war meant being a soldier. But knowing my father, and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent, I found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun. And indeed, I was very far from the mark. One day, while my father was working on a file for us to obtain French nationality, I happened to see some documents that caught my attention. These are real! These are mine, I was born an Argentinean. But the document I happened to see that would help us build a case for the authorities was a document from the army that thanked my father for his work on behalf of the secret services. And then, suddenly, I went "wow!" My father, a secret agent? It was very James Bond. I wanted to ask him questions, which he didn't answer. And later, I told myself that one day I would have to question him. And then I became a mother and had a son, and finally decided it was time — that he absolutely had to talk to us. I had become a mother and he was celebrating his 77th birthday, and suddenly I was very, very afraid. I feared he'd go and take his silences with him, and take his secrets with him. I managed to convince him that it was important for us, but possibly also for other people that he shared his story. He decided to tell it to me and I made a book, from which I'm going to read you some excerpts later. So, his story. My father was born in Argentina. His parents were of Russian descent. The whole family came to settle in France in the '30s. His parents were Jewish, Russian and above all, very poor. So at the age of 14 my father had to work. And with his only diploma, his primary education certificate, he found himself working at a dyer - dry cleaner. That's where he discovered something totally magical, and when he talks about it, it's fascinating — it's the magic of dyeing chemistry. During that time the war was happening and his mother was killed when he was 15. This coincided with the time when he threw himself body and soul into chemistry because it was the only consolation for his sadness. All day he would ask many questions to his boss to learn, to accumulate more and more knowledge, and at night, when no one was looking, he'd put his experience to practice. He was mostly interested in ink bleaching. All this to tell you that if my father became a forger, actually, it was almost by accident. His family was Jewish, so they were hounded. Finally they were all arrested and taken to the Drancy camp and they managed to get out at the last minute thanks to their Argentinean papers. Well, they were out, but they were always in danger. The big "Jew" stamp was still on their papers. It was my grandfather who decided they needed false documents. My father had been instilled with such respect for the law that although he was being persecuted, he'd never thought of false papers. But it was he who went to meet a man from the Resistance. In those times documents had hard covers, they were filled in by hand, and they stated your job. In order to survive, he needed to be working. He asked the man to write "dyer." Suddenly the man looked very, very interested. As a "dyer," do you know how to bleach ink marks? Of course he knew. And suddenly the man started explaining that actually the whole Resistance had a huge problem: even the top experts could not manage to bleach an ink, called "indelible," the "Waterman" blue ink. And my father immediately replied that he knew exactly how to bleach it. Now, of course, the man was very impressed with this young man of 17 who could immediately give him the formula, so he recruited him. And actually, without knowing it, my father had invented something we can find in every schoolchild's pencil case: the so-called "correction pen." (Applause) But it was only the beginning. That's my father. As soon as he got to the lab, even though he was the youngest, he immediately saw that there was a problem with the making of forged documents. All the movements stopped at falsifying. But demand was ever-growing and it was difficult to tamper with existing documents. He told himself it was necessary to make them from scratch. He started a press. He started photoengraving. He started making rubber stamps. He started inventing all kind of things — with some materials he invented a centrifuge using a bicycle wheel. Anyway, he had to do all this because he was completely obsessed with output. He had made a simple calculation: In one hour he could make 30 forged documents. If he slept one hour, 30 people would die. This sense of responsibility for other people's lives when he was just 17 — and also his guilt for being a survivor, since he had escaped the camp when his friends had not — stayed with him all his life. And this is maybe what explains why, for 30 years, he continued to make false papers at the expense of all kinds of sacrifices. I'd like to talk about those sacrifices, because there were many. There were obviously financial sacrifices because he always refused to be paid. To him, being paid would have meant being a mercenary. If he had accepted payment, he wouldn't be able to say "yes" or "no" depending on what he deemed a just or unjust cause. So he was a photographer by day, and a forger by night for 30 years. He was broke all of the time. Then there were the emotional sacrifices: How can one live with a woman while having so many secrets? How can one explain what one does at night in the lab, every single night? Of course, there was another kind of sacrifice involving his family that I understood much later. One day my father introduced me to my sister. He also explained to me that I had a brother, too, and the first time I saw them I must have been three or four, and they were 30 years older than me. They are both in their sixties now. In order to write the book, I asked my sister questions. I wanted to know who my father was, who was the father she had known. She explained that the father that she'd had would tell them he'd come and pick them up on Sunday to go for a walk. They would get all dressed up and wait for him, but he would almost never come. He'd say, "I'll call." He wouldn't call. And then he would not come. Then one day he totally disappeared. Time passed, and they thought he had surely forgotten them, at first. Then as time passed, at the end of almost two years, they thought, "Well, perhaps our father has died." And then I understood that asking my father so many questions was stirring up a whole past he probably didn't feel like talking about because it was painful. And while my half brother and sister thought they'd been abandoned, orphaned, my father was making false papers. And if he did not tell them, it was of course to protect them. After the liberation he made false papers to allow the survivors of concentration camps to immigrate to Palestine before the creation of Israel. And then, as he was a staunch anti-colonialist, he made false papers for Algerians during the Algerian war. After the Algerian war, at the heart of the international resistance movements, his name circulated and the whole world came knocking at his door. In Africa there were countries fighting for their independence: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Angola. And then my father connected with Nelson Mandela's anti-apartheid party. He made false papers for persecuted black South Africans. There was also Latin America. My father helped those who resisted dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and then it was the turn of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico. Then there was the Vietnam War. My father made false papers for the American deserters who did not wish to take up arms against the Vietnamese. Europe was not spared either. My father made false papers for the dissidents against Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, against the colonels' dictatorship in Greece, and even in France. There, just once, it happened in May of 1968. My father watched, benevolently, of course, the demonstrations of the month of May, but his heart was elsewhere, and so was his time because he had over 15 countries to serve. Once, though, he agreed to make false papers for someone you might recognize. (Laughter) He was much younger in those days, and my father agreed to make false papers to enable him to come back and speak at a meeting. He told me that those false papers were the most media-relevant and the least useful he'd had to make in all his life. But, he agreed to do it, even though Daniel Cohn-Bendit's life was not in danger, just because it was a good opportunity to mock the authorities, and to show them that there's nothing more porous than borders — and that ideas have no borders. All my childhood, while my friends' dads would tell them Grimm's fairy tales, my father would tell me stories about very unassuming heroes with unshakeable utopias who managed to make miracles. And those heroes did not need an army behind them. Anyhow, nobody would have followed them, except for a handful [of] men and women of conviction and courage. I understood much later that actually it was his own story my father would tell me to get me to sleep. I asked him whether, considering the sacrifices he had to make, he ever had any regrets. He said no. He told me that he would have been unable to witness or submit to injustice without doing anything. He was persuaded, and he's still convinced that another world is possible — a world where no one would ever need a forger. He's still dreaming about it. My father is here in the room today. His name is Adolfo Kaminsky and I'm going to ask him to stand up. (Applause) Thank you.

Making matter come alive

{0: 'A professor of chemistry, nanoscience and chemical complexity, Lee Cronin and his research group investigate how chemistry can revolutionize modern technology and even create life.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

What I'm going to try and do in the next 15 minutes or so is tell you about an idea of how we're going to make matter come alive. Now this may seem a bit ambitious, but when you look at yourself, you look at your hands, you realize that you're alive. So this is a start. Now this quest started four billion years ago on planet Earth. There's been four billion years of organic, biological life. And as an inorganic chemist, my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic, living world and the inorganic, dead world. And what I'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic, dead matter into living matter, into inorganic biology. Before we do that, I want to kind of put biology in its place. And I'm absolutely enthralled by biology. I love to do synthetic biology. I love things that are alive. I love manipulating the infrastructure of biology. But within that infrastructure, we have to remember that the driving force of biology is really coming from evolution. And evolution, although it was established well over 100 years ago by Charles Darwin and a vast number of other people, evolution still is a little bit intangible. And when I talk about Darwinian evolution, I mean one thing and one thing only, and that is survival of the fittest. And so forget about evolution in a kind of metaphysical way. Think about evolution in terms of offspring competing, and some winning. So bearing that in mind, as a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution? And this seems quite a profound question. And as a chemist, we're not used to profound questions every day. So when I thought about it, then suddenly I realized that biology gave us the answer. And in fact, the smallest unit of matter that can evolve independently is, in fact, a single cell — a bacteria. So this raises three really important questions: What is life? Is biology special? Biologists seem to think so. Is matter evolvable? Now if we answer those questions in reverse order, the third question — is matter evolvable? — if we can answer that, then we're going to know how special biology is, and maybe, just maybe, we'll have some idea of what life really is. So here's some inorganic life. This is a dead crystal, and I'm going to do something to it, and it's going to become alive. And you can see, it's kind of pollinating, germinating, growing. This is an inorganic tube. And all these crystals here under the microscope were dead a few minutes ago, and they look alive. Of course, they're not alive. It's a chemistry experiment where I've made a crystal garden. But when I saw this, I was really fascinated, because it seemed lifelike. And as I pause for a few seconds, have a look at the screen. You can see there's architecture growing, filling the void. And this is dead. So I was positive that, if somehow we can make things mimic life, let's go one step further. Let's see if we can actually make life. But there's a problem, because up until maybe a decade ago, we were told that life was impossible and that we were the most incredible miracle in the universe. In fact, we were the only people in the universe. Now, that's a bit boring. So as a chemist, I wanted to say, "Hang on. What is going on here? Is life that improbable?" And this is really the question. I think that perhaps the emergence of the first cells was as probable as the emergence of the stars. And in fact, let's take that one step further. Let's say that if the physics of fusion is encoded into the universe, maybe the physics of life is as well. And so the problem with chemists — and this is a massive advantage as well — is we like to focus on our elements. In biology, carbon takes center stage. And in a universe where carbon exists and organic biology, then we have all this wonderful diversity of life. In fact, we have such amazing lifeforms that we can manipulate. We're awfully careful in the lab to try and avoid various biohazards. Well what about matter? If we can make matter alive, would we have a matterhazard? So think, this is a serious question. If your pen could replicate, that would be a bit of a problem. So we have to think differently if we're going to make stuff come alive. And we also have to be aware of the issues. But before we can make life, let's think for a second what life really is characterized by. And forgive the complicated diagram. This is just a collection of pathways in the cell. And the cell is obviously for us a fascinating thing. Synthetic biologists are manipulating it. Chemists are trying to study the molecules to look at disease. And you have all these pathways going on at the same time. You have regulation; information is transcribed; catalysts are made; stuff is happening. But what does a cell do? Well it divides, it competes, it survives. And I think that is where we have to start in terms of thinking about building from our ideas in life. But what else is life characterized by? Well, I like think of it as a flame in a bottle. And so what we have here is a description of single cells replicating, metabolizing, burning through chemistries. And so we have to understand that if we're going to make artificial life or understand the origin of life, we need to power it somehow. So before we can really start to make life, we have to really think about where it came from. And Darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere — maybe not in Scotland, maybe in Africa, maybe somewhere else. But the real honest answer is, we just don't know, because there is a problem with the origin. Imagine way back, four and a half billion years ago, there is a vast chemical soup of stuff. And from this stuff we came. So when you think about the improbable nature of what I'm going to tell you in the next few minutes, just remember, we came from stuff on planet Earth. And we went through a variety of worlds. The RNA people would talk about the RNA world. We somehow got to proteins and DNA. We then got to the last ancestor. Evolution kicked in — and that's the cool bit. And here we are. But there's a roadblock that you can't get past. You can decode the genome, you can look back, you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA, but we can't get further than the last ancestor, the last visible cell that we could sequence or think back in history. So we don't know how we got here. So there are two options: intelligent design, direct and indirect — so God, or my friend. Now talking about E.T. putting us there, or some other life, just pushes the problem further on. I'm not a politician, I'm a scientist. The other thing we need to think about is the emergence of chemical complexity. This seems most likely. So we have some kind of primordial soup. And this one happens to be a good source of all 20 amino acids. And somehow these amino acids are combined, and life begins. But life begins, what does that mean? What is life? What is this stuff of life? So in the 1950s, Miller-Urey did their fantastic chemical Frankenstein experiment, where they did the equivalent in the chemical world. They took the basic ingredients, put them in a single jar and ignited them and put a lot of voltage through. And they had a look at what was in the soup, and they found amino acids, but nothing came out, there was no cell. So the whole area's been stuck for a while, and it got reignited in the '80s when analytical technologies and computer technologies were coming on. In my own laboratory, the way we're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats. So what we're trying to do is do reactions — not in one flask, but in tens of flasks, and connect them together, as you can see with this flow system, all these pipes. We can do it microfluidically, we can do it lithographically, we can do it in a 3D printer, we can do it in droplets for colleagues. And the key thing is to have lots of complex chemistry just bubbling away. But that's probably going to end in failure, so we need to be a bit more focused. And the answer, of course, lies with mice. This is how I remember what I need as a chemist. I say, "Well I want molecules." But I need a metabolism, I need some energy. I need some information, and I need a container. Because if I want evolution, I need containers to compete. So if you have a container, it's like getting in your car. "This is my car, and I'm going to drive around and show off my car." And I imagine you have a similar thing in cellular biology with the emergence of life. So these things together give us evolution, perhaps. And the way to test it in the laboratory is to make it minimal. So what we're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules. And so forgive the molecules on the screen, but these are a very simple kit. There's only maybe three or four different types of building blocks present. And we can aggregate them together and make literally thousands and thousands of really big nano-molecular molecules the same size of DNA and proteins, but there's no carbon in sight. Carbon is banned. And so with this Lego kit, we have the diversity required for complex information storage without DNA. But we need to make some containers. And just a few months ago in my lab, we were able to take these very same molecules and make cells with them. And you can see on the screen a cell being made. And we're now going to put some chemistry inside and do some chemistry in this cell. And all I wanted to show you is we can set up molecules in membranes, in real cells, and then it sets up a kind of molecular Darwinism, a molecular survival of the fittest. And this movie here shows this competition between molecules. Molecules are competing for stuff. They're all made of the same stuff, but they want their shape to win. They want their shape to persist. And that is the key. If we can somehow encourage these molecules to talk to each other and make the right shapes and compete, they will start to form cells that will replicate and compete. If we manage to do that, forget the molecular detail. Let's zoom out to what that could mean. So we have this special theory of evolution that applies only to organic biology, to us. If we could get evolution into the material world, then I propose we should have a general theory of evolution. And that's really worth thinking about. Does evolution control the sophistication of matter in the universe? Is there some driving force through evolution that allows matter to compete? So that means we could then start to develop different platforms for exploring this evolution. So you imagine, if we're able to create a self-sustaining artificial life form, not only will this tell us about the origin of life — that it's possible that the universe doesn't need carbon to be alive; it can use anything — we can then take [it] one step further and develop new technologies, because we can then use software control for evolution to code in. So imagine we make a little cell. We want to put it out in the environment, and we want it to be powered by the Sun. What we do is we evolve it in a box with a light on. And we don't use design anymore. We find what works. We should take our inspiration from biology. Biology doesn't care about the design unless it works. So this will reorganize the way we design things. But not only just that, we will start to think about how we can start to develop a symbiotic relationship with biology. Wouldn't it be great if you could take these artificial biological cells and fuse them with biological ones to correct problems that we couldn't really deal with? The real issue in cellular biology is we are never going to understand everything, because it's a multidimensional problem put there by evolution. Evolution cannot be cut apart. You need to somehow find the fitness function. And the profound realization for me is that, if this works, the concept of the selfish gene gets kicked up a level, and we really start talking about selfish matter. And what does that mean in a universe where we are right now the highest form of stuff? You're sitting on chairs. They're inanimate, they're not alive. But you are made of stuff, and you are using stuff, and you enslave stuff. So using evolution in biology, and in inorganic biology, for me is quite appealing, quite exciting. And we're really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive. And again, when you're thinking about how improbable this is, remember, five billion years ago, we were not here, and there was no life. So what will that tell us about the origin of life and the meaning of life? But perhaps, for me as a chemist, I want to keep away from general terms; I want to think about specifics. So what does it mean about defining life? We really struggle to do this. And I think, if we can make inorganic biology, and we can make matter become evolvable, that will in fact define life. I propose to you that matter that can evolve is alive, and this gives us the idea of making evolvable matter. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Just a quick question on timeline. You believe you're going to be successful in this project? When? Lee Cronin: So many people think that life took millions of years to kick in. We're proposing to do it in just a few hours, once we've set up the right chemistry. CA: And when do you think that will happen? LC: Hopefully within the next two years. CA: That would be a big story. (Laughter) In your own mind, what do you believe the chances are that walking around on some other planet is non-carbon-based life, walking or oozing or something? LC: I think it's 100 percent. Because the thing is, we are so chauvinistic to biology, if you take away carbon, there's other things that can happen. So the other thing that if we were able to create life that's not based on carbon, maybe we can tell NASA what really to look for. Don't go and look for carbon, go and look for evolvable stuff. CA: Lee Cronin, good luck. (LC: Thank you very much.) (Applause)

Shake up your story

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

TEDGlobal 2011

Hi everyone. I'm an artist and a dad — second time around. Thank you. And I want to share with you my latest art project. It's a children's book for the iPad. It's a little quirky and silly. It's called "Pop-It," And it's about the things little kids do with their parents. (Music) So this is about potty training — as most of you, I hope, know. You can tickle the rug. You can make the baby poop. You can do all those fun things. You can burst bubbles. You can draw, as everyone should. But you know, I have a problem with children's books: I think they're full of propaganda. At least an Indian trying to get one of these American books in Park Slope, forget it. It's not the way I was brought up. So I said, "I'm going to counter this with my own propaganda." If you notice carefully, it's a homosexual couple bringing up a child. You don't like it? Shake it, and you have a lesbian couple. (Laughter) Shake it, and you have a heterosexual couple. You know, I don't even believe in the concept of an ideal family. I have to tell you about my childhood. I went to this very proper Christian school taught by nuns, fathers, brothers, sisters. Basically, I was brought up to be a good Samaritan, and I am. And I'd go at the end of the day to a traditional Hindu house, which was probably the only Hindu house in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood. Basically, I celebrated every religious function. In fact, when there was a wedding in our neighborhood, all of us would paint our houses for the wedding. I remember we cried profusely when the little goats we played with in the summer became biriani. (Laughter) We all had to fast during Ramadan. It was a very beautiful time. But I must say, I'll never forget, when I was 13 years old, this happened. Babri Masjid — one of the most beautiful mosques in India, built by King Babur, I think, in the 16th century — was demolished by Hindu activists. This caused major riots in my city. And for the first time, I was affected by this communal unrest. My little five-year-old kid neighbor comes running in, and he says, "Rags, Rags. You know the Hindus are killing us Muslims. Be careful." I'm like, "Dude, I'm Hindu." (Laughter) He's like, "Huh!" You know, my work is inspired by events such as this. Even in my gallery shows, I try and revisit historic events like Babri Masjid, distill only its emotional residue and image my own life. Imagine history being taught differently. Remember that children's book where you shake and the sexuality of the parents change? I have another idea. It's a children's book about Indian independence — very patriotic. But when you shake it, you get Pakistan's perspective. Shake it again, and you get the British perspective. (Applause) You have to separate fact from bias, right. Even my books on children have cute, fuzzy animals. But they're playing geopolitics. They're playing out Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan. You know, I'm making a very important argument. And my argument [is] that the only way for us to teach creativity is by teaching children perspectives at the earliest stage. After all, children's books are manuals on parenting, so you better give them children's books that teach them perspectives. And conversely, only when you teach perspectives will a child be able to imagine and put themselves in the shoes of someone who is different from them. I'm making an argument that art and creativity are very essential tools in empathy. You know, I can't promise my child a life without bias — we're all biased — but I promise to bias my child with multiple perspectives. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Does democracy stifle economic growth?

{0: 'Yasheng Huang asks us to rethink our ideas about China and other large emerging economies. Lately he’s been asking, Does democracy hinder or promote economic growth?'}

TEDGlobal 2011

My topic is economic growth in China and India. And the question I want to explore with you is whether or not democracy has helped or has hindered economic growth. You may say this is not fair, because I'm selecting two countries to make a case against democracy. Actually, exactly the opposite is what I'm going to do. I'm going to use these two countries to make an economic argument for democracy, rather than against democracy. The first question there is why China has grown so much faster than India. Over the last 30 years, in terms of the GDP growth rates, China has grown at twice the rate of India. In the last five years, the two countries have begun to converge somewhat in economic growth. But over the last 30 years, China undoubtedly has done much better than India. One simple answer is China has Shanghai and India has Mumbai. Look at the skyline of Shanghai. This is the Pudong area. The picture on India is the Dharavi slum of Mumbai in India. The idea there behind these two pictures is that the Chinese government can act above rule of law. It can plan for the long-term benefits of the country and in the process, evict millions of people — that's just a small technical issue. Whereas in India, you cannot do that, because you have to listen to the public. You're being constrained by the public's opinion. Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agrees with that view. In an interview printed in the financial press of India, He said that he wants to make Mumbai another Shanghai. This is an Oxford-trained economist steeped in humanistic values, and yet he agrees with the high-pressure tactics of Shanghai. So let me call it the Shanghai model of economic growth, that emphasizes the following features for promoting economic development: infrastructures, airports, highways, bridges, things like that. And you need a strong government to do that, because you cannot respect private property rights. You cannot be constrained by the public's opinion. You need also state ownership, especially of land assets, in order to build and roll out infrastructures very quickly. The implication of that model is that democracy is a hindrance for economic growth, rather than a facilitator of economic growth. Here's the key question. Just how important are infrastructures for economic growth? This is a key issue. If you believe that infrastructures are very important for economic growth, then you would argue a strong government is necessary to promote growth. If you believe that infrastructures are not as important as many people believe, then you will put less emphasis on strong government. So to illustrate that question, let me give you two countries. And for the sake of brevity, I'll call one country Country 1 and the other country Country 2. Country 1 has a systematic advantage over Country 2 in infrastructures. Country 1 has more telephones, and Country 1 has a longer system of railways. So if I were to ask you, "Which is China and which is India, and which country has grown faster?" if you believe in the infrastructure view, then you will say, "Country 1 must be China. They must have done better, in terms of economic growth. And Country 2 is possibly India." Actually the country with more telephones is the Soviet Union, and the data referred to 1989. After the country reported very impressive statistics on telephones, the country collapsed. That's not too good. The picture there is Khrushchev. I know that in 1989 he no longer ruled the Soviet Union, but that's the best picture that I can find. (Laughter) Telephones, infrastructures do not guarantee you economic growth. Country 2, that has fewer telephones, is China. Since 1989, the country has performed at a double-digit rate every year for the last 20 years. If you know nothing about China and the Soviet Union other than the fact about their telephones, you would have made a poor prediction about their economic growth in the next two decades. Country 1, that has a longer system of railways, is actually India. And Country 2 is China. This is a very little known fact about the two countries. Yes, today China has a huge infrastructure advantage over India. But for many years, until the late 1990s, China had an infrastructure disadvantage vis-a-vis India. In developing countries, the most common mode of transportation is the railways, and the British built a lot of railways in India. India is the smaller of the two countries, and yet it had a longer system of railways until the late 1990s. So clearly, infrastructure doesn't explain why China did better before the late 1990s, as compared with India. In fact, if you look at the evidence worldwide, the evidence is more supportive of the view that the infrastructure are actually the result of economic growth. The economy grows, government accumulates more resources, and the government can invest in infrastructure — rather than infrastructure being a cause for economic growth. And this is clearly the story of the Chinese economic growth. Let me look at this question more directly. Is democracy bad for economic growth? Now let's turn to two countries, Country A and Country B. Country A, in 1990, had about $300 per capita GDP as compared with Country B, which had $460 in per capita GDP. By 2008, Country A has surpassed Country B with $700 per capita GDP as compared with $650 per capita GDP. Both countries are in Asia. If I were to ask you, "Which are the two Asian countries? And which one is a democracy?" you may argue, "Well, maybe Country A is China and Country B is India." In fact, Country A is democratic India, and Country B is Pakistan — the country that has a long period of military rule. And it's very common that we compare India with China. That's because the two countries have about the same population size. But the more natural comparison is actually between India and Pakistan. Those two countries are geographically similar. They have a complicated, but shared common history. By that comparison, democracy looks very, very good in terms of economic growth. So why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments? One reason is the East Asian Model. In East Asia, we have had successful economic growth stories such as Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Some of these economies were ruled by authoritarian governments in the 60s and 70s and 1980s. The problem with that view is like asking all the winners of lotteries, "Have you won the lottery?" And they all tell you, "Yes, we have won the lottery." And then you draw the conclusion the odds of winning the lottery are 100 percent. The reason is you never go and bother to ask the losers who also purchased lottery tickets and didn't end up winning the prize. For each of these successful authoritarian governments in East Asia, there's a matched failure. Korea succeeded, North Korea didn't. Taiwan succeeded, China under Mao Zedong didn't. Burma didn't succeed. The Philippines didn't succeed. If you look at the statistical evidence worldwide, there's really no support for the idea that authoritarian governments hold a systematic edge over democracies in terms of economic growth. So the East Asian model has this massive selection bias — it is known as selecting on a dependent variable, something we always tell our students to avoid. So exactly why did China grow so much faster? I will take you to the Cultural Revolution, when China went mad, and compare that country's performance with India under Indira Gandhi. The question there is: Which country did better, China or India? China was during the Cultural Revolution. It turns out even during the Cultural Revolution, China out-perfomed India in terms of GDP growth by an average of about 2.2 percent every year in terms of per capita GDP. So that's when China was mad. The whole country went mad. It must mean that the country had something so advantageous to itself in terms of economic growth to overcome the negative effects of the Cultural Revolution. The advantage the country had was human capital — nothing else but human capital. This is the world development index indicator data in the early 1990s. And this is the earliest data that I can find. The adult literacy rate in China is 77 percent as compared with 48 percent in India. The contrast in literacy rates is especially sharp between Chinese women and Indian women. I haven't told you about the definition of literacy. In China, the definition of literacy is the ability to read and write 1,500 Chinese characters. In India, the definition of literacy, operating definition of literacy, is the ability, the grand ability, to write your own name in whatever language you happen to speak. The gap between the two countries in terms of literacy is much more substantial than the data here indicated. If you go to other sources of data such as Human Development Index, that data series, go back to the early 1970s, you see exactly the same contrast. China held a huge advantage in terms of human capital vis-a-vis India. Life expectancies: as early as 1965, China had a huge advantage in life expectancy. On average, as a Chinese in 1965, you lived 10 years more than an average Indian. So if you have a choice between being a Chinese and being an Indian, you would want to become a Chinese in order to live 10 years longer. If you made that decision in 1965, the down side of that is the next year we have the Cultural Revolution. So you have to always think carefully about these decisions. If you cannot chose your nationality, then you will want to become an Indian man. Because, as an Indian man, you have about two years of life expectancy advantage vis-a-vis Indian women. This is an extremely strange fact. It's very rare among countries to have this kind of pattern. It shows the systematic discrimination and biases in the Indian society against women. The good news is, by 2006, India has closed the gap between men and women in terms of life expectancy. Today, Indian women have a sizable life expectancy edge over Indian men. So India is reverting to the normal. But India still has a lot of work to do in terms of gender equality. These are the two pictures taken of garment factories in Guangdong Province and garment factories in India. In China, it's all women. 60 to 80 percent of the workforce in China is women in the coastal part of the country, whereas in India, it's all men. Financial Times printed this picture of an Indian textile factory with the title, "India Poised to Overtake China in Textile." By looking at these two pictures, I say no, it won't overtake China for a while. If you look at other East Asian countries, women there play a hugely important role in terms of economic take-off — in terms of creating the manufacturing miracle associated with East Asia. India still has a long way to go to catch up with China. Then the issue is, what about the Chinese political system? You talk about human capital, you talk about education and public health. What about the political system? Isn't it true that the one-party political system has facilitated economic growth in China? Actually, the answer is more nuanced and subtle than that. It depends on a distinction that you draw between statics of the political system and the dynamics of the political system. Statically, China is a one-party system, authoritarian — there's no question about it. Dynamically, it has changed over time to become less authoritarian and more democratic. When you explain change — for example, economic growth; economic growth is about change — when you explain change, you use other things that have changed to explain change, rather than using the constant to explain change. Sometimes a fixed effect can explain change, but a fixed effect only explains changes in interaction with the things that change. In terms of the political changes, they have introduced village elections. They have increased the security of proprietors. And they have increased the security with long-term land leases. There are also financial reforms in rural China. There is also a rural entrepreneurial revolution in China. To me, the pace of political changes is too slow, too gradual. And my own view is the country is going to face some substantial challenges, because they have not moved further and faster on political reforms. But nevertheless, the system has moved in a more liberal direction, moved in a more democratic direction. You can apply exactly the same dynamic perspective on India. In fact, when India was growing at a Hindu rate of growth — about one percent, two percent a year — that was when India was least democratic. Indira Gandhi declared emergency rule in 1975. The Indian government owned and operated all the TV stations. A little-known fact about India in the 1990s is that the country not only has undertaken economic reforms, the country has also undertaken political reforms by introducing village self-rule, privatization of media and introducing freedom of information acts. So the dynamic perspective fits both with China and in India in terms of the direction. Why do many people believe that India is still a growth disaster? One reason is they are always comparing India with China. But China is a superstar in terms of economic growth. If you are a NBA player and you are always being compared to Michael Jordan, you're going to look not so impressive. But that doesn't mean that you're a bad basketball player. Comparing with a superstar is the wrong benchmark. In fact, if you compare India with the average developing country, even before the more recent period of acceleration of Indian growth — now India is growing between eight and nine percent — even before this period, India was ranked fourth in terms of economic growth among emerging economies. This is a very impressive record indeed. Let's think about the future: the dragon vis-a-vis the elephant. Which country has the growth momentum? China, I believe, still has some of the excellent raw fundamentals — mostly the social capital, the public health, the sense of egalitarianism that you don't find in India. But I believe that India has the momentum. It has the improving fundamentals. The government has invested in basic education, has invested in basic health. I believe the government should do more, but nevertheless, the direction it is moving in is the right direction. India has the right institutional conditions for economic growth, whereas China is still struggling with political reforms. I believe that the political reforms are a must for China to maintain its growth. And it's very important to have political reforms, to have widely shared benefits of economic growth. I don't know whether that's going to happen or not, but I'm an optimist. Hopefully, five years from now, I'm going to report to TEDGlobal that political reforms will happen in China. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Hire the hackers!

{0: 'Journalist Misha Glenny leaves no stone unturned (and no failed state unexamined) in his excavation of criminal globalization.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Now this is a very un-TED-like thing to do, but let's kick off the afternoon with a message from a mystery sponsor. Anonymous: Dear Fox News, it has come to our unfortunate attention that both the name and nature of Anonymous has been ravaged. We are everyone. We are no one. We are anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. We are but the base of chaos. Misha Glenny: Anonymous, ladies and gentlemen — a sophisticated group of politically motivated hackers who have emerged in 2011. And they're pretty scary. You never know when they're going to attack next, who or what the consequences will be. But interestingly, they have a sense of humor. These guys hacked into Fox News' Twitter account to announce President Obama's assassination. Now you can imagine the panic that would have generated in the newsroom at Fox. "What do we do now? Put on a black armband, or crack open the champagne?" (Laughter) And of course, who could escape the irony of a member of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. being a victim of hacking for a change. (Laughter) (Applause) Sometimes you turn on the news and you say, "Is there anyone left to hack?" Sony Playstation Network — done, the government of Turkey — tick, Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency — a breeze, the CIA — falling off a log. In fact, a friend of mine from the security industry told me the other day that there are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't. I mean three companies providing cybersecurity services to the FBI have been hacked. Is nothing sacred anymore, for heaven's sake? Anyway, this mysterious group Anonymous — and they would say this themselves — they are providing a service by demonstrating how useless companies are at protecting our data. But there is also a very serious aspect to Anonymous — they are ideologically driven. They claim that they are battling a dastardly conspiracy. They say that governments are trying to take over the Internet and control it, and that they, Anonymous, are the authentic voice of resistance — be it against Middle Eastern dictatorships, against global media corporations, or against intelligence agencies, or whoever it is. And their politics are not entirely unattractive. Okay, they're a little inchoate. There's a strong whiff of half-baked anarchism about them. But one thing is true: we are at the beginning of a mighty struggle for control of the Internet. The Web links everything, and very soon it will mediate most human activity. Because the Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an old-age dilemma that pits the demands of security with the desire for freedom. Now this is a very complicated struggle. And unfortunately, for mortals like you and me, we probably can't understand it very well. Nonetheless, in an unexpected attack of hubris a couple of years ago, I decided I would try and do that. And I sort of get it. These were the various things that I was looking at as I was trying to understand it. But in order to try and explain the whole thing, I would need another 18 minutes or so to do it, so you're just going to have to take it on trust from me on this occasion, and let me assure you that all of these issues are involved in cybersecurity and control of the Internet one way or the other, but in a configuration that even Stephen Hawking would probably have difficulty trying to get his head around. So there you are. And as you see, in the middle, there is our old friend, the hacker. The hacker is absolutely central to many of the political, social and economic issues affecting the Net. And so I thought to myself, "Well, these are the guys who I want to talk to." And what do you know, nobody else does talk to the hackers. They're completely anonymous, as it were. So despite the fact that we are beginning to pour billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, into cybersecurity — for the most extraordinary technical solutions — no one wants to talk to these guys, the hackers, who are doing everything. Instead, we prefer these really dazzling technological solutions, which cost a huge amount of money. And so nothing is going into the hackers. Well, I say nothing, but actually there is one teeny weeny little research unit in Turin, Italy called the Hackers Profiling Project. And they are doing some fantastic research into the characteristics, into the abilities and the socialization of hackers. But because they're a U.N. operation, maybe that's why governments and corporations are not that interested in them. Because it's a U.N. operation, of course, it lacks funding. But I think they're doing very important work. Because where we have a surplus of technology in the cybersecurity industry, we have a definite lack of — call me old-fashioned — human intelligence. Now, so far I've mentioned the hackers Anonymous who are a politically motivated hacking group. Of course, the criminal justice system treats them as common old garden criminals. But interestingly, Anonymous does not make use of its hacked information for financial gain. But what about the real cybercriminals? Well real organized crime on the Internet goes back about 10 years when a group of gifted Ukrainian hackers developed a website, which led to the industrialization of cybercrime. Welcome to the now forgotten realm of CarderPlanet. This is how they were advertising themselves a decade ago on the Net. Now CarderPlanet was very interesting. Cybercriminals would go there to buy and sell stolen credit card details, to exchange information about new malware that was out there. And remember, this is a time when we're seeing for the first time so-called off-the-shelf malware. This is ready for use, out-of-the-box stuff, which you can deploy even if you're not a terribly sophisticated hacker. And so CarderPlanet became a sort of supermarket for cybercriminals. And its creators were incredibly smart and entrepreneurial, because they were faced with one enormous challenge as cybercriminals. And that challenge is: How do you do business, how do you trust somebody on the Web who you want to do business with when you know that they're a criminal? (Laughter) It's axiomatic that they're dodgy, and they're going to want to try and rip you off. So the family, as the inner core of CarderPlanet was known, came up with this brilliant idea called the escrow system. They appointed an officer who would mediate between the vendor and the purchaser. The vendor, say, had stolen credit card details; the purchaser wanted to get a hold of them. The purchaser would send the administrative officer some dollars digitally, and the vendor would sell the stolen credit card details. And the officer would then verify if the stolen credit card worked. And if they did, he then passed on the money to the vendor and the stolen credit card details to the purchaser. And it was this which completely revolutionized cybercrime on the Web. And after that, it just went wild. We had a champagne decade for people who we know as Carders. Now I spoke to one of these Carders who we'll call RedBrigade — although that wasn't even his proper nickname — but I promised I wouldn't reveal who he was. And he explained to me how in 2003 and 2004 he would go on sprees in New York, taking out $10,000 from an ATM here, $30,000 from an ATM there, using cloned credit cards. He was making, on average a week, $150,000 — tax free of course. And he said that he had so much money stashed in his upper-East side apartment at one point that he just didn't know what to do with it and actually fell into a depression. But that's a slightly different story, which I won't go into now. Now the interesting thing about RedBrigade is that he wasn't an advanced hacker. He sort of understood the technology, and he realized that security was very important if you were going to be a Carder, but he didn't spend his days and nights bent over a computer, eating pizza, drinking coke and that sort of thing. He was out there on the town having a fab time enjoying the high life. And this is because hackers are only one element in a cybercriminal enterprise. And often they're the most vulnerable element of all. And I want to explain this to you by introducing you to six characters who I met while I was doing this research. Dimitry Golubov, aka SCRIPT — born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1982. Now he developed his social and moral compass on the Black Sea port during the 1990s. This was a sink-or-swim environment where involvement in criminal or corrupt activities was entirely necessary if you wanted to survive. As an accomplished computer user, what Dimitry did was to transfer the gangster capitalism of his hometown onto the Worldwide Web. And he did a great job in it. You have to understand though that from his ninth birthday, the only environment he knew was gangsterism. He knew no other way of making a living and making money. Then we have Renukanth Subramaniam, aka JiLsi — founder of DarkMarket, born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. As an eight year-old, he and his parents fled the Sri Lankan capital because Singhalese mobs were roaming the city, looking for Tamils like Renu to murder. At 11, he was interrogated by the Sri Lankan military, accused of being a terrorist, and his parents sent him on his own to Britain as a refugee seeking political asylum. At 13, with only little English and being bullied at school, he escaped into a world of computers where he showed great technical ability, but he was soon being seduced by people on the Internet. He was convicted of mortgage and credit card fraud, and he will be released from Wormwood Scrubs jail in London in 2012. Matrix001, who was an administrator at DarkMarket. Born in Southern Germany to a stable and well-respected middle class family, his obsession with gaming as a teenager led him to hacking. And he was soon controlling huge servers around the world where he stored his games that he had cracked and pirated. His slide into criminality was incremental. And when he finally woke up to his situation and understood the implications, he was already in too deep. Max Vision, aka ICEMAN — mastermind of CardersMarket. Born in Meridian, Idaho. Max Vision was one of the best penetration testers working out of Santa Clara, California in the late 90s for private companies and voluntarily for the FBI. Now in the late 1990s, he discovered a vulnerability on all U.S. government networks, and he went in and patched it up — because this included nuclear research facilities — sparing the American government a huge security embarrassment. But also, because he was an inveterate hacker, he left a tiny digital wormhole through which he alone could crawl. But this was spotted by an eagle-eye investigator, and he was convicted. At his open prison, he came under the influence of financial fraudsters, and those financial fraudsters persuaded him to work for them on his release. And this man with a planetary-sized brain is now serving a 13-year sentence in California. Adewale Taiwo, aka FreddyBB — master bank account cracker from Abuja in Nigeria. He set up his prosaically entitled newsgroup, [email protected] before arriving in Britain in 2005 to take a Masters in chemical engineering at Manchester University. He impressed in the private sector, developing chemical applications for the oil industry while simultaneously running a worldwide bank and credit card fraud operation that was worth millions until his arrest in 2008. And then finally, Cagatay Evyapan, aka Cha0 — one of the most remarkable hackers ever, from Ankara in Turkey. He combined the tremendous skills of a geek with the suave social engineering skills of the master criminal. One of the smartest people I've ever met. He also had the most effective virtual private network security arrangement the police have ever encountered amongst global cybercriminals. Now the important thing about all of these people is they share certain characteristics despite the fact that they come from very different environments. They are all people who learned their hacking skills in their early to mid-teens. They are all people who demonstrate advanced ability in maths and the sciences. Remember that, when they developed those hacking skills, their moral compass had not yet developed. And most of them, with the exception of SCRIPT and Cha0, they did not demonstrate any real social skills in the outside world — only on the Web. And the other thing is the high incidence of hackers like these who have characteristics which are consistent with Asperger's syndrome. Now I discussed this with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen who's the professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge. And he has done path-breaking work on autism and confirmed, also for the authorities here, that Gary McKinnon — who is wanted by the United States for hacking into the Pentagon — suffers from Asperger's and a secondary condition of depression. And Baron-Cohen explained that certain disabilities can manifest themselves in the hacking and computing world as tremendous skills, and that we should not be throwing in jail people who have such disabilities and skills because they have lost their way socially or been duped. Now I think we're missing a trick here, because I don't think people like Max Vision should be in jail. And let me be blunt about this. In China, in Russia and in loads of other countries that are developing cyber-offensive capabilities, this is exactly what they are doing. They are recruiting hackers both before and after they become involved in criminal and industrial espionage activities — are mobilizing them on behalf of the state. We need to engage and find ways of offering guidance to these young people, because they are a remarkable breed. And if we rely, as we do at the moment, solely on the criminal justice system and the threat of punitive sentences, we will be nurturing a monster we cannot tame. Thank you very much for listening. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So your idea worth spreading is hire hackers. How would someone get over that kind of fear that the hacker they hire might preserve that little teensy wormhole? MG: I think to an extent, you have to understand that it's axiomatic among hackers that they do that. They're just relentless and obsessive about what they do. But all of the people who I've spoken to who have fallen foul of the law, they have all said, "Please, please give us a chance to work in the legitimate industry. We just never knew how to get there, what we were doing. We want to work with you." Chris Anderson: Okay, well that makes sense. Thanks a lot Misha. (Applause)

The art of wearable communication

{0: 'Kate Hartman creates devices and interfaces for humans, houseplants, and glaciers. Her work playfully questions the ways in which we relate and communicate.'}

TED2011

My name is Kate Hartman. And I like to make devices that play with the ways that we relate and communicate. So I'm specifically interested in how we, as humans, relate to ourselves, each other and the world around us. (Laughter) So just to give you a bit of context, as June said, I'm an artist, a technologist and an educator. I teach courses in physical computing and wearable electronics. And much of what I do is either wearable or somehow related to the human form. And so anytime I talk about what I do, I like to just quickly address the reason why bodies matter. And it's pretty simple. Everybody's got one — all of you. I can guarantee, everyone in this room, all of you over there, the people in the cushy seats, the people up top with the laptops — we all have bodies. Don't be ashamed. It's something that we have in common and they act as our primary interfaces for the world. And so when working as an interaction designer, or as an artist who deals with participation — creating things that live on, in or around the human form — it's really a powerful space to work within. So within my own work, I use a broad range of materials and tools. So I communicate through everything from radio transceivers to funnels and plastic tubing. And to tell you a bit about the things that I make, the easiest place to start the story is with a hat. And so it all started several years ago, late one night when I was sitting on the subway, riding home, and I was thinking. And I tend to be a person who thinks too much and talks too little. And so I was thinking about how it might be great if I could just take all these noises — like all these sounds of my thoughts in my head — if I could just physically extricate them and pull them out in such a form that I could share them with somebody else. And so I went home, and I made a prototype of this hat. And I called it the Muttering Hat, because it emitted these muttering noises that were kind of tethered to you, but you could detach them and share them with somebody else. (Laughter) So I make other hats as well. This one is called the Talk to Yourself Hat. (Laughter) It's fairly self-explanatory. It physically carves out conversation space for one. And when you speak out loud, the sound of your voice is actually channeled back into your own ears. (Laughter) And so when I make these things, it's really not so much about the object itself, but rather the negative space around the object. So what happens when a person puts this thing on? What kind of an experience do they have? And how are they transformed by wearing it? So many of these devices really kind of focus on the ways in which we relate to ourselves. So this particular device is called the Gut Listener. And it is a tool that actually enables one to listen to their own innards. (Laughter) And so some of these things are actually more geared toward expression and communication. And so the Inflatable Heart is an external organ that can be used by the wearer to express themselves. So they can actually inflate it and deflate it according to their emotions. So they can express everything from admiration and lust to anxiety and angst. (Laughter) And some of these are actually meant to mediate experiences. So the Discommunicator is a tool for arguments. (Laughter) And so actually it allows for an intense emotional exchange, but is serves to absorb the specificity of the words that are delivered. (Laughter) And in the end, some of these things just act as invitations. So the Ear Bender literally puts something out there so someone can grab your ear and say what they have to say. So even though I'm really interested in the relationship between people, I also consider the ways in which we relate to the world around us. And so when I was first living in New York City a few years back, I was thinking a lot about the familiar architectural forms that surrounded me and how I would like to better relate to them. And I thought, "Well, hey! Maybe if I want to better relate to walls, maybe I need to be more wall-like myself." So I made a wearable wall that I could wear as a backpack. And so I would put it on and sort of physically transform myself so that I could either contribute to or critique the spaces that surrounded me. (Laughter) And so jumping off of that, thinking beyond the built environment into the natural world, I have this ongoing project called Botanicalls — which actually enables houseplants to tap into human communication protocols. So when a plant is thirsty, it can actually make a phone call or post a message to a service like Twitter. And so this really shifts the human/plant dynamic, because a single house plant can actually express its needs to thousands of people at the same time. And so kind of thinking about scale, my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers — of course. And so glaciers are these magnificent beings, and there's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them, but what I'm particularly interested in is in human-glacier relations. (Laughter) Because there seems to be an issue. The glaciers are actually leaving us. They're both shrinking and retreating — and some of them have disappeared altogether. And so I actually live in Canada now, so I've been visiting one of my local glaciers. And this one's particularly interesting, because, of all the glaciers in North America, it receives the highest volume of human traffic in a year. They actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier. And this has really gotten me thinking about this experience of the initial encounter. When I meet a glacier for the very first time, what do I do? There's no kind of social protocol for this. I really just don't even know how to say hello. Do I carve a message in the snow? Or perhaps I can assemble one out of dot and dash ice cubes — ice cube Morse code. Or perhaps I need to make myself a speaking tool, like an icy megaphone that I can use to amplify my voice when I direct it at the ice. But really the most satisfying experience I've had is the act of listening, which is what we need in any good relationship. And I was really struck by how much it affected me. This very basic shift in my physical orientation helped me shift my perspective in relation to the glacier. And so since we use devices to figure out how to relate to the world these days, I actually made a device called the Glacier Embracing Suit. (Laughter) And so this is constructed out of a heat reflected material that serves to mediate the difference in temperature between the human body and the glacial ice. And once again, it's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug. So, yea, this is actually just the beginning. These are initial musings for this project. And just as with the wall, how I wanted to be more wall-like, with this project, I'd actually like to take more a of glacial pace. And so my intent is to actually just take the next 10 years and go on a series of collaborative projects where I work with people from different disciplines — artists, technologists, scientists — to kind of work on this project of how we can improve human-glacier relations. So beyond that, in closing, I'd just like to say that we're in this era of communications and device proliferation, and it's really tremendous and exciting and sexy, but I think what's really important is thinking about how we can simultaneously maintain a sense of wonder and a sense of criticality about the tools that we use and the ways in which we relate to the world. Thanks. (Applause)

Welcome to the genomic revolution

{0: 'Richard Resnick is on the front lines of the business of genomes, as CEO of GenomeQuest, a maker of genomic software.'}

TEDxBoston 2011

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the human genome. (Applause) Chromosome one — top left, bottom right — are the sex chromosomes. Women have two copies of that big X chromosome; men have the X and, of course, that small copy of the Y. Sorry boys, but it's just a tiny little thing that makes you different. So if you zoom in on this genome, then what you see, of course, is this double-helix structure — the code of life spelled out with these four biochemical letters, or we call them bases: A, C, G and T. How many are there in the human genome? Three billion. Is that a big number? Well, everybody can throw around big numbers. But in fact, if I were to place one base on each pixel of this 1280x800-resolution screen, we would need 3,000 screens to take a look at the genome. So it's really quite big. And perhaps because of its size, a group of people — all, by the way, with Y chromosomes — decided they would want to sequence it. (Laughter) And so 15 years, actually, and about four billion dollars later, the genome was sequenced and published. In 2003, the final version was published, and they keep working on it. That was all done on a machine like this. It costs about a dollar for each base — a very slow way of doing it. Well, folks, I'm here to tell you that the world has completely changed, and none of you know about it. So now what we do is take a genome, we make maybe 50 copies of it, we cut all those copies up into little 50-base reads, and then we sequence them, massively parallel. Then we bring that into software and reassemble it, and tell you what the story is. So to give you a picture of what this looks like, the Human Genome Project: 3 gigabases, right? One run on one of these modern machines: 200 gigabases in a week. And that 200 is going to change to 600 this summer, and there's no sign of this pace slowing. The price of a base, to sequence a base, has fallen 100 million times. That's the equivalent of you filling up your car with gas in 1998, waiting until 2011, and now you can drive to Jupiter and back twice. (Laughter) World population, PC placements, the archive of all of medical literature, Moore's law, the old way of sequencing, and here's all the new stuff. Guys, this is a long scale; you don't typically see lines that go up like that. So the worldwide capacity to sequence human genomes is something like 50,000 to 100,000 human genomes this year. We know this based on the machines that are being placed. This is expected to double, triple or maybe quadruple year over year for the foreseeable future. In fact, there's one lab in particular that represents 20 percent of all that capacity: It's called the Beijing Genomics Institute. The Chinese are absolutely winning this race to the new Moon, by the way. What does this mean for medicine? So a woman, age 37, presents with stage 2 estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer. She is treated with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. She goes home. Two years later, she comes back with stage 3C ovarian cancer, unfortunately; treated again with surgery and chemotherapy. She comes back three years later at age 42 with more ovarian cancer, more chemotherapy. Six months later, she comes back with acute myeloid leukemia. She goes into respiratory failure and dies eight days later. So first: the way in which this woman was treated, in as little as 10 years, will look like bloodletting. And it's because of people like my colleague, Rick Wilson, at the Genome Institute at Washington University, who decided to take a look at this woman postmortem. And he took skin cells, healthy skin and cancerous bone marrow, and sequenced the whole genomes of both of them in a couple of weeks, no big deal. Then he compared those two genomes in software, and what he found, among other things, was a deletion — a 2,000-base deletion across three billion bases in a particular gene called TP53. If you have this deleterious mutation in this gene, you're 90 percent likely to get cancer in your life. So unfortunately, this doesn't help this woman, but it does have severe — profound, if you will — implications to her family. I mean, if they have the same mutation, and they get this genetic test and they understand it, then they can get regular screens and can catch cancer early, and potentially live a significantly longer life. Let me introduce you to the Beery twins, diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of two. Their mom is a very brave woman who didn't believe it; the symptoms weren't matching up. And through some heroic efforts and a lot of Internet searching, she was able to convince the medical community that, in fact, they had something else. They had dopa-responsive dystonia. And so they were given L-Dopa, and their symptoms did improve, but they weren't totally asymptomatic. Significant problems remained. Turns out the gentleman in this picture is a guy named Joe Beery, who was lucky enough to be the CIO of a company called Life Technologies. They're one of two companies that makes these massive whole-genome sequencing tools. And so he got his kids sequenced. What they found was a series of mutations in a gene called SPR, which is responsible for producing serotonin, among other things. So on top of L-Dopa, they gave these kids a serotonin precursor drug, and they're effectively normal now. Guys, this would never have happened without whole-genome sequencing. At the time — this was a few years ago — it cost $100,000. Today it's $10,000, next year, $1,000, the year after, $100, give or take a year. That's how fast this is moving. So here's little Nick — likes Batman and squirt guns. And it turns out Nick shows up at the children's hospital with this distended belly, like a famine victim. And it's not that he's not eating; it's that when he eats, his intestine basically opens up and feces spill out into his gut. So a hundred surgeries later, he looks at his mom and says, "Mom, please pray for me. I'm in so much pain." His pediatrician happens to have a background in clinical genetics and he has no idea what's going on, but he says, "Let's get this kid's genome sequenced." And what they find is a single-point mutation in a gene responsible for controlling programmed cell death. So the theory is that he's having some immunological reaction to what's going on — to the food, essentially. And that's a natural reaction, which causes some programmed cell death, but the gene that regulates that down is broken. And so this informs, among other things, of course, a treatment for bone marrow transplant, which he undertakes. And after nine months of grueling recovery, he's now eating steak with A1 sauce. (Laughter) The prospect of using the genome as a universal diagnostic is upon us today. Today. It's here. And what it means for all of us is that everybody in this room could live an extra 5, 10, 20 years, just because of this one thing. Which is a fantastic story, unless you think about humanity's footprint on the planet, and our ability to keep up food production. So it turns out that the very same technology is also being used to grow new lines of corn, wheat, soybean and other crops that are highly tolerant of drought, of flood, of pests and pesticides. Now, look — as long as we continue to increase the population, we'll have to continue to grow and eat genetically modified foods. And that's the only position I'll take today. Unless there's anybody in the audience who'd like to volunteer to stop eating? None, not one. This is a typewriter, a staple of every desktop for decades. And, in fact, the typewriter was essentially deleted by this thing. And then more general versions of word processors came about. But ultimately, it was a disruption on top of a disruption. It was Bob Metcalfe inventing the Ethernet, and the connection of all these computers that fundamentally changed everything. Suddenly we had Netscape, we had Yahoo. And we had, indeed, the entire dot-com bubble. (Laughter) Not to worry though, that was quickly rescued by the iPod, Facebook and, indeed, Angry Birds. (Laughter) Look, this is where we are today. This is the genomic revolution today. This is where we are. What I'd like you to consider is: What does it mean when these dots don't represent the individual bases of your genome, but they connect to genomes all across the planet? I just recently had to buy life insurance, and I was required to answer: A. I have never had a genetic test; B. I've had one, here you go; or C. I've had one and I'm not telling. Thankfully, I was able to answer A, and I say that honestly, in case my life insurance agent is listening. But what would have happened if I had said C? Consumer applications for genomics will flourish. Do you want to see if you're genetically compatible with your girlfriend? DNA sequencing on your iPhone? There's an app for that. (Laughter) Personalized genomic massage, anyone? There's already a lab today that tests for allele 334 of the AVPR1 gene, the so-called cheating gene. (Laughter) So anybody who's here today with your significant other, just turn over to them, swab their mouth, send it to the lab and you'll know for sure. (Laughter) Do you really want to elect a president whose genome suggests cardiomyopathy? Think of it — it's 2016, and the leading candidate releases not only her four years of back-tax returns, but also her personal genome. And it looks really good. Then she challenges all her competitors to do the same. Do you think that's not going to happen? Do you think it would have helped John McCain? (Laughter) How many people in the audience have the last name Resnick, like me? Raise your hand. Anybody? Nobody. Typically, there's one or two. So my father's father was one of 10 Resnick brothers. They all hated each other, and all moved to different parts of the planet. So it's likely I'm related to every Resnick that I ever meet, but I don't know. So imagine if my genome were De-identified, sitting in software, And a third cousin's genome was also sitting there, and there was software that could compare the two and make these associations. Not hard to imagine. My company has software that does this right now. Imagine one more thing, that that software is able to ask both parties for mutual consent: "Would you be willing to meet your third cousin?" And if we both say yes — voilà! Welcome to Chromosomally LinkedIn. (Laughter) Now this is probably a good thing, right? Bigger clan gatherings and so on. But maybe it's a bad thing as well. How many fathers in the room? Raise your hands. OK, so experts think that one to three percent of you are not actually the father of your child. (Laughter) Look — (Laughter) These genomes, these 23 chromosomes, they don't in any way represent the quality of our relationships or the nature of our society — at least not yet. And like any new technology, it's really in humanity's hands to wield it for the betterment of mankind or not. And so I urge you all to wake up and to tune in and to influence the genomic revolution that's happening all around you. Thank you. (Applause)

The conscience of television

{0: 'After wholly revamping the Bravo Network, media trendsetter Lauren Zalaznick is inventing fresh ways for NBC Universal to reach coveted new audiences across multiple media.'}

TEDWomen 2010

I want to say that really and truly, after these incredible speeches and ideas that are being spread, I am in the awkward position of being here to talk to you today about television. So most everyone watches TV. We like it. We like some parts of it. Here in America, people actually love TV. The average American watches TV for almost 5 hours a day. Okay? Now I happen to make my living these days in television, so for me, that's a good thing. But a lot of people don't love it so much. They, in fact, berate it. They call it stupid, and worse, believe me. My mother, growing up, she called it the "idiot box." But my idea today is not to debate whether there's such a thing as good TV or bad TV; my idea today is to tell you that I believe television has a conscience. So why I believe that television has a conscience is that I actually believe that television directly reflects the moral, political, social and emotional need states of our nation — that television is how we actually disseminate our entire value system. So all these things are uniquely human, and they all add up to our idea of conscience. Now today, we're not talking about good and bad TV. We're talking about popular TV. We're talking about top-10 Nielsen-rated shows over the course of 50 years. How do these Nielsen ratings reflect not just what you've heard about, which is the idea of our social, collective unconscious, but how do these top-10 Nielsen-rated shows over 50 years reflect the idea of our social conscience? How does television evolve over time, and what does this say about our society? Now speaking of evolution, from basic biology, you probably remember that the animal kingdom, including humans, have four basic primal instincts. You have hunger; you have sex; you have power; and you have the urge for acquisitiveness. As humans, what's important to remember is that we've developed, we've evolved over time to temper, or tame, these basic animal instincts. We have the capacity to laugh and cry. We feel awe, we feel pity. That is separate and apart from the animal kingdom. The other thing about human beings is that we love to be entertained. We love to watch TV. This is something that clearly separates us from the animal kingdom. Animals might love to play, but they don't love to watch. So I had an ambition to discover what could be understood from this uniquely human relationship between television programs and the human conscious. Why has television entertainment evolved the way it has? I kind of think of it as this cartoon devil or angel sitting on our shoulders. Is television literally functioning as our conscience, tempting us and rewarding us at the same time? So to begin to answer these questions, we did a research study. We went back 50 years to the 1959/1960 television season. We surveyed the top-20 Nielsen shows every year for 50 years — a thousand shows. We talked to over 3,000 individuals — almost 3,600 — aged 18 to 70, and we asked them how they felt emotionally. How did you feel watching every single one of these shows? Did you feel a sense of moral ambiguity? Did you feel outrage? Did you laugh? What did this mean for you? So to our global TED audiences, I want to say that this was a U.S. sample. But as you can see, these emotional need states are truly universal. And on a factual basis, over 80 percent of the U.S.'s most popular shows are exported around the world. So I really hope our global audiences can relate. Two acknowledgments before our first data slide: For inspiring me to even think about the idea of conscience and the tricks that conscience can play on us on a daily basis, I thank legendary rabbi, Jack Stern. And for the way in which I'm going to present the data, I want to thank TED community superstar Hans Rosling, who you may have just seen. Okay, here we go. So here you see, from 1960 to 2010, the 50 years of our study. Two things we're going to start with — the inspiration state and the moral ambiguity state, which, for this purpose, we defined inspiration as television shows that uplift me, that make me feel much more positive about the world. Moral ambiguity are televisions shows in which I don't understand the difference between right and wrong. As we start, you see in 1960 inspiration is holding steady. That's what we're watching TV for. Moral ambiguity starts to climb. Right at the end of the 60s, moral ambiguity is going up, inspiration is kind of on the wane. Why? The Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK is shot, the Civil Rights movement, race riots, the Vietnam War, MLK is shot, Bobby Kennedy is shot, Watergate. Look what happens. In 1970, inspiration plummets. Moral ambiguity takes off. They cross, but Ronald Reagan, a telegenic president, is in office. It's trying to recover. But look, it can't: AIDS, Iran-Contra, the Challenger disaster, Chernobyl. Moral ambiguity becomes the dominant meme in television from 1990 for the next 20 years. Take a look at this. This chart is going to document a very similar trend. But in this case, we have comfort — the bubble in red — social commentary and irreverence in blue and green. Now this time on TV you have "Bonanza," don't forget, you have "Gunsmoke," you have "Andy Griffith," you have domestic shows all about comfort. This is rising. Comfort stays whole. Irreverence starts to rise. Social commentary is all of a sudden spiking up. You get to 1969, and look what happens. You have comfort, irreverence, and social commentary, not only battling it out in our society, but you literally have two establishment shows — "Gunsmoke" and "Gomer Pyle" — in 1969 are the number-two- and number-three-rated television shows. What's number one? The socially irreverent hippie show, "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In." They're all living together, right. Viewers had responded dramatically. Look at this green spike in 1966 to a bellwether show. When you guys hear this industry term, a breakout hit, what does that mean? It means in the 1966 television season, The "Smothers Brothers" came out of nowhere. This was the first show that allowed viewers to say, "My God, I can comment on how I feel about the Vietnam War, about the presidency, through television?" That's what we mean by a breakout show. So then, just like the last chart, look what happens. In 1970, the dam bursts. The dam bursts. Comfort is no longer why we watch television. Social commentary and irreverence rise throughout the 70s. Now look at this. The 70s means who? Norman Lear. You have "All in the Family," "Sanford and Son," and the dominant show — in the top-10 for the entire 70s — "MAS*H." In the entire 50 years of television that we studied, seven of 10 shows ranked most highly for irreverence appeared on air during the Vietnam War, five of the top-10 during the Nixon administration. Only one generation, 20 years in, and we discovered, Wow! TV can do that? It can make me feel this? It can change us? So to this very, very savvy crowd, I also want to note the digital folks did not invent disruptive. Archie Bunker was shoved out of his easy chair along with the rest of us 40 years ago. This is a quick chart. Here's another attribute: fantasy and imagination, which are shows defined as, "takes me out of my everyday realm" and "makes me feel better." That's mapped against the red dot, unemployment, which is a simple Bureau of Labor Department statistic. You'll see that every time fantasy and imagination shows rise, it maps to a spike in unemployment. Do we want to see shows about people saving money and being unemployed? No. In the 70s you have the bellwether show "The Bionic Woman" that rocketed into the top-10 in 1973, followed by the "Six Million-Dollar Man" and "Charlie's Angels." Another spike in the 1980s — another spike in shows about control and power. What were those shows? Glamorous and rich. "Dallas," "Fantasy Island." Incredible mapping of our national psyche with some hard and fast facts: unemployment. So here you are, in my favorite chart, because this is our last 20 years. Whether or not you're in my business, you have surely heard or read of the decline of the thing called the three-camera sitcom and the rise of reality TV. Well, as we say in the business, X marks the spot. The 90s — the big bubbles of humor — we're watching "Friends," "Frasier," "Cheers" and "Seinfeld." Everything's good, low unemployment. But look: X marks the spot. In 2001, the September 2001 television season, humor succumbs to judgment once and for all. Why not? We had a 2000 presidential election decided by the Supreme Court. We had the bursting of the tech bubble. We had 9/11. Anthrax becomes part of the social lexicon. Look what happens when we keep going. At the turn of the century, the Internet takes off, reality television has taken hold. What do people want in their TV then? I would have thought revenge or nostalgia. Give me some comfort; my world is falling apart. No, they want judgment. I can vote you off the island. I can keep Sarah Palin's daughter dancing. I can choose the next American Idol. You're fired. That's all great, right? So as dramatically different as these television shows, pure entertainment, have been over the last 50 years — what did I start with? — one basic instinct remains. We're animals, we need our moms. There has not been a decade of television without a definitive, dominant TV mom. The 1950s: June Cleever in the original comfort show, "Leave it to Beaver." Lucille Ball kept us laughing through the rise of social consciousness in the 60s. Maude Findlay, the epitome of the irreverent 1970s, who tackled abortion, divorce, even menopause on TV. The 1980s, our first cougar was given to us in the form of Alexis Carrington. Murphy Brown took on a vice president when she took on the idea of single parenthood. This era's mom, Bree Van de Kamp. Now I don't know if this is the devil or the angel sitting on our conscience, sitting on television's shoulders, but I do know that I absolutely love this image. So to you all, the women of TEDWomen, the men of TEDWomen, the global audiences of TEDWomen, thank you for letting me present my idea about the conscience of television. But let me also thank the incredible creators who get up everyday to put their ideas on our television screens throughout all these ages of television. They give it life on television, for sure, but it's you as viewers, through your collective social consciences, that give it life, longevity, power or not. So thanks very much. (Applause)

The 6 killer apps of prosperity

{0: 'History is a curious thing, and Niall Ferguson investigates not only what happened but why. (Hint: Politics and money explain a lot.)'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about past and future billions. We know that about 106 billion people have ever lived. And we know that most of them are dead. And we also know that most of them live or lived in Asia. And we also know that most of them were or are very poor — did not live for very long. Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today. We know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800. And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners: Europeans, North Americans, Australasians. 19 percent of the world's population today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth. Economic historians call this "The Great Divergence." And this slide here is the best simplification of the Great Divergence story I can offer you. It's basically two ratios of per capita GDP, per capita gross domestic product, so average income. One, the red line, is the ratio of British to Indian per capita income. And the blue line is the ratio of American to Chinese. And this chart goes back to 1500. And you can see here that there's an exponential Great Divergence. They start off pretty close together. In fact, in 1500, the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. When you get to the 1970s, which is where this chart ends, the average Briton is more than 10 times richer than the average Indian. And that's allowing for differences in the cost of living. It's based on purchasing power parity. The average American is nearly 20 times richer than the average Chinese by the 1970s. So why? This wasn't just an economic story. If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were really quite tiny — five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of its population, maybe 20 percent of its income. By 1913, these 10 countries, plus the United States, controlled vast global empires — 58 percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global economic output. And notice, most of that went to the motherland, to the imperial metropoles, not to their colonial possessions. Now you can't just blame this on imperialism — though many people have tried to do so — for two reasons. One, empire was the least original thing that the West did after 1500. Everybody did empire. They beat preexisting Oriental empires like the Mughals and the Ottomans. So it really doesn't look like empire is a great explanation for the Great Divergence. In any case, as you may remember, the Great Divergence reaches its zenith in the 1970s, some considerable time after decolonization. This is not a new question. Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, [posed] it through his character Rasselas in his novel "Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia," published in 1759. "By what means are the Europeans thus powerful; or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither?" That's a great question. And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners — by the people in the rest of the world — like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire — who said in a book published in 1731, "Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?" Unlike Rasselas, Muteferrika had an answer to that question, which was correct. He said it was "because they have laws and rules invented by reason." It's not geography. You may think we can explain the Great Divergence in terms of geography. We know that's wrong, because we conducted two great natural experiments in the 20th century to see if geography mattered more than institutions. We took all the Germans, we divided them roughly in two, and we gave the ones in the East communism, and you see the result. Within an incredibly short period of time, people living in the German Democratic Republic produced Trabants, the Trabbi, one of the world's worst ever cars, while people in the West produced the Mercedes Benz. If you still don't believe me, we conducted the experiment also in the Korean Peninsula. And we decided we'd take Koreans in roughly the same geographical place with, notice, the same basic traditional culture, and we divided them in two, and we gave the Northerners communism. And the result is an even bigger divergence in a very short space of time than happened in Germany. Not a big divergence in terms of uniform design for border guards admittedly, but in almost every other respect, it's a huge divergence. Which leads me to think that neither geography nor national character, popular explanations for this kind of thing, are really significant. It's the ideas. It's the institutions. This must be true because a Scotsman said it. And I think I'm the only Scotsman here at the Edinburgh TED. So let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a Scotsman. He was Adam Smith — not Billy Connolly, not Sean Connery — though he is very smart indeed. (Laughter) Smith — and I want you to go and bow down before his statue in the Royal Mile; it's a wonderful statue — Smith, in the "Wealth of Nations" published in 1776 — that's the most important thing that happened that year ... (Laughter) You bet. There was a little local difficulty in some of our minor colonies, but ... (Laughter) "China seems to have been long stationary, and probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions. But this complement may be much inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil, climate, and situation might admit of." That is so right and so cool. And he said it such a long time ago. But you know, this is a TED audience, and if I keep talking about institutions, you're going to turn off. So I'm going to translate this into language that you can understand. Let's call them the killer apps. I want to explain to you that there were six killer apps that set the West apart from the rest. And they're kind of like the apps on your phone, in the sense that they look quite simple. They're just icons; you click on them. But behind the icon, there's complex code. It's the same with institutions. There are six which I think explain the Great Divergence. One, competition. Two, the scientific revolution. Three, property rights. Four, modern medicine. Five, the consumer society. And six, the work ethic. You can play a game and try and think of one I've missed at, or try and boil it down to just four, but you'll lose. (Laughter) Let me very briefly tell you what I mean by this, synthesizing the work of many economic historians in the process. Competition means, not only were there a hundred different political units in Europe in 1500, but within each of these units, there was competition between corporations as well as sovereigns. The ancestor of the modern corporation, the City of London Corporation, existed in the 12th century. Nothing like this existed in China, where there was one monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity, and anyone with any ambition had to pass one standardized examination, which took three days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of characters and very complex Confucian essay writing. The scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the Oriental world in a number of crucial ways, the most important being that, through the experimental method, it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before. Example: Benjamin Robins's extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to ballistics. Once you do that, your artillery becomes accurate. Think of what that means. That really was a killer application. (Laughter) Meanwhile, there's no scientific revolution anywhere else. The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there. In fact, they demolish Taqi al-Din's observatory, because it's considered blasphemous to inquire into the mind of God. Property rights: It's not the democracy, folks; it's having the rule of law based on private property rights. That's what makes the difference between North America and South America. You could turn up in North America having signed a deed of indenture saying, "I'll work for nothing for five years. You just have to feed me." But at the end of it, you've got a hundred acres of land. That's the land grant on the bottom half of the slide. That's not possible in Latin America where land is held onto by a tiny elite descended from the conquistadors. And you can see here the huge divergence that happens in property ownership between North and South. Most people in rural North America owned some land by 1900. Hardly anyone in South America did. That's another killer app. Modern medicine in the late 19th century began to make major breakthroughs against the infectious diseases that killed a lot of people. And this was another killer app — the very opposite of a killer, because it doubled, and then more than doubled, human life expectancy. It even did that in the European empires. Even in places like Senegal, beginning in the early 20th century, there were major breakthroughs in public health, and life expectancy began to rise. It doesn't rise any faster after these countries become independent. The empires weren't all bad. The consumer society is what you need for the Industrial Revolution to have a point. You need people to want to wear tons of clothes. You've all bought an article of clothing in the last month; I guarantee it. That's the consumer society, and it propels economic growth more than even technological change itself. Japan was the first non-Western society to embrace it. The alternative, which was proposed by Mahatma Gandhi, was to institutionalize and make poverty permanent. Very few Indians today wish that India had gone down Mahatma Gandhi's road. Finally, the work ethic. Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant. He was wrong. Any culture can get the work ethic if the institutions are there to create the incentive to work. We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western phenomenon. In fact, the West has lost its work ethic. Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German — a thousand. And this is part of a really extraordinary phenomenon, and that is the end of the Great Divergence. Who's got the work ethic now? Take a look at mathematical attainment by 15 year-olds. At the top of the international league table according to the latest PISA study, is the Shanghai district of China. The gap between Shanghai and the United Kingdom and the United States is as big as the gap between the U.K. and the U.S. and Albania and Tunisia. You probably assume that because the iPhone was designed in California but assembled in China that the West still leads in terms of technological innovation. You're wrong. In terms of patents, there's no question that the East is ahead. Not only has Japan been ahead for some time, South Korea has gone into third place, and China is just about to overtake Germany. Why? Because the killer apps can be downloaded. It's open source. Any society can adopt these institutions, and when they do, they achieve what the West achieved after 1500 — only faster. This is the Great Reconvergence, and it's the biggest story of your lifetime. Because it's on your watch that this is happening. It's our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese. Now it's just five times, and soon it will be 2.5 times. So I want to end with three questions for the future billions, just ahead of 2016, when the United States will lose its place as number one economy to China. The first is, can you delete these apps, and are we in the process of doing so in the Western world? The second question is, does the sequencing of the download matter? And could Africa get that sequencing wrong? One obvious implication of modern economic history is that it's quite hard to transition to democracy before you've established secure private property rights. Warning: that may not work. And third, can China do without killer app number three? That's the one that John Locke systematized when he said that freedom was rooted in private property rights and the protection of law. That's the basis for the Western model of representative government. Now this picture shows the demolition of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's studio in Shanghai earlier this year. He's now free again, having been detained, as you know, for some time. But I don't think his studio has been rebuilt. Winston Churchill once defined civilization in a lecture he gave in the fateful year of 1938. And I think these words really nail it: "It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is civilization — and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort and culture," what all TEDsters care about most. "When civilization reigns in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people." That's so true. I don't think the decline of Western civilization is inevitable, because I don't think history operates in this kind of life-cycle model, beautifully illustrated by Thomas Cole's "Course of Empire" paintings. That's not the way history works. That's not the way the West rose, and I don't think it's the way the West will fall. The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos. That's one of the most profound insights to come out of the historical study of complex institutions like civilizations. No, we may hang on, despite the huge burdens of debt that we've accumulated, despite the evidence that we've lost our work ethic and other parts of our historical mojo. But one thing is for sure, the Great Divergence is over, folks. Thanks very much. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Niall, I am just curious about your take on the other region of the world that's booming, which is Latin America. What's your view on that? Niall Ferguson: Well I really am not just talking about the rise of the East; I'm talking about the rise of the Rest, and that includes South America. I once asked one of my colleagues at Harvard, "Hey, is South America part of the West?" He was an expert in Latin American history. He said, "I don't know; I'll have to think about that." That tells you something really important. I think if you look at what is happening in Brazil in particular, but also Chile, which was in many ways the one that led the way in transforming the institutions of economic life, there's a very bright future indeed. So my story really is as much about that convergence in the Americas as it's a convergence story in Eurasia. BG: And there is this impression that North America and Europe are not really paying attention to these trends. Mostly they're worried about each other. The Americans think that the European model is going to crumble tomorrow. The Europeans think that the American budget is going to explode tomorrow. And that's all we seem to be caring about recently. NF: I think the fiscal crisis that we see in the developed World right now — both sides of the Atlantic — is essentially the same thing taking different forms in terms of political culture. And it's a crisis that has its structural facet — it's partly to do with demographics. But it's also, of course, to do with the massive crisis that followed excessive leverage, excessive borrowing in the private sector. That crisis, which has been the focus of so much attention, including by me, I think is an epiphenomenon. The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has just accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy. I think that's its real importance. BG: Niall, thank you. (NF: Thank you very much, Bruno.) (Applause)

What we learned from 5 million books

{0: 'Jean-Baptiste Michel looks at how we can use large volumes of data to better understand our world.', 1: 'Erez Lieberman Aiden pursues a broad range of research interests, spanning genomics, linguistics, mathematics ...'}

TEDxBoston 2011

Erez Lieberman Aiden: Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. But we at Harvard were wondering if this was really true. (Laughter) So we assembled a team of experts, spanning Harvard, MIT, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Encyclopedia Britannica and even our proud sponsors, the Google. And we cogitated about this for about four years. And we came to a startling conclusion. Ladies and gentlemen, a picture is not worth a thousand words. In fact, we found some pictures that are worth 500 billion words. Jean-Baptiste Michel: So how did we get to this conclusion? So Erez and I were thinking about ways to get a big picture of human culture and human history: change over time. So many books actually have been written over the years. So we were thinking, well the best way to learn from them is to read all of these millions of books. Now of course, if there's a scale for how awesome that is, that has to rank extremely, extremely high. Now the problem is there's an X-axis for that, which is the practical axis. This is very, very low. (Applause) Now people tend to use an alternative approach, which is to take a few sources and read them very carefully. This is extremely practical, but not so awesome. What you really want to do is to get to the awesome yet practical part of this space. So it turns out there was a company across the river called Google who had started a digitization project a few years back that might just enable this approach. They have digitized millions of books. So what that means is, one could use computational methods to read all of the books in a click of a button. That's very practical and extremely awesome. ELA: Let me tell you a little bit about where books come from. Since time immemorial, there have been authors. These authors have been striving to write books. And this became considerably easier with the development of the printing press some centuries ago. Since then, the authors have won on 129 million distinct occasions, publishing books. Now if those books are not lost to history, then they are somewhere in a library, and many of those books have been getting retrieved from the libraries and digitized by Google, which has scanned 15 million books to date. Now when Google digitizes a book, they put it into a really nice format. Now we've got the data, plus we have metadata. We have information about things like where was it published, who was the author, when was it published. And what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that's not the highest quality data. What we're left with is a collection of five million books, 500 billion words, a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome — a text which, when written out, would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over — a veritable shard of our cultural genome. Of course what we did when faced with such outrageous hyperbole ... (Laughter) was what any self-respecting researchers would have done. We took a page out of XKCD, and we said, "Stand back. We're going to try science." (Laughter) JM: Now of course, we were thinking, well let's just first put the data out there for people to do science to it. Now we're thinking, what data can we release? Well of course, you want to take the books and release the full text of these five million books. Now Google, and Jon Orwant in particular, told us a little equation that we should learn. So you have five million, that is, five million authors and five million plaintiffs is a massive lawsuit. So, although that would be really, really awesome, again, that's extremely, extremely impractical. (Laughter) Now again, we kind of caved in, and we did the very practical approach, which was a bit less awesome. We said, well instead of releasing the full text, we're going to release statistics about the books. So take for instance "A gleam of happiness." It's four words; we call that a four-gram. We're going to tell you how many times a particular four-gram appeared in books in 1801, 1802, 1803, all the way up to 2008. That gives us a time series of how frequently this particular sentence was used over time. We do that for all the words and phrases that appear in those books, and that gives us a big table of two billion lines that tell us about the way culture has been changing. ELA: So those two billion lines, we call them two billion n-grams. What do they tell us? Well the individual n-grams measure cultural trends. Let me give you an example. Let's suppose that I am thriving, then tomorrow I want to tell you about how well I did. And so I might say, "Yesterday, I throve." Alternatively, I could say, "Yesterday, I thrived." Well which one should I use? How to know? As of about six months ago, the state of the art in this field is that you would, for instance, go up to the following psychologist with fabulous hair, and you'd say, "Steve, you're an expert on the irregular verbs. What should I do?" And he'd tell you, "Well most people say thrived, but some people say throve." And you also knew, more or less, that if you were to go back in time 200 years and ask the following statesman with equally fabulous hair, (Laughter) "Tom, what should I say?" He'd say, "Well, in my day, most people throve, but some thrived." So now what I'm just going to show you is raw data. Two rows from this table of two billion entries. What you're seeing is year by year frequency of "thrived" and "throve" over time. Now this is just two out of two billion rows. So the entire data set is a billion times more awesome than this slide. (Laughter) (Applause) JM: Now there are many other pictures that are worth 500 billion words. For instance, this one. If you just take influenza, you will see peaks at the time where you knew big flu epidemics were killing people around the globe. ELA: If you were not yet convinced, sea levels are rising, so is atmospheric CO2 and global temperature. JM: You might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram, and that's to tell Nietzsche that God is not dead, although you might agree that he might need a better publicist. (Laughter) ELA: You can get at some pretty abstract concepts with this sort of thing. For instance, let me tell you the history of the year 1950. Pretty much for the vast majority of history, no one gave a damn about 1950. In 1700, in 1800, in 1900, no one cared. Through the 30s and 40s, no one cared. Suddenly, in the mid-40s, there started to be a buzz. People realized that 1950 was going to happen, and it could be big. (Laughter) But nothing got people interested in 1950 like the year 1950. (Laughter) People were walking around obsessed. They couldn't stop talking about all the things they did in 1950, all the things they were planning to do in 1950, all the dreams of what they wanted to accomplish in 1950. In fact, 1950 was so fascinating that for years thereafter, people just kept talking about all the amazing things that happened, in '51, '52, '53. Finally in 1954, someone woke up and realized that 1950 had gotten somewhat passé. (Laughter) And just like that, the bubble burst. (Laughter) And the story of 1950 is the story of every year that we have on record, with a little twist, because now we've got these nice charts. And because we have these nice charts, we can measure things. We can say, "Well how fast does the bubble burst?" And it turns out that we can measure that very precisely. Equations were derived, graphs were produced, and the net result is that we find that the bubble bursts faster and faster with each passing year. We are losing interest in the past more rapidly. JM: Now a little piece of career advice. So for those of you who seek to be famous, we can learn from the 25 most famous political figures, authors, actors and so on. So if you want to become famous early on, you should be an actor, because then fame starts rising by the end of your 20s — you're still young, it's really great. Now if you can wait a little bit, you should be an author, because then you rise to very great heights, like Mark Twain, for instance: extremely famous. But if you want to reach the very top, you should delay gratification and, of course, become a politician. So here you will become famous by the end of your 50s, and become very, very famous afterward. So scientists also tend to get famous when they're much older. Like for instance, biologists and physics tend to be almost as famous as actors. One mistake you should not do is become a mathematician. (Laughter) If you do that, you might think, "Oh great. I'm going to do my best work when I'm in my 20s." But guess what, nobody will really care. (Laughter) ELA: There are more sobering notes among the n-grams. For instance, here's the trajectory of Marc Chagall, an artist born in 1887. And this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person. He gets more and more and more famous, except if you look in German. If you look in German, you see something completely bizarre, something you pretty much never see, which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets, going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945, before rebounding afterward. And of course, what we're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany. Now these signals are actually so strong that we don't need to know that someone was censored. We can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing. Here's a simple way to do it. Well, a reasonable expectation is that somebody's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after. So that's sort of what we expect. And we compare that to the fame that we observe. And we just divide one by the other to produce something we call a suppression index. If the suppression index is very, very, very small, then you very well might be being suppressed. If it's very large, maybe you're benefiting from propaganda. JM: Now you can actually look at the distribution of suppression indexes over whole populations. So for instance, here — this suppression index is for 5,000 people picked in English books where there's no known suppression — it would be like this, basically tightly centered on one. What you expect is basically what you observe. This is distribution as seen in Germany — very different, it's shifted to the left. People talked about it twice less as it should have been. But much more importantly, the distribution is much wider. There are many people who end up on the far left on this distribution who are talked about 10 times fewer than they should have been. But then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda. This picture is the hallmark of censorship in the book record. ELA: So culturomics is what we call this method. It's kind of like genomics. Except genomics is a lens on biology through the window of the sequence of bases in the human genome. Culturomics is similar. It's the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture. Here, instead of through the lens of a genome, through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record. The great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it. Why can everyone do it? Everyone can do it because three guys, Jon Orwant, Matt Gray and Will Brockman over at Google, saw the prototype of the Ngram Viewer, and they said, "This is so fun. We have to make this available for people." So in two weeks flat — the two weeks before our paper came out — they coded up a version of the Ngram Viewer for the general public. And so you too can type in any word or phrase that you're interested in and see its n-gram immediately — also browse examples of all the various books in which your n-gram appears. JM: Now this was used over a million times on the first day, and this is really the best of all the queries. So people want to be their best, put their best foot forward. But it turns out in the 18th century, people didn't really care about that at all. They didn't want to be their best, they wanted to be their beft. So what happened is, of course, this is just a mistake. It's not that strove for mediocrity, it's just that the S used to be written differently, kind of like an F. Now of course, Google didn't pick this up at the time, so we reported this in the science article that we wrote. But it turns out this is just a reminder that, although this is a lot of fun, when you interpret these graphs, you have to be very careful, and you have to adopt the base standards in the sciences. ELA: People have been using this for all kinds of fun purposes. (Laughter) Actually, we're not going to have to talk, we're just going to show you all the slides and remain silent. This person was interested in the history of frustration. There's various types of frustration. If you stub your toe, that's a one A "argh." If the planet Earth is annihilated by the Vogons to make room for an interstellar bypass, that's an eight A "aaaaaaaargh." This person studies all the "arghs," from one through eight A's. And it turns out that the less-frequent "arghs" are, of course, the ones that correspond to things that are more frustrating — except, oddly, in the early 80s. We think that might have something to do with Reagan. (Laughter) JM: There are many usages of this data, but the bottom line is that the historical record is being digitized. Google has started to digitize 15 million books. That's 12 percent of all the books that have ever been published. It's a sizable chunk of human culture. There's much more in culture: there's manuscripts, there newspapers, there's things that are not text, like art and paintings. These all happen to be on our computers, on computers across the world. And when that happens, that will transform the way we have to understand our past, our present and human culture. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Selling condoms in the Congo

{0: "Amy Lockwood is the deputy director of Stanford's Center for Innovation in Global Health, where she looks at new solutions to big problems."}

TEDGlobal 2011

I am a reformed marketer, and I now work in international development. In October, I spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the [second] largest country in Africa. In fact, it's as large as Western Europe, but it only has 300 miles of paved roads. The DRC is a dangerous place. In the past 10 years, five million people have died due to a war in the east. But war isn't the only reason that life is difficult in the DRC. There are many health issues as well. In fact, the HIV prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults. This might not sound like a large number, but in a country with 76 million people, it means there are 930,000 that are infected. And due to the poor infrastructure, only 25 percent of those are receiving the life-saving drugs that they need. Which is why, in part, donor agencies provide condoms at low or no cost. And so while I was in the DRC, I spent a lot of time talking to people about condoms, including Damien. Damien runs a hotel outside of Kinshasa. It's a hotel that's only open until midnight, so it's not a place that you stay. But it is a place where sex workers and their clients come. Now Damien knows all about condoms, but he doesn't sell them. He said there's just not in demand. It's not surprising, because only three percent of people in the DRC use condoms. Joseph and Christine, who run a pharmacy where they sell a number of these condoms, said despite the fact that donor agencies provide them at low or no cost, and they have marketing campaigns that go along with them, their customers don't buy the branded versions. They like the generics. And as a marketer, I found that curious. And so I started to look at what the marketing looked like. And it turns out that there are three main messages used by the donor agencies for these condoms: fear, financing and fidelity. They name the condoms things like Vive, "to live" or Trust. They package it with the red ribbon that reminds us of HIV, put it in boxes that remind you who paid for them, show pictures of your wife or husband and tell you to protect them or to act prudently. Now these are not the kinds of things that someone is thinking about just before they go get a condom. (Laughter) What is it that you think about just before you get a condom? Sex! And the private companies that sell condoms in these places, they understand this. Their marketing is slightly different. The name might not be much different, but the imagery sure is. Some brands are aspirational, and certainly the packaging is incredibly provocative. And this made me think that perhaps the donor agencies had just missed out on a key aspect of marketing: understanding who's the audience. And for donor agencies, unfortunately, the audience tends to be people that aren't even in the country they're working [in]. It's people back home, people that support their work, people like these. But if what we're really trying to do is stop the spread of HIV, we need to think about the customer, the people whose behavior needs to change — the couples, the young women, the young men — whose lives depend on it. And so the lesson is this: it doesn't really matter what you're selling; you just have to think about who is your customer, and what are the messages that are going to get them to change their behavior. It might just save their lives. Thank you. (Applause)

Fighting a contagious cancer

{0: 'Elizabeth Murchison studies a mysterious (and contagious) cancer that threatens to wipe out Tasmanian devils.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Everyone's familiar with cancer, but we don't normally think of cancer as being a contagious disease. The Tasmanian devil has shown us that, not only can cancer be a contagious disease, but it can also threaten an entire species with extinction. So first of all, what is a Tasmanian devil? Many of you might be familiar with Taz, the cartoon character, the one that spins around and around and around. But not many people know that there actually is a real animal called the Tasmanian devil, and it's the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. A marsupial is a mammal with a pouch like a kangaroo. The Tasmanian devil got its name from the terrifying nocturnal scream that it makes. (Screaming) (Laughter) The Tasmanian devil is predominantly a scavenger, and it uses its powerful jaws and its sharp teeth to chomp on the bones of rotting dead animals. [The] Tasmanian devil is found only on the island of Tasmania, which is that small island just to the south of the mainland of Australia. And despite their ferocious appearance, Tasmanian devils are actually quite adorable little animals. In fact, growing up in Tasmania, it always was incredibly exciting when we got a chance to see a Tasmanian devil in the wild. But the Tasmanian devil population has been undergoing a really extremely fast decline. And in fact, there's concern that the species could go extinct in the wild within 20 to 30 years. And the reason for that is the emergence of a new disease, a contagious cancer. The story begins in 1996 when a wildlife photographer took this photograph here of a Tasmanian devil with a large tumor on its face. At the time, this was thought to be a one-off. Animals, just like humans, sometimes get strange tumors. However, we now believe that this is the first sighting of a new disease, which is now an epidemic spreading through Tasmania. The disease was first sighted in the northeast of Tasmania in 1996 and has spread across Tasmania like a huge wave. Now there's only a small part of the population, which remains unaffected. This disease appears first as tumors, usually on the face or inside the mouth of affected Tasmanian devils. These tumors inevitably grow into larger tumors, such as these ones here. And the next image I'm going to show is quite gruesome. But inevitably, these tumors progress towards being enormous, ulcerating tumors like this one here. This one in particular sticks in my mind, because this is the first case of this disease that I saw myself. And I remember the horror of seeing this little female devil with this huge ulcerating, foul-smelling tumor inside her mouth that had actually cracked off her entire lower jaw. She hadn't eaten for days. Her guts were swimming with parasitic worms. Her body was riddled with secondary tumors. And yet, she was feeding three little baby Tasmanian devils in her pouch. Of course, they died along with the mother. They were too young to survive without their mother. In fact, in the area where she comes from, more than 90 percent of the Tasmanian devil population has already died of this disease. Scientists around the world were intrigued by this cancer, this infectious cancer, that was spreading through the Tasmanian devil population. And our minds immediately turned to cervical cancer in women, which is spread by a virus, and to the AIDS epidemic, which is associated with a number of different types of cancer. All the evidence suggested that this devil cancer was spread by a virus. However, we now know — and I'll tell you right now — that we know that this cancer is not spread by a virus. In fact, the infectious agent of disease in this cancer is something altogether more sinister, and something that we hadn't really thought of before. But in order for me to explain what that is, I need to spend just a couple of minutes talking more about cancer itself. Cancer is a disease that affects millions of people around the world every year. One in three people in this room will develop cancer at some stage in their lives. I myself had a tumor removed from my large intestine when I was only 14. Cancer occurs when a single cell in your body acquires a set of random mutations in important genes that cause that cell to start to produce more and more and more copies of itself. Paradoxically, once established, natural selection actually favors the continued growth of cancer. Natural selection is survival of the fittest. And when you have a population of fast-dividing cancer cells, if one of them acquires new mutations, which allow them to grow more quickly, acquire nutrients more successfully, invade the body, they'll be selected for by evolution. That's why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat. It evolves. Throw a drug at it, and resistant cells will grow back. An amazing fact is that, given the right environment and the right nutrients, a cancer cell has the potential to go on growing forever. However cancer is constrained by living inside our bodies, and its continued growth, its spreading through our bodies and eating away at our tissues, leads to the death of the cancer patient and also to the death of the cancer itself. So cancer could be thought of as a strange, short-lived, self-destructive life form — an evolutionary dead end. But that is where the Tasmanian devil cancer has acquired an absolutely amazing evolutionary adaptation. And the answer came from studying the Tasmanian devil cancer's DNA. This was work from many people, but I'm going to explain it through a confirmatory experiment that I did a few years ago. The next slide is going to be gruesome. This is Jonas. He's a Tasmanian devil that we found with a large tumor on his face. And being a geneticist, I'm always interested to look at DNA and mutations. So I took this opportunity to collect some samples from Jonas' tumor and also some samples from other parts of his body. I took these back to the lab. I extracted DNA from them. And when I looked at the sequence of the DNA, and compared the sequence of Jonas' tumor to that of the rest of his body, I discovered that they had a completely different genetic profile. In fact, Jonas and his tumor were as different from each other as you and the person sitting next to you. What this told us was that Jonas' tumor did not arise from cells of his own body. In fact, more genetic profiling told us that this tumor in Jonas actually probably first arose from the cells of a female Tasmanian devil — and Jonas was clearly a male. So how come a tumor that arose from the cells of another individual is growing on Jonas' face? Well the next breakthrough came from studying hundreds of Tasmanian devil cancers from all around Tasmania. We found that all of these cancers shared the same DNA. Think about that for a minute. That means that all of these cancers actually are the same cancer that arose once from one individual devil, that have broken free of that first devil's body and spread through the entire Tasmanian devil population. But how can a cancer spread in a population? Well the final piece of the puzzle came when we remember how devils behave when they meet each other in the wild. They tend to bite each other, often quite ferociously and usually on the face. We think that cancer cells actually come off the tumor, get into the saliva. When the devil bites another devil, it actually physically implants living cancer cells into the next devil, so the tumor continues to grow. So this Tasmanian devil cancer is perhaps the ultimate cancer. It's not constrained by living within the body that gave rise to it. It spreads through the population, has mutations that allow it to evade the immune system, and it's the only cancer that we know of that's threatening an entire species with extinction. But if this can happen in Tasmanian devils, why hasn't it happened in other animals or even humans? Well the answer is, it has. This is Kimbo. He's a dog that belongs to a family in Mombasa in Kenya. Last year, his owner noticed some blood trickling from his genital region. She took him to the vet and the vet discovered something quite disgusting. And if you're squeamish, please look away now. He discovered this, a huge bleeding tumor at the base of Kimbo's penis. The vet diagnosed this as transmissible venereal tumor, a sexually transmitted cancer that affects dogs. And just as the Tasmanian devil cancer is contagious through the spread of living cancer cells, so is this dog cancer. But this dog cancer is quite remarkable, because it spread all around the world. And in fact, these same cells that are affecting Kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in New York City, in mountain villages in the Himalayas and in Outback Australia. We also believe this cancer might be very old. In fact, genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old, which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the Neanderthals. This cancer is remarkable. It's the oldest mammalian-derived life form that we know of. It's a living relic of the distant past. So we've seen that this can happen in animals. Could cancers be contagious between people? Well this is a question which fascinated Chester Southam, a cancer doctor in the 1950s. Ad he decided to put this to the test by actually deliberately inoculating people with cancer from somebody else. And this is a photograph of Dr. Southam in 1957 injecting cancer into a volunteer, who in this case was an inmate in Ohio State Penitentiary. Most of the people that Dr. Southam injected did not go on to develop cancer from the injected cells. But a small number of them did, and they were mostly people who were otherwise ill — whose immune systems were probably compromised. What this tells us, ethical issues aside, is that ... (Laughter) it's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people. However, under some circumstances, it can happen. And I think that this is something that oncologists and epidemiologists should be aware of in the future. So just finally, cancer is an inevitable outcome of the ability of our cells to divide and to adapt to their environments. But that does not mean that we should give up hope in the fight against cancer. In fact, I believe, given more knowledge of the complex evolutionary processes that drive cancer's growth, we can defeat cancer. My personal aim is to defeat the Tasmanian devil cancer. Let's prevent the Tasmanian devil from being the first animal to go extinct from cancer. Thank you. (Applause)

Doodlers, unite!

{0: 'In her book "Gamestorming," Sunni Brown shows how using art and games can empower serious problem-solving. '}

TED2011

So I just want to tell you my story. I spend a lot of time teaching adults how to use visual language and doodling in the workplace. And naturally, I encounter a lot of resistance, because it's considered to be anti-intellectual and counter to serious learning. But I have a problem with that belief, because I know that doodling has a profound impact on the way that we can process information and the way that we can solve problems. So I was curious about why there was a disconnect between the way our society perceives doodling and the way that the reality is. So I discovered some very interesting things. For example, there's no such thing as a flattering definition of a doodle. In the 17th century, a doodle was a simpleton or a fool — as in Yankee Doodle. In the 18th century, it became a verb, and it meant to swindle or ridicule or to make fun of someone. In the 19th century, it was a corrupt politician. And today, we have what is perhaps our most offensive definition, at least to me, which is the following: To doodle officially means to dawdle, to dilly dally, to monkey around, to make meaningless marks, to do something of little value, substance or import, and — my personal favorite — to do nothing. No wonder people are averse to doodling at work. Doing nothing at work is akin to masturbating at work; it's totally inappropriate. (Laughter) Additionally, I've heard horror stories from people whose teachers scolded them, of course, for doodling in classrooms. And they have bosses who scold them for doodling in the boardroom. There is a powerful cultural norm against doodling in settings in which we are supposed to learn something. And unfortunately, the press tends to reinforce this norm when they're reporting on a doodling scene — of an important person at a confirmation hearing and the like — they typically use words like "discovered" or "caught" or "found out," as if there's some sort of criminal act being committed. And additionally, there is a psychological aversion to doodling — thank you, Freud. In the 1930s, Freud told us all that you could analyze people's psyches based on their doodles. This is not accurate, but it did happen to Tony Blair at the Davos Forum in 2005, when his doodles were, of course, "discovered" and he was labeled the following things. Now it turned out to be Bill Gates' doodle. (Laughter) And Bill, if you're here, nobody thinks you're megalomaniacal. But that does contribute to people not wanting to share their doodles. And here is the real deal. Here's what I believe. I think that our culture is so intensely focused on verbal information that we're almost blinded to the value of doodling. And I'm not comfortable with that. And so because of that belief that I think needs to be burst, I'm here to send us all hurtling back to the truth. And here's the truth: doodling is an incredibly powerful tool, and it is a tool that we need to remember and to re-learn. So here's a new definition for doodling. And I hope there's someone in here from The Oxford English Dictionary, because I want to talk to you later. Here's the real definition: Doodling is really to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think. That is why millions of people doodle. Here's another interesting truth about the doodle: People who doodle when they're exposed to verbal information retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts. We think doodling is something you do when you lose focus, but in reality, it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus. Additionally, it has a profound effect on creative problem-solving and deep information processing. There are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions. They are visual, auditory, reading and writing and kinesthetic. Now in order for us to really chew on information and do something with it, we have to engage at least two of those modalities, or we have to engage one of those modalities coupled with an emotional experience. The incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four learning modalities simultaneously with the possibility of an emotional experience. That is a pretty solid contribution for a behavior equated with doing nothing. This is so nerdy, but this made me cry when I discovered this. So they did anthropological research into the unfolding of artistic activity in children, and they found that, across space and time, all children exhibit the same evolution in visual logic as they grow. In other words, they have a shared and growing complexity in visual language that happens in a predictable order. And I think that is incredible. I think that means doodling is native to us and we simply are denying ourselves that instinct. And finally, a lot a people aren't privy to this, but the doodle is a precursor to some of our greatest cultural assets. This is but one: this is Frank Gehry the architect's precursor to the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. So here is my point: Under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom or a boardroom or even the war room. On the contrary, doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high. And I will go you one further. Because doodling is so universally accessible and it is not intimidating as an art form, it can be leveraged as a portal through which we move people into higher levels of visual literacy. My friends, the doodle has never been the nemesis of intellectual thought. In reality, it is one of its greatest allies. Thank you. (Applause)

A doctor's touch

{0: 'In our era of the patient-as-data-point, Abraham Verghese believes in the old-fashioned physical exam, the bedside chat, the power of informed observation.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

A few months ago, a 40 year-old woman came to an emergency room in a hospital close to where I live, and she was brought in confused. Her blood pressure was an alarming 230 over 170. Within a few minutes, she went into cardiac collapse. She was resuscitated, stabilized, whisked over to a CAT scan suite right next to the emergency room, because they were concerned about blood clots in the lung. And the CAT scan revealed no blood clots in the lung, but it showed bilateral, visible, palpable breast masses, breast tumors, that had metastasized widely all over the body. And the real tragedy was, if you look through her records, she had been seen in four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years. Four or five opportunities to see the breast masses, touch the breast mass, intervene at a much earlier stage than when we saw her. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not an unusual story. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI or orthopedic consult. I am not a Luddite. I teach at Stanford. I'm a physician practicing with cutting-edge technology. But I'd like to make the case to you in the next 17 minutes that when we shortcut the physical exam, when we lean towards ordering tests instead of talking to and examining the patient, we not only overlook simple diagnoses that can be diagnosed at a treatable, early stage, but we're losing much more than that. We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship. This may actually be heresy to say this at TED, but I'd like to introduce you to the most important innovation, I think, in medicine to come in the next 10 years, and that is the power of the human hand — to touch, to comfort, to diagnose and to bring about treatment. I'd like to introduce you first to this person whose image you may or may not recognize. This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since we're in Edinburgh, I'm a big fan of Conan Doyle. You might not know that Conan Doyle went to medical school here in Edinburgh, and his character, Sherlock Holmes, was inspired by Sir Joseph Bell. Joseph Bell was an extraordinary teacher by all accounts. And Conan Doyle, writing about Bell, described the following exchange between Bell and his students. So picture Bell sitting in the outpatient department, students all around him, patients signing up in the emergency room and being registered and being brought in. And a woman comes in with a child, and Conan Doyle describes the following exchange. The woman says, "Good Morning." Bell says, "What sort of crossing did you have on the ferry from Burntisland?" She says, "It was good." And he says, "What did you do with the other child?" She says, "I left him with my sister at Leith." And he says, "And did you take the shortcut down Inverleith Row to get here to the infirmary?" She says, "I did." And he says, "Would you still be working at the linoleum factory?" And she says, "I am." And Bell then goes on to explain to the students. He says, "You see, when she said, 'Good morning,' I picked up her Fife accent. And the nearest ferry crossing from Fife is from Burntisland. And so she must have taken the ferry over. You notice that the coat she's carrying is too small for the child who is with her, and therefore, she started out the journey with two children, but dropped one off along the way. You notice the clay on the soles of her feet. Such red clay is not found within a hundred miles of Edinburgh, except in the botanical gardens. And therefore, she took a short cut down Inverleith Row to arrive here. And finally, she has a dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand, a dermatitis that is unique to the linoleum factory workers in Burntisland." And when Bell actually strips the patient, begins to examine the patient, you can only imagine how much more he would discern. And as a teacher of medicine, as a student myself, I was so inspired by that story. But you might not realize that our ability to look into the body in this simple way, using our senses, is quite recent. The picture I'm showing you is of Leopold Auenbrugger who, in the late 1700s, discovered percussion. And the story is that Leopold Auenbrugger was the son of an innkeeper. And his father used to go down into the basement to tap on the sides of casks of wine to determine how much wine was left and whether to reorder. And so when Auenbrugger became a physician, he began to do the same thing. He began to tap on the chests of his patients, on their abdomens. And basically everything we know about percussion, which you can think of as an ultrasound of its day — organ enlargement, fluid around the heart, fluid in the lungs, abdominal changes — all of this he described in this wonderful manuscript "Inventum Novum," "New Invention," which would have disappeared into obscurity, except for the fact that this physician, Corvisart, a famous French physician — famous only because he was physician to this gentleman — Corvisart repopularized and reintroduced the work. And it was followed a year or two later by Laennec discovering the stethoscope. Laennec, it is said, was walking in the streets of Paris and saw two children playing with a stick. One was scratching at the end of the stick, another child listened at the other end. And Laennec thought this would be a wonderful way to listen to the chest or listen to the abdomen using what he called "the cylinder." Later he renamed it the stethoscope. And that is how stethoscope and auscultation was born. So within a few years, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, all of a sudden, the barber surgeon had given way to the physician who was trying to make a diagnosis. If you'll recall, prior to that time, no matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut — short on the sides, long in the back — and pull your tooth while he was at it. He made no attempt at diagnosis. In fact, some of you might well know that the barber pole, the red and white stripes, represents the blood bandages of the barber surgeon, and the receptacles on either end represent the pots in which the blood was collected. But the arrival of auscultation and percussion represented a sea change, a moment when physicians were beginning to look inside the body. And this particular painting, I think, represents the pinnacle, the peak, of that clinical era. This is a very famous painting: "The Doctor" by Luke Fildes. Luke Fildes was commissioned to paint this by Tate, who then established the Tate Gallery. And Tate asked Fildes to paint a painting of social importance. And it's interesting that Fildes picked this topic. Fildes' oldest son, Philip, died at the age of nine on Christmas Eve after a brief illness. And Fildes was so taken by the physician who held vigil at the bedside for two, three nights, that he decided that he would try and depict the physician in our time — almost a tribute to this physician. And hence the painting "The Doctor," a very famous painting. It's been on calendars, postage stamps in many different countries. I've often wondered, what would Fildes have done had he been asked to paint this painting in the modern era, in the year 2011? Would he have substituted a computer screen for where he had the patient? I've gotten into some trouble in Silicon Valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon for the real patient who's in the computer. I've actually coined a term for that entity in the computer. I call it the iPatient. The iPatient is getting wonderful care all across America. The real patient often wonders, where is everyone? When are they going to come by and explain things to me? Who's in charge? There's a real disjunction between the patient's perception and our own perceptions as physicians of the best medical care. I want to show you a picture of what rounds looked like when I was in training. The focus was around the patient. We went from bed to bed. The attending physician was in charge. Too often these days, rounds look very much like this, where the discussion is taking place in a room far away from the patient. The discussion is all about images on the computer, data. And the one critical piece missing is that of the patient. Now I've been influenced in this thinking by two anecdotes that I want to share with you. One had to do with a friend of mine who had a breast cancer, had a small breast cancer detected — had her lumpectomy in the town in which I lived. This is when I was in Texas. And she then spent a lot of time researching to find the best cancer center in the world to get her subsequent care. And she found the place and decided to go there, went there. Which is why I was surprised a few months later to see her back in our own town, getting her subsequent care with her private oncologist. And I pressed her, and I asked her, "Why did you come back and get your care here?" And she was reluctant to tell me. She said, "The cancer center was wonderful. It had a beautiful facility, giant atrium, valet parking, a piano that played itself, a concierge that took you around from here to there. But," she said, "but they did not touch my breasts." Now you and I could argue that they probably did not need to touch her breasts. They had her scanned inside out. They understood her breast cancer at the molecular level; they had no need to touch her breasts. But to her, it mattered deeply. It was enough for her to make the decision to get her subsequent care with her private oncologist who, every time she went, examined both breasts including the axillary tail, examined her axilla carefully, examined her cervical region, her inguinal region, did a thorough exam. And to her, that spoke of a kind of attentiveness that she needed. I was very influenced by that anecdote. I was also influenced by another experience that I had, again, when I was in Texas, before I moved to Stanford. I had a reputation as being interested in patients with chronic fatigue. This is not a reputation you would wish on your worst enemy. I say that because these are difficult patients. They have often been rejected by their families, have had bad experiences with medical care and they come to you fully prepared for you to join the long list of people who's about to disappoint them. And I learned very early on with my first patient that I could not do justice to this very complicated patient with all the records they were bringing in a new patient visit of 45 minutes. There was just no way. And if I tried, I'd disappoint them. And so I hit on this method where I invited the patient to tell me the story for their entire first visit, and I tried not to interrupt them. We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds. And if I ever get to heaven, it will be because I held my piece for 45 minutes and did not interrupt my patient. I then scheduled the physical exam for two weeks hence, and when the patient came for the physical, I was able to do a thorough physical, because I had nothing else to do. I like to think that I do a thorough physical exam, but because the whole visit was now about the physical, I could do an extraordinarily thorough exam. And I remember my very first patient in that series continued to tell me more history during what was meant to be the physical exam visit. And I began my ritual. I always begin with the pulse, then I examine the hands, then I look at the nail beds, then I slide my hand up to the epitrochlear node, and I was into my ritual. And when my ritual began, this very voluble patient began to quiet down. And I remember having a very eerie sense that the patient and I had slipped back into a primitive ritual in which I had a role and the patient had a role. And when I was done, the patient said to me with some awe, "I have never been examined like this before." Now if that were true, it's a true condemnation of our health care system, because they had been seen in other places. I then proceeded to tell the patient, once the patient was dressed, the standard things that the person must have heard in other institutions, which is, "This is not in your head. This is real. The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection. The bad news is we don't know exactly what's causing this, but here's what you should do, here's what we should do." And I would lay out all the standard treatment options that the patient had heard elsewhere. And I always felt that if my patient gave up the quest for the magic doctor, the magic treatment and began with me on a course towards wellness, it was because I had earned the right to tell them these things by virtue of the examination. Something of importance had transpired in the exchange. I took this to my colleagues at Stanford in anthropology and told them the same story. And they immediately said to me, "Well you are describing a classic ritual." And they helped me understand that rituals are all about transformation. We marry, for example, with great pomp and ceremony and expense to signal our departure from a life of solitude and misery and loneliness to one of eternal bliss. I'm not sure why you're laughing. That was the original intent, was it not? We signal transitions of power with rituals. We signal the passage of a life with rituals. Rituals are terribly important. They're all about transformation. Well I would submit to you that the ritual of one individual coming to another and telling them things that they would not tell their preacher or rabbi, and then, incredibly on top of that, disrobing and allowing touch — I would submit to you that that is a ritual of exceeding importance. And if you shortchange that ritual by not undressing the patient, by listening with your stethoscope on top of the nightgown, by not doing a complete exam, you have bypassed on the opportunity to seal the patient-physician relationship. I am a writer, and I want to close by reading you a short passage that I wrote that has to do very much with this scene. I'm an infectious disease physician, and in the early days of HIV, before we had our medications, I presided over so many scenes like this. I remember, every time I went to a patient's deathbed, whether in the hospital or at home, I remember my sense of failure — the feeling of I don't know what I have to say; I don't know what I can say; I don't know what I'm supposed to do. And out of that sense of failure, I remember, I would always examine the patient. I would pull down the eyelids. I would look at the tongue. I would percuss the chest. I would listen to the heart. I would feel the abdomen. I remember so many patients, their names still vivid on my tongue, their faces still so clear. I remember so many huge, hollowed out, haunted eyes staring up at me as I performed this ritual. And then the next day, I would come, and I would do it again. And I wanted to read you this one closing passage about one patient. "I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin, unable to speak, his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications. When he saw me on what turned out to be his last hours on this earth, his hands moved as if in slow motion. And as I wondered what he was up to, his stick fingers made their way up to his pajama shirt, fumbling with his buttons. I realized that he was wanting to expose his wicker-basket chest to me. It was an offering, an invitation. I did not decline. I percussed. I palpated. I listened to the chest. I think he surely must have known by then that it was vital for me just as it was necessary for him. Neither of us could skip this ritual, which had nothing to do with detecting rales in the lung, or finding the gallop rhythm of heart failure. No, this ritual was about the one message that physicians have needed to convey to their patients. Although, God knows, of late, in our hubris, we seem to have drifted away. We seem to have forgotten — as though, with the explosion of knowledge, the whole human genome mapped out at our feet, we are lulled into inattention, forgetting that the ritual is cathartic to the physician, necessary for the patient — forgetting that the ritual has meaning and a singular message to convey to the patient. And the message, which I didn't fully understand then, even as I delivered it, and which I understand better now is this: I will always, always, always be there. I will see you through this. I will never abandon you. I will be with you through the end." Thank you very much. (Applause)

A short intro to the Studio School

{0: 'Geoff Mulgan is director of the Young Foundation, a center for social innovation, social enterprise and public policy that pioneers ideas in fields such as aging, education and poverty reduction. He’s the founder of the think-tank Demos, and the author of "The Art of Public Strategy."'}

TEDGlobal 2011

What I want to talk about today is one idea. It's an idea for a new kind of school, which turns on its head much of our conventional thinking about what schools are for and how they work. And it might just be coming to a neighborhood near you soon. Where it comes from is an organization called the Young Foundation, which, over many decades, has come up with many innovations in education, like the Open University and things like Extended Schools, Schools for Social Entrepreneurs, Summer Universities and the School of Everything. And about five years ago, we asked what was the most important need for innovation in schooling here in the U.K. And we felt the most important priority was to bring together two sets of problems. One was large numbers of bored teenagers who just didn't like school, couldn't see any relationship between what they learned in school and future jobs. And employers who kept complaining that the kids coming out of school weren't actually ready for real work, didn't have the right attitudes and experience. And so we try to ask: What kind of school would have the teenagers fighting to get in, not fighting to stay out? And after hundreds of conversations with teenagers and teachers and parents and employers and schools from Paraguay to Australia, and looking at some of the academic research, which showed the importance of what's now called non-cognitive skills — the skills of motivation, resilience — and that these are as important as the cognitive skills — formal academic skills — we came up with an answer, a very simple answer in a way, which we called the Studio School. And we called it a studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the Renaissance where work and learning are integrated. You work by learning, and you learn by working. And the design we came up with had the following characteristics. First of all, we wanted small schools — about 300, 400 pupils — 14 to 19 year-olds, and critically, about 80 percent of the curriculum done not through sitting in classrooms, but through real-life, practical projects, working on commission to businesses, NGO's and others. That every pupil would have a coach, as well as teachers, who would have timetables much more like a work environment in a business. And all of this will be done within the public system, funded by public money, but independently run. And all at no extra cost, no selection, and allowing the pupils the route into university, even if many of them would want to become entrepreneurs and have manual jobs as well. Underlying it was some very simple ideas that large numbers of teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real — all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does. Now that was a nice idea, so we moved into the rapid prototyping phase. We tried it out, first in Luton — famous for its airport and not much else, I fear — and in Blackpool — famous for its beaches and leisure. And what we found — and we got quite a lot of things wrong and then improved them — but we found that the young people loved it. They found it much more motivational, much more exciting than traditional education. And perhaps most important of all, two years later when the exam results came through, the pupils who had been put on these field trials who were in the lowest performing groups had jumped right to the top — in fact, pretty much at the top decile of performance in terms of GCSE's, which is the British marking system. Now not surprisingly, that influenced some people to think we were onto something. The minister of education down south in London described himself as a "big fan." And the business organizations thought we were onto something in terms of a way of preparing children much better for real-life work today. And indeed, the head of the Chambers of Commerce is now the chairman of the Studio Schools Trust and helping it, not just with big businesses, but small businesses all over the country. We started with two schools. That's grown this year to about 10. And next year, we're expecting about 35 schools open across England, and another 40 areas want to have their own schools opening — a pretty rapid spread of this idea. Interestingly, it's happened almost entirely without media coverage. It's happened almost entirely without big money behind it. It spread almost entirely through word of mouth, virally, across teachers, parents, people involved in education. And it spread because of the power of an idea — so the very, very simple idea about turning education on its head and putting the things which were marginal, things like working in teams, doing practical projects, and putting them right at the heart of learning, rather than on the edges. Now there's a whole set of new schools opening up this autumn. This is one from Yorkshire where, in fact, my nephew, I hope, will be able to attend it. And this one is focused on creative and media industries. Other ones have a focus on health care, tourism, engineering and other fields. We think we're onto something. It's not perfect yet, but we think this is one idea which can transform the lives of thousands, possibly millions, of teenagers who are really bored by schooling. It doesn't animate them. They're not like all of you who can sit in rows and hear things said to you for hour after hour. They want to do things, they want to get their hands dirty, they want education to be for real. And my hope is that some of you out there may be able to help us. We feel we're on the beginning of a journey of experiment and improvement to turn the Studio School idea into something which is present, not as a universal answer for every child, but at least as an answer for some children in every part of the world. And I hope that a few of you at least can help us make that happen. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Filming democracy in Ghana

{0: 'Jarreth Merz\' new film, "An African Election," follows the 2008 presidential elections in Ghana from start to finish.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

I was born in Switzerland and raised in Ghana, West Africa. Ghana felt safe to me as a child. I was free, I was happy. The early 70s marked a time of musical and artistic excellence in Ghana. But then by the end of the decade, the country had fallen back into political instability and mismanagement. In 1979, I witnessed my first military coup. We the children had gathered at a friend's house. It was a dimly lit shack. There was a beaten up black and white television flickering in the background, and a former head of state and general was being blindfolded and tied to the pole. The firing squad aimed, fired — the general was dead. Now this was being broadcast live. And shortly after, we left the country, and we returned to Switzerland. Now Europe came as a shock to me, and I think I started feeling the need to shed my skin in order to fit in. I wanted to blend in like a chameleon. I think it was a tactic of survival. And it worked, or so I believed. So here I was in 2008 wondering where I was in my life. And I felt I was being typecast as an actor. I was always playing the exotic African. I was playing the violent African, the African terrorist. And I was thinking, how many terrorists could I possibly play before turning into one myself? And I had become ashamed of the other, the African in me. And fortunately I decided in 2008 to return to Ghana, after 28 years of absence. I wanted to document on film the 2008 presidential elections. And there, I started by searching for the footprints in my childhood. And before I even knew it, I was suddenly on a stage surrounded by thousands of cheering people during a political rally. And I realized that, when I'd left the country, free and fair elections in a democratic environment were a dream. And now that I'd returned, that dream had become reality, though a fragile reality. And I was thinking, was Ghana searching for its identity like I was looking for my identity? Was what was happening in Ghana a metaphor for what was happening in me? And it was as if through the standards of my Western life, I hadn't lived up to my full potential. I mean, nor had Ghana, even though we had been trying very hard. Now in 1957, Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to gain its independence. In the late 50s, Ghana and Singapore had the same GDP. I mean, today, Singapore is a First World country and Ghana is not. But maybe it was time to prove to myself, yes, it's important to understand the past, it is important to look at it in a different light, but maybe we should look at the strengths in our own culture and build on those foundations in the present. So here I was, December 7th, 2008. The polling stations opened to the voters at 7:00 AM, but voters, eager to take their own political fate into their hands, were starting to line up at 4:00 AM in the morning. And they had traveled from near, they had traveled from far, because they wanted to make their voices heard. And I asked one of the voters, I said, "Whom are you going to vote for?" And he said, "I'm sorry, I can't tell you." He said that his vote was in his heart. And I understood, this was their election, and they weren't going to let anyone take it away from them. Now the first round of the voting didn't bring forth a clear winner — so nobody had achieved the absolute majority — so voting went into a second round three weeks later. The candidates were back on the road; they were campaigning. The rhetoric of the candidates, of course, changed. The heat was on. And then the cliche came to haunt us. There were claims of intimidation at the polling stations, of ballot boxes being stolen. Inflated results started coming in and the mob was starting to get out of control. We witnessed the eruption of violence in the streets. People were being beaten brutally. The army started firing their guns. People were scrambling. It was complete chaos. And my heart sank, because I thought, here we are again. Here is another proof that the African is not capable of governing himself. And not only that, I am documenting it — documenting my own cultural shortcomings. So when the echo of the gunshots had lingered, it was soon drowned by the chanting of the mob, and I didn't believe what I was hearing. They were chanting, "We want peace. We want peace." And I realized it had to come from the people. After all, they decide, and they did. So the sounds that were before distorted and loud, were suddenly a melody. The sounds of the voices were harmonious. So it could happen. A democracy could be upheld peacefully. It could be, by the will of the masses who were now urgently pressing with all their heart and all their will for peace. Now here's an interesting comparison. We in the West, we preach the values, the golden light of democracy, that we are the shining example of how it's done. But when it comes down to it, Ghana found itself in the same place in which the U.S. election stalled in the 2000 presidential elections — Bush versus Gore. But instead of the unwillingness of the candidates to allow the system to proceed and the people to decide, Ghana honored democracy and its people. It didn't leave it up to the Supreme Court to decide; the people did. Now the second round of voting did not bring forth a clear winner either. I mean, it was so incredibly close. The electoral commissioner declared, with the consent of the parties, to run an unprecedented second re-run. So the people went back to the polls to determine their own president, not the legal system. And guess what, it worked. The defeated candidate gave up power and made way for Ghana to move into a new democratic cycle. I mean, at the absolute time for the absolute need of democracy, they did not abuse their power. The belief in true democracy and in the people runs deep, proving that the African is capable of governing himself. Now the uphill battle for Ghana and for Africa is not over, but I have proof that the other side of democracy exists, and that we must not take it for granted. Now I have learned that my place is not just in the West or in Africa, and I'm still searching for my identity, but I saw Ghana create democracy better. Ghana taught me to look at people differently and to look at myself differently. And yes, we Africans can. Thank you. (Applause)

Battling bad science

{0: 'Ben Goldacre unpicks dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dubious government reports, pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

So I'm a doctor, but I kind of slipped sideways into research, and now I'm an epidemiologist. And nobody really knows what epidemiology is. Epidemiology is the science of how we know in the real world if something is good for you or bad for you. And it's best understood through example as the science of those crazy, wacky newspaper headlines. And these are just some of the examples. These are from the Daily Mail. Every country in the world has a newspaper like this. It has this bizarre, ongoing philosophical project of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer. Here are some of the things they said cause cancer: divorce, Wi-Fi, toiletries and coffee. Some things they say prevent cancer: crusts, red pepper, licorice and coffee. So you can see there are contradictions. Coffee both causes and prevents cancer. As you start to read on, you can see that maybe there's some political valence behind some of this. For women, housework prevents breast cancer, but for men, shopping could make you impotent. (Laughter) So we know that we need to start unpicking the science behind this. And what I hope to show is that unpicking the evidence behind dodgy claims isn't a kind of nasty, carping activity; it's socially useful. But it's also an extremely valuable explanatory tool, because real science is about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else's position. That's what happens in academic journals, it's what happens at academic conferences — the Q&A session after a postdoc presents data is often a bloodbath. And nobody minds that; we actively welcome it. It's like a consenting intellectual S&M activity. (Laughter) So what I'm going to show you is all of the main things, all of the main features of my discipline, evidence-based medicine. And I will talk you through all of these and demonstrate how they work, exclusively using examples of people getting stuff wrong. We'll start with the absolute weakest form of evidence known to man, and that is authority. In science, we don't care how many letters you have after your name — we want to know what your reasons are for believing something. How do you know that something is good for us or bad for us? But we're also unimpressed by authority because it's so easy to contrive. This is somebody called Dr. Gillian McKeith, PhD, or, to give her full medical title, Gillian McKeith. (Laughter) Again, every country has somebody like this. She is our TV diet guru. She has five series of prime-time television, giving out very lavish and exotic health advice. She, it turns out, has a non-accredited correspondence course PhD from somewhere in America. She also boasts that she's a certified professional member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, which sounds very glamorous; you get a certificate. This one belongs to my dead cat, Hettie. She was a horrible cat. You go to the website, fill out the form, give them $60, it arrives in the post. That's not the only reason we think this person is an idiot. She also says things like eat lots of dark green leaves, they contain chlorophyll and really oxygenate your blood. And anybody who's done school biology remembers that chlorophyll and chloroplasts only make oxygen in sunlight, and it's quite dark in your bowels after you've eaten spinach. Next, we need proper science, proper evidence. So: "Red wine can help prevent breast cancer." This is a headline from The Daily Telegraph in the UK. "A glass of red wine a day could help prevent breast cancer." So you find this paper, and find that it is a real piece of science. It's a description of the changes in the behavior of one enzyme when you drip a chemical extracted from some red grape skin onto some cancer cells in a dish on a bench in a laboratory somewhere. And that's a really useful thing to describe in a scientific paper. But on the question of your own personal risk of getting breast cancer if you drink red wine, it tells you absolutely bugger all. Actually, it turns out that your risk of breast cancer increases slightly with every amount of alcohol you drink. So what we want are studies in real human people. And here's another example. This is from Britain's "leading" diet nutritionist in the Daily Mirror, our second-biggest selling newspaper. "An Australian study in 2001 found that olive oil, in combination with fruits, vegetables and pulses, offers measurable protection against skin wrinklings," and give the advice: "If you eat olive oil and vegetables, you'll have fewer wrinkles." They helpfully tell you how to find the paper, and what you find is an observational study. Obviously, nobody has been able to go back to 1930, get all the people born in one maternity unit, and half of them eat lots of fruit and veg and olive oil, half of them eat McDonald's, and then we see how many wrinkles you've got later. You have to take a snapshot of how people are now. And what you find is, of course: people who eat veg and olive oil have fewer wrinkles. But that's because people who eat fruit and veg and olive oil are freaks — they're not normal, they're like you; they come to events like this. (Laughter) They're posh, they're wealthy, less likely to have outdoor jobs, less likely to do manual labor, they have better social support, are less likely to smoke; for a host of fascinating, interlocking social, political and cultural reasons, they're less likely to have wrinkles. That doesn't mean it's the vegetables or olive oil. (Laughter) So ideally, what you want to do is a trial. People think they're familiar with the idea of a trial. Trials are old; the first one was in the Bible, Daniel 1:12. It's straightforward: take a bunch of people, split them in half, treat one group one way, the other group, the other way. A while later, you see what happened to each of them. I'm going to tell you about one trial, which is probably the most well-reported trial in the UK news media over the past decade. This is the trial of fish oil pills. The claim: fish oil pills improve school performance and behavior in mainstream children. They said, "We did a trial. All the previous ones were positive, this one will be too." That should ring alarm bells: if you know the answer to your trial, you shouldn't be doing one. Either you've rigged it by design, or you've got enough data so there's no need to randomize people anymore. So this is what they were going to do in their trial: They were taking 3,000 children, they were going to give them these huge fish oil pills, six of them a day, and then, a year later, measure their school exam performance and compare their performance against what they predicted their exam performance would have been if they hadn't had the pills. Now, can anybody spot a flaw in this design? (Laughter) And no professors of clinical trial methodology are allowed to answer this question. So there's no control group. But that sounds really techie, right? That's a technical term. The kids got the pills, and their performance improved. What else could it possibly be if it wasn't the pills? They got older; we all develop over time. And of course, there's the placebo effect, one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It's not just taking a pill and performance or pain improving; it's about our beliefs and expectations, the cultural meaning of a treatment. And this has been demonstrated in a whole raft of fascinating studies comparing one kind of placebo against another. So we know, for example, that two sugar pills a day are a more effective treatment for gastric ulcers than one sugar pill. Two sugar pills a day beats one a day. That's an outrageous and ridiculous finding, but it's true. We know from three different studies on three different types of pain that a saltwater injection is a more effective treatment than a sugar pill, a dummy pill with no medicine in it, not because the injection or pills do anything physically to the body, but because an injection feels like a much more dramatic intervention. So we know that our beliefs and expectations can be manipulated, which is why we do trials where we control against a placebo, where one half of the people get the real treatment, and the other half get placebo. But that's not enough. What I've just shown you are examples of the very simple and straightforward ways that journalists and food supplement pill peddlers and naturopaths can distort evidence for their own purposes. What I find really fascinating is that the pharmaceutical industry uses exactly the same kinds of tricks and devices, but slightly more sophisticated versions of them, in order to distort the evidence they give to doctors and patients, and which we use to make vitally important decisions. So firstly, trials against placebo: everybody thinks a trial should be a comparison of your new drug against placebo. But in a lot of situations that's wrong; often, we already have a good treatment currently available. So we don't want to know that your alternative new treatment is better than nothing, but that it's better than the best available treatment we have. And yet, repeatedly, you consistently see people doing trials still against placebo. And you can get licensed to bring your drug to market with only data showing that it's better than nothing, which is useless for a doctor like me trying to make a decision. But that's not the only way you can rig your data. You can also rig your data by making the thing you compare your new drug against really rubbish. You can give the competing drug in too low a dose, so people aren't properly treated. You can give the competing drug in too high a dose, so people get side effects. And this is exactly what happened with antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia. Twenty years ago, a new generation of antipsychotic drugs were brought in; the promise was they would have fewer side effects. So people set about doing trials of the new drugs against the old drugs. But they gave the old drugs in ridiculously high doses: 20 milligrams a day of haloperidol. And it's a foregone conclusion if you give a drug at that high a dose, it will have more side effects, and your new drug will look better. Ten years ago, history repeated itself, when risperidone, the first of the new-generation antipsychotic drugs, came off copyright, so anybody could make copies. Everybody wanted to show their drug was better than risperidone, so you see trials comparing new antipsychotic drugs against risperidone at eight milligrams a day. Again, not an insane dose, not an illegal dose, but very much at the high end of normal. So you're bound to make your new drug look better. And so it's no surprise that overall, industry-funded trials are four times more likely to give a positive result than independently sponsored trials. But — and it's a big but — (Laughter) it turns out, when you look at the methods used by industry-funded trials, that they're actually better than independently sponsored trials. And yet, they always manage to get the result that they want. So how does this work? (Laughter) How can we explain this strange phenomenon? Well, it turns out that what happens is the negative data goes missing in action; it's withheld from doctors and patients. And this is the most important aspect of the whole story. It's at the top of the pyramid of evidence. We need to have all of the data on a particular treatment to know whether or not it really is effective. There are two different ways you can spot whether some data has gone missing. You can use statistics or you can use stories. I prefer statistics, so that's what I'll do first. This is a funnel plot. A funnel plot is a very clever way of spotting if small negative trials have disappeared, have gone missing in action. This is a graph of all of the trials done on a particular treatment. As you go up towards the top of the graph, what you see is each dot is a trial. As you go up, those are bigger trials, so they've got less error; they're less likely to be randomly false positives or negatives. So they all cluster together. The big trials are closer to the true answer. Then as you go further down at the bottom, what you can see is, on this side, spurious false negatives, and over on this side, spurious false positives. If there is publication bias, if small negative trials have gone missing in action, you can see it on one of these graphs. So you see here that the small negative trials that should be on the bottom left have disappeared. This is a graph demonstrating the presence of publication bias in studies of publication bias. And I think that's the funniest epidemiology joke you will ever hear. (Laughter) That's how you can prove it statistically. But what about stories? Well, they're heinous, they really are. This is a drug called reboxetine. This is a drug which I, myself, have prescribed to patients. And I'm a very nerdy doctor. I hope I go out of my way to try and read and understand all the literature. I read the trials on this. They were all positive, all well-conducted. I found no flaw. Unfortunately, it turned out, that many of these trials were withheld. In fact, 76 percent of all of the trials that were done on this drug were withheld from doctors and patients. Now if you think about it, if I tossed a coin a hundred times, and I'm allowed to withhold from you the answers half the times, then I can convince you that I have a coin with two heads. If we remove half of the data, we can never know what the true effect size of these medicines is. And this is not an isolated story. Around half of all of the trial data on antidepressants has been withheld, but it goes way beyond that. The Nordic Cochrane Group were trying to get ahold of the data on that to bring it all together. The Cochrane Groups are an international nonprofit collaboration that produce systematic reviews of all of the data that has ever been shown. And they need to have access to all of the trial data. But the companies withheld that data from them. So did the European Medicines Agency — for three years. This is a problem that is currently lacking a solution. And to show how big it goes, this is a drug called Tamiflu, which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on. And they spend that money on the promise that this is a drug which will reduce the rate of complications with flu. We already have the data showing it reduces the duration of your flu by a few hours. But I don't care about that, governments don't care. I'm sorry if you have the flu, I know it's horrible, but we're not going to spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the duration of your flu symptoms by half a day. We prescribe these drugs. We stockpile them for emergencies on the understanding they'll reduce the number of complications, which means pneumonia and death. The infectious diseases Cochrane Group, which are based in Italy, has been trying to get the full data in a usable form out of the drug companies, so they can make a full decision about whether this drug is effective or not, and they've not been able to get that information. This is undoubtedly the single biggest ethical problem facing medicine today. We cannot make decisions in the absence of all of the information. So it's a little bit difficult from there to spin in some kind of positive conclusion. But I would say this: I think that sunlight is the best disinfectant. All of these things are happening in plain sight, and they're all protected by a force field of tediousness. And I think, with all of the problems in science, one of the best things that we can do is to lift up the lid, finger around at the mechanics and peer in. Thank you very much. (Applause)

A flirtatious aria

{0: 'Her voice described as a “sweet gleaming soprano,” Danielle de Niese breathes new life into opera, astonishing critics and making audiences sit up and listen. '}

TEDGlobal 2011

(Music) ♫ I don't understand myself, ♫ ♫ why they keep talking of love, ♫ ♫ if they come near me, ♫ ♫ if they look into my eyes and kiss my hand. ♫ ♫ I don't understand myself, ♫ ♫ why they talk of magic, ♫ ♫ that no one withstands, ♫ ♫ if he sees me, if he passes by. ♫ ♫ But if the red light is on ♫ ♫ in the middle of the night ♫ ♫ and everybody listens to my song, ♫ ♫ then it is plain to see. ♫ ♫ My lips, they give so fiery a kiss, ♫ ♫ my limbs, they are supple and soft. ♫ ♫ It is written for me in the stars, ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss, thou shalt love. ♫ ♫ My feet, they glide and float, ♫ ♫ my eyes, they lure and glow. ♫ ♫ And I dance as if entranced, 'cause I know, ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss. ♫ ♫ In my veins, ♫ ♫ runs a dancer's blood, ♫ ♫ because my beautiful mother ♫ ♫ was the Queen of dance ♫ ♫ in the gilded Alcazar. ♫ ♫ She was so very beautiful, ♫ ♫ I often saw her in my dreams. ♫ ♫ If she beat the tambourine ♫ ♫ to her beguiling dance, all eyes were glowing admiringly. ♫ ♫ She reawakened in me, ♫ ♫ mine is the same lot. ♫ ♫ I dance like her at midnight ♫ ♫ and from deep within I feel: ♫ ♫ My lips, they give so fiery a kiss, ♫ ♫ my limbs, they are supple and soft. ♫ ♫ It is written for me in the stars, ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss, thou shalt love. ♫ ♫ And I dance as if entranced, 'cause I know, ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss. ♫ (Applause)

The generation that's remaking China

{0: 'Yang Lan is often called “the Oprah of China.” The chair of a multiplatform business empire, Yang is pioneering more-open means of communication in the communist nation.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

The night before I was heading for Scotland, I was invited to host the final of "China's Got Talent" show in Shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium. Guess who was the performing guest? Susan Boyle. And I told her, "I'm going to Scotland the next day." She sang beautifully, and she even managed to say a few words in Chinese: 送你葱 So it's not like "hello" or "thank you," that ordinary stuff. It means "green onion for free." Why did she say that? Because it was a line from our Chinese parallel Susan Boyle — a 50-some year-old woman, a vegetable vendor in Shanghai, who loves singing Western opera, but she didn't understand any English or French or Italian, so she managed to fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in Chinese. (Laughter) And the last sentence of Nessun Dorma that she was singing in the stadium was "green onion for free." So [as] Susan Boyle was saying that, 80,000 live audience sang together. That was hilarious. So I guess both Susan Boyle and this vegetable vendor in Shanghai belonged to otherness. They were the least expected to be successful in the business called entertainment, yet their courage and talent brought them through. And a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dreams. Well, being different is not that difficult. We are all different from different perspectives. But I think being different is good, because you present a different point of view. You may have the chance to make a difference. My generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the historic transformation of China that has made so many changes in the past 20, 30 years. I remember that in the year of 1990, when I was graduating from college, I was applying for a job in the sales department of the first five-star hotel in Beijing, Great Wall Sheraton — it's still there. So after being interrogated by this Japanese manager for a half an hour, he finally said, "So, Miss Yang, do you have any questions to ask me?" I summoned my courage and poise and said, "Yes, but could you let me know, what actually do you sell?" I didn't have a clue what a sales department was about in a five-star hotel. That was the first day I set my foot in a five-star hotel. Around the same time, I was going through an audition — the first ever open audition by national television in China — with another thousand college girls. The producer told us they were looking for some sweet, innocent and beautiful fresh face. So when it was my turn, I stood up and said, "Why [do] women's personalities on television always have to be beautiful, sweet, innocent and, you know, supportive? Why can't they have their own ideas and their own voice?" I thought I kind of offended them. But actually, they were impressed by my words. And so I was in the second round of competition, and then the third and the fourth. After seven rounds of competition, I was the last one to survive it. So I was on a national television prime-time show. And believe it or not, that was the first show on Chinese television that allowed its hosts to speak out of their own minds without reading an approved script. (Applause) And my weekly audience at that time was between 200 to 300 million people. Well after a few years, I decided to go to the U.S. and Columbia University to pursue my postgraduate studies, and then started my own media company, which was unthought of during the years that I started my career. So we do a lot of things. I've interviewed more than a thousand people in the past. And sometimes I have young people approaching me say, "Lan, you changed my life," and I feel proud of that. But then we are also so fortunate to witness the transformation of the whole country. I was in Beijing's bidding for the Olympic Games. I was representing the Shanghai Expo. I saw China embracing the world and vice versa. But then sometimes I'm thinking, what are today's young generation up to? How are they different, and what are the differences they are going to make to shape the future of China, or at large, the world? So today I want to talk about young people through the platform of social media. First of all, who are they? [What] do they look like? Well this is a girl called Guo Meimei — 20 years old, beautiful. She showed off her expensive bags, clothes and car on her microblog, which is the Chinese version of Twitter. And she claimed to be the general manager of Red Cross at the Chamber of Commerce. She didn't realize that she stepped on a sensitive nerve and aroused national questioning, almost a turmoil, against the credibility of Red Cross. The controversy was so heated that the Red Cross had to open a press conference to clarify it, and the investigation is going on. So far, as of today, we know that she herself made up that title — probably because she feels proud to be associated with charity. All those expensive items were given to her as gifts by her boyfriend, who used to be a board member in a subdivision of Red Cross at Chamber of Commerce. It's very complicated to explain. But anyway, the public still doesn't buy it. It is still boiling. It shows us a general mistrust of government or government-backed institutions, which lacked transparency in the past. And also it showed us the power and the impact of social media as microblog. Microblog boomed in the year of 2010, with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled. Sina.com, a major news portal, alone has more than 140 million microbloggers. On Tencent, 200 million. The most popular blogger — it's not me — it's a movie star, and she has more than 9.5 million followers, or fans. About 80 percent of those microbloggers are young people, under 30 years old. And because, as you know, the traditional media is still heavily controlled by the government, social media offers an opening to let the steam out a little bit. But because you don't have many other openings, the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong, active and even violent. So through microblogging, we are able to understand Chinese youth even better. So how are they different? First of all, most of them were born in the 80s and 90s, under the one-child policy. And because of selected abortion by families who favored boys to girls, now we have ended up with 30 million more young men than women. That could pose a potential danger to the society, but who knows; we're in a globalized world, so they can look for girlfriends from other countries. Most of them have fairly good education. The illiteracy rate in China among this generation is under one percent. In cities, 80 percent of kids go to college. But they are facing an aging China with a population above 65 years old coming up with seven-point-some percent this year, and about to be 15 percent by the year of 2030. And you know we have the tradition that younger generations support the elders financially, and taking care of them when they're sick. So it means young couples will have to support four parents who have a life expectancy of 73 years old. So making a living is not that easy for young people. College graduates are not in short supply. In urban areas, college graduates find the starting salary is about 400 U.S. dollars a month, while the average rent is above $500. So what do they do? They have to share space — squeezed in very limited space to save money — and they call themselves "tribe of ants." And for those who are ready to get married and buy their apartment, they figured out they have to work for 30 to 40 years to afford their first apartment. That ratio in America would only cost a couple five years to earn, but in China it's 30 to 40 years with the skyrocketing real estate price. Among the 200 million migrant workers, 60 percent of them are young people. They find themselves sort of sandwiched between the urban areas and the rural areas. Most of them don't want to go back to the countryside, but they don't have the sense of belonging. They work for longer hours with less income, less social welfare. And they're more vulnerable to job losses, subject to inflation, tightening loans from banks, appreciation of the renminbi, or decline of demand from Europe or America for the products they produce. Last year, though, an appalling incident in a southern OEM manufacturing compound in China: 13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s committed suicide, just one by one like causing a contagious disease. But they died because of all different personal reasons. But this whole incident aroused a huge outcry from society about the isolation, both physical and mental, of these migrant workers. For those who do return back to the countryside, they find themselves very welcome locally, because with the knowledge, skills and networks they have learned in the cities, with the assistance of the Internet, they're able to create more jobs, upgrade local agriculture and create new business in the less developed market. So for the past few years, the coastal areas, they found themselves in a shortage of labor. These diagrams show a more general social background. The first one is the Engels coefficient, which explains that the cost of daily necessities has dropped its percentage all through the past decade, in terms of family income, to about 37-some percent. But then in the last two years, it goes up again to 39 percent, indicating a rising living cost. The Gini coefficient has already passed the dangerous line of 0.4. Now it's 0.5 — even worse than that in America — showing us the income inequality. And so you see this whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility. And also, the bitterness and even resentment towards the rich and the powerful is quite widespread. So any accusations of corruption or backdoor dealings between authorities or business would arouse a social outcry or even unrest. So through some of the hottest topics on microblogging, we can see what young people care most about. Social justice and government accountability runs the first in what they demand. For the past decade or so, a massive urbanization and development have let us witness a lot of reports on the forced demolition of private property. And it has aroused huge anger and frustration among our young generation. Sometimes people get killed, and sometimes people set themselves on fire to protest. So when these incidents are reported more and more frequently on the Internet, people cry for the government to take actions to stop this. So the good news is that earlier this year, the state council passed a new regulation on house requisition and demolition and passed the right to order forced demolition from local governments to the court. Similarly, many other issues concerning public safety is a hot topic on the Internet. We heard about polluted air, polluted water, poisoned food. And guess what, we have faked beef. They have sorts of ingredients that you brush on a piece of chicken or fish, and it turns it to look like beef. And then lately, people are very concerned about cooking oil, because thousands of people have been found [refining] cooking oil from restaurant slop. So all these things have aroused a huge outcry from the Internet. And fortunately, we have seen the government responding more timely and also more frequently to the public concerns. While young people seem to be very sure about their participation in public policy-making, but sometimes they're a little bit lost in terms of what they want for their personal life. China is soon to pass the U.S. as the number one market for luxury brands — that's not including the Chinese expenditures in Europe and elsewhere. But you know what, half of those consumers are earning a salary below 2,000 U.S. dollars. They're not rich at all. They're taking those bags and clothes as a sense of identity and social status. And this is a girl explicitly saying on a TV dating show that she would rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle. But of course, we do have young people who would still prefer to smile, whether in a BMW or [on] a bicycle. So in the next picture, you see a very popular phenomenon called "naked" wedding, or "naked" marriage. It does not mean they will wear nothing in the wedding, but it shows that these young couples are ready to get married without a house, without a car, without a diamond ring and without a wedding banquet, to show their commitment to true love. And also, people are doing good through social media. And the first picture showed us that a truck caging 500 homeless and kidnapped dogs for food processing was spotted and stopped on the highway with the whole country watching through microblogging. People were donating money, dog food and offering volunteer work to stop that truck. And after hours of negotiation, 500 dogs were rescued. And here also people are helping to find missing children. A father posted his son's picture onto the Internet. After thousands of resends in relay, the child was found, and we witnessed the reunion of the family through microblogging. So happiness is the most popular word we have heard through the past two years. Happiness is not only related to personal experiences and personal values, but also, it's about the environment. People are thinking about the following questions: Are we going to sacrifice our environment further to produce higher GDP? How are we going to perform our social and political reform to keep pace with economic growth, to keep sustainability and stability? And also, how capable is the system of self-correctness to keep more people content with all sorts of friction going on at the same time? I guess these are the questions people are going to answer. And our younger generation are going to transform this country while at the same time being transformed themselves. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Finding life we can't imagine

{0: 'Christoph Adami works on the nature of life and evolution, trying to define life in a way that is as free as possible from our preconceptions.'}

TEDxUIUC

So, I have a strange career. I know it because people come up to me, like colleagues, and say, "Chris, you have a strange career." (Laughter) And I can see their point, because I started my career as a theoretical nuclear physicist. And I was thinking about quarks and gluons and heavy ion collisions, and I was only 14 years old — No, no, I wasn't 14 years old. But after that, I actually had my own lab in the Computational Neuroscience department, and I wasn't doing any neuroscience. Later, I would work on evolutionary genetics, and I would work on systems biology. But I'm going to tell you about something else today. I'm going to tell you about how I learned something about life. And I was actually a rocket scientist. I wasn't really a rocket scientist, but I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in sunny California, where it's warm; whereas now I am in the mid-West, and it's cold. But it was an exciting experience. One day, a NASA manager comes into my office, sits down and says, "Can you please tell us, how do we look for life outside Earth?" And that came as a surprise to me, because I was actually hired to work on quantum computation. Yet, I had a very good answer. I said, "I have no idea." (Laughter) And he told me, "Biosignatures, we need to look for a biosignature." And I said, "What is that?" And he said, "It's any measurable phenomenon that allows us to indicate the presence of life." And I said, "Really? Because isn't that easy? I mean, we have life. Can't you apply a definition, for example, a Supreme Court-like definition of life?" And then I thought about it a little bit, and I said, "Well, is it really that easy? Because, yes, if you see something like this, then all right, fine, I'm going to call it life — no doubt about it. But here's something." And he goes, "Right, that's life too. I know that." Except, if you think that life is also defined by things that die, you're not in luck with this thing, because that's actually a very strange organism. It grows up into the adult stage like that and then goes through a Benjamin Button phase, and actually goes backwards and backwards until it's like a little embryo again, and then actually grows back up, and back down and back up — sort of yo-yo — and it never dies. So it's actually life, but it's actually not as we thought life would be. And then you see something like that. And he was like, "My God, what kind of a life form is that?" Anyone know? It's actually not life, it's a crystal. So once you start looking and looking at smaller and smaller things — so this particular person wrote a whole article and said, "Hey, these are bacteria." Except, if you look a little bit closer, you see, in fact, that this thing is way too small to be anything like that. So he was convinced, but, in fact, most people aren't. And then, of course, NASA also had a big announcement, and President Clinton gave a press conference, about this amazing discovery of life in a Martian meteorite. Except that nowadays, it's heavily disputed. If you take the lesson of all these pictures, then you realize, well, actually, maybe it's not that easy. Maybe I do need a definition of life in order to make that kind of distinction. So can life be defined? Well how would you go about it? Well of course, you'd go to Encyclopedia Britannica and open at L. No, of course you don't do that; you put it somewhere in Google. And then you might get something. (Laughter) And what you might get — and anything that actually refers to things that we are used to, you throw away. And then you might come up with something like this. And it says something complicated with lots and lots of concepts. Who on Earth would write something as convoluted and complex and inane? Oh, it's actually a really, really, important set of concepts. So I'm highlighting just a few words and saying definitions like that rely on things that are not based on amino acids or leaves or anything that we are used to, but in fact on processes only. And if you take a look at that, this was actually in a book that I wrote that deals with artificial life. And that explains why that NASA manager was actually in my office to begin with. Because the idea was that, with concepts like that, maybe we can actually manufacture a form of life. And so if you go and ask yourself, "What on Earth is artificial life?", let me give you a whirlwind tour of how all this stuff came about. And it started out quite a while ago, when someone wrote one of the first successful computer viruses. And for those of you who aren't old enough, you have no idea how this infection was working — namely, through these floppy disks. But the interesting thing about these computer virus infections was that, if you look at the rate at which the infection worked, they show this spiky behavior that you're used to from a flu virus. And it is in fact due to this arms race between hackers and operating system designers that things go back and forth. And the result is kind of a tree of life of these viruses, a phylogeny that looks very much like the type of life that we're used to, at least on the viral level. So is that life? Not as far as I'm concerned. Why? Because these things don't evolve by themselves. In fact, they have hackers writing them. But the idea was taken very quickly a little bit further, when a scientist working at the Santa Fe Institute decided, "Why don't we try to package these little viruses in artificial worlds inside of the computer and let them evolve?" And this was Steen Rasmussen. And he designed this system, but it really didn't work, because his viruses were constantly destroying each other. But there was another scientist who had been watching this, an ecologist. And he went home and says, "I know how to fix this." And he wrote the Tierra system, and, in my book, is in fact one of the first truly artificial living systems — except for the fact that these programs didn't really grow in complexity. So having seen this work, worked a little bit on this, this is where I came in. And I decided to create a system that has all the properties that are necessary to see, in fact, the evolution of complexity, more and more complex problems constantly evolving. And of course, since I really don't know how to write code, I had help in this. I had two undergraduate students at California Institute of Technology that worked with me. That's Charles Ofria on the left, Titus Brown on the right. They are now, actually, respectable professors at Michigan State University, but I can assure you, back in the day, we were not a respectable team. And I'm really happy that no photo survives of the three of us anywhere close together. But what is this system like? Well I can't really go into the details, but what you see here is some of the entrails. But what I wanted to focus on is this type of population structure. There's about 10,000 programs sitting here. And all different strains are colored in different colors. And as you see here, there are groups that are growing on top of each other, because they are spreading. Any time there is a program that's better at surviving in this world, due to whatever mutation it has acquired, it is going to spread over the others and drive the others to extinction. So I'm going to show you a movie where you're going to see that kind of dynamic. And these kinds of experiments are started with programs that we wrote ourselves. We write our own stuff, replicate it, and are very proud of ourselves. And we put them in, and what you see immediately is that there are waves and waves of innovation. By the way, this is highly accelerated, so it's like a 1000 generations a second. But immediately, the system goes like, "What kind of dumb piece of code was this? This can be improved upon in so many ways, so quickly." So you see waves of new types taking over the other types. And this type of activity goes on for quite a while, until the main easy things have been acquired by these programs. And then, you see sort of like a stasis coming on where the system essentially waits for a new type of innovation, like this one, which is going to spread over all the other innovations that were before and is erasing the genes that it had before, until a new type of higher level of complexity has been achieved. And this process goes on and on and on. So what we see here is a system that lives in very much the way we're used to how life goes. But what the NASA people had asked me really was, "Do these guys have a biosignature? Can we measure this type of life? Because if we can, maybe we have a chance of actually discovering life somewhere else without being biased by things like amino acids." So I said, "Well, perhaps we should construct a biosignature based on life as a universal process. In fact, it should perhaps make use of the concepts that I developed just in order to sort of capture what a simple living system might be." And the thing I came up with — I have to first give you an introduction about the idea, and maybe that would be a meaning detector, rather than a life detector. And the way we would do that — I would like to find out how I can distinguish text that was written by a million monkeys, as opposed to text that is in our books. And I would like to do it in such a way that I don't actually have to be able to read the language, because I'm sure I won't be able to. As long as I know that there's some sort of alphabet. So here would be a frequency plot of how often you find each of the 26 letters of the alphabet in a text written by random monkeys. And obviously, each of these letters comes off about roughly equally frequent. But if you now look at the same distribution in English texts, it looks like that. And I'm telling you, this is very robust across English texts. And if I look at French texts, it looks a little bit different, or Italian or German. They all have their own type of frequency distribution, but it's robust. It doesn't matter whether it writes about politics or about science. It doesn't matter whether it's a poem or whether it's a mathematical text. It's a robust signature, and it's very stable. As long as our books are written in English — because people are rewriting them and recopying them — it's going to be there. So that inspired me to think about, well, what if I try to use this idea in order, not to detect random texts from texts with meaning, but rather detect the fact that there is meaning in the biomolecules that make up life. But first I have to ask: what are these building blocks, like the alphabet, elements that I showed you? Well it turns out, we have many different alternatives for such a set of building blocks. We could use amino acids, we could use nucleic acids, carboxylic acids, fatty acids. In fact, chemistry's extremely rich, and our body uses a lot of them. So that we actually, to test this idea, first took a look at amino acids and some other carboxylic acids. And here's the result. Here is, in fact, what you get if you, for example, look at the distribution of amino acids on a comet or in interstellar space or, in fact, in a laboratory, where you made very sure that in your primordial soup, there is no living stuff in there. What you find is mostly glycine and then alanine and there's some trace elements of the other ones. That is also very robust — what you find in systems like Earth where there are amino acids, but there is no life. But suppose you take some dirt and dig through it and then put it into these spectrometers, because there's bacteria all over the place; or you take water anywhere on Earth, because it's teaming with life, and you make the same analysis; the spectrum looks completely different. Of course, there is still glycine and alanine, but in fact, there are these heavy elements, these heavy amino acids, that are being produced because they are valuable to the organism. And some other ones that are not used in the set of 20, they will not appear at all in any type of concentration. So this also turns out to be extremely robust. It doesn't matter what kind of sediment you're using to grind up, whether it's bacteria or any other plants or animals. Anywhere there's life, you're going to have this distribution, as opposed to that distribution. And it is detectable not just in amino acids. Now you could ask: Well, what about these Avidians? The Avidians being the denizens of this computer world where they are perfectly happy replicating and growing in complexity. So this is the distribution that you get if, in fact, there is no life. They have about 28 of these instructions. And if you have a system where they're being replaced one by the other, it's like the monkeys writing on a typewriter. Each of these instructions appears with roughly the equal frequency. But if you now take a set of replicating guys like in the video that you saw, it looks like this. So there are some instructions that are extremely valuable to these organisms, and their frequency is going to be high. And there's actually some instructions that you only use once, if ever. So they are either poisonous or really should be used at less of a level than random. In this case, the frequency is lower. And so now we can see, is that really a robust signature? I can tell you indeed it is, because this type of spectrum, just like what you've seen in books, and just like what you've seen in amino acids, it doesn't really matter how you change the environment, it's very robust, it's going to reflect the environment. So I'm going to show you now a little experiment that we did. And I have to explain to you, the top of this graph shows you that frequency distribution that I talked about. Here, that's the lifeless environment where each instruction occurs at an equal frequency. And below there, I show, in fact, the mutation rate in the environment. And I'm starting this at a mutation rate that is so high that even if you would drop a replicating program that would otherwise happily grow up to fill the entire world, if you drop it in, it gets mutated to death immediately. So there is no life possible at that type of mutation rate. But then I'm going to slowly turn down the heat, so to speak, and then there's this viability threshold where now it would be possible for a replicator to actually live. And indeed, we're going to be dropping these guys into that soup all the time. So let's see what that looks like. So first, nothing, nothing, nothing. Too hot, too hot. Now the viability threshold is reached, and the frequency distribution has dramatically changed and, in fact, stabilizes. And now what I did there is, I was being nasty, I just turned up the heat again and again. And of course, it reaches the viability threshold. And I'm just showing this to you again because it's so nice. You hit the viability threshold. The distribution changes to "alive!" And then, once you hit the threshold where the mutation rate is so high that you cannot self-reproduce, you cannot copy the information forward to your offspring without making so many mistakes that your ability to replicate vanishes. And then, that signature is lost. What do we learn from that? Well, I think we learn a number of things from that. One of them is, if we are able to think about life in abstract terms — and we're not talking about things like plants, and we're not talking about amino acids, and we're not talking about bacteria, but we think in terms of processes — then we could start to think about life not as something that is so special to Earth, but that, in fact, could exist anywhere. Because it really only has to do with these concepts of information, of storing information within physical substrates — anything: bits, nucleic acids, anything that's an alphabet — and make sure that there's some process so that this information can be stored for much longer than you would expect — the time scales for the deterioration of information. And if you can do that, then you have life. So the first thing that we learn is that it is possible to define life in terms of processes alone, without referring at all to the type of things that we hold dear, as far as the type of life on Earth is. And that, in a sense, removes us again, like all of our scientific discoveries, or many of them — it's this continuous dethroning of man — of how we think we're special because we're alive. Well, we can make life; we can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it. And once we have that, then it is not such a difficult task anymore to say, if we understand the fundamental processes that do not refer to any particular substrate, then we can go out and try other worlds, figure out what kind of chemical alphabets might there be, figure enough about the normal chemistry, the geochemistry of the planet, so that we know what this distribution would look like in the absence of life, and then look for large deviations from this — this thing sticking out, which says, "This chemical really shouldn't be there." Now we don't know that there's life then, but we could say, "Well at least I'm going to have to take a look very precisely at this chemical and see where it comes from." And that might be our chance of actually discovering life when we cannot visibly see it. And so that's really the only take-home message that I have for you. Life can be less mysterious than we make it out to be when we try to think about how it would be on other planets. And if we remove the mystery of life, then I think it is a little bit easier for us to think about how we live, and how perhaps we're not as special as we always think we are. And I'm going to leave you with that. And thank you very much. (Applause)

Less stuff, more happiness

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

TED2011

What's in the box? Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've traveled with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment. (Laughter) (Applause) Sound familiar? Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago? Three times. So you'd think, with all this extra space, we'd have plenty of room for all our stuff. Nope. There's a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal storage. So we've got triple the space, but we've become such good shoppers that we need even more space. So where does this lead? Lots of credit card debt, huge environmental footprints, and perhaps not coincidentally, our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years. Well I'm here to suggest there's a better way, that less might actually equal more. I bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less: college — in your dorm, traveling — in a hotel room, camping — rig up basically nothing, maybe a boat. Whatever it was for you, I bet that, among other things, this gave you a little more freedom, a little more time. So I'm going to suggest that less stuff and less space are going to equal a smaller footprint. It's actually a great way to save you some money. And it's going to give you a little more ease in your life. So I started a project called Life Edited at lifeedited.org to further this conversation and to find some great solutions in this area. First up: crowd-sourcing my 420 sq. ft. apartment in Manhattan with partners Mutopo and Jovoto.com. I wanted it all — home office, sit down dinner for 10, room for guests, and all my kite surfing gear. With over 300 entries from around the world, I got it, my own little jewel box. By buying a space that was 420 sq. ft. instead of 600, immediately I'm saving 200 grand. Smaller space is going to make for smaller utilities — save some more money there, but also a smaller footprint. And because it's really designed around an edited set of possessions — my favorite stuff — and really designed for me, I'm really excited to be there. So how can you live little? Three main approaches. First of all, you have to edit ruthlessly. We've got to clear the arteries of our lives. And that shirt that I hadn't worn in years? It's time for me to let it go. We've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we've got to learn to stem the inflow. We need to think before we buy. Ask ourselves, "Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?" By all means, we should buy and own some great stuff. But we want stuff that we're going to love for years, not just stuff. Secondly, our new mantra: small is sexy. We want space efficiency. We want things that are designed for how they're used the vast majority of the time, not that rare event. Why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three? So we want things that nest, we want things that stack, and we want it digitized. You can take paperwork, books, movies, and you can make it disappear — it's magic. Finally, we want multifunctional spaces and housewares — a sink combined with a toilet, a dining table becomes a bed — same space, a little side table stretches out to seat 10. In the winning Life Edited scheme in a render here, we combine a moving wall with transformer furniture to get a lot out of the space. Look at the coffee table — it grows in height and width to seat 10. My office folds away, easily hidden. My bed just pops out of the wall with two fingers. Guests? Move the moving wall, have some fold-down guest beds. And of course, my own movie theater. So I'm not saying that we all need to live in 420 sq. ft. But consider the benefits of an edited life. Go from 3,000 to 2,000, from 1,500 to 1,000. Most of us, maybe all of us, are here pretty happily for a bunch of days with a couple of bags, maybe a small space, a hotel room. So when you go home and you walk through your front door, take a second and ask yourselves, "Could I do with a little life editing? Would that give me a little more freedom? Maybe a little more time?" What's in the box? It doesn't really matter. I know I don't need it. What's in yours? Maybe, just maybe, less might equal more. So let's make room for the good stuff. Thank you. (Applause)

We can recycle plastic

{0: "Discarded plastic, too often, ends up buried or burned, not recycled (it's just too complicated). But Mike Biddle has found a way to close the loop."}

TEDGlobal 2011

I'm a garbage man. And you might find it interesting that I became a garbage man, because I absolutely hate waste. I hope, within the next 10 minutes, to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life. And I'd like to start at the very beginning. Think back when you were just a kid. How did look at the stuff in your life? Perhaps it was like these toddler rules: It's my stuff if I saw it first. The entire pile is my stuff if I'm building something. The more stuff that's mine, the better. And of course, it's your stuff if it's broken. (Laughter) Well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry, it's become pretty clear to me that we don't necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults. And let me tell you why I have that perspective. Because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people's discarded stuff. Now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff, but it's a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world — well less than one percent. In fact, the United Nations estimates that there's about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year — and that's one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream. And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth, that number well more than doubles. And of course, the more developed the country, the bigger these mountains. Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. We see above-ground mines. And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place. And it's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams. Because as we've heard all week at TED, the world's getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff. And of course, they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted. And what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day? It's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals. And the metals, we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world. And the plastics, we get from oil, which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract. And these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we're already starting to see today. The good news is we are starting to recover materials from our end-of-life stuff and starting to recycle our end-of-life stuff, particularly in regions of the world like here in Europe that have recycling policies in place that require that this stuff be recycled in a responsible manner. Most of what's extracted from our end-of-life stuff, if it makes it to a recycler, are the metals. To put that in perspective — and I'm using steel as a proxy here for metals, because it's the most common metal — if your stuff makes it to a recycler, probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose. Plastics are a whole other story: well less than 10 percent are recovered. In fact, it's more like five percent. Most of it's incinerated or landfilled. Now most people think that's because plastics are a throw-away material, have very little value. But actually, plastics are several times more valuable than steel. And there's more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel. So why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material? Well it's predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another. They have very different densities. They have different electrical and magnetic properties. And they even have different colors. So it's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials. Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range. They have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties. And any plastic can be any color, as you probably well know. So the traditional ways of separating materials just simply don't work for plastics. Another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world — and sadly to say, particularly from the United States, where we don't have any recycling policies in place like here in Europe — finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling. People, for as little as a dollar a day, pick through our stuff. They extract what they can, which is mostly the metals — circuit boards and so forth — and they leave behind mostly what they can't recover, which is, again, mostly the plastics. Or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here. And they extract the metals by hand. Now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution, this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution. I call this environmental arbitrage. And it's not fair, it's not safe and it's not sustainable. Now because the plastics are so plentiful — and by the way, those other methods don't lead to the recovery of plastics, obviously — but people do try to recover the plastics. This is just one example. This is a photo I took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai, India. They store the plastics on the roofs. They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these, and people try very hard to separate the plastics, by color, by shape, by feel, by any technique they can. And sometimes they'll resort to what's known as the "burn and sniff" technique where they'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic. None of these techniques result in any amount of recycling in any significant way. And by the way, please don't try this technique at home. So what are we to do about this space-age material, at least what we used to call a space-aged material, these plastics? Well I certainly believe that it's far too valuable and far too abundant to keep putting back in the ground or certainly send up in smoke. So about 20 years ago, I literally started in my garage tinkering around, trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other, and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends, in the mining world actually, and in the plastics world, and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world. Because after all, we're doing above-ground mining. And we eventually broke the code. This is the last frontier of recycling. It's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the Earth. And we finally figured out how to do it. And in the process, we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics. The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals. You breakdown the molecules, you recombine them in very specific ways, to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day. We said, there's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics. And not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint, sustainable from an economic standpoint as well. Well a good place to start is with waste. It certainly doesn't cost as much as oil, and it's plentiful, as I hope that you've been able to see from the photographs. And because we're not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them, we're using a mining approach to extract the materials. We have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment. We have enormous energy savings. I don't know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way. And instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life, our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them. And we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that's made from petrochemicals. Our customers get to enjoy huge CO2 savings. They get to close the loop with their products. And they get to make more sustainable products. In the short time period I have, I want to show you a little bit of a sense about how we do this. It starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits. They recover the metals and leave behind what's called shredder residue — it's their waste — a very complex mixture of materials, but predominantly plastics. We take out the things that aren't plastics, such as the metals they missed, carpeting, foam, rubber, wood, glass, paper, you name it. Even an occasional dead animal, unfortunately. And it goes in the first part of our process here, which is more like traditional recycling. We're sieving the material, we're using magnets, we're using air classification. It looks like the Willy Wonka factory at this point. At the end of this process, we have a mixed plastic composite: many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics. This goes into the more sophisticated part of our process, and the really hard work, multi-step separation process begins. We grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail. We use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics, not only by type, but by grade. And out the end of that part of the process come little flakes of plastic: one type, one grade. We then use optical sorting to color sort this material. We blend it in 50,000-lb. blending silos. We push that material to extruders where we melt it, push it through small die holes, make spaghetti-like plastic strands. And we chop those strands into what are called pellets. And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry. This is the same material that you would get from oil. And today, we're producing it from your old stuff, and it's going right back into your new stuff. (Applause) So now, instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke, you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products, in your office, or back at work in your home. And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic, replacing virgin plastic, to make their new products. So I hope I've changed the way you look at at least some of the stuff in your life. We took our clues from mother nature. Mother nature wastes very little, reuses practically everything. And I hope that you stop looking at yourself as a consumer — that's a label I've always hated my entire life — and think of yourself as just using resources in one form, until they can be transformed to another form for another use later in time. And finally, I hope you agree with me to change that last toddler rule just a little bit to: "If it's broken, it's my stuff." Thank you for your time. (Applause)

Trusting the ensemble

{0: 'Charles Hazlewood dusts off and invigorates classical music, adding a youthful energy and modern twists to centuries-old masterworks. At TEDGlobal, he conducts the Scottish Ensemble.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

I am a conductor, and I'm here today to talk to you about trust. My job depends upon it. There has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in. Now in the old days, conducting, music making, was less about trust and more, frankly, about coercion. Up to and around about the Second World War, conductors were invariably dictators — these tyrannical figures who would rehearse, not just the orchestra as a whole, but individuals within it, within an inch of their lives. But I'm happy to say now that the world has moved on, music has moved on with it. We now have a more democratic view and way of making music — a two-way street. I, as the conductor, have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music, within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine. For myself, of course, I have to completely trust my body language. That's all I have at the point of sale. It's silent gesture. I can hardly bark out instructions while we're playing. (Music) Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Ensemble. (Applause) So in order for all this to work, obviously I have got to be in a position of trust. I have to trust the orchestra, and, even more crucially, I have to trust myself. Think about it: when you're in a position of not trusting, what do you do? You overcompensate. And in my game, that means you overgesticulate. You end up like some kind of rabid windmill. And the bigger your gesture gets, the more ill-defined, blurry and, frankly, useless it is to the orchestra. You become a figure of fun. There's no trust anymore, only ridicule. And I remember at the beginning of my career, again and again, on these dismal outings with orchestras, I would be going completely insane on the podium, trying to engender a small scale crescendo really, just a little upsurge in volume. Bugger me, they wouldn't give it to me. I spent a lot of time in those early years weeping silently in dressing rooms. And how futile seemed the words of advice to me from great British veteran conductor Sir Colin Davis who said, "Conducting, Charles, is like holding a small bird in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you crush it. If you hold it too loosely, it flies away." I have to say, in those days, I couldn't really even find the bird. Now a fundamental and really viscerally important experience for me, in terms of music, has been my adventures in South Africa, the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet in my view, but a country which, through its musical culture, has taught me one fundamental lesson: that through music making can come deep levels of fundamental life-giving trust. Back in 2000, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa to form a new opera company. So I went out there, and I auditioned, mainly in rural township locations, right around the country. I heard about 2,000 singers and pulled together a company of 40 of the most jaw-droppingly amazing young performers, the majority of whom were black, but there were a handful of white performers. Now it emerged early on in the first rehearsal period that one of those white performers had, in his previous incarnation, been a member of the South African police force. And in the last years of the old regime, he would routinely be detailed to go into the township to aggress the community. Now you can imagine what this knowledge did to the temperature in the room, the general atmosphere. Let's be under no illusions. In South Africa, the relationship most devoid of trust is that between a white policeman and the black community. So how do we recover from that, ladies and gentlemen? Simply through singing. We sang, we sang, we sang, and amazingly new trust grew, and indeed friendship blossomed. And that showed me such a fundamental truth, that music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words cannot. So we got some shows off the ground. We started touring them internationally. One of them was "Carmen." We then thought we'd make a movie of "Carmen," which we recorded and shot outside on location in the township outside Cape Town called Khayelitsha. The piece was sung entirely in Xhosa, which is a beautifully musical language, if you don't know it. It's called "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha" — literally "Carmen of Khayelitsha." I want to play you a tiny clip of it now for no other reason than to give you proof positive that there is nothing tiny about South African music making. (Music) (Applause) Something which I find utterly enchanting about South African music making is that it's so free. South Africans just make music really freely. And I think, in no small way, that's due to one fundamental fact: they're not bound to a system of notation. They don't read music. They trust their ears. You can teach a bunch of South Africans a tune in about five seconds flat. And then, as if by magic, they will spontaneously improvise a load of harmony around that tune because they can. Now those of us that live in the West, if I can use that term, I think have a much more hidebound attitude or sense of music — that somehow it's all about skill and systems. Therefore it's the exclusive preserve of an elite, talented body. And yet, ladies and gentlemen, every single one of us on this planet probably engages with music on a daily basis. And if I can broaden this out for a second, I'm willing to bet that every single one of you sitting in this room would be happy to speak with acuity, with total confidence, about movies, probably about literature. But how many of you would be able to make a confident assertion about a piece of classical music? Why is this? And what I'm going to say to you now is I'm just urging you to get over this supreme lack of self-confidence, to take the plunge, to believe that you can trust your ears, you can hear some of the fundamental muscle tissue, fiber, DNA, what makes a great piece of music great. I've got a little experiment I want to try with you. Did you know that TED is a tune? A very simple tune based on three notes — T, E, D. Now hang on a minute. I know you're going to say to me, "T doesn't exist in music." Well ladies and gentlemen, there's a time-honored system, which composers have been using for hundreds of years, which proves actually that it does. If I sing you a musical scale: A, B, C, D, E, F, G — and I just carry on with the next set of letters in the alphabet, same scale: H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T — there you go. T, see it's the same as F in music. So T is F. So T, E, D is the same as F, E, D. Now that piece of music that we played at the start of this session had enshrined in its heart the theme, which is TED. Have a listen. (Music) Do you hear it? Or do I smell some doubt in the room? Okay, we'll play it for you again now, and we're going to highlight, we're going to poke out the T, E, D. If you'll pardon the expression. (Music) Oh my goodness me, there it was loud and clear, surely. I think we should make this even more explicit. Ladies and gentlemen, it's nearly time for tea. Would you reckon you need to sing for your tea, I think? I think we need to sing for our tea. We're going to sing those three wonderful notes: T, E, D. Will you have a go for me? Audience: T, E, D. Charles Hazlewood: Yeah, you sound a bit more like cows really than human beings. Shall we try that one again? And look, if you're adventurous, you go up the octave. T, E, D. Audience: T, E, D. CH: Once more with vim. (Audience: T, E, D.) There I am like a bloody windmill again, you see. Now we're going to put that in the context of the music. The music will start, and then at a signal from me, you will sing that. (Music) One more time, with feeling, ladies and gentlemen. You won't make the key otherwise. Well done, ladies and gentlemen. It wasn't a bad debut for the TED choir, not a bad debut at all. Now there's a project that I'm initiating at the moment that I'm very excited about and wanted to share with you, because it is all about changing perceptions, and, indeed, building a new level of trust. The youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy, which as you can imagine, if you don't have an experience of it yourself, is quite a big thing to take on board. But the gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me, aside from her very existence, is that it's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hitherto hidden, the community of disabled people. And I found myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology's been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement. Of course there's a grimmer side to that truth, which is that it's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust, to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion. So I find myself asking: where is music in all of this? You can't tell me that there aren't millions of disabled people, in the U.K. alone, with massive musical potential. So I decided to create a platform for that potential. It's going to be Britain's first ever national disabled orchestra. It's called Paraorchestra. I'm going to show you a clip now of the very first improvisation session that we had. It was a really extraordinary moment. Just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians. Normally when you improvise — and I do it all the time around the world — there's this initial period of horror, like everyone's too frightened to throw the hat into the ring, an awful pregnant silence. Then suddenly, as if by magic, bang! We're all in there and it's complete bedlam. You can't hear anything. No one's listening. No one's trusting. No one's responding to each other. Now in this room with these four disabled musicians, within five minutes a rapt listening, a rapt response and some really insanely beautiful music. (Video) (Music) Nicholas:: My name's Nicholas McCarthy. I'm 22, and I'm a left-handed pianist. And I was born without my left hand — right hand. Can I do that one again? (Music) Lyn: When I'm making music, I feel like a pilot in the cockpit flying an airplane. I become alive. (Music) Clarence: I would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk. There's so much joy and things I could get from playing an instrument and performing. It's removed some of my paralysis. (Music) (Applause) CH: I only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today, so you could see at firsthand how utterly extraordinary they are. Paraorchestra is the name of that project. If any of you thinks you want to help me in any way to achieve what is a fairly impossible and implausible dream still at this point, please let me know. Now my parting shot comes courtesy of the great Joseph Haydn, wonderful Austrian composer in the second half of the 18th century — spent the bulk of his life in the employ of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, along with his orchestra. Now this prince loved his music, but he also loved the country castle that he tended to reside in most of the time, which is just on the Austro-Hungarian border, a place called Esterhazy — a long way from the big city of Vienna. Now one day in 1772, the prince decreed that the musicians' families, the orchestral musicians' families, were no longer welcome in the castle. They weren't allowed to stay there anymore; they had to be returned to Vienna — as I say, an unfeasibly long way away in those days. You can imagine, the musicians were disconsolate. Haydn remonstrated with the prince, but to no avail. So given the prince loved his music, Haydn thought he'd write a symphony to make the point. And we're going to play just the very tail end of this symphony now. And you'll see the orchestra in a kind of sullen revolt. I'm pleased to say, the prince did take the tip from the orchestral performance, and the musicians were reunited with their families. But I think it sums up my talk rather well, this, that where there is trust, there is music — by extension life. Where there is no trust, the music quite simply withers away. (Music) (Applause)

What do babies think?

{0: 'Alison Gopnik takes us into the fascinating minds of babies and children, and shows us how much we understand before we even realize we do.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

What is going on in this baby's mind? If you'd asked people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn't take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, we think that this baby's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists. Let me give you just one example of this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind of that other baby. After all, one of the things that's hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel isn't actually exactly like what we think and feel. Anyone who's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get. We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people. Now the question is: How could we ask them? Babies, after all, can't talk, and if you ask a three year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. So how do we actually ask them the question? Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I — was actually to give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, like the crackers and don't like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what Betty did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl. And she would act as if she liked it or she didn't. So half the time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn't like the broccoli — just like a baby and any other sane person. But half the time, what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go, "Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm." And then she would take a little bit of the crackers, and she'd go, "Eww, yuck, crackers. I tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck." So she'd act as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted. We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies. And then she would simply put her hand out and say, "Can you give me some?" So the question is: What would the baby give her, what they liked or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just barely walking and talking, would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli, like they couldn't figure this out. But then after they stared for a long time, they would just give her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like. So there are two really remarkable things about this. The first one is that these little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature, that we don't always want the same thing. And what's more, they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted. Even more remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn't do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature in the three months from when they were 15 months old. So children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought. And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that's actually demonstrated it. The question you might ask though is: Why do children learn so much? And how is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time? I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And actually in many ways, they're worse than useless, because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive. But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it turns out that there's actually an answer. If we look across many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are. And sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there. On one side is a New Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And this is a bird on the cover of science who's learned how to use a tool to get food. On the other hand, we have our friend the domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps. So they're very, very good at pecking for grain, and they're not much good at doing anything else. Well it turns out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months. So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot. There's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. Well what kind of explanation could we have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. So they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren't very good at doing anything in particular, but they're extremely good at learning about laws of different environments. And of course, we human beings are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows. We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal. We're smarter, we're more flexible, we can learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space. And our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species. My son is 23. (Laughter) And at least until they're 23, we're still popping those worms into those little open mouths. All right, why would we see this correlation? Well an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world, but it has one big disadvantage. And that one big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all that learning, you're going to be helpless. So you don't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, "A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually be better?" You want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up. And the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor. So the idea is that we have this early period when we're completely protected. We don't have to do anything. All we have to do is learn. And then as adults, we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world. So one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species. So they're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we're production and marketing. We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use. Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species — kind of like caterpillars and butterflies — except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path. If this is true, if these babies are designed to learn — and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that's what they're for — we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. But real computers are actually getting to be a lot better. And there's been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently. And it all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century. And essentially what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that scientists find out about the world. So what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with. They go out and test it against the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. Then they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that. And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing. So if you want to know what's going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something like this. This is Reverend Bayes's notebook. So I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they're revising to figure out how the world works. All right, now that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it be that children are doing statistics? So to test this we used a machine that we have called the Blicket Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others. And using this very simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed you this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put a block on top of the detector. But actually, this detector works in a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave a block over the top of the detector, something you wouldn't ever think of to begin with, the detector will actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, it will only activate two out of six times. So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy. So we did just this; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to make it go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector. Now there are two things that are really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They're just learning how to count. But unconsciously, they're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure. And the other interesting thing is that they're using that evidence to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. And in studies we've just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we've show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task. So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments we call it "getting into everything" or else "playing." And there's been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program. Here's one from Cristine Legare's lab. What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors. And what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn't, and then she showed them an anomaly. And what you'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes. (Video) Boy: How about this? Same as the other side. Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis has just been falsified. (Laughter) Boy: This one lighted up, and this one nothing. AG: Okay, he's got his experimental notebook out. Boy: What's making this light up. (Laughter) I don't know. AG: Every scientist will recognize that expression of despair. (Laughter) Boy: Oh, it's because this needs to be like this, and this needs to be like this. AG: Okay, hypothesis two. Boy: That's why. Oh. (Laughter) AG: Now this is his next idea. He told the experimenter to do this, to try putting it out onto the other location. Not working either. Boy: Oh, because the light goes only to here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity in here, but this doesn't have electricity. AG: Okay, that's a fourth hypothesis. Boy: It's lighting up. So when you put four. So you put four on this one to make it light up and two on this one to make it light up. AG: Okay,there's his fifth hypothesis. Now that is a particularly — that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really do is do a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical of four year-olds. Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature? What's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true. I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults. Now here's what we know about how adult consciousness works. And adults' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we decide that something's relevant or important, we should pay attention to it. Our consciousness of that thing that we're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And we even know something about the way the brain does this. So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different. I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing. But they're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once. And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet. So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention. So they're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that's important. That's the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn. Well if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases where we're put in a new situation that we've never been in before — when we fall in love with someone new, or when we're in a new city for the first time. And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you've been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters. So what's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That's a fantastic way to be, but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o'clock in the morning. (Laughter) Now it's good to be a grownup. I don't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It's good to be a grownup. We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do. But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children. (Applause)

How beauty feels

{0: 'As a partner in seymourpowell, Richard Seymour designs idea-driven products -- from household goods to trains and motorcycles.'}

TEDSalon London Spring 2011

When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker. And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches. And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he'd bought. And the guy took it apart, and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels. And as he did so, his customer noticed that on the back side of the balance wheel was an engraving, were words. And he said to the guy, "Why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see?" And the watchmaker turned around and said, "God can see it." Now I'm not in the least bit religious, neither was my father, but at that point, I noticed something happening here. I felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves, and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere, I guess. But I felt something. And it was a physiological response. And from that point on, from my age at the time, I began to think of things in a different way. And as I took on my career as a designer, I began to ask myself the simple question: Do we actually think beauty, or do we feel it? Now you probably know the answer to this already. You probably think, well, I don't know which one you think it is, but I think it's about feeling beauty. And so I then moved on into my design career and began to find some exciting things. One of the most early work was done in automotive design — some very exciting work was done there. And during a lot of this work, we found something, or I found something, that really fascinated me, and maybe you can remember it. Do you remember when lights used to just go on and off, click click, when you closed the door in a car? And then somebody, I think it was BMW, introduced a light that went out slowly. Remember that? I remember it clearly. Do you remember the first time you were in a car and it did that? I remember sitting there thinking, this is fantastic. In fact, I've never found anybody that doesn't like the light that goes out slowly. I thought, well what the hell's that about? So I started to ask myself questions about it. And the first was, I'd ask other people: "Do you like it?" "Yes." "Why?" And they'd say, "Oh, it feels so natural," or, "It's nice." I thought, well that's not good enough. Can we cut down a little bit further, because, as a designer, I need the vocabulary, I need the keyboard, of how this actually works. And so I did some experiments. And I suddenly realized that there was something that did exactly that — light to dark in six seconds — exactly that. Do you know what it is? Anyone? You see, using this bit, the thinky bit, the slow bit of the brain — using that. And this isn't a think, it's a feel. And would you do me a favor? For the next 14 minutes or whatever it is, will you feel stuff? I don't need you to think so much as I want you to feel it. I felt a sense of relaxation tempered with anticipation. And that thing that I found was the cinema or the theater. It's actually just happened here — light to dark in six seconds. And when that happens, are you sitting there going, "No, the movie's about to start," or are you going, "That's fantastic. I'm looking forward to it. I get a sense of anticipation"? Now I'm not a neuroscientist. I don't know even if there is something called a conditioned reflex. But it might be. Because the people I speak to in the northern hemisphere that used to go in the cinema get this. And some of the people I speak to that have never seen a movie or been to the theater don't get it in the same way. Everybody likes it, but some like it more than others. So this leads me to think of this in a different way. We're not feeling it. We're thinking beauty is in the limbic system — if that's not an outmoded idea. These are the bits, the pleasure centers, and maybe what I'm seeing and sensing and feeling is bypassing my thinking. The wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit, the cortex. They arrive first. So how do we make that actually work? And how much of that reactive side of it is due to what we already know, or what we're going to learn, about something? This is one of the most beautiful things I know. It's a plastic bag. And when I looked at it first, I thought, no, there's no beauty in that. Then I found out, post exposure, that this plastic bag if I put it into a filthy puddle or a stream filled with coliforms and all sorts of disgusting stuff, that that filthy water will migrate through the wall of the bag by osmosis and end up inside it as pure, potable drinking water. And all of a sudden, this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me. Now I'm going to ask you again to switch on the emotional bit. Would you mind taking the brain out, and I just want you to feel something. Look at that. What are you feeling about it? Is it beautiful? Is it exciting? I'm watching your faces very carefully. There's some rather bored-looking gentlemen and some slightly engaged-looking ladies who are picking up something off that. Maybe there's an innocence to it. Now I'm going to tell you what it is. Are you ready? This is the last act on this Earth of a little girl called Heidi, five years old, before she died of cancer to the spine. It's the last thing she did, the last physical act. Look at that picture. Look at the innocence. Look at the beauty in it. Is it beautiful now? Stop. Stop. How do you feel? Where are you feeling this? I'm feeling it here. I feel it here. And I'm watching your faces, because your faces are telling me something. The lady over there is actually crying, by the way. But what are you doing? I watch what people do. I watch faces. I watch reactions. Because I have to know how people react to things. And one of the most common faces on something faced with beauty, something stupefyingly delicious, is what I call the OMG. And by the way, there's no pleasure in that face. It's not a "this is wonderful!" The eyebrows are doing this, the eyes are defocused, and the mouth is hanging open. That's not the expression of joy. There's something else in that. There's something weird happening. So pleasure seems to be tempered by a whole series of different things coming in. Poignancy is a word I love as a designer. It means something triggering a big emotional response, often quite a sad emotional response, but it's part of what we do. It isn't just about nice. And this is the dilemma, this is the paradox, of beauty. Sensorily, we're taking in all sorts of things — mixtures of things that are good, bad, exciting, frightening — to come up with that sensorial exposure, that sensation of what's going on. Pathos appears obviously as part of what you just saw in that little girl's drawing. And also triumph, this sense of transcendence, this "I never knew that. Ah, this is something new." And that's packed in there as well. And as we assemble these tools, from a design point of view, I get terribly excited about it, because these are things, as we've already said, they're arriving at the brain, it would seem, before cognition, before we can manipulate them — electrochemical party tricks. Now what I'm also interested in is: Is it possible to separate intrinsic and extrinsic beauty? By that, I mean intrinsically beautiful things, just something that's exquisitely beautiful, that's universally beautiful. Very hard to find. Maybe you've got some examples of it. Very hard to find something that, to everybody, is a very beautiful thing, without a certain amount of information packed in there before. So a lot of it tends to be extrinsic. It's mediated by information before the comprehension. Or the information's added on at the back, like that little girl's drawing that I showed you. Now when talking about beauty you can't get away from the fact that a lot experiments have been done in this way with faces and what have you. And one of the most tedious ones, I think, was saying that beauty was about symmetry. Well it obviously isn't. This is a more interesting one where half faces were shown to some people, and then to add them into a list of most beautiful to least beautiful and then exposing a full face. And they found that it was almost exact coincidence. So it wasn't about symmetry. In fact, this lady has a particularly asymmetrical face, of which both sides are beautiful. But they're both different. And as a designer, I can't help meddling with this, so I pulled it to bits and sort of did stuff like this, and tried to understand what the individual elements were, but feeling it as I go. Now I can feel a sensation of delight and beauty if I look at that eye. I'm not getting it off the eyebrow. And the earhole isn't doing it to me at all. So I don't know how much this is helping me, but it's helping to guide me to the places where the signals are coming off. And as I say, I'm not a neuroscientist, but to understand how I can start to assemble things that will very quickly bypass this thinking part and get me to the enjoyable precognitive elements. Anais Nin and the Talmud have told us time and time again that we see things not as they are, but as we are. So I'm going to shamelessly expose something to you, which is beautiful to me. And this is the F1 MV Agusta. Ahhhh. It is really — I mean, I can't express to you how exquisite this object is. But I also know why it's exquisite to me, because it's a palimpsest of things. It's masses and masses of layers. This is just the bit that protrudes into our physical dimension. It's something much bigger. Layer after layer of legend, sport, details that resonate. I mean, if I just go through some of them now — I know about laminar flow when it comes to air-piercing objects, and that does it consummately well, you can see it can. So that's getting me excited. And I feel that here. This bit, the big secret of automotive design — reflection management. It's not about the shapes, it's how the shapes reflect light. Now that thing, light flickers across it as you move, so it becomes a kinetic object, even though it's standing still — managed by how brilliantly that's done on the reflection. This little relief on the footplate, by the way, to a rider means there's something going on underneath it — in this case, a drive chain running at 300 miles and hour probably, taking the power from the engine. I'm getting terribly excited as my mind and my eyes flick across these things. Titanium lacquer on this. I can't tell you how wonderful this is. That's how you stop the nuts coming off at high speed on the wheel. I'm really getting into this now. And of course, a racing bike doesn't have a prop stand, but this one, because it's a road bike, it all goes away and it folds into this little gap. So it disappears. And then I can't tell you how hard it is to do that radiator, which is curved. Why would you do that? Because I know we need to bring the wheel farther into the aerodynamics. So it's more expensive, but it's wonderful. And to cap it all, brand royalty — Agusta, Count Agusta, from the great histories of this stuff. The bit that you can't see is the genius that created this. Massimo Tamburini. They call him "The Plumber" in Italy, as well as "Maestro," because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time. There's so little compromise on this, you can't see it. But unfortunately, the likes of me and people that are like me have to deal with compromise all the time with beauty. We have to deal with it. So I have to work with a supply chain, and I've got to work with the technologies, and I've got to work with everything else all the time, and so compromises start to fit into it. And so look at her. I've had to make a bit of a compromise there. I've had to move that part across, but only a millimeter. No one's noticed, have they yet? Did you see what I did? I moved three things by a millimeter. Pretty? Yes. Beautiful? Maybe lesser. But then, of course, the consumer says that doesn't really matter. So that's okay, isn't it? Another millimeter? No one's going to notice those split lines and changes. It's that easy to lose beauty, because beauty's incredibly difficult to do. And only a few people can do it. And a focus group cannot do it. And a team rarely can do it. It takes a central cortex, if you like, to be able to orchestrate all those elements at the same time. This is a beautiful water bottle — some of you know of it — done by Ross Lovegrove, the designer. This is pretty close to intrinsic beauty. This one, as long as you know what water is like then you can experience this. It's lovely because it is an embodiment of something refreshing and delicious. I might like it more than you like it, because I know how bloody hard it is to do it. It's stupefyingly difficult to make something that refracts light like that, that comes out of the tool correctly, that goes down the line without falling over. Underneath this, like the story of the swan, is a million things very difficult to do. So all hail to that. It's a fantastic example, a simple object. And the one I showed you before was, of course, a massively complex one. And they're working in beauty in slightly different ways because of it. You all, I guess, like me, enjoy watching a ballet dancer dance. And part of the joy of it is, you know the difficulty. You also may be taking into account the fact that it's incredibly painful. Anybody seen a ballet dancer's toes when they come out of the points? While she's doing these graceful arabesques and plies and what have you, something horrible's going on down here. The comprehension of it leads us to a greater and heightened sense of the beauty of what's actually going on. Now I'm using microseconds wrongly here, so please ignore me. But what I have to do now, feeling again, what I've got to do is to be able to supply enough of these enzymes, of these triggers into something early on in the process, that you pick it up, not through your thinking, but through your feeling. So we're going to have a little experiment. Right, are you ready? I'm going to show you something for a very, very brief moment. Are you ready? Okay. Did you think that was a bicycle when I showed it to you at the first flash? It's not. Tell me something, did you think it was quick when you first saw it? Yes you did. Did you think it was modern? Yes you did. That blip, that information, shot into you before that. And because your brain starter motor began there, now it's got to deal with it. And the great thing is, this motorcycle has been styled this way specifically to engender a sense that it's green technology and it's good for you and it's light and it's all part of the future. So is that wrong? Well in this case it isn't, because it's a very, very ecologically-sound piece of technology. But you're a slave of that first flash. We are slaves to the first few fractions of a second — and that's where much of my work has to win or lose, on a shelf in a shop. It wins or loses at that point. You may see 50, 100, 200 things on a shelf as you walk down it, but I have to work within that domain, to ensure that it gets you there first. And finally, the layer that I love, of knowledge. Some of you, I'm sure, will be familiar with this. What's incredible about this, and the way I love to come back to it, is this is taking something that you hate or bores you, folding clothes, and if you can actually do this — who can actually do this? Anybody try to do this? Yeah? It's fantastic, isn't it? Look at that. Do you want to see it again? No time. It says I have two minutes left, so we can't do this. But just go to the Web, YouTube, pull it down, "folding T-shirt." That's how underpaid younger-aged people have to fold your T-shirt. You didn't maybe know it. But how do you feel about it? It feels fantastic when you do it, you look forward to doing it, and when you tell somebody else about it — like you probably have — you look really smart. The knowledge bubble that sits around the outside, the stuff that costs nothing, because that knowledge is free — bundle that together and where do we come out? Form follows function? Only sometimes. Only sometimes. Form is function. Form is function. It informs, it tells us, it supplies us answers before we've even thought about it. And so I've stopped using words like "form," and I've stopped using words like "function" as a designer. What I try to pursue now is the emotional functionality of things. Because if I can get that right, I can make them wonderful, and I can make them repeatedly wonderful. And you know what those products and services are, because you own some of them. They're the things that you'd snatch if the house was on fire. Forming the emotional bond between this thing and you is an electrochemical party trick that happens before you even think about it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The day I turned down Tim Berners-Lee

TEDGlobal 2011

Well we all know the World Wide Web has absolutely transformed publishing, broadcasting, commerce and social connectivity, but where did it all come from? And I'll quote three people: Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee. So let's just run through these guys. This is Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush was the U.S. government's chief scientific adviser during the war. And in 1945, he published an article in a magazine called Atlantic Monthly. And the article was called "As We May Think." And what Vannevar Bush was saying was the way we use information is broken. We don't work in terms of libraries and catalog systems and so forth. The brain works by association. With one item in its thought, it snaps instantly to the next item. And the way information is structured is totally incapable of keeping up with this process. And so he suggested a machine, and he called it the memex. And the memex would link information, one piece of information to a related piece of information and so forth. Now this was in 1945. A computer in those days was something the secret services used to use for code breaking. And nobody knew anything about it. So this was before the computer was invented. And he proposed this machine called the memex. And he had a platform where you linked information to other information, and then you could call it up at will. So spinning forward, one of the guys who read this article was a guy called Doug Engelbart, and he was a U.S. Air Force officer. And he was reading it in their library in the Far East. And he was so inspired by this article, it kind of directed the rest of his life. And by the mid-60s, he was able to put this into action when he worked at the Stanford Research Lab in California. He built a system. The system was designed to augment human intelligence, it was called. And in a premonition of today's world of cloud computing and softwares of service, his system was called NLS for oN-Line System. And this is Doug Engelbart. He was giving a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968. What he showed — he sat on a stage like this, and he demonstrated this system. He had his head mic like I've got. And he works this system. And you can see, he's working between documents and graphics and so forth. And he's driving it all with this platform here, with a five-finger keyboard and the world's first computer mouse, which he specially designed in order to do this system. So this is where the mouse came from as well. So this is Doug Engelbart. The trouble with Doug Engelbart's system was that the computers in those days cost several million pounds. So for a personal computer, a few million pounds was like having a personal jet plane; it wasn't really very practical. But spin on to the 80s when personal computers did arrive, then there was room for this kind of system on personal computers. And my company, OWL built a system called Guide for the Apple Macintosh. And we delivered the world's first hypertext system. And this began to get a head of steam. Apple introduced a thing called HyperCard, and they made a bit of a fuss about it. They had a 12-page supplement in the Wall Street Journal the day it launched. The magazines started to cover it. Byte magazine and Communications at the ACM had special issues covering hypertext. We developed a PC version of this product as well as the Macintosh version. And our PC version became quite mature. These are some examples of this system in action in the late 80s. You were able to deliver documents, were able to do it over networks. We developed a system such that it had a markup language based on html. We called it hml: hypertext markup language. And the system was capable of doing very, very large documentation systems over computer networks. So I took this system to a trade show in Versailles near Paris in late November 1990. And I was approached by a nice young man called Tim Berners-Lee who said, "Are you Ian Ritchie?" and I said, "Yeah." And he said, "I need to talk to you." And he told me about his proposed system called the World Wide Web. And I thought, well, that's got a pretentious name, especially since the whole system ran on his computer in his office. But he was completely convinced that his World Wide Web would take over the world one day. And he tried to persuade me to write the browser for it, because his system didn't have any graphics or fonts or layout or anything; it was just plain text. I thought, well, you know, interesting, but a guy from CERN, he's not going to do this. So we didn't do it. In the next couple of years, the hypertext community didn't recognize him either. In 1992, his paper was rejected for the Hypertext Conference. In 1993, there was a table at the conference in Seattle, and a guy called Marc Andreessen was demonstrating his little browser for the World Wide Web. And I saw it, and I thought, yep, that's it. And the very next year, in 1994, we had the conference here in Edinburgh, and I had no opposition in having Tim Berners-Lee as the keynote speaker. So that puts me in pretty illustrious company. There was a guy called Dick Rowe who was at Decca Records and turned down The Beatles. There was a guy called Gary Kildall who went flying his plane when IBM came looking for an operating system for the IBM PC, and he wasn't there, so they went back to see Bill Gates. And the 12 publishers who turned down J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, I guess. On the other hand, there's Marc Andreessen who wrote the world's first browser for the World Wide Web. And according to Fortune magazine, he's worth 700 million dollars. But is he happy? (Laughter) (Applause)

How to spot a liar

{0: 'Pamela Meyer thinks we’re facing a pandemic of deception, but she’s arming people with tools that can help take back the truth.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar. (Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar. Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. We're all liars. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building. Now, speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, "Liespotting," no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no. They say, "It's okay, we'll email you." (Laughter) I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband's like, "Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?" So before I get started, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, "Gotcha! Gotcha! Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril. I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying." No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie. So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to. Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. Now not all lies are harmful. Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, "Nice song." "Honey, you don't look fat in that, no." Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, "You know, I just fished that email out of my Spam folder. So sorry." But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. And that can have dramatic costs for us. Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars. That's seven percent of revenues. Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us. Deception is actually serious business. This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man, British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. And you can't find this guy on Google; you can't find him anywhere. He was interviewed once, and he said the following. He said, "Look, I've got one rule." And this was Henry's rule, he said, "Look, everyone is willing to give you something. They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for." And that's the crux of it. If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know, what is it that you're hungry for? And we all kind of hate to admit it. We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer — the list goes on. Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like. And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies. On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. Now granted, many of those are white lies. But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. (Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. We can't believe how prevalent lying is. We're essentially against lying. But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people. If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now, you may think that's bad. If you're unmarried, that number drops to three. Lying's complex. It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We're deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives. That's truth number two about lying. We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World. (Laughter) Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive. Now you might remember Koko. Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language? Koko was taught to communicate via sign language. Here's Koko with her kitten. It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten. Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall. (Laughter) We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack. It's starts really, really early. How early? Well babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who's coming and then go right back to crying. One-year-olds learn concealment. (Laughter) Two-year-olds bluff. Five-year-olds lie outright. They manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover-up. By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions. By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with Spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic — in short, what one author calls a post-truth society. It's been very confusing for a long time now. What do you do? Well, there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass. Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate. Why is it so easy to learn? There are good liars and bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you two patterns of deception. And then we're going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves. We're going to start with speech. (Video) Bill Clinton: I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. And these allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you. (Applause) Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs? Well first we heard what's known as a non-contracted denial. Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language. We also heard distancing language: "that woman." We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool. Now if Bill Clinton had said, "Well, to tell you the truth ..." or Richard Nixon's favorite, "In all candor ..." he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter that knows that qualifying language, as it's called, qualifying language like that, further discredits the subject. Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail — and we're all really glad he didn't do that — he would have further discredited himself. Freud had it right. Freud said, look, there's much more to it than speech: "No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips." And we all do it no matter how powerful you are. We all chatter with our fingertips. I'm going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who's chattering with his fingertips. (Laughter) Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language. With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. Because we think liars fidget all the time. Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. Can you all spot the fake smile here? You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. But the real smile's in the eyes, the crow's feet of the eyes. They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox. Don't overdo the Botox; nobody will think you're honest. Now we're going to look at the hot spots. Can you tell what's happening in a conversation? Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions? Now, I know it seems really obvious, but when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators. An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They're going to say, "Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks." They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview. And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment. Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places. And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order. And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells. Why do they do that? Well, we all do the same thing. We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. We say "yes," we shake our heads "no." We tell very convincing stories, we slightly shrug our shoulders. We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. Now, that smile is known in the trade as "duping delight." And we're going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we're going to start — for those of you who don't know him, this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock. We're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test. See now if you can spot him saying, "yes" while shaking his head "no," slightly shrugging his shoulders. (Video) John Edwards: I'd be happy to participate in one. I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine, because of the timing of events. So I know it's not possible. Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen. Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody — JE: Well, I'm only one side. I'm only one side of the test. But I'm happy to participate in one. PM: Okay, those head shakes are much easier to spot once you know to look for them. There are going to be times when someone makes one expression while masking another that just kind of leaks through in a flash. Murderers are known to leak sadness. Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger. And we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous and it's easy to learn, and that's the expression of contempt. Now with anger, you've got two people on an even playing field. It's still somewhat of a healthy relationship. But when anger turns to contempt, you've been dismissed. It's associated with moral superiority. And for that reason, it's very, very hard to recover from. Here's what it looks like. It's marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. It's the only asymmetrical expression. And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows — and it doesn't always follow — look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, "No thank you. I'm not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you." Science has surfaced many, many more indicators. We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit. They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them. They'll alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower. Now here's the deal. These behaviors are just behaviors. They're not proof of deception. They're red flags. We're human beings. We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long. They don't mean anything in and of themselves. But when you see clusters of them, that's your signal. Look, listen, probe, ask some hard questions, get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing, walk into curiosity mode, ask more questions, have a little dignity, treat the person you're talking to with rapport. Don't try to be like those folks on "Law & Order" and those other TV shows that pummel their subjects into submission. Don't be too aggressive, it doesn't work. Now, we've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who's lying and how to spot a lie. And as I promised, we're now going to look at what the truth looks like. But I'm going to show you two videos, two mothers — one is lying, one is telling the truth. And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. And I think they're an excellent example of what the truth looks like. This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother. What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. And if you look closely, you'll see duping delight throughout this video. (Video) Diane Downs: At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I'm driving, and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth. And that — maybe it'll fade too with time — but I don't think so. That bothers me the most. PM: Now I'm going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in court. Here you're going to see no false emotion, just the authentic expression of a mother's agony. (Video) Erin Runnion: I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby, and you hurt her, and you crushed her, you terrified her until her heart stopped. And she fought, and I know she fought you. But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her. And I don't understand it, and I never will. PM: Okay, there's no doubting the veracity of those emotions. Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it. We know, for example, that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive. And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day. But you've got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door? Liespotters rely on human tools. They know, as someone once said, "Character's who you are in the dark." And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. It's a much more noisy world. So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency — character integrity — that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter. So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code. When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, "Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized." And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit. And that's the truth. Thank you. (Applause)

My mushroom burial suit

{0: 'Artist and TED Fellow Jae Rhim Lee re-imagines the relationships between the body and the world. '}

TEDGlobal 2011

So I'm here to explain why I'm wearing these ninja pajamas. And to do that, I'd like to talk first about environmental toxins in our bodies. So some of you may know about the chemical Bisphenol A, BPA. It's a material hardener and synthetic estrogen that's found in the lining of canned foods and some plastics. So BPA mimics the body's own hormones and causes neurological and reproductive problems. And it's everywhere. A recent study found BPA in 93 percent of people six and older. But it's just one chemical. The Center for Disease Control in the U.S. says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies, and this includes preservatives, pesticides and heavy metals like lead and mercury. To me, this says three things. First, don't become a cannibal. Second, we are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution. And third, our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins. So what happens to all these toxins when we die? The short answer is: They return to the environment in one way or another, continuing the cycle of toxicity. But our current funeral practices make the situation much worse. If you're cremated, all those toxins I mentioned are released into the atmosphere. And this includes 5,000 pounds of mercury from our dental fillings alone every year. And in a traditional American funeral, a dead body is covered with fillers and cosmetics to make it look alive. It's then pumped with toxic formaldehyde to slow decomposition — a practice which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel. So by trying to preserve our dead bodies, we deny death, poison the living and further harm the environment. Green or natural burials, which don't use embalming, are a step in the right direction, but they don't address the existing toxins in our bodies. I think there's a better solution. I'm an artist, so I'd like to offer a modest proposal at the intersection of art, science and culture. The Infinity Burial Project, an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies. The Infinity Burial Project began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the Infinity Mushroom — a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies, clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots, leaving clean compost. But I learned it's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom. I also learned that some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins in soil. So I thought maybe I could train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms to eat my body. So today, I'm collecting what I shed or slough off — my hair, skin and nails — and I'm feeding these to edible mushrooms. As the mushrooms grow, I pick the best feeders to become Infinity Mushrooms. It's a kind of imprinting and selective breeding process for the afterlife. So when I die, the Infinity Mushrooms will recognize my body and be able to eat it. All right, so for some of you, this may be really, really out there. (Laughter) Just a little. I realize this is not the kind of relationship that we usually aspire to have with our food. We want to eat, not be eaten by, our food. But as I watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body, I imagine the Infinity Mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment. See for me, cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet, it's a step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay. It's also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet. Growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms called decompiculture, a concept that was developed by an entomologist, Timothy Myles. The Infinity Mushroom is a subset of decompiculture I'm calling body decompiculture and toxin remediation — the cultivation of organisms that decompose and clean toxins in bodies. And now about these ninja pajamas. Once it's completed, I plan to integrate the Infinity Mushrooms into a number of objects. First, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores, the Mushroom Death Suit. (Laughter) I'm wearing the second prototype of this burial suit. It's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores. The dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia, which are the equivalent of plant roots. I'm also making a decompiculture kit, a cocktail of capsules that contain Infinity Mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation. These capsules are embedded in a nutrient-rich jelly, a kind of second skin, which dissolves quickly and becomes baby food for the growing mushrooms. So I plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two, and then I'd like to begin testing them, first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects. And believe it or not, a few people have offered to donate their bodies to the project to be eaten by mushrooms. (Laughter) What I've learned from talking to these folks is that we share a common desire to understand and accept death and to minimize the impact of our death on the environment. I wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms, so I formed the Decompiculture Society, a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options, seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the Infinity Mushroom. The Decompiculture Society shares a vision of a cultural shift, from our current culture of death denial and body preservation to one of decompiculture, a radical acceptance of death and decomposition. Accepting death means accepting that we are physical beings who are intimately connected to the environment, as the research on environmental toxins confirms. And the saying goes, we came from dust and will return to dust. And once we understand that we're connected to the environment, we see that the survival of our species depends on the survival of the planet. I believe this is the beginning of true environmental responsibility. Thank you. (Applause)

Learning from a barefoot movement

{0: 'Sanjit “Bunker” Roy is the founder of Barefoot College, which helps rural communities becomes self-sufficient.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

I'd like to take you to another world. And I'd like to share a 45 year-old love story with the poor, living on less than one dollar a day. I went to a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me. I was all set to be a diplomat, teacher, doctor — all laid out. Then, I don't look it, but I was the Indian national squash champion for three years. (Laughter) The whole world was laid out for me. Everything was at my feet. I could do nothing wrong. And then I thought out of curiosity I'd like to go and live and work and just see what a village is like. So in 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, "I'd like to live and work in a village." Mother went into a coma. (Laughter) "What is this? The whole world is laid out for you, the best jobs are laid out for you, and you want to go and work in a village? I mean, is there something wrong with you?" I said, "No, I've got the best eduction. It made me think. And I wanted to give something back in my own way." "What do you want to do in a village? No job, no money, no security, no prospect." I said, "I want to live and dig wells for five years." "Dig wells for five years? You went to the most expensive school and college in India, and you want to dig wells for five years?" She didn't speak to me for a very long time, because she thought I'd let my family down. But then, I was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have, which are never brought into the mainstream — which is never identified, respected, applied on a large scale. And I thought I'd start a Barefoot College — college only for the poor. What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college. I went to this village for the first time. Elders came to me and said, "Are you running from the police?" I said, "No." (Laughter) "You failed in your exam?" I said, "No." "You didn't get a government job?" I said, "No." "What are you doing here? Why are you here? The education system in India makes you look at Paris and New Delhi and Zurich; what are you doing in this village? Is there something wrong with you you're not telling us?" I said, "No, I want to actually start a college only for the poor. What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college." So the elders gave me some very sound and profound advice. They said, "Please, don't bring anyone with a degree and qualification into your college." So it's the only college in India where, if you should have a Ph.D. or a Master's, you are disqualified to come. You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college. You have to work with your hands. You have to have a dignity of labor. You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community. So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism. Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone setter is a professional. These are professionals all over the world. You find them in any inaccessible village around the world. And we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills that they have is universal. It needs to be used, needs to be applied, needs to be shown to the world outside — that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today. So the college works following the lifestyle and workstyle of Mahatma Gandhi. You eat on the floor, you sleep on the floor, you work on the floor. There are no contracts, no written contracts. You can stay with me for 20 years, go tomorrow. And no one can get more than $100 a month. You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot College. You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College. That is where we want you to try crazy ideas. Whatever idea you have, come and try it. It doesn't matter if you fail. Battered, bruised, you start again. It's the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher. And it's the only college where we don't give a certificate. You are certified by the community you serve. You don't need a paper to hang on the wall to show that you are an engineer. So when I said that, they said, "Well show us what is possible. What are you doing? This is all mumbo-jumbo if you can't show it on the ground." So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986. It was built by 12 Barefoot architects who can't read and write, built on $1.50 a sq. ft. 150 people lived there, worked there. They got the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2002. But then they suspected, they thought there was an architect behind it. I said, "Yes, they made the blueprints, but the Barefoot architects actually constructed the college." We are the only ones who actually returned the award for $50,000, because they didn't believe us, and we thought that they were actually casting aspersions on the Barefoot architects of Tilonia. I asked a forester — high-powered, paper-qualified expert — I said, "What can you build in this place?" He had one look at the soil and said, "Forget it. No way. Not even worth it. No water, rocky soil." I was in a bit of a spot. And I said, "Okay, I'll go to the old man in village and say, 'What should I grow in this spot?'" He looked quietly at me and said, "You build this, you build this, you put this, and it'll work." This is what it looks like today. Went to the roof, and all the women said, "Clear out. The men should clear out because we don't want to share this technology with the men. This is waterproofing the roof." (Laughter) It is a bit of jaggery, a bit of urens and a bit of other things I don't know. But it actually doesn't leak. Since 1986, it hasn't leaked. This technology, the women will not share with the men. (Laughter) It's the only college which is fully solar-electrified. All the power comes from the sun. 45 kilowatts of panels on the roof. And everything works off the sun for the next 25 years. So long as the sun shines, we'll have no problem with power. But the beauty is that is was installed by a priest, a Hindu priest, who's only done eight years of primary schooling — never been to school, never been to college. He knows more about solar than anyone I know anywhere in the world guaranteed. Food, if you come to the Barefoot College, is solar cooked. But the people who fabricated that solar cooker are women, illiterate women, who actually fabricate the most sophisticated solar cooker. It's a parabolic Scheffler solar cooker. Unfortunately, they're almost half German, they're so precise. (Laughter) You'll never find Indian women so precise. Absolutely to the last inch, they can make that cooker. And we have 60 meals twice a day of solar cooking. We have a dentist — she's a grandmother, illiterate, who's a dentist. She actually looks after the teeth of 7,000 children. Barefoot technology: this was 1986 — no engineer, no architect thought of it — but we are collecting rainwater from the roofs. Very little water is wasted. All the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank, and no water is wasted. If we have four years of drought, we still have water on the campus, because we collect rainwater. 60 percent of children don't go to school, because they have to look after animals — sheep, goats — domestic chores. So we thought of starting a school at night for the children. Because the night schools of Tilonia, over 75,000 children have gone through these night schools. Because it's for the convenience of the child; it's not for the convenience of the teacher. And what do we teach in these schools? Democracy, citizenship, how you should measure your land, what you should do if you're arrested, what you should do if your animal is sick. This is what we teach in the night schools. But all the schools are solar-lit. Every five years we have an election. Between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic process, and they elect a prime minister. The prime minister is 12 years old. She looks after 20 goats in the morning, but she's prime minister in the evening. She has a cabinet, a minister of education, a minister for energy, a minister for health. And they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children. She got the World's Children's Prize five years ago, and she went to Sweden. First time ever going out of her village. Never seen Sweden. Wasn't dazzled at all by what was happening. And the Queen of Sweden, who's there, turned to me and said, "Can you ask this child where she got her confidence from? She's only 12 years old, and she's not dazzled by anything." And the girl, who's on her left, turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said, "Please tell her I'm the prime minister." (Laughter) (Applause) Where the percentage of illiteracy is very high, we use puppetry. Puppets is the way we communicate. You have Jokhim Chacha who is 300 years old. He is my psychoanalyst. He is my teacher. He's my doctor. He's my lawyer. He's my donor. He actually raises money, solves my disputes. He solves my problems in the village. If there's tension in the village, if attendance at the schools goes down and there's a friction between the teacher and the parent, the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says, "Shake hands. The attendance must not drop." These puppets are made out of recycled World Bank reports. (Laughter) (Applause) So this decentralized, demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages, we've covered all over India from Ladakh up to Bhutan — all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained. And we went to Ladakh, and we asked this woman — this, at minus 40, you have to come out of the roof, because there's no place, it was all snowed up on both sides — and we asked this woman, "What was the benefit you had from solar electricity?" And she thought for a minute and said, "It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter." (Laughter) Went to Afghanistan. One lesson we learned in India was men are untrainable. (Laughter) Men are restless, men are ambitious, men are compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate. (Laughter) All across the globe, you have this tendency of men wanting a certificate. Why? Because they want to leave the village and go to a city, looking for a job. So we came up with a great solution: train grandmothers. What's the best way of communicating in the world today? Television? No. Telegraph? No. Telephone? No. Tell a woman. (Laughter) (Applause) So we went to Afghanistan for the first time, and we picked three women and said, "We want to take them to India." They said, "Impossible. They don't even go out of their rooms, and you want to take them to India." I said, "I'll make a concession. I'll take the husbands along as well." So I took the husbands along. Of course, the women were much more intelligent than the men. In six months, how do we train these women? Sign language. You don't choose the written word. You don't choose the spoken word. You use sign language. And in six months they can become solar engineers. They go back and solar-electrify their own village. This woman went back and solar-electrified the first village, set up a workshop — the first village ever to be solar-electrified in Afghanistan [was] by the three women. This woman is an extraordinary grandmother. 55 years old, and she's solar-electrified 200 houses for me in Afghanistan. And they haven't collapsed. She actually went and spoke to an engineering department in Afghanistan and told the head of the department the difference between AC and DC. He didn't know. Those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages in Afghanistan. We went to Africa, and we did the same thing. All these women sitting at one table from eight, nine countries, all chatting to each other, not understanding a word, because they're all speaking a different language. But their body language is great. They're speaking to each other and actually becoming solar engineers. I went to Sierra Leone, and there was this minister driving down in the dead of night — comes across this village. Comes back, goes into the village, says, "Well what's the story?" They said, "These two grandmothers ... " "Grandmothers?" The minister couldn't believe what was happening. "Where did they go?" "Went to India and back." Went straight to the president. He said, "Do you know there's a solar-electrified village in Sierra Leone?" He said, "No." Half the cabinet went to see the grandmothers the next day. "What's the story." So he summoned me and said, "Can you train me 150 grandmothers?" I said, "I can't, Mr. President. But they will. The grandmothers will." So he built me the first Barefoot training center in Sierra Leone. And 150 grandmothers have been trained in Sierra Leone. Gambia: we went to select a grandmother in Gambia. Went to this village. I knew which woman I would like to take. The community got together and said, "Take these two women." I said, "No, I want to take this woman." They said, "Why? She doesn't know the language. You don't know her." I said, "I like the body language. I like the way she speaks." "Difficult husband; not possible." Called the husband, the husband came, swaggering, politician, mobile in his hand. "Not possible." "Why not?" "The woman, look how beautiful she is." I said, "Yeah, she is very beautiful." "What happens if she runs off with an Indian man?" That was his biggest fear. I said, "She'll be happy. She'll ring you up on the mobile." She went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger. She walked out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran. She handled the national press, and she was a star. And when I went back six months later, I said, "Where's your husband?" "Oh, somewhere. It doesn't matter." (Laughter) Success story. (Laughter) (Applause) I'll just wind up by saying that I think you don't have to look for solutions outside. Look for solutions within. And listen to people. They have the solutions in front of you. They're all over the world. Don't even worry. Don't listen to the World Bank, listen to the people on the ground. They have all the solutions in the world. I'll end with a quotation by Mahatma Gandhi. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win." Thank you. (Applause)

Freeing energy from the grid

{0: 'Justin Hall-Tipping works on nano-energy startups -- mastering the electron to create power. '}

TEDGlobal 2011

Why can't we solve these problems? We know what they are. Something always seems to stop us. Why? I remember March the 15th, 2000. The B15 iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf. In the newspaper it said "it was all part of a normal process." A little bit further on in the article it said "a loss that would normally take the ice shelf 50-100 years to replace." That same word, "normal," had two different, almost opposite meanings. If we walk into the B15 iceberg when we leave here today, we're going to bump into something a thousand feet tall, 76 miles long, 17 miles wide, and it's going to weigh two gigatons. I'm sorry, there's nothing normal about this. And yet I think it's this perspective of us as humans to look at our world through the lens of normal is one of the forces that stops us developing real solutions. Only 90 days after this, arguably the greatest discovery of the last century occurred. It was the sequencing for the first time of the human genome. This is the code that's in every single one of our 50 trillion cells that makes us who we are and what we are. And if we just take one cell's worth of this code and unwind it, it's a meter long, two nanometers thick. Two nanometers is 20 atoms in thickness. And I wondered, what if the answer to some of our biggest problems could be found in the smallest of places, where the difference between what is valuable and what is worthless is merely the addition or subtraction of a few atoms? And what if we could get exquisite control over the essence of energy, the electron? So I started to go around the world finding the best and brightest scientists I could at universities whose collective discoveries have the chance to take us there, and we formed a company to build on their extraordinary ideas. Six and a half years later, a hundred and eighty researchers, they have some amazing developments in the lab, and I will show you three of those today, such that we can stop burning up our planet and instead, we can generate all the energy we need right where we are, cleanly, safely, and cheaply. Think of the space that we spend most of our time. A tremendous amount of energy is coming at us from the sun. We like the light that comes into the room, but in the middle of summer, all that heat is coming into the room that we're trying to keep cool. In winter, exactly the opposite is happening. We're trying to heat up the space that we're in, and all that is trying to get out through the window. Wouldn't it be really great if the window could flick back the heat into the room if we needed it or flick it away before it came in? One of the materials that can do this is a remarkable material, carbon, that has changed its form in this incredibly beautiful reaction where graphite is blasted by a vapor, and when the vaporized carbon condenses, it condenses back into a different form: chickenwire rolled up. But this chickenwire carbon, called a carbon nanotube, is a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of one of your hairs. It's a thousand times more conductive than copper. How is that possible? One of the things about working at the nanoscale is things look and act very differently. You think of carbon as black. Carbon at the nanoscale is actually transparent and flexible. And when it's in this form, if I combine it with a polymer and affix it to your window when it's in its colored state, it will reflect away all heat and light, and when it's in its bleached state it will let all the light and heat through and any combination in between. To change its state, by the way, takes two volts from a millisecond pulse. And once you've changed its state, it stays there until you change its state again. As we were working on this incredible discovery at University of Florida, we were told to go down the corridor to visit another scientist, and he was working on a pretty incredible thing. Imagine if we didn't have to rely on artificial lighting to get around at night. We'd have to see at night, right? This lets you do it. It's a nanomaterial, two nanomaterials, a detector and an imager. The total width of it is 600 times smaller than the width of a decimal place. And it takes all the infrared available at night, converts it into an electron in the space of two small films, and is enabling you to play an image which you can see through. I'm going to show to TEDsters, the first time, this operating. Firstly I'm going to show you the transparency. Transparency is key. It's a film that you can look through. And then I'm going to turn the lights out. And you can see, off a tiny film, incredible clarity. As we were working on this, it dawned on us: this is taking infrared radiation, wavelengths, and converting it into electrons. What if we combined it with this? Suddenly you've converted energy into an electron on a plastic surface that you can stick on your window. But because it's flexible, it can be on any surface whatsoever. The power plant of tomorrow is no power plant. We talked about generating and using. We want to talk about storing energy, and unfortunately the best thing we've got going is something that was developed in France a hundred and fifty years ago, the lead acid battery. In terms of dollars per what's stored, it's simply the best. Knowing that we're not going to put fifty of these in our basements to store our power, we went to a group at University of Texas at Dallas, and we gave them this diagram. It was in actually a diner outside of Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. We said, "Could you build this?" And these scientists, instead of laughing at us, said, "Yeah." And what they built was eBox. EBox is testing new nanomaterials to park an electron on the outside, hold it until you need it, and then be able to release it and pass it off. Being able to do that means that I can generate energy cleanly, efficiently and cheaply right where I am. It's my energy. And if I don't need it, I can convert it back up on the window to energy, light, and beam it, line of site, to your place. And for that I do not need an electric grid between us. The grid of tomorrow is no grid, and energy, clean efficient energy, will one day be free. If you do this, you get the last puzzle piece, which is water. Each of us, every day, need just eight glasses of this, because we're human. When we run out of water, as we are in some parts of the world and soon to be in other parts of the world, we're going to have to get this from the sea, and that's going to require us to build desalination plants. 19 trillion dollars is what we're going to have to spend. These also require tremendous amounts of energy. In fact, it's going to require twice the world's supply of oil to run the pumps to generate the water. We're simply not going to do that. But in a world where energy is freed and transmittable easily and cheaply, we can take any water wherever we are and turn it into whatever we need. I'm glad to be working with incredibly brilliant and kind scientists, no kinder than many of the people in the world, but they have a magic look at the world. And I'm glad to see their discoveries coming out of the lab and into the world. It's been a long time in coming for me. 18 years ago, I saw a photograph in the paper. It was taken by Kevin Carter who went to the Sudan to document their famine there. I've carried this photograph with me every day since then. It's a picture of a little girl dying of thirst. By any standard this is wrong. It's just wrong. We can do better than this. We should do better than this. And whenever I go round to somebody who says, "You know what, you're working on something that's too difficult. It'll never happen. You don't have enough money. You don't have enough time. There's something much more interesting around the corner," I say, "Try saying that to her." That's what I say in my mind. And I just say "thank you," and I go on to the next one. This is why we have to solve our problems, and I know the answer as to how is to be able to get exquisite control over a building block of nature, the stuff of life: the simple electron. Thank you. (Applause)

How cyberattacks threaten real-world peace

{0: 'Guy-Philippe Goldstein is the author of <em>Babel Minute Zero</em>, a novel that examines the reality of cyberwar in our current geopolitical topography.'}

TEDxParis 2010

Good afternoon. If you have followed diplomatic news in the past weeks, you may have heard of a kind of crisis between China and the U.S. regarding cyberattacks against the American company Google. Many things have been said about this. Some people have called a cyberwar what may actually be just a spy operation — and obviously, a quite mishandled one. However, this episode reveals the growing anxiety in the Western world regarding these emerging cyber weapons. It so happens that these weapons are dangerous. They're of a new nature: they could lead the world into a digital conflict that could turn into an armed struggle. These virtual weapons can also destroy the physical world. In 1982, in the middle of the Cold War in Soviet Siberia, a pipeline exploded with a burst of 3 kilotons, the equivalent of a fourth of the Hiroshima bomb. Now we know today — this was revealed by Thomas Reed, Ronald Reagan's former U.S. Air Force Secretary — this explosion was actually the result of a CIA sabotage operation, in which they had managed to infiltrate the IT management systems of that pipeline. More recently, the U.S. government revealed that in September 2008, more than 3 million people in the state of Espirito Santo in Brazil were plunged into darkness, victims of a blackmail operation from cyber pirates. Even more worrying for the Americans, in December 2008 the holiest of holies, the IT systems of CENTCOM, the central command managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, may have been infiltrated by hackers who used these: plain but infected USB keys. And with these keys, they may have been able to get inside CENTCOM's systems, to see and hear everything, and maybe even infect some of them. As a result, the Americans take the threat very seriously. I'll quote General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who says in a report to Congress that cyberattacks could be as powerful as weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the Americans have decided to spend over 30 billion dollars in the next five years to build up their cyberwar capabilities. And across the world today, we see a sort of cyber arms race, with cyberwar units built up by countries like North Korea or even Iran. Yet, what you'll never hear from spokespeople from the Pentagon or the French Department of Defence is that the question isn't really who's the enemy, but actually the very nature of cyber weapons. And to understand why, we must look at how, through the ages, military technologies have maintained or destroyed world peace. For example, if we'd had TEDxParis 350 years ago, we would have talked about the military innovation of the day — the massive Vauban-style fortifications — and we could have predicted a period of stability in the world or in Europe. which was indeed the case in Europe between 1650 and 1750. Similarly, if we'd had this talk 30 or 40 years ago, we would have seen how the rise of nuclear weapons, and the threat of mutually assured destruction they imply, prevents a direct fight between the two superpowers. However, if we'd had this talk 60 years ago, we would have seen how the emergence of new aircraft and tank technologies, which give the advantage to the attacker, make the Blitzkrieg doctrine very credible and thus create the possibility of war in Europe. So military technologies can influence the course of the world, can make or break world peace — and there lies the issue with cyber weapons. The first issue: Imagine a potential enemy announcing they're building a cyberwar unit, but only for their country's defense. Okay, but what distinguishes it from an offensive unit? It gets even more complicated when the doctrines of use become ambiguous. Just 3 years ago, both the U.S. and France were saying they were investing militarily in cyberspace, strictly to defend their IT systems. But today both countries say the best defense is to attack. And so, they're joining China, whose doctrine of use for 15 years has been both defensive and offensive. The second issue: Your country could be under cyberattack with entire regions plunged into total darkness, and you may not even know who's attacking you. Cyber weapons have this peculiar feature: they can be used without leaving traces. This gives a tremendous advantage to the attacker, because the defender doesn't know who to fight back against. And if the defender retaliates against the wrong adversary, they risk making one more enemy and ending up diplomatically isolated. This issue isn't just theoretical. In May 2007, Estonia was the victim of cyberattacks, that damaged its communication and banking systems. Estonia accused Russia. But NATO, though it defends Estonia, reacted very prudently. Why? Because NATO couldn't be 100% sure that the Kremlin was indeed behind these attacks. So to sum up, on the one hand, when a possible enemy announces they're building a cyberwar unit, you don't know whether it's for attack or defense. On the other hand, we know that these weapons give an advantage to attacking. In a major article published in 1978, Professor Robert Jervis of Columbia University in New York described a model to understand how conflicts could arise. In this context, when you don't know if the potential enemy is preparing for defense or attack, and if the weapons give an advantage to attacking, then this environment is most likely to spark a conflict. This is the environment that's being created by cyber weapons today, and historically it was the environment in Europe at the onset of World War I. So cyber weapons are dangerous by nature, but in addition, they're emerging in a much more unstable environment. If you remember the Cold War, it was a very hard game, but a stable one played only by two players, which allowed for some coordination between the two superpowers. Today we're moving to a multipolar world in which coordination is much more complicated, as we have seen at Copenhagen. And this coordination may become even trickier with the introduction of cyber weapons. Why? Because no nation knows for sure whether its neighbor is about to attack. So nations may live under the threat of what Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling called the "reciprocal fear of surprise attack," as I don't know if my neighbor is about to attack me or not — I may never know — so I might take the upper hand and attack first. Just last week, in a New York Times article dated January 26, 2010, it was revealed for the first time that officials at the National Security Agency were considering the possibility of preemptive attacks in cases where the U.S. was about to be cyberattacked. And these preemptive attacks might not just remain in cyberspace. In May 2009, General Kevin Chilton, commander of the U.S. nuclear forces, stated that in the event of cyberattacks against the U.S., all options would be on the table. Cyber weapons do not replace conventional or nuclear weapons — they just add a new layer to the existing system of terror. But in doing so, they also add their own risk of triggering a conflict — as we've just seen, a very important risk — and a risk we may have to confront with a collective security solution which includes all of us: European allies, NATO members, our American friends and allies, our other Western allies, and maybe, by forcing their hand a little, our Russian and Chinese partners. The information technologies Joël de Rosnay was talking about, which were historically born from military research, are today on the verge of developing an offensive capability of destruction, which could tomorrow, if we're not careful, completely destroy world peace. Thank you. (Applause)

A prosthetic arm that "feels"

{0: 'A doctor and engineer, Todd Kuiken builds new prosthetics that connect with the human nervous system. Yes: bionics.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

So today, I would like to talk with you about bionics, which is the popular term for the science of replacing part of a living organism with a mechatronic device, or a robot. It is essentially the stuff of life meets machine. And specifically, I'd like to talk with you about how bionics is evolving for people with arm amputations. This is our motivation. Arm amputation causes a huge disability. I mean, the functional impairment is clear. Our hands are amazing instruments. And when you lose one, far less both, it's a lot harder to do the things we physically need to do. There's also a huge emotional impact. And actually, I spend as much of my time in clinic dealing with the emotional adjustment of patients as with the physical disability. And finally, there's a profound social impact. We talk with our hands. We greet with our hands. And we interact with the physical world with our hands. And when they're missing, it's a barrier. Arm amputation is usually caused by trauma, with things like industrial accidents, motor vehicle collisions or, very poignantly, war. There are also some children who are born without arms, called congenital limb deficiency. Unfortunately, we don't do great with upper-limb prosthetics. There are two general types. They're called body-powered prostheses, which were invented just after the Civil War, refined in World War I and World War II. Here you see a patent for an arm in 1912. It's not a lot different than the one you see on my patient. They work by harnessing shoulder power. So when you squish your shoulders, they pull on a bicycle cable. And that bicycle cable can open or close a hand or a hook or bend an elbow. And we still use them commonly, because they're very robust and relatively simple devices. The state of the art is what we call myoelectric prostheses. These are motorized devices that are controlled by little electrical signals from your muscle. Every time you contract a muscle, it emits a little electricity that you can record with antennae or electrodes and use that to operate the motorized prosthesis. They work pretty well for people who have just lost their hand, because your hand muscles are still there. You squeeze your hand, these muscles contract. You open it, these muscles contract. So it's intuitive, and it works pretty well. Well how about with higher levels of amputation? Now you've lost your arm above the elbow. You're missing not only these muscles, but your hand and your elbow too. What do you do? Well our patients have to use very code-y systems of using just their arm muscles to operate robotic limbs. We have robotic limbs. There are several available on the market, and here you see a few. They contain just a hand that will open and close, a wrist rotator and an elbow. There's no other functions. If they did, how would we tell them what to do? We built our own arm at the Rehab Institute of Chicago where we've added some wrist flexion and shoulder joints to get up to six motors, or six degrees of freedom. And we've had the opportunity to work with some very advanced arms that were funded by the U.S. military, using these prototypes, that had up to 10 different degrees of freedom including movable hands. But at the end of the day, how do we tell these robotic arms what to do? How do we control them? Well we need a neural interface, a way to connect to our nervous system or our thought processes so that it's intuitive, it's natural, like for you and I. Well the body works by starting a motor command in your brain, going down your spinal cord, out the nerves and to your periphery. And your sensation's the exact opposite. You touch yourself, there's a stimulus that comes up those very same nerves back up to your brain. When you lose your arm, that nervous system still works. Those nerves can put out command signals. And if I tap the nerve ending on a World War II vet, he'll still feel his missing hand. So you might say, let's go to the brain and put something in the brain to record signals, or in the end of the peripheral nerve and record them there. And these are very exciting research areas, but it's really, really hard. You have to put in hundreds of microscopic wires to record from little tiny individual neurons — ordinary fibers that put out tiny signals that are microvolts. And it's just too hard to use now and for my patients today. So we developed a different approach. We're using a biological amplifier to amplify these nerve signals — muscles. Muscles will amplify the nerve signals about a thousand-fold, so that we can record them from on top of the skin, like you saw earlier. So our approach is something we call targeted reinnervation. Imagine, with somebody who's lost their whole arm, we still have four major nerves that go down your arm. And we take the nerve away from your chest muscle and let these nerves grow into it. Now you think, "Close hand," and a little section of your chest contracts. You think, "Bend elbow," a different section contracts. And we can use electrodes or antennae to pick that up and tell the arm to move. That's the idea. So this is the first man that we tried it on. His name is Jesse Sullivan. He's just a saint of a man — 54-year-old lineman who touched the wrong wire and had both of his arms burnt so badly they had to be amputated at the shoulder. Jesse came to us at the RIC to be fit with these state-of-the-art devices, and here you see them. I'm still using that old technology with a bicycle cable on his right side. And he picks which joint he wants to move with those chin switches. On the left side he's got a modern motorized prosthesis with those three joints, and he operates little pads in his shoulder that he touches to make the arm go. And Jesse's a good crane operator, and he did okay by our standards. He also required a revision surgery on his chest. And that gave us the opportunity to do targeted reinnervation. So my colleague, Dr. Greg Dumanian, did the surgery. First, we cut away the nerve to his own muscle, then we took the arm nerves and just kind of had them shift down onto his chest and closed him up. And after about three months, the nerves grew in a little bit and we could get a twitch. And after six months, the nerves grew in well, and you could see strong contractions. And this is what it looks like. This is what happens when Jesse thinks open and close his hand, or bend or straighten your elbow. You can see the movements on his chest, and those little hash marks are where we put our antennae, or electrodes. And I challenge anybody in the room to make their chest go like this. His brain is thinking about his arm. He has not learned how to do this with the chest. There is not a learning process. That's why it's intuitive. So here's Jesse in our first little test with him. On the left-hand side, you see his original prosthesis, and he's using those switches to move little blocks from one box to the other. He's had that arm for about 20 months, so he's pretty good with it. On the right side, two months after we fit him with his targeted reinnervation prosthesis — which, by the way, is the same physical arm, just programmed a little different — you can see that he's much faster and much smoother as he moves these little blocks. And we're only able to use three of the signals at this time. Then we had one of those little surprises in science. So we're all motivated to get motor commands to drive robotic arms. And after a few months, you touch Jesse on his chest, and he felt his missing hand. His hand sensation grew into his chest again probably because we had also taken away a lot of fat, so the skin was right down to the muscle and deinnervated, if you would, his skin. So you touch Jesse here, he feels his thumb; you touch it here, he feels his pinky. He feels light touch down to one gram of force. He feels hot, cold, sharp, dull, all in his missing hand, or both his hand and his chest, but he can attend to either. So this is really exciting for us, because now we have a portal, a portal, or a way to potentially give back sensation, so that he might feel what he touches with his prosthetic hand. Imagine sensors in the hand coming up and pressing on this new hand skin. So it was very exciting. We've also gone on with what was initially our primary population of people with above-the-elbow amputations. And here we deinnervate, or cut the nerve away, just from little segments of muscle and leave others alone that give us our up-down signals and two others that will give us a hand open and close signal. This was one of our first patients, Chris. You see him with his original device on the left there after eight months of use, and on the right, it is two months. He's about four or five times as fast with this simple little performance metric. All right. So one of the best parts of my job is working with really great patients who are also our research collaborators. And we're fortunate today to have Amanda Kitts come and join us. Please welcome Amanda Kitts. (Applause) So Amanda, would you please tell us how you lost your arm? Amanda Kitts: Sure. In 2006, I had a car accident. And I was driving home from work, and a truck was coming the opposite direction, came over into my lane, ran over the top of my car and his axle tore my arm off. Todd Kuiken: Okay, so after your amputation, you healed up. And you've got one of these conventional arms. Can you tell us how it worked? AK: Well, it was a little difficult, because all I had to work with was a bicep and a tricep. So for the simple little things like picking something up, I would have to bend my elbow, and then I would have to cocontract to get it to change modes. When I did that, I had to use my bicep to get the hand to close, use my tricep to get it to open, cocontract again to get the elbow to work again. TK: So it was a little slow? AK: A little slow, and it was just hard to work. You had to concentrate a whole lot. TK: Okay, so I think about nine months later that you had the targeted reinnervation surgery, took six more months to have all the reinnervation. Then we fit her with a prosthesis. And how did that work for you? AK: It works good. I was able to use my elbow and my hand simultaneously. I could work them just by my thoughts. So I didn't have to do any of the cocontracting and all that. TK: A little faster? AK: A little faster. And much more easy, much more natural. TK: Okay, this was my goal. For 20 years, my goal was to let somebody [be] able to use their elbow and hand in an intuitive way and at the same time. And we now have over 50 patients around the world who have had this surgery, including over a dozen of our wounded warriors in the U.S. armed services. The success rate of the nerve transfers is very high. It's like 96 percent. Because we're putting a big fat nerve onto a little piece of muscle. And it provides intuitive control. Our functional testing, those little tests, all show that they're a lot quicker and a lot easier. And the most important thing is our patients have appreciated it. So that was all very exciting. But we want to do better. There's a lot of information in those nerve signals, and we wanted to get more. You can move each finger. You can move your thumb, your wrist. Can we get more out of it? So we did some experiments where we saturated our poor patients with zillions of electrodes and then had them try to do two dozen different tasks — from wiggling a finger to moving a whole arm to reaching for something — and recorded this data. And then we used some algorithms that are a lot like speech recognition algorithms, called pattern recognition. See. (Laughter) And here you can see, on Jesse's chest, when he just tried to do three different things, you can see three different patterns. But I can't put in an electrode and say, "Go there." So we collaborated with our colleagues in University of New Brunswick, came up with this algorithm control, which Amanda can now demonstrate. AK: So I have the elbow that goes up and down. I have the wrist rotation that goes — and it can go all the way around. And I have the wrist flexion and extension. And I also have the hand closed and open. TK: Thank you, Amanda. Now this is a research arm, but it's made out of commercial components from here down and a few that I've borrowed from around the world. It's about seven pounds, which is probably about what my arm would weigh if I lost it right here. Obviously, that's heavy for Amanda. And in fact, it feels even heavier, because it's not glued on the same. She's carrying all the weight through harnesses. So the exciting part isn't so much the mechatronics, but the control. So we've developed a small microcomputer that is blinking somewhere behind her back and is operating this all by the way she trains it to use her individual muscle signals. So Amanda, when you first started using this arm, how long did it take to use it? AK: It took just about probably three to four hours to get it to train. I had to hook it up to a computer, so I couldn't just train it anywhere. So if it stopped working, I just had to take it off. So now it's able to train with just this little piece on the back. I can wear it around. If it stops working for some reason, I can retrain it. Takes about a minute. TK: So we're really excited, because now we're getting to a clinically practical device. And that's where our goal is — to have something clinically pragmatic to wear. We've also had Amanda able to use some of our more advanced arms that I showed you earlier. Here's Amanda using an arm made by DEKA Research Corporation. And I believe Dean Kamen presented it at TED a few years ago. So Amanda, you can see, has really good control. It's all the pattern recognition. And it now has a hand that can do different grasps. What we do is have the patient go all the way open and think, "What hand grasp pattern do I want?" It goes into that mode, and then you can do up to five or six different hand grasps with this hand. Amanda, how many were you able to do with the DEKA arm? AK: I was able to get four. I had the key grip, I had a chuck grip, I had a power grasp and I had a fine pinch. But my favorite one was just when the hand was open, because I work with kids, and so all the time you're clapping and singing, so I was able to do that again, which was really good. TK: That hand's not so good for clapping. AK: Can't clap with this one. TK: All right. So that's exciting on where we may go with the better mechatronics, if we make them good enough to put out on the market and use in a field trial. I want you to watch closely. (Video) Claudia: Oooooh! TK: That's Claudia, and that was the first time she got to feel sensation through her prosthetic. She had a little sensor at the end of her prosthesis that then she rubbed over different surfaces, and she could feel different textures of sandpaper, different grits, ribbon cable, as it pushed on her reinnervated hand skin. She said that when she just ran it across the table, it felt like her finger was rocking. So that's an exciting laboratory experiment on how to give back, potentially, some skin sensation. But here's another video that shows some of our challenges. This is Jesse, and he's squeezing a foam toy. And the harder he squeezes — you see a little black thing in the middle that's pushing on his skin proportional to how hard he squeezes. But look at all the electrodes around it. I've got a real estate problem. You're supposed to put a bunch of these things on there, but our little motor's making all kinds of noise right next to my electrodes. So we're really challenged on what we're doing there. The future is bright. We're excited about where we are and a lot of things we want to do. So for example, one is to get rid of my real estate problem and get better signals. We want to develop these little tiny capsules about the size of a piece of risotto that we can put into the muscles and telemeter out the EMG signals, so that it's not worrying about electrode contact. And we can have the real estate open to try more sensation feedback. We want to build a better arm. This arm — they're always made for the 50th percentile male — which means they're too big for five-eighths of the world. So rather than a super strong or super fast arm, we're making an arm that is — we're starting with, the 25th percentile female — that will have a hand that wraps around, opens all the way, two degrees of freedom in the wrist and an elbow. So it'll be the smallest and lightest and the smartest arm ever made. Once we can do it that small, it's a lot easier making them bigger. So those are just some of our goals. And we really appreciate you all being here today. I'd like to tell you a little bit about the dark side, with yesterday's theme. So Amanda came jet-lagged, she's using the arm, and everything goes wrong. There was a computer spook, a broken wire, a converter that sparked. We took out a whole circuit in the hotel and just about put on the fire alarm. And none of those problems could I have dealt with, but I have a really bright research team. And thankfully Dr. Annie Simon was with us and worked really hard yesterday to fix it. That's science. And fortunately, it worked today. So thank you very much. (Applause)

Art made of storms

{0: 'Nathalie Miebach is a Boston-based artist who translates weather data into complex sculptures and musical scores.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

(Music) What you just heard are the interactions of barometric pressure, wind and temperature readings that were recorded of Hurricane Noel in 2007. The musicians played off a three-dimensional graph of weather data like this. Every single bead, every single colored band, represents a weather element that can also be read as a musical note. I find weather extremely fascinating. Weather is an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us. So I use sculpture and music to make it, not just visible, but also tactile and audible. All of my work begins very simple. I extract information from a specific environment using very low-tech data collecting devices — generally anything I can find in the hardware store. I then compare my information to the things I find on the Internet — satellite images, weather data from weather stations as well as offshore buoys. That's both historical as well as real data. And then I compile all of these numbers on these clipboards that you see here. These clipboards are filled with numbers. And from all of these numbers, I start with only two or three variables. That begins my translation process. My translation medium is a very simple basket. A basket is made up of horizontal and vertical elements. When I assign values to the vertical and horizontal elements, I can use the changes of those data points over time to create the form. I use natural reed, because natural reed has a lot of tension in it that I cannot fully control. That means that it is the numbers that control the form, not me. What I come up with are forms like these. These forms are completely made up of weather data or science data. Every colored bead, every colored string, represents a weather element. And together, these elements, not only construct the form, but they also reveal behavioral relationships that may not come across through a two-dimensional graph. When you step closer, you actually see that it is indeed all made up of numbers. The vertical elements are assigned a specific hour of the day. So all the way around, you have a 24-hour timeline. But it's also used to assign a temperature range. On that grid, I can then weave the high tide readings, water temperature, air temperature and Moon phases. I also translate weather data into musical scores. And musical notation allows me a more nuanced way of translating information without compromising it. So all of these scores are made up of weather data. Every single color, dot, every single line, is a weather element. And together, these variables construct a score. I use these scores to collaborate with musicians. This is the 1913 Trio performing one of my pieces at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Meanwhile, I use these scores as blueprints to translate into sculptural forms like this, that function still in the sense of being a three-dimensional weather visualization, but now they're embedding the visual matrix of the musical score, so it can actually be read as a musical score. What I love about this work is that it challenges our assumptions of what kind of visual vocabulary belongs in the world of art, versus science. This piece here is read very differently depending on where you place it. You place it in an art museum, it becomes a sculpture. You place it in a science museum, it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data. You place it in a music hall, it all of a sudden becomes a musical score. And I really like that, because the viewer is really challenged as to what visual language is part of science versus art versus music. The other reason why I really like this is because it offers an alternative entry point into the complexity of science. And not everyone has a Ph.D. in science. So for me, that was my way into it. Thank you. (Applause)

How economic inequality harms societies

{0: 'In "The Spirit Level," Richard Wilkinson charts data that proves societies that are more equal are healthier, happier societies.'}

TEDGlobal 2011

You all know the truth of what I'm going to say. I think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution. What's changed is we now can look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does. I'm going to take you through that data and then explain why the links I'm going to be showing you exist. But first, see what a miserable lot we are. (Laughter) I want to start though with a paradox. This shows you life expectancy against gross national income — how rich countries are on average. And you see the countries on the right, like Norway and the USA, are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left. And it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all. There's no suggestion of a relationship there. But if we look within our societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society. This, again, is life expectancy. These are small areas of England and Wales — the poorest on the right, the richest on the left. A lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us. Even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top. So income means something very important within our societies, and nothing between them. The explanation of that paradox is that, within our societies, we're looking at relative income or social position, social status — where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us. And as soon as you've got that idea, you should immediately wonder: what happens if we widen the differences, or compress them, make the income differences bigger or smaller? And that's what I'm going to show you. I'm not using any hypothetical data. I'm taking data from the U.N. — it's the same as the World Bank has — on the scale of income differences in these rich developed market democracies. The measure we've used, because it's easy to understand and you can download it, is how much richer the top 20 percent than the bottom 20 percent in each country. And you see in the more equal countries on the left — Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden — the top 20 percent are about three and a half, four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent. But on the more unequal end — U.K., Portugal, USA, Singapore — the differences are twice as big. On that measure, we are twice as unequal as some of the other successful market democracies. Now I'm going to show you what that does to our societies. We collected data on problems with social gradients, the kind of problems that are more common at the bottom of the social ladder. Internationally comparable data on life expectancy, on kids' maths and literacy scores, on infant mortality rates, homicide rates, proportion of the population in prison, teenage birthrates, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness — which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction — and social mobility. We put them all in one index. They're all weighted equally. Where a country is is a sort of average score on these things. And there, you see it in relation to the measure of inequality I've just shown you, which I shall use over and over again in the data. The more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems. It's an extraordinarily close correlation. But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita, gross national income, there's nothing there, no correlation anymore. We were a little bit worried that people might think we'd been choosing problems to suit our argument and just manufactured this evidence, so we also did a paper in the British Medical Journal on the UNICEF index of child well-being. It has 40 different components put together by other people. It contains whether kids can talk to their parents, whether they have books at home, what immunization rates are like, whether there's bullying at school. Everything goes into it. Here it is in relation to that same measure of inequality. Kids do worse in the more unequal societies. Highly significant relationship. But once again, if you look at that measure of child well-being, in relation to national income per person, there's no relationship, no suggestion of a relationship. What all the data I've shown you so far says is the same thing. The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. That's very important in poorer countries, but not in the rich developed world. But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much. I'm going to show you some of the separate bits of our index. Here, for instance, is trust. It's simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted. It comes from the World Values Survey. You see, at the more unequal end, it's about 15 percent of the population who feel they can trust others. But in the more equal societies, it rises to 60 or 65 percent. And if you look at measures of involvement in community life or social capital, very similar relationships closely related to inequality. I may say, we did all this work twice. We did it first on these rich, developed countries, and then as a separate test bed, we repeated it all on the 50 American states — asking just the same question: do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures? So here is trust from a general social survey of the federal government related to inequality. Very similar scatter over a similar range of levels of trust. Same thing is going on. Basically we found that almost anything that's related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the 50 states in that separate test bed. We're not just talking about a fluke. This is mental illness. WHO put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society. This is the percent of the population with any mental illness in the preceding year. And it goes from about eight percent up to three times that — whole societies with three times the level of mental illness of others. And again, closely related to inequality. This is violence. These red dots are American states, and the blue triangles are Canadian provinces. But look at the scale of the differences. It goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150. This is the proportion of the population in prison. There's a about a tenfold difference there, log scale up the side. But it goes from about 40 to 400 people in prison. That relationship is not mainly driven by more crime. In some places, that's part of it. But most of it is about more punitive sentencing, harsher sentencing. And the more unequal societies are more likely also to retain the death penalty. Here we have children dropping out of high school. Again, quite big differences. Extraordinarily damaging, if you're talking about using the talents of the population. This is social mobility. It's actually a measure of mobility based on income. Basically, it's asking: do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons, or is there no relationship between the two? And at the more unequal end, fathers' income is much more important — in the U.K., USA. And in Scandinavian countries, fathers' income is much less important. There's more social mobility. And as we like to say — and I know there are a lot of Americans in the audience here — if Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark. (Laughter) (Applause) I've shown you just a few things in italics here. I could have shown a number of other problems. They're all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient. But there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries — not just a little bit worse, but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common. Think of the expense, the human cost of that. I want to go back though to this graph that I showed you earlier where we put it all together to make two points. One is that, in graph after graph, we find the countries that do worse, whatever the outcome, seem to be the more unequal ones, and the ones that do well seem to be the Nordic countries and Japan. So what we're looking at is general social disfunction related to inequality. It's not just one or two things that go wrong, it's most things. The other really important point I want to make on this graph is that, if you look at the bottom, Sweden and Japan, they're very different countries in all sorts of ways. The position of women, how closely they keep to the nuclear family, are on opposite ends of the poles in terms of the rich developed world. But another really important difference is how they get their greater equality. Sweden has huge differences in earnings, and it narrows the gap through taxation, general welfare state, generous benefits and so on. Japan is rather different though. It starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax. It has lower taxes. It has a smaller welfare state. And in our analysis of the American states, we find rather the same contrast. There are some states that do well through redistribution, some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax. So we conclude that it doesn't much matter how you get your greater equality, as long as you get there somehow. I am not talking about perfect equality, I'm talking about what exists in rich developed market democracies. Another really surprising part of this picture is that it's not just the poor who are affected by inequality. There seems to be some truth in John Donne's "No man is an island." And in a number of studies, it's possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy. This is just one example. It's infant mortality. Some Swedes very kindly classified a lot of their infant deaths according to the British register of general socioeconomic classification. And so it's anachronistically a classification by fathers' occupations, so single parents go on their own. But then where it says "low social class," that's unskilled manual occupations. It goes through towards the skilled manual occupations in the middle, then the junior non-manual, going up high to the professional occupations — doctors, lawyers, directors of larger companies. You see there that Sweden does better than Britain all the way across the social hierarchy. The biggest differences are at the bottom of society. But even at the top, there seems to be a small benefit to being in a more equal society. We show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the United States and internationally. And that seems to be the general picture — that greater equality makes most difference at the bottom, but has some benefits even at the top. But I should say a few words about what's going on. I think I'm looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality. More to do with feelings of superiority and inferiority, of being valued and devalued, respected and disrespected. And of course, those feelings of the status competition that comes out of that drives the consumerism in our society. It also leads to status insecurity. We worry more about how we're judged and seen by others, whether we're regarded as attractive, clever, all that kind of thing. The social-evaluative judgments increase, the fear of those social-evaluative judgments. Interestingly, some parallel work going on in social psychology: some people reviewed 208 different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had their stress hormones, their responses to doing stressful tasks, measured. And in the review, what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of cortisol, the central stress hormone. And the conclusion was it was tasks that included social-evaluative threat — threats to self-esteem or social status in which others can negatively judge your performance. Those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of stress. Now we have been criticized. Of course, there are people who dislike this stuff and people who find it very surprising. I should tell you though that when people criticize us for picking and choosing data, we never pick and choose data. We have an absolute rule that if our data source has data for one of the countries we're looking at, it goes into the analysis. Our data source decides whether it's reliable data, we don't. Otherwise that would introduce bias. What about other countries? There are 200 studies of health in relation to income and equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals. This isn't confined to these countries here, hiding a very simple demonstration. The same countries, the same measure of inequality, one problem after another. Why don't we control for other factors? Well we've shown you that GNP per capita doesn't make any difference. And of course, others using more sophisticated methods in the literature have controlled for poverty and education and so on. What about causality? Correlation in itself doesn't prove causality. We spend a good bit of time. And indeed, people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes. The big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system. Or for instance, the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on. I should say that to deal with this, we've got to deal with the post-tax things and the pre-tax things. We've got to constrain income, the bonus culture incomes at the top. I think we must make our bosses accountable to their employees in any way we can. I think the take-home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us. Suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies, and that's exciting. Thank you. (Applause)

The strange tale of the Norden bombsight

{0: "Detective of fads and emerging subcultures, chronicler of jobs-you-never-knew-existed, Malcolm Gladwell's work is toppling the popular understanding of bias, crime, food, marketing, race, consumers and intelligence."}

TEDGlobal 2011

Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. I last did a TED Talk I think about seven years ago or so. I talked about spaghetti sauce. And so many people, I guess, watch those videos. People have been coming up to me ever since to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce, which is a wonderful thing in the short term — (Laughter) but it's proven to be less than ideal over seven years. And so I though I would come and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me. (Laughter) The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make. And so I thought I would tell a story about someone who made one of the most precious objects of his era. And the man's name is Carl Norden. Carl Norden was born in 1880. And he was Swiss. And of course, the Swiss can be divided into two general categories: those who make small, exquisite, expensive objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small, exquisite, expensive objects. And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp. He's an engineer. He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich. In fact, one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin who would go on to break small, expensive, exquisite objects. And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl. And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word. He wears three-piece suits; and he has a very, very small, important mustache; and he is domineering and narcissistic and driven and has an extraordinary ego; and he works 16-hour days; and he has very strong feelings about alternating current; and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness; and he drinks lots of coffee; and he does his best work sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours in complete silence with nothing but a slide rule. In any case, Carl Norden emigrates to the United States just before the First World War and sets up shop on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. And he becomes obsessed with the question of how to drop bombs from an airplane. Now if you think about it, in the age before GPS and radar, that was obviously a really difficult problem. It's a complicated physics problem. You've got a plane that's thousands of feet up in the air, going at hundreds of miles an hour, and you're trying to drop an object, a bomb, towards some stationary target in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud cover and all kinds of other impediments. And all sorts of people, moving up to the First World War and between the wars, tried to solve this problem, and nearly everybody came up short. The bombsights that were available were incredibly crude. But Carl Norden is really the one who cracks the code. And he comes up with this incredibly complicated device. It weighs about 50 lbs. It's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. And it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings and gadgets and gauges. And he makes this complicated thing. And what he allows people to do is he makes the bombardier take this particular object, visually sight the target, because they're in the Plexiglas cone of the bomber, and then they plug in the altitude of the plane, the speed of the plane, the speed of the wind and the coordinates of the target. And the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb. And as Norden famously says, "Before that bombsight came along, bombs would routinely miss their target by a mile or more." But he said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft. Now I cannot tell you how incredibly excited the U.S. military was by the news of the Norden bombsight. It was like manna from heaven. Here was an army that had just had experience in the First World War, where millions of men fought each other in the trenches, getting nowhere, making no progress, and here someone had come up with a device that allowed them to fly up in the skies high above enemy territory and destroy whatever they wanted with pinpoint accuracy. And the U.S. military spends 1.5 billion dollars — billion dollars in 1940 dollars — developing the Norden bombsight. And to put that in perspective, the total cost of the Manhattan project was three billion dollars. Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project of the modern era. And there were people, strategists, within the U.S. military who genuinely thought that this single device was going to spell the difference between defeat and victory when it came to the battle against the Nazis and against the Japanese. And for Norden as well, this device had incredible moral importance, because Norden was a committed Christian. In fact, he would always get upset when people referred to the bombsight as his invention, because in his eyes, only God could invent things. He was simply the instrument of God's will. And what was God's will? Well God's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war be reduced to as small an amount as possible. And what did the Norden bombsight do? Well it allowed you to do that. It allowed you to bomb only those things that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb. So in the years leading up to the Second World War, the U.S. military buys 90,000 of these Norden bombsights at a cost of $14,000 each — again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money. And they trained 50,000 bombardiers on how to use them — long extensive, months-long training sessions — because these things are essentially analog computers; they're not easy to use. And they make every one of those bombardiers take an oath, to swear that if they're ever captured, they will not divulge a single detail of this particular device to the enemy, because it's imperative the enemy not get their hands on this absolutely essential piece of technology. And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane, it's escorted there by a series of armed guards. And it's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it. And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards. It's never allowed to be photographed. And there's a little incendiary device inside of it, so that, if the plane ever crashes, it will be destroyed and there's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it. The Norden bombsight is the Holy Grail. So what happens during the Second World War? Well, it turns out it's not the Holy Grail. In practice, the Norden bombsight can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft., but that's under perfect conditions. And of course, in wartime, conditions aren't perfect. First of all, it's really hard to use — really hard to use. And not all of the people who are of those 50,000 men who are bombardiers have the ability to properly program an analog computer. Secondly, it breaks down a lot. It's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys and gadgets and ball-bearings, and they don't work as well as they ought to in the heat of battle. Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations, he assumed that a plane would be flying at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes. Well in a real war, you can't do that; you'll get shot down. So they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds. And the Norden bombsight doesn't work as well under those conditions. But most of all, the Norden bombsight required the bombardier to make visual contact with the target. But of course, what happens in real life? There are clouds, right. It needs cloudless sky to be really accurate. Well how many cloudless skies do you think there were above Central Europe between 1940 and 1945? Not a lot. And then to give you a sense of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was, there was a famous case in 1944 where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna, Germany. And the chemical plant comprised 757 acres. And over the course of 22 bombing missions, the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs on this 757 acre chemical plant, using the Norden bombsight. Well what percentage of those bombs do you think actually landed inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant? 10 percent. 10 percent. And of those 10 percent that landed, 16 percent didn't even go off; they were duds. The Leuna chemical plant, after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war, was up and running within weeks. And by the way, all those precautions to keep the Norden bombsight out of the hands of the Nazis? Well it turns out that Carl Norden, as a proper Swiss, was very enamored of German engineers. So in the 1930s, he hired a whole bunch of them, including a man named Hermann Long who, in 1938, gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the Nazis. So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war — which also, by the way, didn't work very well. (Laughter) So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight? Well because we live in an age where there are lots and lots of Norden bombsights. We live in a time where there are all kinds of really, really smart people running around, saying that they've invented gadgets that will forever change our world. They've invented websites that will allow people to be free. They've invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing that will make our world forever better. If you go into the military, you'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well. If you go to the Pentagon, they will say, "You know what, now we really can put a bomb inside a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft." And you know what, it's true; they actually can do that now. But we need to be very clear about how little that means. In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War, the U.S. military, the air force, sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles to the Iraqi desert equipped with these five million dollar cameras that allowed them to see the entire desert floor. And their mission was to find and to destroy — remember the Scud missile launchers, those surface-to-air missiles that the Iraqis were launching at the Israelis? The mission of the two squadrons was to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers. And so they flew missions day and night, and they dropped thousands of bombs, and they fired thousands of missiles in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge. And after the war was over, there was an audit done — as the army always does, the air force always does — and they asked the question: how many Scuds did we actually destroy? You know what the answer was? Zero, not a single one. Now why is that? Is it because their weapons weren't accurate? Oh no, they were brilliantly accurate. They could have destroyed this little thing right here from 25,000 ft. The issue was they didn't know where the Scud launchers were. The problem with bombs and pickle barrels is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel, it's knowing how to find the pickle barrel. That's always been the harder problem when it comes to fighting wars. Or take the battle in Afghanistan. What is the signature weapon of the CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan? It's the drone. What is the drone? Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision. And over the course of the last six years in Northwest Pakistan, the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles, and it's used those drones to kill 2,000 suspected Pakistani and Taliban militants. Now what is the accuracy of those drones? Well it's extraordinary. We think we're now at 95 percent accuracy when it comes to drone strikes. 95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed, right? That is one of the most extraordinary records in the history of modern warfare. But do you know what the crucial thing is? In that exact same period that we've been using these drones with devastating accuracy, the number of attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks, against American forces in Afghanistan has increased tenfold. As we have gotten more and more efficient in killing them, they have become angrier and angrier and more and more motivated to kill us. I have not described to you a success story. I've described to you the opposite of a success story. And this is the problem with our infatuation with the things we make. We think the things we make can solve our problems, but our problems are much more complex than that. The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have, it's how you use the bombs you have, and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all. There's a postscript to the Norden story of Carl Norden and his fabulous bombsight. And that is, on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay flew over Japan and, using a Norden bombsight, dropped a very large thermonuclear device on the city of Hiroshima. And as was typical with the Norden bombsight, the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft. But of course, it didn't matter. And that's the greatest irony of all when it comes to the Norden bombsight. the air force's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb, which didn't need a bombsight at all. Meanwhile, back in New York, no one told Carl Norden that his bombsight was used over Hiroshima. He was a committed Christian. He thought he had designed something that would reduce the toll of suffering in war. It would have broken his heart. (Applause)

Open-source cancer research

{0: 'In his lab, Jay Bradner, a researcher at Harvard and Dana Farber in Boston, works on a breakthrough approach for subverting cancer .. and he’s giving the secret away.'}

TEDxBoston 2011

I moved to Boston 10 years ago from Chicago, with an interest in cancer and in chemistry. You might know that chemistry is the science of making molecules or, to my taste, new drugs for cancer. And you might also know that, for science and medicine, Boston is a bit of a candy store. You can't roll a stop sign in Cambridge without hitting a graduate student. The bar is called the Miracle of Science. The billboards say "Lab Space Available." And it's fair to say that in these 10 years, we've witnessed absolutely the start of a scientific revolution — that of genome medicine. We know more about the patients that enter our clinic now than ever before. And we're able, finally, to answer the question that's been so pressing for so many years: Why do I have cancer? This information is also pretty staggering. You might know that, so far, in just the dawn of this revolution, we know that there are perhaps 40,000 unique mutations affecting more than 10,000 genes, and that there are 500 of these genes that are bona-fide drivers, causes of cancer. Yet comparatively, we have about a dozen targeted medications. And this inadequacy of cancer medicine really hit home when my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We didn't fly him to Boston. We didn't sequence his genome. It's been known for decades what causes this malignancy. It's three proteins: ras, myc, p53. This is old information we've known since about the 80s, yet there's no medicine I can prescribe to a patient with this or any of the numerous solid tumors caused by these three ... Horsemen of the Apocalypse that is cancer. There's no ras, no myc, no p53 drug. And you might fairly ask: Why is that? And the very unsatisfying yet scientific answer is: it's too hard. That for whatever reason, these three proteins have entered a space, in the language of our field, that's called the undruggable genome — which is like calling a computer unsurfable or the Moon unwalkable. It's a horrible term of trade. But what it means is that we've failed to identify a greasy pocket in these proteins, into which we, like molecular locksmiths, can fashion an active, small, organic molecule or drug substance. Now, as I was training in clinical medicine and hematology and oncology and stem-cell transplantation, what we had instead, cascading through the regulatory network at the FDA, were these substances: arsenic, thalidomide, and this chemical derivative of nitrogen mustard gas. And this is the 21st century. And so, I guess you'd say, dissatisfied with the performance and quality of these medicines, I went back to school, in chemistry, with the idea that perhaps by learning the trade of discovery chemistry and approaching it in the context of this brave new world of the open source, the crowd source, the collaborative network that we have access to within academia, that we might more quickly bring powerful and targeted therapies to our patients. And so, please consider this a work in progress, but I'd like to tell you today a story about a very rare cancer called midline carcinoma, about the undruggable protein target that causes this cancer, called BRD4, and about a molecule developed at my lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, called JQ1, which we affectionately named for Jun Qi, the chemist that made this molecule. Now, BRD4 is an interesting protein. You might ask: with all the things cancer's trying to do to kill our patient, how does it remember it's cancer? When it winds up its genome, divides into two cells and unwinds again, why does it not turn into an eye, into a liver, as it has all the genes necessary to do this? It remembers that it's cancer. And the reason is that cancer, like every cell in the body, places little molecular bookmarks, little Post-it notes, that remind the cell, "I'm cancer; I should keep growing." And those Post-it notes involve this and other proteins of its class — so-called bromodomains. So we developed an idea, a rationale, that perhaps if we made a molecule that prevented the Post-it note from sticking by entering into the little pocket at the base of this spinning protein, then maybe we could convince cancer cells, certainly those addicted to this BRD4 protein, that they're not cancer. And so we started to work on this problem. We developed libraries of compounds and eventually arrived at this and similar substances called JQ1. Now, not being a drug company, we could do certain things, we had certain flexibilities, that I respect that a pharmaceutical industry doesn't have. We just started mailing it to our friends. I have a small lab. We thought we'd just send it to people and see how the molecule behaves. We sent it to Oxford, England, where a group of talented crystallographers provided this picture, which helped us understand exactly how this molecule is so potent for this protein target. It's what we call a perfect fit of shape complementarity, or hand in glove. Now, this is a very rare cancer, this BRD4-addicted cancer. And so we worked with samples of material that were collected by young pathologists at Brigham and Women's Hospital. And as we treated these cells with this molecule, we observed something really striking. The cancer cells — small, round and rapidly dividing, grew these arms and extensions. They were changing shape. In effect, the cancer cell was forgetting it was cancer and becoming a normal cell. This got us very excited. The next step would be to put this molecule into mice. The only problem was there's no mouse model of this rare cancer. And so at the time we were doing this research, I was caring for a 29-year-old firefighter from Connecticut who was very much at the end of life with this incurable cancer. This BRD4-addicted cancer was growing throughout his left lung. And he had a chest tube in that was draining little bits of debris. And every nursing shift, we would throw this material out. And so we approached this patient and asked if he would collaborate with us. Could we take this precious and rare cancerous material from this chest tube and drive it across town and put it into mice and try to do a clinical trial at a stage that with a prototype drug, well, that would be, of course, impossible and, rightly, illegal to do in humans. And he obliged us. At the Lurie Family Center for Animal Imaging, our colleague, Andrew Kung, grew this cancer successfully in mice without ever touching plastic. And you can see this PET scan of a mouse — what we call a pet PET. The cancer is growing as this red, huge mass in the hind limb of this animal. And as we treat it with our compound, this addiction to sugar, this rapid growth, faded. And on the animal on the right, you see that the cancer was responding. We've completed, now, clinical trials in four mouse models of this disease. And every time, we see the same thing. The mice with this cancer that get the drug live, and the ones that don't rapidly perish. So we started to wonder, what would a drug company do at this point? Well, they probably would keep this a secret until they turn the prototype drug into an active pharmaceutical substance. So we did just the opposite. We published a paper that described this finding at the earliest prototype stage. We gave the world the chemical identity of this molecule, typically a secret in our discipline. We told people exactly how to make it. We gave them our email address, suggesting that if they write us, we'll send them a free molecule. (Laughter) We basically tried to create the most competitive environment for our lab as possible. And this was, unfortunately, successful. (Laughter) Because now, we've shared this molecule, just since December of last year, with 40 laboratories in the United States and 30 more in Europe — many of them pharmaceutical companies, seeking now to enter this space, to target this rare cancer that, thankfully right now, is quite desirable to study in that industry. But the science that's coming back from all of these laboratories about the use of this molecule has provided us insights we might not have had on our own. Leukemia cells treated with this compound turn into normal white blood cells. Mice with multiple myeloma, an incurable malignancy of the bone marrow, respond dramatically to the treatment with this drug. You might know that fat has memory. I'll nicely demonstrate that for you. (Laughter) In fact, this molecule prevents this adipocyte, this fat stem cell, from remembering how to make fat, such that mice on a high-fat diet, like the folks in my hometown of Chicago — (Laughter) fail to develop fatty liver, which is a major medical problem. What this research taught us — not just my lab, but our institute, and Harvard Medical School more generally — is that we have unique resources in academia for drug discovery; that our center, which has tested perhaps more cancer molecules in a scientific way than any other, never made one of its own. For all the reasons you see listed here, we think there's a great opportunity for academic centers to participate in this earliest, conceptually tricky and creative discipline of prototype drug discovery. So what next? We have this molecule, but it's not a pill yet. It's not orally bioavailable. We need to fix it so we can deliver it to our patients. And everyone in the lab, especially following the interaction with these patients, feels quite compelled to deliver a drug substance based on this molecule. It's here where I'd say that we could use your help and your insights, your collaborative participation. Unlike a drug company, we don't have a pipeline that we can deposit these molecules into. We don't have a team of salespeople and marketeers to tell us how to position this drug against the other. What we do have is the flexibility of an academic center to work with competent, motivated, enthusiastic, hopefully well-funded people to carry these molecules forward into the clinic while preserving our ability to share the prototype drug worldwide. This molecule will soon leave our benches and go into a small start-up company called Tensha Therapeutics. And, really, this is the fourth of these molecules to kind of "graduate" from our little pipeline of drug discovery, two of which — a topical drug for lymphoma of the skin and an oral substance for the treatment of multiple myeloma — will actually come to the bedside for the first clinical trial in July of this year — for us, a major and exciting milestone. I want to leave you with just two ideas. The first is: if anything is unique about this research, it's less the science than the strategy. This, for us, was a social experiment — an experiment in "What would happen if we were as open and honest at the earliest phase of discovery chemistry research as we could be?" This string of letters and numbers and symbols and parentheses that can be texted, I suppose, or Twittered worldwide, is the chemical identity of our pro compound. It's the information that we most need from pharmaceutical companies, the information on how these early prototype drugs might work. Yet this information is largely a secret. And so we seek, really, to download from the amazing successes of the computer-science industry, two principles — that of open source and that of crowdsourcing — to quickly, responsibly accelerate the delivery of targeted therapeutics to patients with cancer. Now, the business model involves all of you. This research is funded by the public. It's funded by foundations. And one thing I've learned in Boston is that you people will do anything for cancer, and I love that. You bike across the state, you walk up and down the river. (Laughter) I've never seen, really, anywhere, this unique support for cancer research. And so I want to thank you for your participation, your collaboration and most of all, for your confidence in our ideas. (Applause)